WHY COLONIZATION IS ILLEGITIMATE:

Zionism of the Founding Fathers: Israel’s creation matches the principles of statesmen who established our republic. (Joseph Prud’homme, June 27, 2024, Modern Age)

[A] significant number of founders held that religion should be integrated into the fabric of law and society, specifically at a regional or local level. They held that the people are entitled to create a religious state, with “religion” understood either in a general sense or as one specific denomination—as long as the substance of that religion was conducive to recognizing and protecting the rights of all, with the state ensuring everyone’s freedom of religious belief and practice.

Such a state must be a politically representative one and exercise authority only over a geographically compact community. These conditions, they believed, would produce a government more responsive to the concerns of all the citizenry.

Christianity, of course, was seen as especially conducive to the protection of individual rights, including the right of religious liberty. Thus Christianity was something the state could protect and promote by law without compelling individuals in ways that would violate individual conscience.

The pamphlet Worcestriensis, for example—which was written anonymously in 1776 in Massachusetts and remained influential in New England for decades—supports at once the establishment of a specific faith and the support by law of religious liberty. Even in the presence of extensive denominational diversity, this work suggests, establishment works best in compact areas due to the ease with which citizens can petition government should abuses occur, as well as the reality that living amidst difference tends to form habits that bolster support for the legal protections of religious liberty for all within the community. And indeed, in most New England states the religious establishment was at the town level.

The Constitution expressly sought to avoid any measure that could undermine state-level solicitude toward religion. All ratifiers of the Constitution knew that six states in 1789 had official religious establishments that accorded Christianity, or even a particular denomination, privileged status, often in the form of direct financial support to that faith and no other.

As President Thomas Jefferson—himself in many ways a strict separationist—stated in his second inaugural address, “religious exercises are under the direction and discipline of state or church” (emphasis added). To be sure, Jefferson would have wanted New England states to shed their religious establishments on their own. But many founders saw a state-level affiliation of faith and government as a form of morally acceptable statecraft or as a genuine and positive benefit.

Israel’s founding embodied these points central to many in the founding generation and therefore would likely have won their support.

Of course, this argument favors Palestinian statehood for all the same reasons.

HOW WILSON LOST WWI:

The U.S. Must Stand by and for the Kurds (Gregg Roman, 2/21/24, Real Clear World)

The Kurds, a resilient and significant ethnic group without a recognized state of their own, have long been instrumental in the fight against terrorism and the preservation of American interests in a volatile Middle East. It is time for the U.S. to honor its promises, acknowledge the historical injustices faced by the Kurds, and stand firmly in support of their aspirations for autonomy and security.

It is an appropriate moment to step back, appreciate Kurdish history, and consider our obligations to the Kurds not only in Syria but in Iraq, Turkey, and Iran as well.

The Kurds, predominantly Sunni Muslims, are the most populous ethnic group on earth without a recognized state of their own. A diverse group of some 25 to 30 million people, about half of the Kurds inhabit lands across parts of Southeast Turkey. Most rest live in northeast Syria, northern and western Iran, southwestern Armenia, and northern Iraq.

The most prominent feature of the Kurdish landscape is the rugged mountains of the eastern Taurus-Zagros Mountain range. Because of the mountains’ imposing nature, armies have had trouble conquering the area, which has allowed the Kurdish people to survive in their fastnesses throughout the centuries. Indeed, a famous Kurdish proverb says, “The Kurds have no friends but the mountains.”

The proverb has proven, sadly, to be true.

The Kurds were promised a state in the wake of the First World War – that is, after the destruction of the Ottoman Empire – in the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres. Nevertheless, the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne reneged on this promise.

Both Bushes deserrve blame too, for not recognizing the nation of Kurdistan after the Iraq wars.

VERSAILLES DID NOT TREAT THE ALLIES HARSHLY ENOUGH:

False Messiahs (Barnett R. Rubin, January 4, 2024, Boston Review)

Neither the British nor the Zionist movement considered the views of the people who lived in Palestine, 96 percent of them Arab. By Herzl’s own account in his diary, he did not speak to a single Arab during his 1898 visit to Palestine.

As historian Rashid Khalidi documents in The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (2020), Balfour wrote in a 1919 memo to the British cabinet that “in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country. . . . Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.” Winston Churchill, in his 1937 testimony to the Peel Commission appointed by London to make recommendations on Palestine, was more emphatic:

I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to those people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, or, at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.

Why did Zionism and many Jews accept this bargain? As Europeans, even if oppressed ones, they largely shared the virtually unchallenged assumptions of European colonial thinking. Circumstances also provided them with little choice. Given the opportunity, many—perhaps most—of the Jewish refugees from Hitler would have gone to the United States rather than Palestine. But by the 1930s, the tightening grip of anti-Semitism on the Western world convinced even erstwhile Jewish opponents of Zionism that they had no choice. Zionism’s claim that Jews could never be safe among other nations was proving true, not only in Nazi Germany but also in the “liberal” west. Jews trying to flee Nazi anti-Semitism butted up against anti-Semitic immigration laws in the United States and UK. The British—indeed Home Secretary Balfour himself—had enacted the Aliens Act in 1905, introducing immigration restrictions. The U.S. Immigration Act of 1924 was explicitly intended to stop the massive immigration of Eastern European Jews, among others. In July 1938, thirty-two nations assembled on Lake Geneva at the Evian conference to consider what to do about the mounting tide of Jewish refugees. Every delegate expressed sympathy for the refugees, but only Ecuador and the Dominican Republic offered to admit any of them.

The Mandate for Palestine given by the League of Nations to Britain in 1920—which came into effect in 1923—gave the Zionist organization legal status as “a public body for the purpose of advising and co-operating with the Administration of Palestine in such economic, social and other matters as may affect the establishment of the Jewish national home and the interests of the Jewish population in Palestine.” It also provided that the mandatory authorities “shall facilitate Jewish immigration under suitable conditions and shall encourage . . . settlement by Jews on the land.” The mandate forbade discrimination by the British in Palestine against other members of the League of Nations but offered neither protection nor any form of representation to the Palestinian Arabs.

As colonial subjects, the Palestinian Arabs, unlike the Americans or British, had no sovereign power to regulate immigration into their territory. The combination of the Nazi regime, the exclusionary consensus expressed at the Evian conference, and the British mandate on Palestine together imposed a disproportionate burden of accepting Jewish refugees on the Palestinians, whose tiny country had nothing to do with the origin of the crisis and was deprived of any means of self-government.