My friend Samuel Fleischacker is writing a wonderful series on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Sam is a professor of philosophy. To a subject normally discussed in the tones used by two overheated and underdressed young men standing next to the cars they’ve banged into each other, Sam brings a philosophical coolheadedness. He analyzes what people are really talking about, and explains where they use one word to describe several different things, thereby confusing matters.
His latest post, for instance, is about what it means when people talk about Jews or Arabs “owning” the land between the sea and the river. The question itself, he explains,
…brings us to a simple fact about the conflict over Israel/Palestine that often gets overlooked: it’s about collective rights, not individual ones… When Jews say that the land is inherently ‘Jewish’, they mean that the Jewish people collectively owns the land, that the political units on it should represent and foster Jewish culture. And when Palestinians say that the land is ‘Arab’, or ‘Palestinian’, they likewise mean to make a claim about its proper political and cultural character, not about individual rights.
But individual ownership and political rule are nothing alike:
If you come to a house I own, I have every right to tell you to leave if you say things that offend me, or if you disagree with me or play music I don’t like. I have a right to kick you out for any reason whatever, to make your stay with me contingent on any condition I choose. On the other hand, unless you are my child, I don’t have a right to inflict any sort of punishment on you, beyond expelling you…
A state’s rights over its citizens are almost exactly the reverse. A decent state may not expel any citizen just for saying things that offend people, or that disagree with its official views, or for bad taste in music. … But the state can certainly punish people for all sorts of actions taken in its territory. That’s in fact one of its main jobs.
The idea behind this distinction is that ownership gives each individual a right to some space of freedom in which she can do what she likes, while political rule comes in precisely to limit that freedom, so as to protect the freedom of others and/or promote the common good of all.
I agree that the distinction is regularly ignored – for instance, in the shouting that regularly takes place in the comments section here when I mention the illegality of settlement. The fact that individual Jews or a Jewish organization once owned land, or currently own land, in the West Bank does not mean that Jews as a collective own that land – nor does it grant the right to the Israeli government to establish settlements there with the aim of maintaining permanent rule over that area. The opposite is the case. Ownership and political rule are separate categories, with separate purposes, each properly restricted in different ways. Read Sam to understand this better.
Hear! Hear!
Haim, I too get so exasperated with the talking points of right wing operatives that completely gloss over the distinction between what it means for land to be owned by a person and what it means for land to be part of the territory of a particular country.
So we often hear the right make the specious claim that X% of West Bank land was legally bought from its native owners. Well that’s fine, but it has absolutely no bearing on which state that strip of land is a part of. However if we did accept that logic, then any land in Israel bought by an American would thereby change hands from Israeli rule to American rule. And that’s just silly. Yet the same old argument still trotted out all the time.