2002-08-05|11:54 a.m.
In one of my political science classes, we learned about Stateless people. My teacher described them as people that �just appeared out of no where.� A couple examples are the Kurdish people in the Middle East and the Basque in Spain. They live, or have lived, in conflict with the people they share a country with because they have no prior claim to the land. It is all very tribal. Even the Palestinians are essentially Stateless, even though they have documentation that stakes claim to their land.
What I don�t understand, is that the political forum will entertain arguments about this fact. They pull in historians to find out who the land belongs to and where everyone is from. Without the proper documentation, a whole group of people are displaced. And this becomes justification for their exploitation. And this is where I am confused. We are supposed to just throw up our hands? MM gave the excellent analogy of a lost library book. If you can�t find where it belongs, do you just leave it there in the middle of the floor? It has to be given a place.
I think the problem has nothing to do with someone being displaced. Obviously they are living somewhere. Obviously they are going to try to remain. It seems altogether absurd to offer any argument against it. These people are not simply Kurdish, or whatever nation-less-nationality they are. They are people. Human beings that live, breathe, and eat. Humans, and not moments of history that need documentation, that are part of a reality that need to be accepted.
And I hate the argument that the Jewish people belong in Israel because they are the �holy people�. They can have Israel. The Israelis need a place to live too, but just because the Bible may say that they belong there, it doesn�t remove the fact that a myriad of globally accepted documents ensure that part of that land belongs to the Palestinians and the Israelis have no right to abuse them or take their land.
And it really angers me to hear some Bible-thumping jerk from the United States say that the Palestinians don�t belong there. They need to jump back into history a few hundred years to a people that occupied this land before them. A people long exploited by Bible-thumping jerks. These prior inhabitants have enough holy word of their own to claim this land. But since when did we really start caring about holy words? And since when did we start honoring treaties? So, really, it doesn�t matter who was there first, or who has a document guarantying right to land, or who has a manifestation from a god. Why don�t we all just stop pretending? We don�t care about history or state boarders. We don�t care.