S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is in Israel on Friday for meetings with senior government leaders and to see firsthand some of the U.S. weapons and security assistance that Washington rapidly delivered to Israel in the first week of its war with the militant Hamas group.
Austin is the second high-level U.S. official sent by President Joe Biden to visit Israel in two days. His quick trip from Brussels, where he was attending a NATO defense ministers meeting, came a day after Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in the region. Blinken is continuing the frantic Mideast diplomacy, seeking to avert an expanded regional conflict.
The Canaanites were the first inhabitants that we know of. King David captured it from them and turned it into a capital. So by your logic we should give it back to the Canaanites from whom King David stole it from 3,000 years ago.
Genetic data shows that Israelis are most likely from a subset of Canaanites back in the day, and likely the modern genetic incarnation of the group.
Even if that were not true, King David supposedly killed and assimilated them all, so there’s no one to give the land to anyways.
My statement was meant to point out the ridiculousness of the comment I was replying to. If you go far back enough every bit of land has been fought over. Original ownership of the land is a phallacy that seems to make sense if you pick a specific time period and ignore all that happened before. At this point, the wars over the holy land are all finger pointing and dubious claims at best.
So what do we do? Nuke the dome of the rock and tell both groups they can have their God’s holy land when they’re ready to join the rest of human civilization? Split it 50/50 and DMZ the two sides somehow?
If land claims are that dubious (which I agree with) then who can say it wasn’t the right of the British to give it to the Jewish people in the 40’s? Multiple generations of each have lived on this land, though. It may have been a mistake to give it to them but that was a couple generations ago and what’s done is done.
The best case scenario is that Palestinians get assimilated into surrounding Muslim countries, anything else and the loss of culture will be surpassed by a loss of life instead.