Israel Is the Least-Stolen Land
Letters, June 19, 2022, WSJ

In “‘Native Land Acknowledgments’ Are the Latest Woke Ritual” (op-ed, June 11),
Eugene Kontorovich elegantly ridicules the budding leftist requirement that public statements be prefaced by a ceremonial nod to the peoples who once inhabited roughly our territories, thereby honoring their supposed moral superiority.
He notes in passing that “conquest and migration have shaped the entire world.”
So far as I know, only one country was purchased rather than conquered. Ironically,
that country is also the one most accused of having “stolen” the land it now controls.
That country is Israel. The making of the Jewish state represents perhaps history’s
most peaceable in-migration and state creation. Zionist efforts long had a near-exclusively mercantile, not military, quality. Jews lacked the power to fight
the Ottoman or British empires, so they purchased land, acre by acre, in voluntary
transactions. Only when the British withdrew from Palestine in 1948, followed immediately by an all-out attempt by Arab states to crush the nascent Israel, did
Israelis take up the sword in self-defense and go on to win land through military
conquest. By then, however, this exceptional polity had already existed thru purchase.
---Daniel Pipes, Middle East Forum, Philadelphia
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It is a distortion of history that those demanding land acknowledgments see Israelis as perpetrators rather than victims of the removal of indigenous peoples from their lands. In this warped view, Jewish Americans are damned if we do and damned if we don’t: Whether we choose to remain in the country of our
birth or return to the land of our ancestors, our residence is seen as illegitimate.
The decent thing to do is to recognize that all humans are born equally innocent.
Land acknowledgments in which people apologize for the crimes of others centuries
before their time should be abolished.
---David Golub, Mineola, N.Y.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/israel-zionism-land-acknowledgment-stolen-indigenous-11655495920

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