Israel Is the Least-Stolen Land

Letter to the Editor

An Israeli flag attached to Andromeda’s Rock in the Mediterranean Sea, against the Tel Aviv skyline.

To the Editor:

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 through purchase.

Daniel Pipes
Middle East Forum
Philadelphia

Twitter
Telegram
LinkedIn
Email
Copy
Link copied
Print

Daniel Pipes

Daniel Pipes, a historian, has led the Middle East Forum since its founding in 1994. He taught at Chicago, Harvard, Pepperdine, and the U.S. Naval War College. He served in five U.S. administrations, received two presidential appointments, and testified before many congressional committees. The author of 16 books on the Middle East, Islam, and other topics, Mr. Pipes writes a column for the Washington Times and the Spectator; his work has been translated into 39 languages. DanielPipes.org contains an archive of his writings and media appearances; he tweets at @DanielPipes. He received both his A.B. and Ph.D. from Harvard. The Washington Post deems him “perhaps the most prominent U.S. scholar on radical Islam.” Al-Qaeda invited Mr. Pipes to convert and Edward Said called him an “Orientalist.”