this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2023
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This is a theoretical moral quandary I've tried to determine for myself and have yet to figure out:
How long is "long enough" between when one group forces another group out of its land and when the invading group should/can be accepted as the "rightful" group for that area?
I often point out that some Palestinian people who were forced out of their homes in the creation of Israel are still alive as reasoning for why it's not right to have Israel exist where it is, so I know that "within a lifetime" is too short. At the same time, I also know that thousands of years (i.e. Israelite homeland) is too long to reclaim land, so I've narrowed it down (if you can call it that) to "more than a lifetime, less than a few millennia."
What about a couple hundred years? Is it when everyone who originally lived on the land has grown old and died? When their children have? Grandchildren?
So much of human history is violence resulting in displacement. I feel like the line has historically been drawn at "when the original group is either wiped out or too weak to say anything anymore," which is not the moral line for which I'm looking.
I'd be really interested to see what anyone else thinks on this.
Take a look at the effects of colonisation. In 1788 the British First Fleet established a colony in Sydney, land of the Eora Nation, which is now functionally extinct. The following 245 years have led to the near-destruction of the some 200 nations and language groups across the Australian continent. Many are extinct, and genocides (particularly the "Black War" in Tasmania), intermarriage, forbidding indigenous language communication, and disease wiped out most of the rest of the cultural and linguistic heritage of Australia, dating back (in the northern parts east of Darwin at least) up to 65,000 years.
Do the Wiradjuri deserve a state? It would occupy much of NSW and Victoria, if Australia ceded their traditional boundaries. Yet their continuous culture spans far longer than the Jews or Arab Muslims. So I think the answer to your question depends on the circumstances a people have been subjected to, and whether there are enough of them left, with enough resources, to fight the status quo. Ultimately, might makes right, and after the horrors perpetrated by Nazi Germany a mere 80-odd years ago, there were enough European Jews who had fled the genocides, and enough of a nation/diaspora to band together and influence the world after the dust settled. The same cannot be said for the Indigenous Tasmanians, unfortunately, whose culture was annihilated to the point that their languages only exist on early recordings by anthropologists.