Some wars are fought over ideology and personal animosity, but most wars are fought over territory. Sometimes the territorial ambitions are clouded by the debate, as in our Civil War, which most people think was fought over the slavery issue but which was actually fought (by the North) over whether the South had the right to secede. But underneath all this was the question of who would control the South. A war of territory.

After some 8000 years of written history, the planet is occupied by this group here, that group there, and in many places there is a verbal contest as to which group has the best "right" to the land. Nowhere is this more evident than in the middle east, where the land of "Palestine" is occupied by the Israelis and contested by the Palestinians.

There are several ways to look at territorial claim legitimacy, but three are most prominent:

1) The strongest people capable of defending their territory have the best claim to the land.

2) The people with the oldest occupation of the land (reaching furthest back into history), though interrupted or displaced, have the best claim to the land.

3) The people with the longest settlement of the land, though now displaced, have the best claim to the land.

Assuming that we had some way of adjudicating the validity of the claims, let us examine them in more detail:

Most Americans regard America as inhabited originally by Indians, who lost it slowly over 300 years to transplanted Europeans. The white settlers had the ability and the will, and overcame the resistance of a larger Indian population to eventually rule the land from coast to coast. (A similar story evolved in Canada, and all of Central and South America.)

Americans rely on position 1 as the basis for the legitimacy of their claim. The surviving Indians, working through the courts, have already obtained many large monetary awards from the federal government, (more accurately, from us, since we supply the money) basing their claim on positions 2 and 3.

Now it transpires that the original inhabitants of this half of the world were orientals from Asia who arrived more than 15,000 years ago. (Maybe 30,000 years ago.) The Indians have since evolved significantly from the earliest migrations, and one could argue that although they are legitimate descendants, they are not original claimants. (It would be interesting to debate what we all think would become of this country if we simply surrendered it to the surviving Indians, but that discussion is for another forum.)

But if we were, as "people of the earth" to decide that either positions 2 or 3 were superior to position 1, here is what would happen in the world:

England, France, Spain, and Portugal, if we counted back 1000 years, would have to surrender their land to the current descendants of the Scandinavians/Germans, as successive waves of them, with different names, conquered the land. If we go back 2000 years, then they would have to surrender to the current descendants of the Romans, and if we chose a still earlier date, some other nomadic warlike people from the Russian steppes. There IS a problem here.

All of Eastern Europe, casting back 1000 years, would go to the Scythians, but if 2000 years, would go to the Greeks. The Greeks could also claim Egypt, Turkey, and most of Italy, on the basis of temporary rule. Russia represents a whole collection of mainly upper Asian peoples and it would be difficult to sort all of that out.

The middle east is easier because there are more records. The Greeks held sway when Ptolemy and Cleopatra reigned, but the pyramid builders go much further back. Between Egypt and Persia there were the brief dynasties of the Babylonians and Assyrians.

Every group here named is named because we have a name; every group named had an antecedent group which does not have a name.

When we look at all this it is clear that the only 2 places in the world where the present people were not displaced by subsequent people are China and India. But that is a view limited by our perspective, as we have no records and only conjecture as to the origins of the Chinese and Indians from migratory people elsewhere. If the original human lines all emerged from the Rift Valley of Africa, as is now popularly assumed, does all the world belong to Kenya?

In a world of claims and counterclaims, perhaps it is not surprising that as a practical matter, the world has generally settled on choice 1 (the strongest/current occupier) to resolve territorial disputes and to draw maps. Winning a war and gaining legitimacy in a territory has a long pedigree. Time has a way of altering such relationships, however, without war.

Consider the Caribbean. In the public consciousness, Blacks are thought to be "native" to Bermuda and the Bahamas (and other island nations in the area), but these isolated islands were either empty when discovered and claimed by the British, or lightly occupied by itinerant sea-going Indians from South America. The claim of Britain to both these island groups is as good a claim as any people could have in an international arena (first, strongest, longest) except that Black populations have a higher birth rate than whites, and Blacks make up, currently, the larger numbers.

Perhaps we should add another claim: 4) By superior birth rate. Blacks increase their proportion every year in this country, for the same reason. Spanish-speaking peoples, pouring in all along the southern border, also have a high breeding rate. And in recent years, with the number of Asians coming in under the present immigration policy (that permits Asians in high numbers and Europeans almost not at all), it will not be so very long before the white people who conquered the Americas over the past 500 years will be outvoted by the "Rainbow".

The present whites of South Africa defeated the British, Australians, and Dutch to take over their portion of the African continent, but then they allowed in large numbers of Blacks fleeing genocidal Black governments on their borders. Now the Blacks are in the majority, have obtained political power through the intervention of a third-world dominated "international bureaucracy" (the perenially inept and corrupt UN) and the whites cling only to superior fire power and the small hope that a majority Black population can avoid totalitarianism, and they have no good track record in that regard, in Africa, or inner-city America.

Returning to the middle east, what we see in Palestine is this:

Israel claims "Palestine" (in the current debate, the West Bank and the Gaza strip, although Palestine is really Judea, which is everything that Israel now occupies) by virtue of current Conquest (Claim 1), Oldest, though displaced (Claim 2), and Longest, though interrupted (Claim 3).

In contrast, the PLO claims Palestine by virtue of Arabs having been the main occupiers from 600 AD until the U.N. mandate divided the area in 1948 (which computes to 1350 years), by which they mean they have the "most recent" history on their side. Given enough time, they will claim it by 4) as well since they have the higher birth rate. We should note, however, that the UN "mandate" created a Palestinian state which was 60% within Jordan, only 10% within Israel - but Jordan killed 20,000 of the difficult-to-live-with Palestinians before the rest got the message to flee, and since other Arab countries will not take them, they migrated to Israel, which was willing to take them, though they no doubt realize now that it was a bad decision. So why should a "Palestinian state" be carved entirely out of Israel, which is already a tiny country?

Conclusions 1. Since the people of the Renaissance (white Europeans, wherever they now live) have chosen a breeding habit of small families, they will, sooner or later, be inundated by the faster breeding peoples of the third world who do not, generally, subscribe to the white culture/ethics/ democracy credo. In every experiment in which third world peoples have the majority, democracy is soon victim to the emergent strongman, culture retreats to a new lower level that emphasizes the military, and the country is soon in debt. This being the case, the Renaissance peoples, when outnumbered, must suspend rule by the majority and instead dominate from the barrel of a gun, or cease to exist. (Many Liberals, in their Guilt, would choose to cease to exist. My hope is that they do so sooner rather than later and let the rest of us clean up the mess without them.)

2. Israel should keep the West Bank and the Gaza strip. Israel should be kept a "Jewish state" by which is meant Arabs do not get to vote. Yes, Israel would thus be a "limited democracy." (They should keep the Golan heights simply for their military defensive value.)

3. A land for the PLO should be carved out of the Sinai. Development of the project should be funded by Arab oil money, only.

4. South Africa whites should retreat into that portion (1/3?) of the coastal country where the majority is still white and the industrial base is located, and declare a new country. In this new region, Blacks would not vote. The "New South Africa" would be a "limited democracy."

---

Comments are solicited. Updated July, 2006 during the Iranian attack on Israel using Hezbollah proxies operating from Lebanon. And again in June of 2010 while observing the slow take over of Europe by Islamics, who breed faster than any other ethnic group.

--= The Hartman Web Site © , 1996 All rights reserved. =--