Reply #9: Hi Rex,

[sofa king]

I spent about eight years working on land and title disputes in the United States, most of them involving American Indian tribes.

I'll try to skip most of the legal stuff and give you just the straight version: a people's claim to land expires as soon as they are too weak to control it any longer, period. There is plenty of ink spilled to make it appear otherwise, but that's how it really is.

At this point, the lawyers could swoop in and remind that I'm totally wrong in the eyes of the law. But I'm not, and to those lawyers I cite the millions of acres of alienated territory in the United States which was stolen from American Indians in spite of things like the 1790 Indian Non-intercourse Act and perpetuity clauses in our highest law of our land, treaties.

The Non-intercourse Act is particularly instructive, because that law made all land transactions between entities other than the United States and tribes null and void--they never happened, according to the law; the Indians still own that stolen land, even today.

The Oneida cutlery factory is still Indian land, according to the Non-intercourse Act. And yet the forks keep rolling off the line.

New Zealand made a similar arrangement with Maori tribes at the Treaty of Waitangi, and they're not going to give that stolen land back, either.

Sometimes the stolen land later was paid for at pennies on the dollar. Sometimes it wasn't. Never, as far as I know (and I should know), has stolen Indian land in America been directly returned to its owners quickly, fairly and without equivocation. That's in spite of the fact that the basic tenets of our legal system required in many cases that we do exactly that.

In cases like the air-tight Oneida claim I linked above, the lawyers just delayed the return of the land until other legal tools like laches could be used to dismantle the claim in the Supreme Court. Same thing happens everywhere else, all over the world.

So the honest (though not necessarily legal) answer is: as soon as you lose it, it's gone forever, unless you fight to get it back. The Law of Conquest never went away. I'm the first person to tell you that it shouldn't be that way, but it is.

There is a depressing corollary to all of this: lose your land, and you lose your nation. The reason why American Indian tribes have any claim at all (for most non-Indian entities, no land claim can last longer than about forty years, after which statutes of limitations and other clauses invalidate the claim) is because the United States once treated with tribes as sovereign, independent entities. But as they lost control of their land base, they lost their sovereignty, and today they are domestic dependent entities. Same thing happened in New Zealand and Canada; it was worse in Australia and South America, and most other places colonized by Europeans.

These questions may have been posed with sympathy toward one side or the other in the Israel-Palestine question, but there is a further wrinkle in that case: look to the past nineteen hundred years prior to 1948 and look for any significant period in which either Palestians or Jews actually owned and controlled that territory. I'm not sure there is one. For virtually all of that time, the territory was under the control of someone else, be it Romans, Byzantines, Crusaders, Mamelukes, Ottomans, the British, or other Arab groups. That only further underscores the sad reality of might-makes-right as the only controlling law.

Edit: I should also point out that both parties in the Arab-Israeli dispute are fully cognizant of this law of the jungle. That is why the Palestinians made the "liquidation of Zionism" a cornerstone of their governing document (Article 15 of the PLO Charter). That's also why the Israelis have responded to Palestinian insurrection by land confiscation and colonization. Edit2: I spent eight years researching it, not ten, and I'm still doing it.