"Cutting water, cutting electricity, cutting food to a mass of civilian people is against international law," said EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell in Muscat.
This is where it gets tricky and a lot of nuance is lost, I think. There reaches a certain point where it stops being zero-sum because two or more parties can each have an entirely independent and valid claim.
In your example, if you pass the money to your children, they reach 40 years old, spending the money they believe is theirs, and then suddenly they’re told they owe $2M they don’t have for something they didn’t do, that’s not fair on them. Have they benefitted from the $2M? Absolutely. Is it fair that they benefitted while the person/people you stole it from suffered? Absolutely not. But your children didn’t do anything to deserve punishment.
Now I’m generally fairly anti-Israel, and have been for years, so don’t take this as me being an apologist for colonisers. But for someone who has lived all their life in Israel - whose great-grandparents were colonisers - Israel is home and they feel they have just as much right to it as the people it was stolen from 80 years ago. The longer these conflicts go on, the more difficult it is to come up with a fair solution on a human level.
Israel is definitely in the wrong, though. It’s very clearly not fair from a Palestinian perspective. But no matter how you try to divide up the land now, there will be innocent people who suffer for it. There’s no easy solution to it, unfortunately. It’s more complex than just “give it back”.
If I steal 2 million dollars from you and hang on to it until I have children and give it to them, is that their money or is it still stolen?
This is where it gets tricky and a lot of nuance is lost, I think. There reaches a certain point where it stops being zero-sum because two or more parties can each have an entirely independent and valid claim.
In your example, if you pass the money to your children, they reach 40 years old, spending the money they believe is theirs, and then suddenly they’re told they owe $2M they don’t have for something they didn’t do, that’s not fair on them. Have they benefitted from the $2M? Absolutely. Is it fair that they benefitted while the person/people you stole it from suffered? Absolutely not. But your children didn’t do anything to deserve punishment.
Now I’m generally fairly anti-Israel, and have been for years, so don’t take this as me being an apologist for colonisers. But for someone who has lived all their life in Israel - whose great-grandparents were colonisers - Israel is home and they feel they have just as much right to it as the people it was stolen from 80 years ago. The longer these conflicts go on, the more difficult it is to come up with a fair solution on a human level.
Israel is definitely in the wrong, though. It’s very clearly not fair from a Palestinian perspective. But no matter how you try to divide up the land now, there will be innocent people who suffer for it. There’s no easy solution to it, unfortunately. It’s more complex than just “give it back”.