TheIronRuler said:
Comrade_Beric said:
I have heard as such many times, almost always from Israelis for one of two reasons. Either A) as an excuse to not consider giving back the land or stop taking more from the Palestinians because "hey, they can just go to Jordan" or B) because they believe Jordan should be part of Israel, too. B) is unrealistic and both are offensive.
The few times I have heard an Arab equate the two was when they were either born in Jordan but a parent was a refugee from Palestine or when they were trying to explain why Jordan should be retaliating every time Israel bombs another Palestinian family.
I've heard of the B option for the first time here.
But damn it, the whole point of what I said is that you CAN'T DEFINE palestinian nationality.
Because there is already one and it's called Jordan.
Every single person that lived and was born during the British Mandate is palestinian. So you have Jewish palestinians. Hurrah.
You need to see my problem with defining an ethnic group for palestinians... there is already one, and it's called Jordanian. palestinians were people that lived in that piece of land the British mandate governed. Which include Israel and Jordon and all the Arabs, Christian and Muslims living there at the time.
Yes, I'm saying that they aren't a real nationality.
You can't say that though. Or, you can, it's just wrong. Like, egregiously, by definition wrong. Nationalities are made up. They are, in the words of Benedict Anderson, "Imagined Communities."* I challenge you to give me a good definition of nationality which successfully covers the nationality of every nation-state. You can give me some nice tries, but you're not going to be able to come up with one which actually works. Just for example, give me a definition of nationality which covers "American."** And "Yugoslav."***
Oh, and in particular reply to "every single person that lived and was born during the British Mandate is palestinian [sic]": Yes, just like every single person that lived and was born during the Austrian Empire was Austrian, and not, say Czech, Magyar, etc. It's not even really true to say that every single person that lived and was born during France is/was French. Ignoring, for the moment, the fact that the concept of "being French" as some sort of useful thing to say (in something like the modern sense) dates from around the 17th century probably, you've still got all those Bretons and the like who didn't even speak French and would be unwilling to identify with anything bigger than their own home town until they finally were inducted into "being French" via the wonders of universal education**** in the late 19th/early 20th century.
And this, of course, is all even granting that "nationality" is some sort of meaningful and/or necessary concept in the crafting of states. There are plenty of states which are not, in fact, nation states in any meaningful sense, and there used to be a whole lot more (all of them, in fact). So, yeah, your first task is to somehow prove that if the Palestinians are not really a nation/nationality, that that somehow matters and should be relevant for how we view the fact that they were forced out of their homes and have been oppressed by Israel for about sixty years. If you can do that, then you still have to come up with a definition of nationality which denies the Palestinians a place, but allows the others I mentioned.
*the title of his seminal work on the development of nationalism.
**Don't tell me it's not a nationality, because I can find around 300 million people, with their own nation-state, who'll say different.
***Likewise, don't try and tell me it's not a nationality. There are still, to this day, years after Yugoslavia's collapse people who refuse to identify as Serbian, or Albanian, or Kosovar, because they are Yugoslavs.
****Also the levée en masse, from the Revolution.
