In the U.S., the legal concerns would include issues like unreasonable search and seizure, due process violations, trespass, eminent domain, improper eviction, and housing law violations. Israel likely has comparable laws. Do you believe there’s a risk of trivializing the matter by overlooking these legal complexities, not to mention the practical considerations of mass forcible removal?
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My argument is simple; we should return the stolen land, property, and everything taken from Palestinians. Houses have been confiscated, families evicted, and more. We must give it all back.
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Defenitely not. Quite remarkable, given the astonishing capacity of the human kind. The lesson to be learned from it’s history is that we just cannot help to repeat it, despite genuine efforts not to do so.
As Matsuo Basho once wrote:
Summer grass
All that remains
Of a Samurai’s dream
夏草や 兵どもが 夢の跡
For an explanation: link
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No, it is not simple. It is simplistic. @mark5000 asked you about “legal complexities and practical considerations of mass forcible removal”, you cannot go “hey it is simple” and ignore the issue!
For example, my country has failed to create a land registry database during peacetime. The effort has taken 35 years. It is still ongoing (and it will be probably for 35 years more) and the result was a country-wide mess during peace-time with everything intact.
And you think that the same thing can be done in a warzone where things could have easily be turned into rubble or been built over. 
Give it some thought please.
Unless you expect us to agree that it will be made good by magic and good will.
I do not think that anyone here wants war and suffering to exist and we all agree that it would be great if all conflicts could end effective immediately and people get along and solve their problems diplomatically. However, from that wish to reality there are a lot of practical problems that cannot be easily dismissed.
What you are doing is saying that solving world poverty is simple by saying “just give everyone free money and let it rain food from the sky”.
If only that could happen/work.
I think you over-estimate the good will and our drive to improve, as a species. The facts, as you said, point to our inability, through millenia, to understand that things and accomplishments are transient.
Similar warnings exist in our western culture as well (e.g. Solon’s encounter with King Croesus in Herodotos’ tales - thought Tolstoy’s version of it is more famous now -, Lucian’s Dialogues of the dead (especially no. 3, 5, 8 and 20)) and I could think of more (even the Bible itself contains such warnings and Carl Sagan’s famous Pale Blue Dot is the most recent example I can remember), but who cares? Even finding the links was a waste of time, noone will probably click/read/consider them and if they do, it doesn’t matter because, as a species, collectively, we keep doing the same things, over and over and over again. What difference does it make what a few people understand something or not? Our ability to learn and “astonishing capacity” seems to be focoused on growing mostly in technological matter, not behavioural.
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There are currently 1833 players with a Ukrainian flag, and 77 with a Palestinian Territories flag.
(random comparison: there are 30 from Laos)
Keep in mind that only about 10% of users set a flag - although Ukrainians and Palestinians might be more motivated than others to set a flag - so the actual number of Ukranian and Palestinian might be up to ten times higher than the numbers above.
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I suspect a lot, perhaps the majority, of those with the Palestinian flag are not actually Palestinian, but rather showing solidarity with them.
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I had the same thought. And a similar number probably does the same with the Ukrainian flag.
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That’s almost saying nothing and surely not answering the question.
We can put whatever flag we want to.
Maybe with the email of registration, OGS could provide a bit better statistics (although still debatable)
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I wouldn’t be surprised if we had to put up the @gmail.com flag if we go by that.
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Relocating settlers should be easy and simple. After all, it was straightforward for Israelis to settle and take over Palestinian lands and properties.
“When someone shows you who they really are, believe them. Israel did the entire world a huge favour by showing her true colours. It’s now for the people to decide whether they stand for or against mass murder, genocide, and terrorism.”
https://x.com/damaskesque/status/1741360502045855893?s=20
RIP John Pilger (1939-2023): ‘Israel is a Lying Machine, Palestine Has The Right to Defend Itself’ RIP John Pilger (1939-2023): ‘Israel is a Lying Machine, Palestine Has The Right to Defend Itself’
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In this case, if we are going to be that practical we might as well add our “thoughts and prayers” to the solution and go over to TikTok and watch “manifestation tutorials” so that you can manifest a magic lamp in 2024. Watch out for the three wishes they give though, because those djinn are known to be treacherous!!
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Can you or someone here tell me why it’s so hard? Evicting settlers from Israel seems to be full of legal problems, lawyers, and who knows what else. But why was it easy for them (Israel) to take houses, properties, and land from Palestinians? It was simple to do this, but now it’s suddenly full of legal issues to reverse it. Please explain.
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Fine, since this is phrased as a serious honest question and it is a free day, I’ll give you some answers/examples:
a) Swap the flags - #65 by JethOrensin as you may have noticed my country failed for 35 years to even record whose house is where, during peacetime. For example, my uncle had a one-story house and a one-story storehouse. I took the paperwork to the land registry myself and everything was correct. Contracts, papers, satelite maps, coordinates, the lot. Result? According to the land registry now my uncle has NO house and two-story storehouse.
So, locating whose house is where, how big it was, how many stories it was, who owned its floor/story/apartment is an extremely difficult and arduous process. If you think this is an easy process, please send an email to the “Greek ministry of land”, they are in dire need of help.
Now add to this the fact that there is no peace in the region, those are very densely populated areas, a lot of buildings might have been torn down, a lot of the former residents might me long gone or dead and you have an even more complex issue at hand.
I had already written all that but you ignored them.
b) A lot of the occupied buildings are not even there anymore. Along with the people, corporations and building conglomerates moved in as well. This means that building blocks and small houses were torn down to become building blocks and malls and larger high-rise residential buildings. Let’s say that you lived in a small old house that is no longer there. Where are they going to return you to? To a corner of a mall or an office complex?
c) In no agreement that was ever made in the history of our species, has there been a deal where the side/person holding most of the power agreed to actually lose more things by signing a deal. Even the most incompetent leaders in history understood that “when you are strong, you get more when you close a deal” and that’s the main basis of diplomacy, ever since the times that “diplomacy” was conducted with clubs and stones outside caves. Israel is the de facto stronger part at this moment in history, ergo there is no way they would ever accept to 1) get all those people out, 2) pay for the reparations of the people they displaced and then 3) pay reparations for their own people that they had sent to live there with promises of a better life and 4) then pay even more to actually relocate them somewhere of equal value.
Even one of those four things would have been a dealbreaker for the power-holder of a deal. You want all four of them to happen and you call that “simple and easy”.
d) The exact same problem still exists with Northern Cyprus. Things like this have happened before. Reading some history is always useful. As you will find out, no commonly accepted solution has been found yet and it has been more than 50 years now. Even if we discount the changes and urban development of the past 50 years and we somehow magically could return all those people and those areas back to the way they were 50 years ago, most of the people that were evicted are probably too old or even dead. Most of their children were either too young or not even born there. And where would all the people that moved in and have lived there for all this time go now? It is a tricky and complex problem. Which is why it is un(re)solved.
Do you want me to continue or is is now clear that this is NOT a “simple matter”?
Here is a very simple example:
Let’s say we are in a film noir and you go in and rob a bank. You get into the safe with some daring-do and you get all the gold from the personal mini-safes. While trying to escape with all the gold, the police apprehends you and they get the gold back.
You put all the gold in your bag without a care of which container/safe you took it from and without any documentation. You didn’t care because now all the gold was yours. However the police needs to 1) document the gold, 2) take stock of the list of people that were clients of the bank, 3) reference and cross-reference the contents of the sack compared with what the people declared that they had into their personal safes (the banks used to keep no record of personal safe contents - that’s why they were personal) and the process will take a lot of time because you can be good money that once a robbery has occured people are going to inflate the contents of their safes (only they knew what was in there, so by declaring more, they might get more if some other safe-holder is missing or doesn’t declare their own contents - these are real-life problems, people lie to the police or to insurance in similar cases all the time).
Unsurprisingly, putting things in a bag is easy. Giving them back is much harder.
Now do that with houses and acres and acres of land.
Especially in a place full of conflict and mostly devoid of laws/lawkeeping, no land-registries and unknown amount of deeds.
That final part is important.
Somehow you seem to assume that all those people even had deeds (newsflash: probably not) and that fleeing people are like “hey let’s run for it, but first let’s grab our bags with the deeds and the topographic diagrams of the house!!!” … Who does that? Not even a small fraction of people, is the answer.
So, let’s say you had a house of 80square meters and you know that your neighbour that had a similar house is dead. Now they tell you that the houses are gone, but you have a chance to get your land back and a new house. What are the chances that you declare that you had 160 square meters? 
Now put the other neighbours into the mix that they know that middle neighbour is dead and they all over-estimate their plot? Who will get those 80 square meters? And thus the squabble begins.
Maybe you have been blessed in life and never had to see nor hear about such occurances and you might think that such things are rare and that people will honestly get back into their places without any arguments or disagreements, but in rural Greece those are common-place and I can fill books with them. Actually a great deal of the problems with our land registry is that exact issue. Honest mistakes and the incompetency of the clerks aside, a lot of people found a chance to grab land from their neighbours and took a swing at it. They reckon that they have nothing to lose.
If their trick works? They get more land!
If it does not work? They get the land that they really have now and they go “sorry, my bad, oooops 
”
So what do they have to lose? Getting caught costs them nothing.
So, no risk and a lot of potential gain.
And thus their “real nature” as human-form vultures is revealed and that begun a country-wide land registering fight that has lasted 35 years and will last 35 years more (if we are lucky).
So, do you want more? Have you had enough? Do you finally see the complexity? Are you even going to read any of that or did you give up half-way? 
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I wonder how New Zealand manages Maori claims to lands? Should non-Maori New Zealanders leave New Zealand to return it all to the Maori?
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The 1939 map looks very much like someone was painting pictographs on it and like a very sad bunny if you look at it from afar. A surprising map progression to be honest.
Now I honestly want to know the story of that part in the middle of the 1860 map (and you can still see its outline in the other maps too). That’s a “bold move” if I ever saw one.
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To be honest, I know next to nothing about it. But is it neccessary to know more?
I just noted a problem that may seem simple and I offered a simple solution.
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I’ve read your whole piece, and it’s great you wrote a lot. However, I don’t agree as the examples are small and isolated. Check out this website: Israel sets record for illegal settlement approvals: Rights group | Occupied West Bank News | Al Jazeera
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That patch is a big lake, which I suppose is excluded from land ownership in those maps.
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I’m Dutch and lived in Utrecht, for 21 years before moving to New Zealand. It’s different from the Middle East, with a strong Māori presence. We celebrate Māori holidays, speak their language freely, and they’re well represented in Parliament. We also have a treaty that helps us live together. However, there’s always room to improve relationships.
Since you’re from the Netherlands or based there, you must know about colonialism and the huge harm it has caused globally, even today. For example, Israeli and American colonialism in Palestine.
That’s interesting, i am surprised then you only talk about give back (which is corelated with a 2 states solution ) when your own country history lead to coexistence in the same place.
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