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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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My understanding was Palestine didn't have a property system analogous to western country systems. That the land owners were more like (charitably) feudal administrators over their land, and when they sold that land there was some expectation that the tenants had a remaining claim on the land. So it's not like Chinese immigrants coming in and making consensual trades for single houses, but more like (charitably) they gave the Mayor a few million dollars to overtake mayoral duties, and then they referred a la Hitchhiker's Guide to Property Rights to some Alpha Centauri law that administration of the city means full rights to all houses within and out you must go.

An expectation that tenants have some remaining claim on the land they live on after it's been sold is worth exactly as much as the paper it's not written on. On every continent, the imposition of modern property rights involved the dissolution of these supposed expectations without compensation. It happened in Britain with the Enclosures, in China and Russia during their respective Communist takeovers, and in the Americas when the colonial governments got out their maps and started drawing rectangles so they could sell them to people.

In fairness to the former tenants, this dissolution often caused mass human suffering. In fairness to everyone else, there was no vote to give these arbitrary land-based privileges to that particular handful of tenant farmers. Neither the people at large nor the governments in charge agreed to perpetuate any such rights. You can't run a modern state on vague feudal expectations.

It would be arbitrary and unusual to single out this one strip of the former Ottoman Empire to operate under the rules of the feudal system when practically every square inch of the rest of the world had either been converted to private property or was in the process of being converted to private property.

The privilege of forcing other people to live according to your arbitrary and whimsical ideas about property rights is exclusively reserved for those too well-armed to evict.

You seem to be severely underestimating the extensive use of customary land tenure throughout the world today as well as the increasingly conscientious approaches governments have taken when introducing land titling and property right acknowledgements for those lands. There is not one way to implement these changes, and yet you take some of the worst examples from history and seem to say this is just how it need go.