MattE
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Australian Politics
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If you zoom out and look at history honestly, basically all land is conquered land. Borders didn’t magically appear because everyone agreed nicely. People moved, fought wars, took territory, lost it, took it back, and repeated that cycle for thousands of years. Tribes replaced other tribes, kingdoms swallowed smaller kingdoms, empires collapsed and new states popped up. There’s no country on Earth that doesn’t sit on land someone else lived on before.
That’s why the idea of an exclusively “colonial settler” state doesn’t really make sense. It treats some countries as morally illegitimate while giving others a free pass, even though they came into existence the exact same way. Australia, the US, China, Turkey, and most of Europe only exist in their current form because of conquest, displacement, or forced assimilation at some point. That’s not a defence, it’s just reality.
Israel gets singled out a lot in this debate, as if it’s uniquely evil or fake. But the land has changed hands constantly for thousands of years under different empires and rulers. Israel emerged after war, the collapse of the British mandate, and competing nationalist movements, which is how heaps of modern states formed. You can criticise Israeli government policies without pretending Israel is some special exception to how history actually works.
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