Yassine Meskhout
Jan 05, 2025
There’s a hidden assumption within discussions on territorial disputes that I never see called out, and that’s the question of how we determine who controls the dirt. This post is ultimately about Israel & Palestine, but it’s a broadly applicable lesson.
The first part is that we need to separate the concept of property from sovereignty. If you wake up tomorrow under the sovereign rule of a different government, it doesn’t mean that your property rights get erased. It’s certainly possible for the new government to use this opportunity and want to start with a blank slate, but the common practice is to maintain the status quo. For example, when Spain ceded Florida to the United States, the Adams–Onís Treaty explicitly preserved existing property rights:
This also happened with the Louisiana Purchase and the Alaska Purchase for French and Russian landowners respectively. So when we’re talking about which sovereignty should hold dominion over any particular piece of land, never forget that it’s NOT the same thing as which individuals should hold property over any particular piece of land.
I would like to think this is a blatantly obvious axiom, and yet almost every discussion on territorial disputes obfuscates the issue. Perhaps intentionally.
Limiting the question over which sovereignty should hold dominion significantly clarifies any given territorial dispute. The primary parties that would have a stake in this matter would be:
- The sovereignties themselves
- Any third parties that have more influence with one sovereignty than the other
- Any subjects within the disputed territory who now face a different legal regime
The first factor is the tired old story of nationalism, the stuff that has grinded billions of lives throughout history on pointless causes. Do I have any reason to care whether tiny pockets of land along the Danube river are under Croatian or Serbian jurisdiction? I would, but only if the delta in governance between the two countries has a material impact on the subjects or the environment. Otherwise, who gives a shit?
On the second factor, if I ran a tourism company in Thailand, I’d probably care whether the Preah Vihear Temple is under the jurisdiction of Thailand versus Cambodia. But for everyone else, if either country can maintain such a historic site equally well, why would anyone give a shit which flag flies over it?
After we shed off nationalist pride concerns, or whatever stake any given special interest might hold, we’re always going to be left with only the third factor: how the subjects are treated. Crucially though on this issue, we’re not comparing the difference between one legal jurisdiction versus anarchy, but rather the delta between two possible legal regimes.
Once you understand and accept this point, virtually every single outstanding territorial dispute out there comes off as really fucking pointless. The best example is the town of Olivenza, which was continuously held by Portugal since the year 1297, until it was ceded to Spain in 1801.
Source
For complicated reasons, Portugal has been asking for a backsies soon after ceding it and has yet to back down. And yet, despite what is nominally a live territorial dispute, neither country really give a shit. I have to also assume that the town’s 12,000 inhabitants also don’t give a shit. The Spanish and Portuguese governments are basically identical in terms of governance and legal systems, and both countries are part of the Schengen Area that allows free trade and free immigration, which means border crossings are a non-issue.
To any normal person, it would be profoundly bizarre for anybody to get animated about this issue, like say by donning a suicide bomb vest. I’m sure there’s some hardcore Portuguese nationalist somewhere out there who cosplays as The Sleeping King on the weekends and yells on the street corner about how the Bandeirantes will rise again, but nobody has any obligation to affirm their peculiar delusions.
There’s a fourth factor of consideration for territorial disputes that I didn’t mention above:
- Which “ethnicity” the land “belongs” to
What I neither understand nor support, is ascribing “ownership” to “people”. I don’t believe that anybody’s ethnicity should ever matter for any reason, and I certainly do not believe that anybody’s ethnicity should ever be the source of any legal privileges. Anyone who ever discusses the concept of indigeneity or self-determination within the context of territorial disputes is sneakily upholding a regressive vision of the world, one that necessarily requires segregating and assortatively parceling out land on the basis of skin.
You see this come up all the time, without any explicit acknowledgement. Consider the example of Western Sahara, currently claimed and mostly occupied by Morocco.
The area was previously a Spanish colonial holding, but just as the Spanish left in 1976, a Sahrawi nationalist group known as the Polisario Front rose up and started fighting against both the Moroccan and Mauritanian armies in an attempt to secure their “right of self-determination and independence”. Long story short, Morocco moved in and pushed out the Polisario further into the empty desert and built a ridiculously long ‘sand wall’ that is saturated with millions of explosives mines. The remaining area beyond the wall is uninhabitable empty desert, and so the Polisario have actually escaped into neighboring Algeria and have been living in permanent refugee camps ever since in the Tindouf Province.
Sahrawi simply translates to “person of the Sahara”. If you’ve read my book review on the topic, you know that I find racial categories arbitrary and incoherent. Ethnic categories, a supposedly different and much more fractal categorization system, simply amplifies the inherent problems. I’m not
Razib Khan and even though I grew up in Morocco, I can’t possibly begin to tell you how anyone would be able to tell the difference between a Sahrawi and a plain-vanilla Moroccan.
We’re talking about marshy soup of genetic intermixing, cumulating across thousands of years of migrations, trade, invasions, explorations, and annexations. It’s simply madness for anyone to unsheathe their Sharpie marker and claim the ability to crisply delineate not only demarcations between people groups, but also specifically assign those groups to some rightful territory. Do you split up by genetic strain? By language? By skin color? By dress style? By cultural rituals? By traditional diets? How does any of this work?
Even if you could coherently define a group, how far back do you go? What’s now known as Western Sahara was variously occupied within the last thousand years by the Almoravid Dynasty (until 1147), then the Almohad Caliphate (until 1215), then the Marinid Dynasty (until 1465), then by vassals of a vassal of the Ottoman Empire (until 1554), then the Saadi Sultanate (until 1659), then it gets fuzzy with the Alawi Sultanate (until 1884), then by Spain (until 1976), until finally under Moroccan control. You can pin anyone of those holdings in time and declare them as the “rightful” ones, so which one do you pick? If you go for the nexus between blood and soil, you still have to elevate one group over another. If you prioritize it in reverse chronological order, wouldn’t that reify the current Moroccan holding? This whole exercise is nonsense.
Going back to the original considerations I outlined, Western Sahara is a source of intense nationalism for Moroccans. Personally, I have no interest. Morocco has formidable phosphate reserves, constituting about 70% of the world’s known reserves, and a significant mine is located in Western Sahara. The Moroccan phosphate industry undoubtedly has an interest in Morocco maintaining its dominion over the territory. Personally, I don’t care.
That leaves us with the third factor: the delta between Moroccan and Polisario governance. The Polisario never had a chance to demonstrate their governance acumen given how quickly they got kicked out of the area. Regardless, I have no reason to believe that were the Polisario to somehow regain Western Sahara, they would usher in a golden age of prosperity to the area. The evidence does not exist.
One time I visited Morocco during an anniversary of the Green March, where in 1975 the government bussed in 350,000 settlers in a bid to take over the territory. The Moroccan television stations had back-to-back programming interviewing folks on the street living in the “Southern Provinces” invariably singing the praises of the Moroccan government for its generous investments in hospitals, schools, and roads.
Obviously these were state-run television stations dutifully airing nationalistic propaganda, but unfortunately b-roll footage from the street is the best we’ve got. The disputed status of the territory makes it very difficult to collect reliable data (which is why the area appears blank on almost every information map) but overall there’s no obvious indication that the place is meaningfully different from any other equivalently remote part of “mainland” Morocco.
How does all of this apply to the Israel-Palestine conflict? I’ve written my piece on the overall matter in case you need a refresher (part 1 & 2). Unlike many Zionists, absolutely none of my support for Israel is predicated on some inchoate “Jewish claim” to the area based either on indigeneity lineage or ancient historical precedent. For the many reasons stated above, I absolutely do not care what ethnicity occupied the place 2,000 years ago, nor do I care to tally up the lengthy list of historical grievances. There’s ardent nationalists on both sides of the conflict who strenuously disagree with me, tant pis.
The only aspect that matters to me regarding which sovereign should hold dominion is based on which government is the superior steward. I assumed others shared my prioritization of this factor, which is why I wrote so much on the comparative prosperity under Israeli and neighboring Arab sovereignty:
From the standpoint of material conditions, there’s an obvious winner. The tail is very long in terms of unhinged extremism, but I’ve never heard even ardent pro-Palestinian advocates make the claim that a one-state under Palestinian rule could come anywhere near replicating Israeli prosperity. The best one can do to speculate is look at neighboring countries with comparable religion, culture, and institutions to forecast what that hypothetical scenario would look like. Jordan presents the best-case scenario for a comparison given its population is estimated to be 50% of Palestinian descent. So are people seriously blowing themselves up just to replicate Jordan? Seriously? Give it up already.
Just like the Portuguese nationalist bursting a vein over stolen Olivenza, nobody has any obligation to affirm anyone’s peculiar delusions. It’s ok to accurately label foolish, destructive, and pointless endeavors as foolish, destructive, and pointless.
