177. "Conquered territory" vs. "occupied territory."

Oh how much depends on the word you use for land your country's armed forces have won.  Call it "conquered territory" and nobody objects (with words, anyway) to what you do with it.  Call it "occupied territory," though, and you're in the stew.  "Hey, that land belongs to somebody else."  Occupation, unlike conquest, is not legitimate.

Conquest is legitimized by history.  This is the way the world has gone. The conquering country is a member of a very large, very ancient class.  Challenge what it's doing and you're challenging all of them.  Hell, you're practically challenging the foundations of the earth.  Very few of today's people are living on land that hasn't, at some time, been conquered for them.

The Israelis are paying the price for accepting "occupied" as the word their newly acquired Palestinian Territory in 1967.  Constantly being criticized.  Why didn't they insist on "conquered territory"?  They'd have freed themselves of so much flak.  Besides, isn't "conquered" a better fit with the way they have been treating the land, or have shown, by their tolerance of the settlers, the way they want to treat it?

Well, there were a lot of reasons they didn't use "conquered," beginning with the fact that conquest would have incorporated enough non-Jews in their country to make the Jews a minority, but a very big reason was that by 1967 conquest wasn't legitimate any more.  International law had changed.  In the early days of the Zionist movement "conquest" was in international law recognized as a "right" — meaning, like most things in international law, "something we're not going to argue about."  Unless you were willing and able to take the land back from the country that took it there was no point in opening your mouth.  The word "right" gave nations victorious in war the feeling of legitimacy that people victorious in lawsuits had.  It was a very useful term at the end of the 19th century, when Europeans were taking African land.

But "right of conquest" didn't hold up.  Though it was riding high in 1897, when Theodore Herzl first envisioned a homeland for the Jews in the Middle East, and still had plenty of momentum in 1917, when the British government blessed Herzl's vision, by 1946, at the Nuremberg Trials, it was dying and by 1974, with United Nations resolution 3314, the word was dead.  The "right" of conquest became the "crime" of conquest, called "aggression."

If only Israel had won the Palestinian territory 70 years earlier!  Things would have been (linguistically) so simple.  "We got it, boys.  Legitimately.  Might as well quiet down."

That's words for you.  You get one you can take shelter under and, whooosht, somebody takes it away.  Who took "right of conquest" away?  Well, grandchildren (this blog isn't just for profs), they are called "humanitarians" and they have taken a lot of the old words away.  They did it by changing our attitude toward the thing the word referred to.  Invading a country was bad.  And not just bad where it had always been bad, in the eyes of the invaded country, but in the eyes of the world community. If that community thought something was bad you couldn't use a good word, like "right," for it.  Not for long.  

The world community had begun to count for something at the time the humanitarians got together (the 18th century) and they made use of it.  Get those first public intellectuals, get those gabby philosophes, get everybody in the Republic of Letters, talking in a disapproving way about conquest (or slavery, or prisons, or insane asylums, or child labor) and you could change the attitudes of the literate world.  (That's what you finally had in the 18th century, a big, literate, middle-class world.)  The change succeeded, children, and we call the change "the Enlightenment."

I offer that name, not for your use on a quiz, but for your understanding of Israel's pain, its linguistic pain.  The words that fit its actions, and were once acceptable, cannot be used.  The enlightened community has replaced them with other, more humane, words, and Israelis must use them.  One must debate in the style (some would say "fashion") of the times.