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."
