[The following, by Eamonn McDonagh, is crossposted from Z Word.]

1. In response to my post about Ireland's law of return, a reader who signs himself "lapsedmethodist" asks,

I think that this question reflects a view of history that plagues much commentary on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Those who hold it see the Zionist enterprise as unjust from the outset because it sought and seeks to persuade a great number of people to move somewhere else, to a place where people who are not part of that enterprise already live.

2. In order to find something inherently unjust in Zionism on these grounds your conception of history would have to go something like this, "Every people in the world occupies a natural, legitimate and correct territory. History is something that happens to peoples settled on their ancestral territories. Large-scale, voluntary migrations that have effects on the pre-existing populations are something that simply do not occur. Zionism is unjust because it represents a rupture of this 'a place for everybody and everybody in his place' natural order of things".

3. I trust that I don't have to labor the point of how false this view is. Vast flows of migration - both voluntary and involuntary - have shaped and reshaped the world in the modern period. To give just one example; every single country on the American continent is a product of massive immigration from Europe, an immigration that frequently had genocidal consequences for the indigenous inhabitants of the new nations. There is no "originally" in history, no virgin moment when everyone was where they are supposed to be; there is only a certain state of affairs at a certain date and a certain balance of forces, with a scaffolding of class, national, ethnic and religious interests, yearnings and desires supporting them.

4. An interesting peculiarity about those who hold this view is that they only apply it to the Israel-Palestine conflict. They only see the nation building project of the Jews to be fundamentally unjust, never that of any other people and, of course, never their own.

5. To return to "lapsedmethodist"; it would appear that he sees no difficulty with Ireland's law of return because the Irish state appears to him to be a natural, timeless phenomenon rather than the product of the struggles of women and men who dreamed themselves Irish, a polity which came into being without the aid of an ideology or the participation of people living on other continents, and the birth and life of which have only involved the correction of previous injustice and never the producing of fresh injustice.