It's the oppression stupid!

Photo from worldsecuritynetwork.com

Matthew Yglesias has a post up about the possible precedent set by Kosovo's independence and it's application to the Palestinians and other peoples around the world who seek the same freedom:

...Now, I'm for Kosovo independence. But at the same time, I really don't think it's viable to support independence for every ethnic minority group everywhere around the world. So why Palestine? What makes the Palestinians so special that they deserve their own country when the Catalans and the Québécois and all the rest don't have them? The answer is pretty simple -- the alternative to independence is citizenship. The Québécois don't have an independent country, but they are citizens of Canada. Catalans are citizens of spain. Flemish and Walloons are both citizens of Belgium. Komi are citizens of Russia. When you see legal discriminatory treatment against citizens -- as with African-Americans in the United States until very recently -- that's a problem. People are owed equal citizenship.

It's clear, though, that granting Israeli citizenship on terms of equality to residents of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip is incompatible with the idea of Israel as a Jewish state. Thus, Palestinian independence emerges as a reasonable, practical, and moral alternative. Basically, there are four things you could do with Israel-Palestine. One option is partition and independence. Another option is equal citizenship and the end of Israel. A third option is "transfer" and ethnic cleansing. And a fourth option is apartheid...

The idea of citizenship v. independence is flawed. Yglesias says the the Quebecois, Catalans, et. al. have not been supported in bids for independence because they are citizens of some nation.

What happens when the lucky citizens want independence?

The point of Kosovo's independence isn't about them being a minority group but an oppressed minority of citizens of the Serbia state. Oppression isn't just a "problem" it's the issue around which many independence movements are created.

If a people are oppressed it makes it a non-starter for many of them to consider the idea of citizenship as being worth anything. Citizenship means trying to make an alliance with people who have been kicking them in the teeth.

Now sometimes that can be overcome. The example of Quebec is notable because French-Canadians were discriminated against by their English speaking brothers. The province well may have been on it's way to breaking away from Canada but a number of societal and political changes increased the power of the Francophone community and made it politically smarter to end the discrimination. The possible break away of Quebec was never about citizenship because the Quebecois were already Canadians, they were treated as lesser citizens.

The best example I can give where citizenship is not enough is our own fight for independence.

The people of the 13 colonies were British citizens but that didn't prevent a revolutionary war. Read the Declaration of Independence. It's a list of transgressions against the people by the state. If anything the fact that they were British citizens made the oppression seem worse because there was a feeling that the British were hurting their brothers.

The idea of citizenship v. independence doesn't hold up.

In my post earlier I listed the Catalans and Basques in Spain and the people South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia as potential flashpoints because of the situation in Kosovo.

In all of those cases those peoples are citizens of that country but that doesn't stop them from feeling slighted by those states and dreaming of their own land, where they can speak their own language under their own flag.

The Palestinians aren't fighting for their own state because the idea of citizenship is the best solution in an untenable situation or because citizenship is incompatible with what the people of Israel want. They are fighting for their own land because of the oppression they have faced for 60 years now.

The same way the people of Israel did.