The "stolen land" argument for justifying violent conflict is an odd one and it's also strangely popular among leftists.
Leftists also seem to be the people who are slavishly attacking anyone who is voicing nuance in the current Ukrainian conflict. Albeit, I haven't been voicing much nuance and I'm not a leftist.
Leftists are also currently the most likely to attack Israel for being "stolen land" in their justifications of terrorist organizations like Hamas attempting to kill Israelis.
You're gonna run into a real problem here if you're one of those people who slapped a Ukrainian flag on your profile picture and you still think that Israel is stolen land.
In reality, if you wanna push this to a logical conclusion, just about everything is stolen land. On a cosmic scale, 12,000 years of human history is nothing. For a human being, 12,000 years is incomprehensible. For the average American millennial, history started the day that he or she was pushed through the birth canal. Any understanding of human history shows us a picture of constant violence and takeovers of violent lands. Every plot of land was stolen at some point.
If you want to apply any logic to this, Putin has a better argument than the Palestinians.
Modern Russia has had a massive stake in what is modern day Ukraine since 300 years before Andrei Rublev. The Cossacks never had a firm grasp on the area. Dating back to the crusades, the land was heavily contested due to the value of the Black Sea. It's easily arguable that modern Russia had that land centuries before there was a modern, independent Ukraine. Many Ukrainians are on the side of the Belarusians in having a romantic view of the Soviet Union and a desire to see a new Russian expansion.
In the case of Israel, one can make the same arguments. The problem is, you'd have to be making identical arguments to Putin with a much weaker case.
Yes, what is modern day Israel has been contested, conquered, maybe "stolen" for millennia; but, you can't argue that the Muslims have had a stake in that land from anywhere near the beginning of an establishment of civilization. The Jews were on that land for well more than a millennium before the foundation of Islam. The Jews never made anywhere near a full Exodus from the land. There were constant attempts by the British, when the land was colonized, to create two separate states.
The Palestinians have a much weaker argument regarding Israel being stolen land than Putin does.
My point isn't to defend Putin, I don't. My point is to condemn this way of thinking and to point out the hypocrisy of this way of thinking. If you're anti-Israel because you regard her as stolen land, you have to be on the side of Putin on this one point.
You can be anti-Israel and anti-Putin while being intellectually consistent. No two conflicts are identical. On this one issue, if you buy the "stolen land" argument in regard to Israel, you have to admit that Putin has a better argument than you do.
