When you say “they,” are you referring to all humans throughout all of human history? Not conquering/displacing people is a much more recent international norm
The ancients very much understood the value in just changing leadership. So conquering yes, genocide? Usually only when religion is involved.
That’s breathtakingly untrue. I know it’s the sensational popular view of historical warfare but it’s just not true. Generally the worst thing that would happen is to be enslaved. But as time goes on and we develop different power structures after the Romans, decapitation of the government becomes far more preferred. So there’s a big battle, the loser leader gets killed, and the remaining nobles swear loyalty to the new leader. Trained people are simply too valuable to kill out of hand.
Of course we do have documented instances of genocide and mass destruction. Nobody is saying it didn’t happen. It just wasn’t the normal mode of operation.
This is fundamentally not true. Invading, looting then burning down entire towns, killing men, and raping and/or kidnapping women and children was practiced across the globe by many different cultures for thousands of years
You’re confusing the fact that stuff happened, with that stuff being the go to thing to do. Even the Mongols preferred to take towns with the populace intact so they could get taxes as soon as possible. Popular history blows the genocidal stuff way out of proportion.
Not true. At least not for the Muslim conquest of the Levant according to Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister:
“The fellahin are not descendants of the Arab conquerors, who captured Eretz Israel and Syria in the seventh century CE. The Arab victors did not destroy the agricultural population they found in the country. They expelled only the alien Byzantine rulers, and did not touch the local population. Nor did the Arabs go in for settlement. Even in their former habitations the Arabs did not engage in farming…their whole interest in the new countries was political, religious and material: to rule, to propagate Islam, and to collect taxes…the Jewish farmer, like any other farmer, was not easily torn from his soil…Despite the repression and suffering the rural population remained unchanged.” [7]
Ben Gurion is quoted by Shlomo Sand in his book https://blogs.umb.edu/joinercenter/2012/10/09/review-of-shlomo-sand-the-invention-of-the-jewish-people-london-verso-2009-translated-by-yael-lotan/
More of a recent virtue signal we’ve been propagandized to believe, while continuing the conquering and displacement without skipping a beat.
While the west was writing the UN declaration of human rights, they were hard at work creating the state of Israel, directly denying Palestine their right to democracy and displacing a million of them.
At the end of WW2 America, and the rest of the anglo-allies, assisted France in trying to reclaim their colonies, rejecting hundreds of millions their “basic human right” to democracy; all of this went on for decades after the declaration was ratified, as if that meant anything.
Human rights don’t apply as long as you are labelled a communist, terrorist, separatist, extremist, pedo, etc, etc. Then they can torture you in a black site all nice and legal.
Most of our history has been written by sociopathic criminals.
…they were hard at work creating the state of Israel, directly denying Palestine their right to democracy and displacing a million of them.
There was no Palestinian sovereign state prior to Britain’s decision to establish a Jewish homeland in the region. It was briefly under shared British and French control following a revolt against the Ottoman Empire during WWI; then the League of Nations assigned Britain control over the region as “Mandatory Palestine”.
Mandatory Palestine was explicitly intended to be temporary, with Britain providing “administrative advice and assistance by a Mandatory until such time as they are able to stand alone”. Additionally, it was always intended to provide a home for the Jewish people without displacing Palestinian Arabs. Of course, this didn’t really work out. There was a lot of conflict between the Palestinian nationalists and the Jewish nationalists.
The UN’s action in 1947 was to partition the region into separate Jewish and Palestinian sovereign states. The reason this didn’t actually happen was because Arabic leaders both within the region and nearby rejected the idea of a sovereign Jewish state in the region. Israel declared independence anyway, and as the Palestinian Mandate expired, the 1948 Arab-Israeli war began as an effort to destroy the newly formed Israel. But of course Israel got support from other countries, and the war ended with Israel controlling most of Palestine and believing its neighbors to be a constant existential threat.
The Palestinians did not declare an independent, sovereign state until 1988, at which point they actually declared Jerusalem to be the capital of Palestine. There has never been a proposal for a two-state solution that Palestinian leaders have endorsed.
If you look at the entirety of human history, genocides and displacements have objectively been at an all-time low since the end of WWII
