It's a damned shame so much of the world knows how to read and write. To draw maps. If they hadn't figured out how to record their history and the battles they've fought (remembering that history is usually written by the winners, but lots of everyday folks keep diaries about events) they would have forgotten a lot of the small details and might not be parsing the dispute so finely today.

Some of you are harking toward the Ur status of things - back how it was in The Very Beginning. Whenever that was. It isn't going to happen. Today's Americans aren't going to move off of the continent if they find that they have no blood quantum of American Indian. Protestant former Scots aren't going to move back to Scotland from Northern Ireland. White South Africans who are still in South Africa are probably going to stay there. India Indians who live in various nations around the world are going to stay where they settled. Etc., etc.

Events in recent history - lets make that the last couple of hundred years - are plenty to keep people busy. It lets the Armenians fight with the Turks about how much land they are really entitled to, it lets the Kurds continue to try to carve out their historic homeland from Turkey as well as northern Iraq. It lets Japan fight with Russia about some inhospitable islands off the coast of Siberia and yet a logical extension of the Japanese archipelago. It lets American Indians continue to fight battles to prove they were tribes and receive compensation for lost assets (just because they protested the Dawes rolls in 1887 doesn't mean they weren't Indians). It lets ethnic regions artificially joined by colonizers fight to disassociate. The fact that European Jews left Europe under the worst of possible conditions and moved into the thousands-of-years-ago-historic-homeland of Jews in Jerusalem means they displaced the people who had been living there for a very long time since they left (if they were ever there to begin with). There are bound to be some misunderstandings.

SRS