A Cool Hour on the Israel-Palestine Conflict 5 (by Samuel Fleischacker)
[This post is part of a series by Sam running at normblog on Mondays. The first post of the series is here.]
5. Historical Claims
Last week I discussed what I consider a very weak style of argument for either Israel's or the Palestinian claim to the land: that religious Scriptures underwrite that claim. This week I look at another problematic type of argument: that the land belongs to Jews or Arabs because it is important to them historically.
a) 'This is the land in which the Jewish nation was formed, filled with places of great importance to Jewish history.'
b) 'The Palestinians were the original inhabitants of this land, descending from the Canaanites - and the Jews - who lived here in ancient times.'
I've headlined this post with certain variants of the historical claims used to defend Jewish and Arab claims to the land. There are other variants: Jews, for instance, sometimes say that there has been a Jewish presence in the land continuously over the past 2000 years. But the vast majority of Jews has not lived in Israel/Palestine during that time, and at no point from, approximately, the 6th until the mid-20th century were most of its inhabitants Jewish. There have almost always been small Jewish communities in the land, but that of course doesn't entitle Jews to dominate it. If the land should be given to the people who made up the bulk of its inhabitants over the past several centuries, the Palestinians certainly win.
So the main Jewish historical claim to the land takes the form I put under a): that Jews used to be the dominant group in this territory, that they lived in it for hundreds of years, and that their group identity was formed here; that it is their ancestral home. Now I think we do need to accept that this claim is true, while b) above is probably false. It's possible that some Palestinians have ancestors who were Canaanites, and likely that some are biological descendants of Jews. That doesn't make them culturally Canaanite or Jewish, any more than my having, say, some distant Danish or Mongolian ancestors makes me Danish or Mongolian. The earliest community that lived in the land whose cultural heirs survive today is the Jewish community.
It is also true that an attachment to the land of Israel has remained central to both the Jewish religion and Jewish cultural identity all through the two millennia in which they have lived elsewhere. Zionism may be a new political movement, dating just to the mid-19th century, but for 2000 years Jews have prayed three times a day for a rebuilding of their ancient state in Israel, commemorated Jerusalem and marked their exile from it in fast days and festivals, written hundreds of poems about the land - for liturgical and non-liturgical use - and returned, in small numbers, to form communities there or to die there.
The question is, what political difference does all this make? Many peoples were formed in a place far from where they currently live: Turks in East Asia; Celts in central Europe; Sinti and Roma peoples (so-called 'Gypsies') probably in India. Others lived for a long time in, ruled over, and/or built up important cultural institutions in areas that have since come to be dominated by other ethnic groups: Muslims in southern Spain are again a good example, as are Greeks in southern Italy and eastern Turkey, and Turks throughout the Balkans. Buddhists once dominated Afghanistan, much of India and Java. Some of these groups have also maintained a cultural memory of their life in these areas, albeit usually not with the intensity of the one Jews have for Israel/Palestine. Does that mean that they should all be permitted to 'return' to their ancient homes - at the cost of the current inhabitants of these areas? Must the Turks who now live in the Aegean coast see their area become dominated once again by Greeks, or the Christians who have dominated Andalucian Spain for 500 years now see their area become again largely Muslim? The expulsion of Muslims from Spain in the 15th century was violent and unjust, and the descendants of its victims remember the Muslim presence there very vividly, but that does not give them a right to displace its current inhabitants. So too the Jews had no right to displace the inhabitants of Israel/Palestine just because they once lived there - even if they lived there for a long time, were expelled unjustly from it, and cared deeply for it ever afterwards.
We might apply, to the historical claims we're considering, the rule I suggested for religious ones in the last post: is the principle that underlies them one we would be willing to uphold as a general rule for the international order? How would we feel about a general rule that peoples have a right to return to, and govern, any land that in the past they inhabited, and that mattered to their historical development? The international order would become a scene of constant, irresolvable violence. A principle that every people can return to its ancestral homeland would be as destructive to international peace and justice as a principle that every religious group can use its Scriptures to make political claims. So whether the Jews were in the land first or not shouldn't make any difference to its current political status.
Turning back for a moment to the truth of this claim, there are people who question it, but these doubts seem to me spurious. Some contemporary scholars - the so-called 'Minimalists' or Copenhagen school - have suggested that the Bible's depiction of a Jewish or Israelite presence in the land before the 4th or 5th pre-Christian century is a fantasy: that there never was a Davidic kingdom, for instance. The scholarship behind these claims has been widely debunked (there's an excellent recent article on this by Marc Brettler), but even if it were correct, Jews would have been the dominant group in the land for 9 or 10 centuries in the ancient past - and have formed their identity there. Nor does any other cultural group that lived then in this land still survive.
The mention of 'cultural groups' brings up the problem with another type of challenge to the claim that the land is the Jewish ancestral home. Some Palestinians say that, whatever may have been the case with the ancient Jews, most modern Jews are actually descendants of Europeans or central Asians, not of people who lived in Israel/Palestine. As a matter of genetics, there may be some truth to this. Like many Ashkenazi Jews, I am light-skinned and have blue eyes; I look more like an Afghani than a classic 'Semite' (when I wore a shalwar kamiz in Peshawar, Afghani refugees insisted that I must be one of them). Although the hypothesis that most Ashkenazi Jews descend from the medieval Khazar kingdom has been widely discredited, it still strikes me as not implausible. But I don't see what difference genetic line makes. 'Jew' (like 'Arab' and 'Muslim' and any other cultural or religious term) is a name for an historical identity, not a biological one. In regarding oneself as Jewish, one identifies with a community that speaks certain languages, has a certain religion, and commemorates certain historical events, not with a set of biological markers. Converts, and the descendants of converts, can be just as Jewish as people with two Jewish parents, while someone whose ancestors converted from Judaism, and who identifies herself now as a Muslim or Christian, is not a Jew. When Jews talk of a Jewish ancestral home, and want to revive the Jewish presence there, they don't mean that it was once filled up with people of a certain genetic stock and should be filled up with such people again. They mean that it once had a certain collective identity and should have that collective identity again. That's also what Muslims mean when they speak in favour of a Muslim state, and Arabs mean when they work for an Arab state. My discovering that I had some Arab blood would not make me a good candidate for leadership, or even citizenship, in any Arab state. Nor, by the same token, does it make any difference to the collective identity of Israel/Palestine whether or not the Palestinians descend from ancient Canaanite or Jewish inhabitants of the land. After all, they don't want a Canaanite or Jewish state in the land (it wouldn't resolve their situation, from their own point of view, if they all converted to Judaism!) - they want an Arab and/or Muslim state. And there is no historical evidence of an Arab presence in the land, let alone a Muslim one of course, before the ancient Jews lived there.
So I think the seemingly obvious view that ancient Palestine was predominantly Jewish really is as obvious as it seems. But that still leaves us with the question of what political difference it makes. And I can't see how it makes any political difference. Of course it's understandable why Jews would feel a particular attachment to this land, given its importance to their historical identity - who but a Jew is going to care much for the ruins of ancient synagogues in Zippori, or Zealot hideouts on Masada? - and perhaps, if nobody had lived there when Zionism began, it would be obvious that they therefore had more of a claim to it than anyone else. But it's hard to see why the presence of a people in a land many centuries ago, no matter how important it then was to them, should give their descendants a greater right to that land than its current inhabitants. The European settlers who came to America did terrible things to its native inhabitants, and I think Native Americans have a right to a state of their own on this continent. But that doesn't mean that they should have a preferential right to buy every piece of land that comes vacant in the Americas, let alone to expel current occupants from their homes. Nor would anyone think that Turks, now, may simply claim their ancestral plots of land in East Asia, or that Celts have a right to rule Austria. Human beings move around a lot, and international politics would be a disaster if every group could claim a right to take over the lands in which it lived centuries ago.
On this issue, then, I think there is a moral asymmetry that favours the Palestinians. Not because they are, or might be, descendants of the ancient Canaanites or Jews - that, even if true has to be irrelevant - but because they made up the bulk of the land's inhabitants in the 19th and 20th centuries, when Zionism got started, and most had roots in it going back long before that. Current occupants always have the best claim to a particular piece of land, as long as they did not acquire it violently or dishonestly. Ancestral occupancy, by contrast, like religion, makes for a politically dangerous source of claims to ownership, and can't be recognized as legitimate in one place without disturbing the way we settle issues of this sort all over.
That leaves open the question of whether the land should be seen as 'belonging' to a collective group of any sort. Why see the land as inherently Jewish or Arab? Why see any land that way - as inherently the territory of a particular group?
I'll turn to the whole idea of collective ownership in the next post. (Sam Fleischacker)
[The next post in the series is here. Responses may be sent to Sam at this email address: sfleisch (AT) uic (DOT) edu]
