A Cool Hour on the Israel-Palestine Conflict 6 (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.]
6. Collective Ownership
In the last two posts, I've looked at weak answers to the question, 'Whose land is it anyway?' The presupposition of that question is that the land belongs to a group - Jews or Arabs. But why should that be? Much of Israel/Palestine was unoccupied when Zionism began. Was even that land inherently 'Jewish' or 'Arab'? What does it mean to suggest that a land - any land - belongs to a group?
This brings us to a simple fact about the conflict over Israel/Palestine that often gets overlooked: it's about collective rights, not individual ones. When Jews call the land of Israel 'our home', they don't mean that a lot of Jews individually own land in the country, nor do Palestinians, when they call the land theirs, mean primarily that individual Palestinians used to own property there. In the early days of Zionism, many Palestinians thought that Jews should not be allowed to buy land in the country, since it was all 'really' Arab and/or Muslim, while many of the incoming Jews regarded the procedures by which they did buy land as mere formalities, since the whole of it was 'really' Jewish. Palestinian nationalists also believe, to this day, that Jews had no right to be given state lands by the British, while many Israelis even today think that non-Jews should not be allowed to buy lands owned by Israel's quasi-official Jewish Agency. For both groups, that is, what would normally be legitimate ways for individuals to acquire property become illegitimate when viewed from the collective perspective. When Jews say that the land is inherently 'Jewish', they mean that the Jewish people collectively owns the land, that the political units on it should represent and foster Jewish culture. And when Palestinians say that the land is 'Arab', or 'Palestinian', they likewise mean to make a claim about its proper political and cultural character, not about individual rights.
We similarly misconceive the debates over Israel's Law of Return, and the proposed Palestinian Right of Return, if we understand them as primarily concerned with individual rights. I don't mean that individual rights are entirely irrelevant to them. Israel's Law of Return - which gives any Jew anywhere a right to immediate Israeli citizenship, something very difficult to attain if one is not Jewish - is certainly meant to provide persecuted Jews throughout the world a place of refuge, but it is also, and primarily, a tool for ensuring that Israel's population remain largely Jewish: and that its public square, therefore, express and foster Jewish culture. And what offends most Palestinians about the Law of Return is not that it favours individual Jews over individual non-Jews, as if this were a Middle East version of the US debate over affirmative action, but that it gives the Jewish collective an advantage over the Palestinian collective. Similarly, while the proposed Palestinian Right of Return is meant in part to redress the injuries suffered by individual Arabs who lost their homes in 1948, it is also, and primarily, meant to re-establish Arab cultural and political hegemony in the land. And what upsets Israeli Jews about a Palestinian Right of Return, what makes them oppose it so adamantly, is not they are unwilling to recognize or try to redress the individual losses of Arabs expelled in 1948 (Israelis are not, on the whole, opposed to monetary compensation for those injuries), but that they cannot countenance the end of collective Jewish sovereignty, of a place where Jews have cultural and political hegemony.
Now, one may think that there are no, or should be no, collective rights of any sort; one may feel distaste at the very idea that any group should deliberately seek cultural and political hegemony in any area. I'm not unsympathetic to that reaction, in fact. But it is important, when looking at this conflict, to recognize that both sides claim collective rights and both sides deliberately seek such hegemony. There are few thorough liberals or Marxists in either camp (the prominence of some Marxists - George Habash, say, or Ilan Pappé - gives a misleading picture of most people on either side). If one thinks that the main job of states is to protect individual rights, or give power to the working class, or promote everyone's happiness, one should be unsympathetic with either Jewish or Palestinian nationalism. I'll spend some time, in the next post, on nationalism, and the degree to which it deserves respect, but for the moment we should simply recognize that the Israel/Palestine conflict is a struggle between two nationalisms, not between a nationalist movement - Zionism - on the one side, and liberal or Marxist opponents of nationalism on the other.
Back to collective ownership. How can a land, as a whole and independently of individual claims to it, be intrinsically either 'Palestinian' or 'Jewish'? Who - which group - really 'owns' any part of the world? An Englishman may look out on the rolling hills of the Cotswolds and think that of course this is 'English' land. But is even that so obvious? All sorts of people lived in the Cotswolds in the past. Some - Celts, for instance - have been forcefully expelled. And in the future, it may come to be dominated by immigrants from Pakistan or China. Perhaps its characteristic churches will one day be replaced by mosques, or Buddhist temples. Would that be a tragedy? Would it be an injustice?
The example points up, I hope, how difficult questions of collective ownership can be. The Cotswolds are certainly part of a political entity called 'England', and no one doubts the legitimacy of that political unit's rule over the area, but whether there is any necessity, or moral rightness, about its population, and public character, coming predominantly from the ethnic group that calls itself 'English' is another matter entirely.
Jews and Arabs both look out over the land of Israel/Palestine and see it as theirs - obviously theirs, in fact. Jews see Jericho and the caves where David is said to have hidden from Saul and the remains of ancient synagogues in Zippori and Safed and Jerusalem, and are inspired by practically every acre to think of the Bible and Jewish history. Arabs see their current and former homes, and the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa mosque (if Muslim), or Nazareth and Bethlehem (if Christian), and recall Saladin and the battles of the Crusades. A Palestinian Arab feels that the land of Palestine is his or hers; so does a Jew.
These feelings are natural but, I think, very misleading. Both Jews and Palestinians have historical ties to the land - have in fact lived together on it for centuries. Neither has had collective control over it for millennia. Members of many other groups - Armenians, Kurds, Turks: people who do not identify themselves as either Jewish or Arab - have lived there as well. Finally, the whole idea that a land intrinsically 'belongs' to any group of people, that individuals should be welcomed into it or barred from it on the basis of group membership, is a highly suspect one that smacks of racism.
To see this, consider the difference between ownership and political rule. If you come to a house I own, I have every right to tell you to leave if you say things that offend me, or if you disagree with me or play music I don't like. I have a right to kick you out for any reason whatever, to make your stay with me contingent on any condition I choose. On the other hand, unless you are my child, I don't have a right to inflict any sort of punishment on you, beyond expelling you. Even if you commit murder, I need to call in the police rather than punishing you myself (I can of course use force to defend myself, or others, against a violent attack by you, but that's not the same as punishment: I'd have that right even if we were in your house).
A state's rights over its citizens are almost exactly the reverse. A decent state may not expel any citizen just for saying things that offend people, or that disagree with its official views, or for bad taste in music. The conditions under which a citizen may remain in its dominions must not be arbitrary, must be such that reasonable people can understand, accept, and administer them. But the state can certainly punish people for all sorts of actions taken in its territory. That's in fact one of its main jobs.
The idea behind this distinction is that ownership gives each individual a right to some space of freedom in which she can do what she likes, while political rule comes in precisely to limit that freedom, so as to protect the freedom of others and/or promote the common good of all. And because political rule limits freedom, it needs to be responsible, as much as possible, to everyone it affects. People need a say in laws they can be punished for disobeying, need to be consulted in some way as they are made and be able to appeal to fair procedures when they are enforced. If each person's ownership of property were limited by these considerations, on the other hand - if I had to consult everyone around me before deciding what could go on in my home - there would essentially be no private ownership of property, and no one would have the space of individual freedom that goes with such ownership.
So we separate ownership from rule, and for good reason. We want owners not to have the power that the state has, to be kept in check, vis-à-vis people who come on to their property, by the state, and we want the state to treat its power as something that must be reasonable in the eyes of all the citizens it governs, not to be the equivalent of private ownership. Some absolute monarchs (not even all of them) used to act as if they owned the countries over which they ruled. That was an attitude that regularly led to oppression and pointless violence, and was resisted by most theorists of politics even in the heyday of absolute monarchy.
It follows, I think, that we should be very wary of the whole idea of 'collective ownership' of any large territory, and reject the idea that such ownership is ever equivalent to a right to exercise political rule. No group should have the same rights over territory in which many people live that a private home-owner has over her house. The idea that Group X (you can stick any group you want in here) owns a whole country and can therefore treat its inhabitants arbitrarily is noxious, and inimical to the very idea of legitimate political rule. If the members of Group X set up a government to rule a land, they need to make sure that it respects the needs and rights of every person in that land. If they want to claim ownership over the land instead, they should submit to a political entity distinct from them. The Inuit have been granted a sort of ownership over parts of Canada by the Canadian government, but their rights over that land are limited by Canadian law. That seems a pretty good arrangement to me, but it's quite different from the arrangement nationalist Arabs and Jews have wanted to set up in the land of Palestine.
Having said all this, I think it may sometimes be acceptable for the international order to grant collective rights of some sort over various pieces of land, so as to satisfy the legitimate impulses behind nationalism. But, even then, it would be better to describe those rights without using the language of ownership. There is reason, as I'll explain in the next post, for groups to want their culture or religion to be represented in the public sphere, to want some public realm in which their history and symbols can be expressed and discussed. And that is enough to justify allowing political entities, in some ways, to favour one group over another. But even here it is misleading and dangerous to describe the collective flavour of the political entity as a reflection of a group's ownership of a particular land: that denigrates the rights of others who live in it. (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]
