A Cool Hour on the Israel-Palestine Conflict 9 (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.]
9. The Case for a Jewish State in Israel/Palestine
Last week I discussed the principle of self-determination, which favours the Palestinian claim to the land. This week I'll consider the principles underlying the Jewish claim. The principle of self-determination, I said last week, is reasonable but has problems. The same, I think, can be said about the principles on which the Jewish case relies.
The best Jewish claim to Israel/Palestine rests on the following two premises:
(1) Jews need a state, at least in the modern age, as much as or more than other peoples.
(2) Jews acquired the land of Israel/Palestine legitimately:
(a) by buying parts of it, in wholly legitimate ways, from its Arab landowners, and
(b) by being granted political title to it by the British in 1917 (the Balfour Declaration), the League of Nations in 1922 (the Palestine Mandate), and the United Nations in 1948.
I'll take these claims in order.
(1) As I noted in my post on nationalism, the Jews have as much reason to have a nation-state as any other group: they have a collective identity and can't readily preserve it, let alone celebrate and develop it, without some public realm to call their own. Indeed, in an age of nationalism, it's harder for Jews to make such public space for themselves than in the earlier world of empires and dynasties. With the rise of nationalism in 19th-century Europe, Jews were seen as more of an outsider group than ever and anti-Semitism reached a high and very dangerous level. A series of pogroms in Russia - which the state encouraged and against which there was no international outcry - along with the Dreyfus affair in France, sparked Zionism. These experiences were eventually followed, of course, by the horrific Nazi genocide. Even after the Second World War there have been anti-Semitic movements and expulsions of Jews, inspired by nationalist sentiments and often unrelated to the Israel/Palestine conflict, in Russia, Poland, Ethiopia, Iran, Iraq, Morocco, Libya, Egypt, Syria, and Yemen. Zionist communities in Palestine served as a refuge for Jews fleeing both the Russian pogroms and the Nazis, and Israel has been the only country to take in large numbers of the Jews expelled from Arab and Muslim countries, or from Russia and Ethiopia. Should the 700,000 Jews of France, who have faced intense anti-Semitic pressures for 10 years now, or the more than half a million Jews in Russia, where anti-Semitism remains a fixture, ever feel a need to find a new home, it's hard to imagine where they would go other than Israel. Even the United States is unlikely to take in large numbers of them.
So Israel remains a refuge for Jews fleeing persecution as well as the only place, now that the great Jewish communities of Europe and the Middle East have been destroyed, in which Jews have towns and villages they can call their own, and can publicly celebrate and develop and discuss their culture and religion. Nationalism in general may well be a bad thing, and there is good reason for us all to look forward to a day on which no state identifies itself with the Russian or Arab or Thai people, or the Christian or Muslim or Buddhist religion, but for the moment, in a world order dominated by nationalist states, there is every reason for one state in it to represent the Jews.
(2)That leaves open the question of whether the Zionist movement went about its project in the right way - whether it is true, as our second premise asserts, that the Jews acquired the land for their national home justly.
(a) I think the record on this is mixed. It is clearly incorrect to say, as many opponents of Zionism do, that the Jews stole the land. The early Zionist movement bought most of the land it used from Arab landowners, and much of the rest was was state-owned land given it by the ruling British power (which gave yet more land to local Arabs). Other lands were claimed by the Zionists as unowned, under their understanding of local laws and custom. None of these were dishonest or illegal ways of acquiring land. To say that they were wholly unimpeachable is also incorrect, however. Land transfers in Palestine, as in other parts of the Arab world, had historically preserved the rights of tenant farmers before the Zionists arrived. The Zionists tended instead to buy a plot of land from an absentee landowner and then remove all the tenant farmers in favour of immigrant Jews. They also refused to honour certain traditional easement rights (matruka), and misunderstood or tendentiously misinterpreted local laws and customs about so-called miri lands, claiming some of them as unowned when they were merely being allowed to lie fallow. (Baruch Kimmerling's Zionism and Territory explains these issues well.) And the British government's right to rule the country was a disputed one - not only in light of the general dubiousness of imperialism, but because it had promised Arab leaders in the First World War that they would have independence after the war. So its grants of state land, whether to Jews or to Arabs, were not necessarily legitimate.
Turning now to (2)(b), the sources on which Jews have relied to establish their political right to the land, it should be clear that if the British had no right to rule Palestine, then they had no right to hand that rule over to the Jews either. As for the League of Nations, it was dominated by European imperial powers and set up very much to govern the world as they saw fit. If today we look back on the whole project of European imperialism as unjust, then we have reason to question any decision of the League of Nations about who should rule what.
How about the decisions of the United Nations? Well, unlike the League of Nations, the United Nations was set up to represent all the world's people, and to replace imperialism with a new, more democratic international order. But it is states, not peoples - let alone individuals - who have voting power in the UN, and the states of the world, from the founding of the UN down to the present day, have been largely undemocratic. Jews have for that reason tended to dismiss the famous 1975 UN resolution equating Zionism with racism, as well as the many resolutions condemning specific Israeli actions, as the acts of an undemocratic body with no standing to make legitimate international law. But they are then in poor position to turn around and acclaim the 1948 vote for the establishment of a Jewish state as a mark of Israel's legitimacy. The UN in 1948 was no more representative of the will of the world than it was in 1975.
If we step back from the purely legal issues, now, we might ask whether the Jews had a moral right to move into Palestine, and try to change its collective identity from an Arab to a Jewish one. It is sometimes said that Zionism might have been OK if the Jews had asked permission of the local Arabs to move in, that the great failing of Zionism was to work with the British rather than the local population. And I do think that the Zionist movement made a mistake by throwing in its lot with the British - Chaim Weizmann wrongly thought the British would be there forever - rather than forging alliances with nascent Arab nationalist movements.
But the fact that they didn't do that does not, I think, vitiate the legitimacy of their national project. Here are some reasons to doubt the principle that the Jews had a right to a state for themselves only if the local inhabitants agreed.
(i) Local populations, all over the world, don't like it if the collective flavour of their area shifts so that they come to be in the minority, but no one with liberal, anti-racist inclinations wants to uphold a principle that they should therefore have veto power over who moves into the neighbourhood. Human beings move around all the time, and the ethnic flavour of areas thereby changes. When I was a child, a neighbourhood in New York City where my relatives lived (Jackson Heights) was largely Jewish; now it is largely Indian. I miss the Jewishness of that neighbourhood, but I certainly don't think there's anything unjust about its having become Indian instead. Many Europeans today are resentful of the move of Muslims into their countries; many Americans, too, are upset if their neighbourhoods become largely Muslim. I wouldn't like to think, and I doubt the readers of this blog would like to think, that these people are right to insist that Europe and America ought always to be dominated by Christians. But, for exactly the same reasons, the idea that Palestine, or a large part of Palestine, would become Jewish, while understandably upsetting to its erstwhile local population, should not be regarded as an injustice. Recall the test I've invoked a few times in these posts: what would it mean to establish a general principle, all over the world, that no one may move into an area, even if she finds someone willing to sell her a piece of land, unless the local inhabitants approve of her cultural or religious affiliation? Such a principle would entrench racism and xenophobia, and limit the mobility of oppressed minorities especially. I think it's reasonable for people to have some cultural control over some areas - for every cultural group to have some public space to call its own - but in general surely justice requires us to put up with changes in the cultural identity of our neighbourhoods, rather than giving each group a right, whenever they form a majority, to exclude members of other groups.
(ii) The attempt to form a national home for Jews was in one crucial way unlike any other nationalism at the time: Jews, unlike Croats and Magyars and Arabs and Germans, were spread out all over the world, with no clear home in any single part of it. There would have been parallels to this if Native Americans, or the Sinti and Roma people, or the Bahais or Zoroastrians had sought a national home for themselves - all projects that seem to me clearly in accord with justice, and a good idea for at least some of these groups - but other widely dispersed communities had not then engaged in such a project. (The recent establishment of a Canadian homeland for the Inuit is the first close parallel.) This means that any land chosen for the project would have had to be first acquired from the local population, and its collective character changed. And it is reasonable to suppose that nationalist leaders in any such land would therefore have opposed the project. So if it is a decisive objection to Zionism that nationalist leaders in Palestine didn't like the idea that part of the land they hoped to rule would become Jewish, then no national homeland for the Jews would have been legitimate.
Some people draw just this conclusion, but it seems to me clearly unjust. If we are going to have national states at all, why should the dispersed groups in the world - precisely the weakest peoples, the ones least able to maintain their collective identity, and most likely to be oppressed by surrounding majorities - be deprived of such states? Why should only larger, better clustered groups - whose domination over their lands is, moreover, often the result of a long history of violence and oppression - have their demographic dominance ratified as rightful?
The Jews were dispersed in large part because of discrimination by Christians and Muslims. They had for over a millennium been repeatedly expelled from their homes, treated as lesser human beings, and/or killed in large numbers, in the name of Christian or Muslim ideology (the situation was far worse in Christian countries, but there were persecutions of Jews in Muslim countries as well, with a series of bad pogroms in Damascus, especially, beginning some decades before the rise of Zionism). That context makes it understandable that they might not have felt morally obliged to ask the permission of Christians and Muslims before setting out to make a state of their own - and in any case strengthens the argument that they needed and deserved some state somewhere in the world, even if the establishment of such a state might require a demographic shift.
(iii) Even if the Jews should have asked somebody's permission to immigrate to Palestine, it's very unclear who that should have been. Should they have asked King Faisal, the nominal ruler over the area shortly after World War I? They might have gotten his permission: he at least briefly supported 'the return of Jews to their ancient homeland', as one of his official newspapers put it, albeit without political sovereignty over the land. But modern Palestinians might reasonably object that King Faisal was an outsider, not a representative of the local population. So should the Jews have turned instead to the leaders of the nascent Palestinian nationalist movement - the wealthy families, like the Nashashibis, the Husseinis, or the Nusseibehs, who hoped to rule the area? Most of them would of course not have favoured Zionism. But why should they be taken as the only legitimate representatives of the local population? They were moneyed and cultural elites, not elected officials. So should the Jews have asked all Arabs - self-identified 'Palestinians' as well as the Druze and southern Beduins who didn't label themselves that way - for permission to live in the land, perhaps in the form of a plebiscite? Suppose they had. It's hard to guess what would have happened, but if they had been allowed to lobby for their cause, and offer tradeoffs of various kinds to those willing to let them form a homeland, it's far from impossible that they might have won the permission they sought. In every country, there are those who resist the leaders of their national movements, especially since those leaders tend to come from the elites. They - like the Arabs who sold land to the Jews - might have been willing to strike a deal with Zionism, if a good one had been offered.
(iv) Almost all the new states of Asia and Africa formed in the 20th century, not just Israel, are creations of European imperial powers rather than spontaneous formations shaped by the demography and will of the local inhabitants. Pakistan and India allowed British imperial officials to draw the border between them. Indonesia is a united country by courtesy of the Dutch, and the straight lines on the map of much of the Middle East and Africa make clear how much they were defined by European colonialists. Over and over again, a dominant ethnic group has claimed, from a European imperial power, the right to rule the territory controlled by that power, and eventually won that right either from the imperial power itself or from an international order dominated by such powers. (The result has been a series of secessionist movements and civil wars caused by resentment among the groups - Berbers and Igbo and Hutus and Eritreans - who got the short end of the stick.) These arrangements may or may not in the long run be good for everyone involved - there are pragmatic reasons why a single, large, multi-ethnic state may be better than a hodge-podge of tiny states drawn along ethnic lines - but they arose in any case under the auspices, and by way of the authority, of European imperial powers. So there is a certain bad faith in accusing the Zionist movement alone of having turned to the British rather than to the local inhabitants for permission to set up a Jewish state. All the nationalist movements of the time - Arab nationalism, Indian nationalism, Pakistani nationalism - did something similar.
Imagine now that you were in a position, in the late 19th or early 20th century, to decide where the Jews might have a state, or to influence how the Zionist movement set about this project. What would you have done? The ideal thing might have been to convene representatives of all the world's peoples (assuming that the idea of a 'people' could be satisfactorily defined) in a conference in which some solution would be found for the political situation of all dispersed, homeless groups. This could, of course, be part of a more general solution to the problems to which nationalism was responding, a more general decision about how ethnic and religious groups can express themselves in a public space.
Failing that, you might have sought a habitable but thus far uninhabited part of the world for a Jewish state in particular, if there are any such places.
Or again, if that failed, you might have urged the Jews to work hard with local inhabitants in some area (perhaps Palestine; perhaps not) to win their agreement to the cession of some part of that area for the purpose of a Jewish state.
None of these things happened, of course. The actual process by which a Jewish state came about was not nearly so pretty, not nearly so fair or concerned about the rights of the people whose collective aspirations were harmed by it. But political decisions are almost never taken in an ideal way - the founding of states, especially, tends to be riddled with favouritism for some groups and inadequate representation of others - and it doesn't seem to me that the methods the Zionists actually employed differed enough from the ideal ones to nullify the justice of their entire project. They did, after all, attempt to buy the land in which they settled and to get permission, from some ruling authority, to set up a state in it. And they did have reason to think their particular form of nationalism was an unusual one, with special circumstances that required a more unusual way of forming a state than other nationalisms employed - as well as reason to think that their group had a particularly strong need for a state, given the persecution it was suffering all over the world.
I don't know if this is enough to convince neutral observers that Zionism was a good idea, let alone the only just response to the suffering and communal aspirations of the Jews, but I hope it is enough to convince people that the Zionists were at least not radically self-deluded or evil-minded to think that their cause was a just one, and that they at least tried to use generally just means to achieve 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]
