[This post is part of a series by Sam running here on Mondays for the next couple of months.]
2. Definitions and Stage-Setting
Last week I began a series of posts on this blog, concerning the fundamental issues in the Israel/Palestine conflict - whether the land properly 'belongs' to Jews or to Arabs, whether Zionism is inherently racist or anti-Zionism inherently anti-Semitic, etc. I devoted that post to explaining why I was engaging in this project at all. This week I take up some general issues, to set the conflict in context. I'll then turn for some weeks to what I call 'clutter' - the myths, weak arguments, and prejudices on both sides that inflame discussion and get in the way of a clear view of the issues. Finally, beginning with week 6 or 7, I'll examine what I think are the real arguments for both the Israeli and the Palestinian points of view.
A few definitions, to begin with:
1) By 'Zionism', I mean simply the movement to establish a national home for the Jewish people. That's how the term was originally defined, and how it is still primarily used among people who call themselves 'Zionists'. To be a Zionist, one need not approve of Israeli rule over the West Bank and Gaza, nor need one have any particular view on whether a Jewish state should be religious or secular, or what rights non-Jews should have in it. Originally, one need not even have believed that a Jewish home must be in Israel/Palestine. The Zionist movement at one point debated a proposal to settle in parts of Kenya (this is erroneously called 'the Uganda proposal': there's a wonderful book called African Zion about this, written by Robert Weisbord), and Theodor Herzl, the movement's first leader, also considered proposals to locate the Jewish state in Cyprus, the Sinai Peninsula, Libya, Argentina, Mozambique, and part of what is now Iraq. Most Zionists have, however, long rejected these ideas, and sought statehood in the ancient home of the Jewish people. So it is not wrong to assume that Zionism, today, entails a commitment to a Jewish nation-state somewhere in the land of Israel/Palestine.
2) When I say 'Palestinian', I'll generally mean the Muslim and Christian Arabs who identify themselves as such. As even the founders of the PLO recognized, there are Jewish families who have lived in the land for a long time and deserve also to be called 'Palestinian', but most of their descendants identify now with the state of Israel so it is confusing to include them in a group that sees itself as excluded by that state. There are also Arabs - Bedouins in the Negev, and Druze outside of the Golan - who identify more with Israel than with the Palestinian national movement. Technically, they should also not be called 'Palestinians' (most of them would reject that name), but it will not greatly affect what I say if one takes the word to include all Arab inhabitants of the land.
3) There are non-Jewish, and anti-Zionist, citizens of Israel. There are also many Jews outside of Israel who see themselves as bound up with its fate and therefore support it as fervently as its most hardline citizens. Again, there are both Christian and Muslim Palestinians, and there are also Muslims across the world who identify with the fate of Palestine. I'll therefore often characterize one side of the conflict as 'Jews' or 'Zionists' rather than 'Israelis', and the other side as 'Arabs and Muslims' rather than 'Palestinians'. No single term for either side is a completely happy one, and it is well to keep in mind that the people who see themselves as having a stake in the conflict cut across a number of different religious, ethnic, and political lines: it is not simply a struggle between two groups living in a small sub-section of the Levant.
4) I will try mostly to use 'nation' for a cultural or religious group whose members or leaders claim that it ought to have political sovereignty somewhere in the world, and 'state' for entities that actually exercise such sovereignty. Not every purported nation has a state - the Basques, Kurds, Acehnese, and many others do not - and not every state purports to represent a particular nation. That's not the official basis, at least, of the US political system, and many other states (Belgium, India, Indonesia) understand themselves as representing two or more national groups. It'll be especially important to keep these terms apart when we look at the ideology of nationalism.
To get, now, at what I think are the core moral issues in the Israel/Palestine conflict, let's move back in time, from the situation we face today, to the original injustices, or perceived injustices, that brought us to this situation.
For the last 30 years, the main bone of contention between Israel and the Palestinians has had to do with Jewish settlements in the West Bank (and Gaza, until recently), and the control Israel maintains, largely to protect those settlements, over the daily life of Palestinians. Even with nominal autonomy, Palestinians feel oppressed by Israeli checkpoints and border crossings, by the military presence in their towns that protects Jewish settlers, and, of course, by the settlers themselves, whom they see as having taken their land and who treat them with contempt or worse. Israel, on the other hand, claims that it needs to maintain control over the Palestinian territories in order to prevent terrorist attacks.
On the issue of the settlements, my sympathies are wholly with the Palestinians. The settlements are, by Israel's own records, established largely on lands that were taken illegitimately from private Arab owners; most, if not all, of them are prohibited by international law; and their establishment has brought with it a set of policies and legal practices that have been bitterly oppressive to the Palestinians. I regard the settlement project as a terrible injustice that should never have been undertaken and should be brought to an end as soon as possible.
But I am joined in this view by a large percentage of the Israeli public. Israel's Peace Now movement, which is devoted to ending the settlements, has by now sent many of its members to the Knesset, and polls have for years found 70 percent of the Israeli population willing to withdraw from the settlements. What keeps most Israelis wary of the peace process is a fear that the aim of most Palestinians remains not simply to win a state in the West Bank and Gaza, but to establish Arab hegemony over the whole of what is now Israel. And the insistence of Palestinian leaders and spokespeople on the need for a 'right of return' for the descendants of the Palestinians who fled or were expelled in 1948, feeds that fear.
I don't think one will easily find any Palestinian who would deny the legitimacy of the right of return, in principle at least (Sari Nusseibeh is the only Palestinian leader I know who has openly called for a renunciation of that right, and even he defends this proposal as a matter of pragmatics, not justice), or deny that they think the fairest solution to the conflict would be a single state that did not favour Jews and might eventually become Arab. Which is to say that the fear of Israelis that Palestinians do not really accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state in any part of the land is well-grounded, and that the hostility between the two parties goes back at least to what critics of Israel call its 'original sin': the expulsion of around 700,000 Palestinians at the founding of the state in 1948.
Now there is some dispute over the numbers here, the degree to which it was an expulsion, and the degree to which it represented any deliberate plan on the part of the Israeli leadership at the time. But there is no doubt that at least a large part of the Palestinian population fled because they were forced to do so, or terrorized into doing so by Jewish massacres of innocent civilians like (but not limited to) the one at Deir Yassin. It's hard to see, therefore, why they and their children should not have a right to return to their old homes.
To which even Israelis with considerable sympathy for that view tend to respond by pointing out that the expulsion of 1948 did not occur in a vacuum, that a war between Jews and Arabs was going on all through the country at the time, that practically every Jewish massacre of Arab civilians can be matched by an Arab massacre of Jewish civilians, and that the war of '48 was preceded by a 20-year period in which Arabs frequently killed local Jews. So the degree to which one views the expulsion as an injustice depends on whether one thinks it was the Jews or the Arabs in 1948 who were waging a just war. If the Arabs were responding to an unjust political coup by the Jews - if the establishment of a Jewish state amounted to an expropriation of their land - then their attack on the Jews may count as legitimate self-defence, and even the massacre of Jewish civilians, in the circumstances, might be seen as at most an understandable wartime excess. If the Jews, by contrast, were defending themselves against a wrongful attack by their Arab neighbours, then the expulsion of some of those neighbours may count as legitimate self-defence, or at worst an understandable wartime excess.
So the justice and injustice of what happened in 1948 really depends on the justice and injustice of the Zionist project as a whole. Israel's legitimacy depends, not on the expulsion of Palestinians in 1948, but on whether the move to build a Jewish state on the land before that point was legitimate or not. By the time we get to 1948, so much hatred and violence had been built up between Arabs and Jews that both sides were trying to expel the others out of the land. The question is, who is responsible, or more responsible, for the circumstances that bred this history of hatred and violence?
Hence everything comes back to the foundations of the Zionist movement, between roughly 1882 and 1947 - the original justifications given for, and policies adopted by, those who promoted a Jewish homeland in Palestine. If that was unjust, then Arab resistance to it, even if it has sometimes spilled over into actrocities, has on the whole been justified: from its beginning to the present day. If the Zionist project was a just one, on the other hand, then the Jewish defence of it, from its beginnings through the present day, has on the whole been justified - even if it has sometimes spilled over into atrocities.
And if, to recall the third option that I favour, it is understandable why each side sees the other as unjust, if there is a reasonable case for justice on both sides, then perhaps each side can, now, forgive or at least forget the evils it has suffered from the other side, and work towards a solution that could be mutually acceptable. Then each can see the other as acting on reasonable grounds, not out of blind hatred (Zionists characteristically see their opponents as all anti-Semites; anti-Zionists characteristically see Zionists as all racists), and work for a compromise rather than insisting, obstinately, on its rights alone.
To bring out this third option, I will consider here mostly the conflict between Arabs and Jews before 1948, over the whole project of setting up a Jewish home in Palestine. How, if at all, can that project be justified? Who had title to the land of Palestine originally - whose land was it, anyway? (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]