1948 and Other Key Dates in Zionist History –
A Narrative-Conscious Approach
May 21, 2002
I am sharing this historical analysis of the unfolding of the stages of the Israeli-Palestinian imbroglio that I wrote in 2002. Little has changed except that the references to Israeli settlements in Gaza were evacuated in 2005 and so accordingly I have changed references to them to the past tense. Most of the information here is well-known to informed readers. The only novel aspect is my attempt to view the events described simultaneously from the different perspectives of the opposing actors in the historical drama. — LL May 23, 2011
Methodological Premises
In this essay, I discuss the significance of various dates in Zionist history in the full knowledge that there are at least two narrative frameworks from which the story of Zionism can be told – the Jewish-Zionist and the Arab-Palestinian. As an interested party, I naturally tend to see the story from my side. I do so in the awareness that there is another interpretation that can be given to the “facts” I present. Though I try not to be blindly locked into one narrative viewpoint, my perception cannot help being colored by it. I am at times judgmental of the premises of the alternative viewpoint from the standpoint of my own; that is, I speculate on how certain of what I perceive to be blind-spots and injustices of the Zionist story told from the Palestinian viewpoint may have arisen historically, but my speculation is admittedly partisan and told from my Zionist viewpoint. The judgments that I render are thus admittedly not final, but would have to be addressed and redressed from someone of the other viewpoint who had digested my observations and responded with his/her side of the story.
1881 and 1897: Modern Zionism Is Born
A non-Jewish colleague and friend recently remarked to me that the State of Israel can be justified as a response to the Holocaust of European Jewry. This is a useful starting point with much truth. However, it needs some qualification. The “Holocaust” must be understood in the broadest sense, as the climax of a crisis in European-Jewish relations that had been germinating for 1800 years, and which worsened noticeably with the rise of anti-Semitism throughout most of Europe from 1870 onward. Those Jews who picked up on the early warning signs, started devising Zionism as a response before the calamity struck in all its horrible force.
Modern Zionism had independent beginnings in eastern and western Europe. In Russia, 1881 marked the assassination of the liberal Czar Alexander II and the ascent to power of his reactionary son Alexander III. Alexander III initiated a campaign against Russian Jewry, marked by discriminatory legislation and pogroms. His minister Pobedonotsev was reputed to have advocated the elimination of Russian Jewry, a third by emigration, a third by extermination, and a third by conversion. The 1880’s saw the publication of Leo Pinsker’s seminal essay, “Auto-Emancipation” and the proto-Zionist groups Bilu and Hovevei Zion. The “First Aliyah” of this decade saw scattered dozens and hundreds of young Russian Jews moving to Palestine with vague dreams of settling on the land,[1] the first precursors of the agricultural settlements (including the kibbutzim) that would become significant after 1900.
In the 1890s, the Viennese Jewish journalist Theodor Herzl covered the Dreyfus trial in France as a correspondent of the Neue Freie Presse and observed the mobs of French anti-Semites (followers of Eduard Drumont’s Action Française) crying, “Death to the Jews!”[2] Although he did not have the historical hindsight that would establish a definite historical link between these phenomena and the Holocaust of 1933-45, his confidence in the security of European Jewry was definitely shaken. He perceived the status of European Jewry as that of a people rendered anomalous by lack of a clear and present homeland. The return of Jewry to its ancient homeland would hopefully normalize Jewish status and reduce the motivation of anti-Semitism.
Both the Russian Zionists and Herzl conceived of the tie of the Jewish people to the land of Israel in secular-historical terms. On those premises, a people’s “title” to its land is based on historical associations, not the will of God. Both were naïve as to the prior presence of Palestinian Arabs in the land and the problems that this might raise for the Zionist enterprise.
1917: The Balfour Declaration
The Balfour Declaration was issued by the British government in the midst of World War I, at a time when Allied politicians were anticipating the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and planning how to parcel out its remains. Whose interests and ambitions were to be accommodated? British diplomats contemplated the facilitation of both Jewish and Arab national projects after the war. Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann was in contact and negotiation with both British and Arab diplomats to express Zionist interests and negotiate their fulfillment in tandem with Arab interests.
When the war actually ended and Britain assumed control of Palestine, she had to contend with a situation where Palestine west of Jordan was home to about 600,000 Arab-Palestinians and 100,000 Jews.[3] The Jews comprised some ultra-Orthodox who had lived in scholarly enclaves supported by the charity of their European coreligionists, and a growing number of “Halutzim” (pioneers), the new settlers, mostly secular, who had come in the last 40 years to develop a new life in the towns and agricultural collectives. Colonial rule by a Jewish minority over an Arab majority was out of the question. Indeed, the local Arab aristocracy felt their rights had been slighted, for they felt that after the demise of the Ottoman Empire the political leadership of Palestine should have devolved on them exclusively. Some of the Zionist progressives dreamed of Zionism having a quiet revolutionary effect on the Arab peasant masses, weaning them from their quasi-feudal dependence on their traditional landlords and leading to an improvement in their educational, social, hygienic and political situation. They even attributed the growing Arab opposition to Zionism as an attempt by a reactionary class to salvage their hegemony by suppressing social progress.[4] Nor was it obvious from the outset whether the Arab leadership would adopt a compromising or intransigeant stance toward the Jewish inroads in Palestine. Under these circumstances, the Zionist plan was to grow the Jewish population in Palestine to the point that they were a majority, and then work for statehood under conditions favorable to Jewish national hopes. Though the territorial unity of western Palestine (west of the Jordan) was assumed at this point, later developments would show that it was not a non-negotiable item for the majority of Zionists. However, a minority, led by Vladimir Jabotinsky and known as “Revisionist Zionists,” harbored maximalist territorial ambitions. This policy division within the Zionist leadership foreshadowed the later political division between the Israeli Labor party (led successively by Ben Gurion, Golda Meir, Rabin, Peres, and Barak) and Herut/Likud (led successively by Begin, Shamir, Netanyahu and Sharon).
1929: The Struggle Turns Violent
In 1929, a wave of riots broke out among Palestinian Arabs, who attacked Jewish communities in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Hebron and other locations. The worst damage occurred in Hebron, where over 60 Jews, mostly ultra-Orthodox, were killed. The most charitable interpretation, offered by some recent historians, is that there was a misunderstanding on the part of the Arab rioters, who mistook the erection of a screen to separate the Jewish men and women worshipping in front of the Western Wall on Yom Kippur as the beginning of a change of the religious-territorial status quo aimed ultimately at desecrating and destroying the Dome of the Rock. The standard Zionist interpretation is that the intransigeant wing of the Arab-Palestinian leadership, led by Haj Amin al-Husseini (Mufti of Jerusalem), deliberately used false propaganda to incite the Arab masses and supplied them with weapons to wreak violence and terrorize the Zionists into calling off the Zionist project.[5] What is undeniable is that the 1929 riots marked the beginning of increasingly violent confrontations between the Arab-Palestinian leadership and the Zionists which escalated ultimately into the 1948-9 war. The interpretation which I grew up with, and which no evidence has yet led me seriously to question, is that a moderate Zionist leadership which sought conciliation and compromise was rebuffed at every step by an extremist Arab-Palestinian leadership. Not that there were not moderates and extremists in both camps, but from 1929 to 1948 the moderate faction clearly held the upper hand on the Zionist side, while the extremist faction dominated on the Arab side. The al-Husseini faction prevailed in the Arab camp, not because it was representative of the Arab-Palestinian people (on this there is no conclusive evidence), but because through his office as Mufti of Jerusalem, his strong-arm tactics (including assassination of moderate Arab-Palestinians who dared challenge his leadership), and constant provocation of violence, he defined a situation to which others must necessarily respond. His constant opposition to immigration of Jews into Palestine, even when the ascent of Nazis to power in Germany made this a dire necessity, and even after 1945 when the survivors of the Holocaust languished in displaced-persons camps, is notorious, as is his consorting with Mussolini and Hitler during the war years. He opposed every proposal of partition of Palestine, even the 1936 plan which would have given the Zionists a tiny sliver of land, and most crucially the 1947 partition which the Zionists had enthusiastically accepted. Had the Arabs accepted the 1947 partition as the Zionists did, there would be no Arab refugee problem, no expulsion of Arabs from their ancestral villages, no continuing state of hostility and intermittent warfare between Israelis and Palestinians for the last 54 years. I would welcome a coherent, convincing narrative of the 1929-1948 period that would lead me to revise my estimate of the developments of this period. To date, I have seen none.
1948: Israeli Statehood and Al-Naqba
The date of Israel’s independence is celebrated by Israelis, and mourned by Palestinians as a day of national tragedy. The day commemorates the events of 1948, in which the Israeli state came to be, and in which hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs were displaced from their homes and became refugees. From my liberal-Zionist perspective I see the Palestinians in their tragedy as the victims of a struggle between two nations in which the blame, though not wholly borne by one side or the other, lies predominantly on the Arab leadership (including foreign Arab nations) that rejected the 1947 partition and led the Arabs into war. The Palestinian narrative with which I am somewhat acquainted lays the blame mostly on the Zionists. I believe that it is the Palestinian interpretation of the 1948 events which colors their whole perception of Zionism, and leads them to portray it as a revival of the ancient Israelite conquest policies of Joshua. By eliminating the context of pre-1948 Arab rejectionism, they are left with a picture of Jews who invaded a land of peaceable inhabitants and expelled those inhabitants willfully in order to make room for themselves.[6] Indeed, if we were to eliminate the whole pre-history of Palestine from 1900 to 1948 (including the war which the Arabs declared on Zionism in 1948), and if we viewed the expulsions of 1948 in isolation, the actions of the Jews toward the Arabs in that year would seem monstrous and indefensible. A Palestinian growing up in refugee camps from birth on, who hears the story of his people from that vantage point, and perceives his wretched living conditions in contrast with those of his middle-class Israel neighbors, cannot but view the role that Israel has played toward his people with resentment and hatred.
And who am I to say that this Palestinian is responsible for the conditions from which he suffers? He who was born after 1948 did not participate in the historic decisions, whether to welcome the original Zionist settlers at the beginning of the century, or what stand to take on the Balfour Declaration and British mandate, or whether to ratify or reject the partition plan of 1947. All he knows is that he personally suffers the consequences of al-Naqba, the uprooting of the Palestinian people from their homes in 1948, and that the poverty and lack of opportunity from which he suffers is unfair. Israel benefited from the same events that caused his suffering, so it is natural in his eyes to blame them. He does not understand why Israel refuses to entertain a recent proposal, that the “right of return” of Palestinians be finessed by a complex formula including return of a nominally small sample, financial remuneration for the rest, and admission by Israel of responsibility for the expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948.
From the Israelis’ point of view, refusal of the last condition is perfectly understandable. First of all, not all of the Palestinians were actually expelled. Some were (a fact which traditionally-patriotic Israelis are still denying). Many evacuated their homes willingly – some as part of a conscious strategy to facilitate the war against the nascent Israel, many more in panic (especially after the Irgun massacre of the Arab village Deir Yassin in western Jerusalem). Some of the Israeli expulsions had clear military justification, especially in those cities of mixed population where prior Arab hostilities posed a clear and present danger to the Jewish population; others were not so clearly justifiable. But it is overwhelmingly arguable from the Israeli point of view that a conciliatory approach of the Arab leadership would have been reciprocated at once on the part of the Zionists, and the Palestinians would have been left unmolested to live where they were. It was the clear and present danger to the Jewish population from the war initiated by the Arabs, and the defensive measures which the Israelis had to take for their own survival, that resulted in the dislocation of the Palestinian people. Security concerns were also cited in support of the refusal of Israeli leaders to readmit them to home communities immediately after the war. Though many of the Palestinian Arabs were probably not individually responsible for the fate that overtook them, collectively the Arab nation was accurately perceived as the adversary. In a state of war, when national survival is at stake, the distinction between individual and collective responsibility is regrettably one of the first casualties. Especially in the aftermath of the Holocaust, the dangers to Israel’s survival were not to be taken lightly in 1949.
Israel has countered the Palestinian assertion of a “right of return” by pointing out an analogy with other cases of national partition and border realignments. In 1945, the borders of Poland were moved westward on both the German and Russian frontiers, and many Poles and Germans moved west in order to remain politically integrated with their compatriots, though it meant giving up their former homes. In 1947, the partition of India and creation of Pakistan led to similar relocations. The relocation (part forced, part voluntary) of Palestinians beyond the Green Line in 1948-9 was balanced by the relocation (part forced, part voluntary) of Jews from Arab lands to Israel in the years immediately following. In all these cases other than the Palestinian, the relocated individuals and families were integrated into their new host countries and became politically settled and economically productive. Whether rightly or wrongly, Israel has seen in the continuing “refugee” status of the Palestinians after over half a century the willful pursuit of a political agenda continuous with the aims of the Arab rejectionists of 1947. The origins, activities, and constituency-base of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, from its origins before 1967 to the start of the Oslo process in the 1990s, lend support to this interpretation.
The political platform of the Palestinian Liberation Organization was formed in the post-1948 context, and bears clear witness to the pre-1967 origins of the sentiments it expresses. Indeed, Arafat’s guerrilla activities against Israel predate 1967. In 1966 there were no “occupied territories” to oppose (if by this one means the West Bank and Gaza); there were no “settlements” to oppose (if by this one means settlements in the West Bank and Gaza). There was only Israel within the Green Line. But that Israel was home for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians before 1948, and that was what they wanted to recover. There was incessant low-level sniping and guerrilla activity between 1949 and 1967, which was one of Israel’s motives for the 1956 Sinai war. The guerrillas were unreconciled to the 1949 armistice; they wanted their homes back. Their interests would later be one crucial factor motivating Arafat’s rejection of Barak’s Camp David offer in 2000, and his insistence on the Palestinian “right of return.” How many of the refugees from which the guerrillas were recruited, were continually motivated by the same intransigeant opposition to accepting one square meter of Jewish sovereignty that motivated Haj Amin al-Husseini’s rejectionist cadres before 1947, and how many simply wished to return to their homes and live in peace, is the big question that can never be answered definitively. But in either case, from 1948 onward (and especially after 1967) the pain of homelessness and uprooting were potent factors motivating the guerrillas to fight against Israel’s existence. Their hostility, in turn, was correctly perceived by Israel as a threat to her security.
1967 – Victory, Occupation, Settlements
In 1967, Israel fought again for its survival against a massive Egyptian buildup and blockade, and captured control of Gaza, Sinai, the West Bank, and the Golan heights. During the next decades, Israel built a network of homes, settlements, suburbs, towns, and villages in the occupied territories. The motivations of these new (and sometimes old-new) settlements were diverse and complex. The whole range of these situations and motivations must be described, in order for any intelligent judgment to be made concerning them. I am reminded in this connection of H.W. Fowler’s demarcation of five classes of English-speakers regarding split infinitives: those who neither know nor care what they are, those who do not know but care very much, those who know and condemn, those who know and approve, and those who know and distinguish.[7]
The Western Wall (and nearby, the Jewish Quarter whose synagogues stood desolate from 1949 to 1967) stands in the territory outside pre-1967 Israel. No serious student of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has proposed that Israel should cede the Western Wall and its adjacent plaza to the Palestinians. That the site most sacred to Jewry should have been in Arab hands from 1949 to 1967, with no recognition of the right of a Jew to visit it to pray, was a crying injustice waiting to be righted. This is one “territory” which I cannot see how any decent person, Jewish or not, would vote to return to its pre-1967 status.
The village of Kfar Etzion south of Bethlehem was one of the first to be settled after the 1967 war. The history of the village is instructive. It was founded in 1935, evacuated in the face of Arab attacks in 1936, and re-settled in 1943. In 1948, it was besieged by the Arab Legion; the women and children were evacuated, and the men were massacred by the Arabs. The survivors of the original village and their descendants spearheaded the resettlement in 1967; for them, it was a homecoming and vindication. In succeeding years, the “Etzion bloc” has been expanded by the addition of several nearby villages and the town of Efrat, all of them on previously vacant land. In 1996, a bypass road was constructed to allow the residents of these communities to commute to Jerusalem without driving through Bethlehem; these commuters were subject to near-constant shooting attacks during the Al-Aksa intifada. Most peace-settlement scenarios assign the Etzion bloc to Israel, with the possibility of other Israeli land being given to the Palestinians as a swap.
Ma’aleh Adumim is a thriving new eastern suburb of Jerusalem, on the road toward Jericho. It sits isolated on a stretch of red desert hills reminding the American visitor of Arizona, sparsely populated with a few small Arab villages and Bedouin camel-stops. This settlement has filled an urgent need of housing for greater-Jerusalem residents, at a minimum of inconvenience to the surrounding population. It has been generally quiet during the intifada, in stark contrast to Gilo, a contiguous suburb of southern Jerusalem which has been the object of frequent attack.
The Jewish settlements in the Golan occupy the high land from which Syrian artillery took pot shots at the lower-lying villages of Huleh and Galilee from 1949 to 1967. The region possesses few historical-religious associations (mostly from the Roman period), but considerable strategic value. It also produces the best-quality wine currently produced in Israel. The current residents are among the most pragmatic and flexible of Israeli “settlers,” and though they love the land and have lived there most of their adult lives, they would pick up and leave without a fuss if a peace settlement required it.
Hebron is arguably the most ancient Jewish historical site, containing the tomb of the patriarchs. It was for a long time one of the traditional four Jewish “holy cities” and home to an ultra-Orthodox scholarly community until the massacre of 1929 caused its evacuation. The proximity to sacred history is bought here at a fearful price, for Jewish and Palestinian extremists are both drawn to it disproportionately, and (including the nearby Jewish settlement Kiryat Arba) it has been one of the worst chronic hot spots of violence in the land since 1967. Baruch Goldstein’s massacre of Moslem worshippers in 1994 was the most notorious incident in a constant two-way vendetta, which has picked up where 1929 left off.
Katif and Netsarim in the Gaza strip laid no pretense to sacred history (indeed, in Biblical times Gaza was the stronghold of the Philistines, not part of Israel), but they consisted [before the Israeli evacuation of Gaza in 2005] of islands of middle-class suburbia (complete with beachfront) alongside the most crowded concentration of refugee camps and slums in the Middle East. Here one needs no conspiracy theory of directed attacks to account for the frequent violence which claimed many lives (including Alisa Flatow of West Orange, New Jersey, my neighboring community). Their very existence was a gratuitous provocation.
This sampling shows the variety of motivation and significance behind the settlement phenomenon: historic sanctity, middle-class comfort, suburban convenience, military-strategic value, triumphalist assertiveness. The diverse attitudes of Israelis toward the settlements are as instructive as the diversity of the settlements themselves. We must recall in this connection, that Israeli political leadership was exercised exclusively by Labor from 1948 until 1977. In the last quarter-century, the right-of-center Likud party has enjoyed political parity with Labor. Israelis have expressed their profound ambivalence on the “land or peace” by alternately selecting first one party, then the other, to carry the banner of leadership.
Even before the rise of Menachem Begin to power in 1977, Israelis were in a dilemma on the issue of what to do with the land acquired in their 1967 victory. One counsel suggested returning the land in order to obtain a lasting peace, but there seemed to be no responsible party in sight with whom to deal. Arafat’s PLO then wanted nothing less than the undoing of the 1947 partition, and spoke only with violence, directed variously at Israeli schoolchildren, Olympic athletes, and Jewish tourists. There were plenty of decent Palestinians in the territories willing to sell produce and crafts, but they lacked a mature political voice.
In this setting, Israelis fell guiltily in love with the land and acted surreptitiously on that feeling, much as a teenage couple whose parents do not approve of their relationship will steal kisses and more when they can seize the opportunity, torn between desire and guilt. When Likud came into power (as a consequence of the perceived failure of Labor in the Yom Kippur war and the social rise of the more conservative Sephardic Jews of Arab-country origins), the same objectives were pursued more aggressively and without guilt. The peace faction argued that it would be necessary eventually to trade land for peace, and meanwhile there should be as little change in the status quo as possible. The expansionists responded that the Palestinians as a group would never accede to a reasonable settlement, so what was the point of remaining “virtuous” – denying one’s love for the land and its historic-religious associations – for the sake of an idealistic chimera with no practical chance of realization?
The expansionist assertion of a Jewish “right” to the entire land was based on three arguments: (1) God promised this land to the Jewish people, as recorded in the Bible. (2) Historically, the “West Bank” was the historic heartland of the Jewish people. Indeed, the majority of Biblical history was lived in the hills of Judea and Samaria, and in the towns of Shechem, Bethel, Gibeon and Shiloh, Bethlehem and Hebron. Here the patriarchs wandered, the judges judged, the kings ruled, the prophets taught. (3) The “Arabs”[8] purportedly forfeited whatever claim they may have had to even a part of the land by their unjust wars against Israel in 1948 and 1967. Though in the aftermath of a bloody century of world history most people would the general principle of establishing title to land by conquest, the argument that the wars of 1948 and 1967 were defensive and justified from Israel’s side strengthened the Israeli rightists in their perception that Israel now held the territories for a good and just reason and should not relinquish them.
1987-2002: Intifada I, Oslo Agreement, Intifada II
The Palestinian intifada of 1987 forced Israelis to reexamine some of the assumptions which they had harbored since 1948 and 1967, and to reevaluate the actions to which those assumptions had led them. The reevaluation has not proceeded in a straight line, and has suffered some reverses since the intifada of 2000. As the controversy is particularly intense right now in the thick of the events we have most recently experienced, the views I present here will necessarily be my own, and people of good will may disagree. However, the issues I raise will be offered as essential for anyone to address, whether he agrees with my conclusions or not.
The 1987 intifada (in which Arafat and his PLO did not participate, because they were then in exile) demonstrated that the common mass of the Palestinian people do have a political will. They are still groping for the means with which to give it mature expression. However, concerned people must work in concert to help create the conditions under which they can do so appropriately and positively. Failure to do so will only result in the already bad situation getting progressively worse. It was Rabin’s perception of this truth that led him to shift course from cracking down on the Palestinians to pursuing the peace process.
Is the content of that Palestinian popular will for the Palestinian people to achieve self-determination-in-place, or is it the old rejectionist mantra that wishes to put an end to the state of Israel? Here the Palestinians are divided and need constructive leadership from within. Polls have suggested for the past several years that a majority of the Palestinians would welcome the opportunity of a Palestinian state within the West Bank and Gaza. However, from 1929 onward, it is not the Palestinian majority that has generally seized the situation, but an activist minority. When the Oslo accords were ratified and the Palestinian Authority poised to begin operation in 1996, a wave of terrorist activity from Hamas raised anxieties among Israelis and influenced the electoral victory of Netanyahu over Peres that year, an outcome which froze the peace process at the very point it needed to move forward in order to succeed. This is just one example of many in recent years which show how extremists in each camp create crises which can scare the other camp into tilting toward extremism at the very moment when moderates should have been in the ascendancy. The balance of power in each camp is held by those in the center. They would prefer in their heart of hearts to pursue a moderate course, and they wish they could trust the other enough to feel secure in doing so. But when push comes to shove, they feel they must act defensively when attacked. The pattern was repeated in 2000, when the Israelis elected Ariel Sharon by a decisive margin in response to the Al Aksa Intifada and Arafat’s rejection of the Barak and Clinton offers.
I believed in 1995, and still believe now, that the majority of the Palestinian people would be willing to live peacefully in a state comprising the West Bank and Gaza, with border adjustments to be worked out swapping a few small settlement blocs for other land. But who will lead them to this goal? It seemed promising to some of us in 1995 that Arafat would follow the historical example of the Vikings[9] and Menahem Begin, and would mature in his persona (given strong enough incentives), graduating from terrorist/freedom-fighter to statesman. It was clear in an instant at Camp David in 2000, that that hope was to be disappointed. The conspiratorially-minded will maintain that Arafat’s reversion to his PLO principles in 2000 was merely throwing off the mask, that his touting the “peace of the brave” during the Oslo negotiations was a sham, and that the whole establishment of a legitimate base of power through the PA was merely a Trojan-horse maneuver, like Hitler’s non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union which he honored for scarcely two years, a tactical positioning to prepare him for the final assault on his eternal enemy. I must admit in candor that this hypothesis is within the realm of possibility, given the available evidence. I prefer to believe, however, that Arafat could have been converted – if not to principled devotion to peace, at least to pragmatic compliance with the requirements of a peace settlement – if Israel had been more perfect in her own conduct, virtuously resisting the temptation of the settlements and their expansion, and engaging more vigorously in dialogue with the Palestinian people on all levels. On the other hand, I do not think Israel is to be unduly condemned for behaving about as well or poorly as most people would have behaved under similar circumstances. We are not saints, nor are we wicked. We are simply fallible human beings. As for Arafat, if my free-will hypothesis is correct, he was granted the opportunity for personal redemption and he failed, and in his failure he doomed Israel and the Palestinians to another cycle of violence, which hopefully is drawing now to a close.
Principles for Moving Forward
If the constitutional experience of the American people has taught us anything, it is that we must arrange our public lives so that we do not rely too much on the heroic virtue of this individual or that group of people, but we must devise a structure so that the ordinary interests of people of average virtue will tend to drive the structure so that it will work to the advantage and happiness of all alike. The principles of that structure should be clear by now to most people. They include:
(1) The establishment of a Palestinian state. The final borders of such a state must be negotiated in an international forum, probably along the lines that were emerging at the Camp David talks and the subsequent Taba talks in 2000. Retreat from the majority of West Bank settlements will probably required by the terms of such a settlement.
(2) Security against terrorism. In the light of the past two years’ experience, this will probably require severe limits on Palestinian military capabilities, and third-party inspections to enforce those limits. It may also require establishment of a Palestinian leadership cadre recruited in substantial measure from people with no prior involvement with the PLO, Hamas, or other organizations devoted to terroristic violence. Distinctions may have to be made between different degrees of involvement in such activities. By way of analogy, it may be useful to recall that many of the first generation of Israeli politicians belonged to the Haganah, the conventional military body which fought the early wars for the protection of the Jewish community of Palestine, but the leaders of the terroristic Irgun and Stern Gang – Menahem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir – were kept out of full political leadership for a variety of reasons for a quarter of a century. Though it is necessary that Palestinians shall select their own leaders, ways should be found to encourage them to select as leaders those who can honor the requirements of a political settlement with conviction and full integrity, and not fall back automatically on the solutions favored by long years of violent struggle.
(3) Active participation of third parties, especially the United States. Objective arbiters will be required to assist in whatever capacity needed, starting with the formulation of the terms of an overall settlement, and proceeding to their enforcement. The Oslo accords, imperfect as they were, would not have come to be without international participation. The early Bush’s administration’s distancing from the conflict led to dramatic deterioration. An international conference[10] is needed now to provide the principal parties with a viewpoint beyond their own, to explore options until formulas are found that both can live with. Unfortunately it is all too likely that there will also continue to be local incidents, such as the recent standoffs in Ramallah and Bethlehem, where third-party arbitration is essential to negotiate compromises. And there may be security issues where the mistrust on both sides is so great that the continual presence of a third-party guarantor on site is essential. This leads to the fourth point:
(4) Justice must replace revenge on the public level. An individual must take his own justice where no other recourse exists; but an individual taking his own justice is by the nature of things too subjectively involved to distinguish accurately between justice and revenge. The wisdom of the ancients decreed third-party arbitration for precisely these kinds of situations, and the remedy which that wisdom proposed then is very much called for today. There must be a continually available resource, in the form of an arbitration court or council, to handle disputes between the parties as they arise. On the other hand, external constraints are not enough; there must also be internal ones, which leads to the fifth point:
(5) Forgiveness must replace revenge on the private level. There are wrongs committed generations ago which are still distorting the lives of people who were born after that time. These people seek redress for these ancient wrongs from their current adversaries, and they are looking in the wrong direction. They will pound their adversaries mercilessly in vain for these unrightable wrongs, thus poisoning the present with the undigested waste-matter of the past, until they realize that a different method of purgation is required, which must come from within and without simultaneously. Today’s Israelis are not to be blamed for the expulsions of 1948, and today’s Palestinians are not to be blamed for those Holocaust relatives who perished because of the White Paper of 1939. People need to unburden themselves by ventilating and sharing their narratives with the other; people need to acknowledge to the other: “I feel your pain; I am sorry for what you went through.” But whoever expects to hear from the other, “I bear the guilt for your suffering; I am sorry for what I did, and I repent of my actions,” will be disappointed. The Israeli of today is not the Irgun commando of 1948 who massacred at Deir Yassin, and the Israel which he affirms in his heart is a bastion of social idealism, for which Deir Yassin was a freak aberration. He may condemn the action, but he will not identify with it, so “repentance” is not in his power. On the other hand, the Palestinian of today is not Haj Amin al-Husseini, nor is he one of the rioters who pillaged the peaceful religious community of Hebron in 1929. Thus the Palestinian and the Israeli will each pursue the real criminal, the real object of his resentment and revenge-obsession, in vain. They are ghosts and phantoms. To seek them among the living will result only in demonizing one’s innocent, honorable opponent unfairly, and in perpetuating the revenge-cycle through delusional identifications.
Of course, each will say he is responding only to current wrongs. But the perception of current wrongs is shaped by the significance of an action in the context of a 100-year narrative, on which there is never any consensus. For instance, a Palestinian in Jenin will rail at an Israeli, “You destroyed my house.” The Israeli will respond, “I needed to do it to weed out your suicide bombers who are destroying my society.” The Palestinian will reply, “The suicide bombers are the only means left for us to fight for our homeland, which you insist on denying us.” The Israeli replies, “You would have had it by now, except for your mistake in 1947 in turning down partition, which you compound every time you attack us.” And so the interpretation one makes of today’s actions leads right back to the ghosts.
Nor can one settle this kind of argument simply by sharing narratives in the hope that one will convert the other. The one who says, “I have heard your narrative; now I know that you are right and I am wrong; I repent of my narrative and adopt yours in its place” is a liar. Dialogue must proceed from honesty. By listening, one learns what one did not know; one will need to adjust one’s narrative as a result to accommodate the new information. One must learn to know the other through his narrative, while remaining true to oneself and one’s own narrative, for the selves that we are have grown from the histories of our peoples and their understanding of those histories. We can correct our understanding of the past, but we cannot undo it. Our best hope is to understand ourselves and our opponents better through sharing our narratives, and to construct on that past the best future we can come up with. We will hopefully be less dogmatic in our disagreements, and less willing to kill over them, if we understand our opponent’s point of view even half as well as we understand our own.
Honesty means pursuit of truth – being as true to the truth as one can, through openness without giving up one’s core convictions. The concept of “truth and reconciliation” (which has developed into an institution in South Africa and elsewhere – the formal hearing and judging of past wrongs, without criminal penalties, for the moral vindication of the victimized) implies that hearing and sharing the truth will lead to a lessening of hostilities. This means that both parties must be committed to that goal, and both parties must be willing to accept that exhuming the past and burying it are part of the same process. We exhume the past to reveal it, and we bury the poison of resentment which we have harbored, which we have the power to relinquish once the truth of the past has been revealed. By relinquishing the poison of resentment, we also relinquish blame, at least of our current adversary. And that is a kind of forgiveness, the quality on which our future depends.
Forgiveness also has its limits. It can relax its quest of righting past wrongs, but righting present wrongs takes priority. Especially where the consequences of past wrongs persist in the present, they must be corrected, as long as that does not perpetrate new injustice. The answer to denial of Palestinian national aspirations in the past is to grant them in the present. But to insist on granting them full repatriation to their original homes of 1948 is to risk repeating the whole complex of problems which led us to where we are now, trying to force two national groups between which there is a great deal of mistrust into unnatural proximity. We have to employ good fences in this situation to try to make good neighbors. Someday, we hope we will be such good neighbors that we will be able to cross the fence whenever we want. I almost said, “to do away with the fence.” But that is too optimistic – at least for now.
On Agreeing To Disagree
The rabbis said: “A disagreement which is for the sake of Heaven will endure, but a disagreement which is not for the sake of Heaven will not endure. An example of the first: Hillel and Shammai. An example of the second: Korah and his rebellious company.”[11]
There are Jews who will disagree with what I say here. I have had these discussions with them before, and I welcome their different viewpoints, from which I hope I can learn.
There are Palestinians and their sympathizers who will disagree with me from another perspective. I wish to hear what they have to say from their perspective, and I hope to learn enough from it to bring us closer in understanding. I hope they will listen to me in the same spirit and for the same ultimate goals.
The kind of disagreement which we need to bury as soon as possible, is the kind of Cain and Abel (whom the rabbis could have mentioned in place of Korah) – the kind which leads people to kill each other. That kind of disagreement only brings pain and suffering. Instead of destroying our opponent as we wished, it only turns him into our worst image of him. He needs to transform himself into the monster we took him for, in order to defend himself. And then we must turn ourselves into that same monster, in order to defend ourselves from him. We must move into a future in which the first rule is: never kill; never take vengeance in blood; never perpetuate the cycle of violence. If we cannot agree on this rule, we cannot get to first base.
Stopping the killing and speaking honestly with each other go hand in hand. When I am in fear of my life, I weigh my words as to what will be strategically and tactically to my advantage, for survival is the first rule. It is only when we have put killing behind us that we can be honest enough to share our narratives in full honestly, and from that gain the trust to live with each other in trust and peace.
A rabbi of the second century said the world rests on three pillars: on justice, truth, and peace.[12] We cannot have justice until those who are currently disenfranchised have their place in the sun. We cannot have truth until we trust each other enough to risk saying the real truth about ourselves to our adversary, and listening truly to the truth he has to impart to us. And the only way to gain this trust is if we stop killing each other – that is, until we achieve peace. On the other hand, we cannot achieve a true and lasting peace unless it is based on this justice and this truth of which we have just spoken.
The three must be achieved simultaneously. And as a wise man noted many years ago, the threefold cord is not easily broken. (Ecclesiastes 4:12)
[1] As it was initially beyond their means to establish independent settlements, they started out as hired laborers on the plantations which the bourgeois proto-Zionists Moses Montefiore and Edmund Rothschild had already established since the middle of the 19th century.
[2] Vienna itself had a mayor, Karl Lüger (1844-1910), elected on an explicitly anti-Semitic platform. Though elected twice to the office already and barred by the Emperor, he was finally confirmed in 1897, the year of the First Zionist Congress. It is curious that with so much expression of anti-Semitism in Herzl’s home community, it took events in France to trigger his Zionist epiphany.
[3] The Arab population in Palestine was lower in the 19th century, but the economic development of the land concurrent with the Jewish settlement attracted Arab immigration from neighboring countries.
[4] See for instance Maurice Samuel, On the Rim of the Wilderness, Liveright 1931, Chapter 13, “Liberating the Fellah.”
[5] For an expression of the modern view, see Tom Segev, One Palestine Complete,Holt 2000, pp. 295ff. For the traditional Zionist view, see Maurice Samuel, What Happened In Palestine, Stratford 1929.
[6] The expulsions of 1948 are conflated in the Palestinian narrative with evictions of Palestinian-Arab tenants from purchased lands in 1920’s-30’s. The two phenomena are very different. Jews who purchased Arab agricultural estates for purpose of developing their own agricultural settlements found the presence of Arab tenant-farmers inconsistent with their own planned use of the land, and sometimes they evicted them. Though this was undoubtedly an evil to the evicted tenants, it was well within the letter of the law and the traditional institutions of agricultural landlordism. Compensation measures established in the 1930s for the relief of the farmers thus evicted elicited 3000 claims on behalf of 15,000 people – clearly a small minority of the total Arab population in Palestine. (Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete, Holt 2000, p. 274) No one, to my knowledge, has done a quantitative analysis, what percent of Jewish agricultural settlements used pre-worked Arab land requiring eviction of the tenants, and what percent used new land – the famous Huleh valley kibbutzim whose settlers drained the swamps to reclaim the land at the risk of contracting malaria, or those who irrigated the arid wastes of the Negev. Palestinian narrative deplores the former; Zionist narrative celebrates the latter. We need to weigh both in our considered judgment of the whole phenomenon of Zionism.
[7] H.W. Fowler, Modern English Usage, Oxford 1965, p. 579.
[8] The Israeli parties of the right prefer to call the Palestinians “Arabs,” not wanting to concede that they have a national existence apart from Arabs generally.
[9] Let us not forget that the Vikings, or “North Men” (Norsemen), settled northern France which was named “Normandy” after them. A certain “William of Normandy” founded the present British monarchy.
[10] In an ideal world, the United Nations would provide that objective role. It is beyond the scope of this paper to inquire why the presently-existing United Nations (as opposed to the Platonic-ideal “United Nations”) has been so corrupted as to be incapable of performing that role with any credibility. How the head of an International Red Cross which blackballs the Magen David Edom (Israeli Red Shield of David) could be proposed to sit on a commission to judge the actions of the Israeli army, boggles the mind.
[11] Mishnah Avot 5:17.
[12] Mishnah Avot 1:18, citing Rabbi Simeon ben Gamaliel.
