Sunday, June 18, 2017

Six Days and Fifty Years

I noticed this letter by Stu Blander in the New York Times Book Review, a response to a review by Gal Beckerman, 50 Years On, Stories of the Six Day War and What Came After, and saw that it provided a brief set of talking points meant to defend Israel's 50-years-and-counting Occupation. I thought I'd quote these points (in bold below) and see how well they hold up:

  1. the historical connection between the Jewish people and the land of Israel (both sides of the Green Line, e.g., Hebron) spans two millenniums; As expressed this may be true but carries no weight. Many peoples have comparably long historical connections to this or other lands, but that doesn't give them any right to claim land and subjugate and/or eject those living there -- as Israelis have done. The louder form of this argument, one often heard from Israelis, is that God gave them the land, but while that may be an article of faith for Jews it is arbitrary and unconvincing to anyone else. (Those Christians who are pro-Zionist are more likely to base their views on Revelations than on Exodus. But aside from the British of 1922-39, Christian rulers of Palestine -- Romans, Byzantines, and Crusaders -- prohibited Jewish immigration, in contrast to the Arabs and Ottomans, who allowed it).

  2. the Green Line was intended as a temporary armistice line, not a final border; The UN's 1947 Partition Resolution was intended to be a final border, but Israelis, while campaigning hard for UN approval, rejected it when they declared independence without specifying any borders and launched Plan D to seize West Galilee, Jerusalem, and environs -- indeed to seize as much land as they could without too many Palestinian Arabs. The "temporary borders" of the UN-brokered armistice agreements were expected to be finalized in peace agreements, which Israel didn't make any effort to negotiate in good faith. That is primarily because David Ben Gurion and his successors always contemplated seizing and annexing more territory by armed force. Regardless of Israeli intent, the Green Line did over nearly 20 years come to be regarded as a de facto border, as recognized in UNSCR 242 following the 1967 War, and it was eventually accepted by all nations of the Arab League, by the PLO, and finally Hamas. It is only Israel that isn't satisfied with the Green Line as a border.

  3. the territories were acquired in a defensive war; The 1967 War was initiated in a surprise attack by Israel, and followed a plan aimed at rapidly conquering territory previously held or administered by Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. Egypt provoked a crisis by demanding that UN monitor troops leave their territory in the Sinai Peninsula, and once that happened by closing the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping. Both of those reversed concessions that Egypt had made following Israel's attack on Egypt in 1956. There is no reason to think that Egypt (or any other Arab country) would have attacked Israel at that time, and it is likely that had Israel not attacked the crisis would have been resolved diplomatically. Syria and Jordan were dragged into the war because they had signed mutual defense deals with Egypt -- a failed attempt at deterring Israeli attack. Even if they fired on Israel first, it was only after Israel had attacked Egypt, and Israel responded with an aggressive campaign to seize strategic territory.

  4. Security Council Resolution 242 contemplates the retention of some of the territories; The preamble very clearly refers to the "inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war," so there is no reason to think that the Resolution "contemplates the retention of some of the territories." While Israel officially accepted the Resolution, they thought they had a loophole, arguing that the lack of a definite article (withdrawal "from territories occupied in the recent conflict" instead of withdrawal "from the territories"). By that bit of nitpicking, Israel could claim to respect international law while "creating facts on the ground" to carve out territories they would refuse to ever withdraw from. The first such "fact on the ground" -- the razing of a Palestinian neighborhood adjacent to the Western Wall of the Temple Mount -- took place before the war ended, and Israeli annexation of a greatly expanded Jerusalem very shortly after. As internal documents from the time were declassified, it has become clear that Israeli leaders never intended to give up various territories.

  5. the 1948-49 war resulted in the destruction of existing Jewish settlements (e.g., Gush Etzion) to which Israelis returned after 1967; The massacre at Gush Etzion is a rare case where Arab militia were able to destroy an isolated Jewish settlement. On the other hand, Israeli forces destroyed some 700 Palestinian villages, and forced some 700,000 Palestinians to flee. The net effect of the 1948-49 was was that Israel expanded its territory from 55% offered in the UN Partition Resolution to 72% while at the same time reducing the non-Jewish population from 45% to 20% -- a massive demographic shift that nowadays we commonly refer to as "ethnic cleansing." No doubt the massacre at Gush Etzion was unjust, as was the 1929 attack on the Zionist settlement in Hebron, which resulted in its retreat, and another early post-1967 settlement. But if you want to redress those acts, you need to do it for both sides, which would mean allowing 700 resettlements of Israel by Palestinian refugees. Otherwise, those settlements are just land grabs by the superior military force.

  6. there are significant security reasons for continued control of the territories; Maybe there were some valid reasons in 1967, and possibly up to the 1977 Peace Treaty with Egypt, but Israel has not faced any significant border threats since roughly that time. Israel created a problem with Lebanon when Israel intervened there in 1978 and especially 1982, and when Israel escalated a minor border incident in 2006 into a major war, but all of those were preventable or could have been handled otherwise. And Israel's Occupation creates far more dissent and resistance, and far more immediate threats, than allowing those territories to develop independently (as, for instance, the Oslo Accords promised but never delivered, again due to Israeli sabotage).

  7. international law is far from clear as to which side has the better of the "legal" argument; One point international law is very clear on is that the Jewish-only settlements Israel has been building on territory seized by force in the 1967 War are illegal. A second point is that Israel has refused to permit refugees from the 1948-49 and 1967 Wars to return to their homes or compensate them for their losses, contrary to UN Resolution. There are also various laws regarding treatment of people in Occupied Territories that Israel is likely to have violated. Israel runs a very coercive and invasive Occupation regime, which systematically discriminates against civil and human rights of Palestinians. Israel routinely practices collective punishment against Palestinians. It's not clear to me what the "legal" arguments on the other side may be, or how they can possibly offset these complaints.

I can see some merit in some of these points, especially up through the 1967 War. European settler colonies have either succeeded or failed depending on whether they were able to establish a demographic majority -- as they clearly did in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, but as they failed to do in Algeria, South Africa, Rhodesia, or Kenya. Until the 1948-49 War, the Jewish Yishuv in Palestine was limited to about 32% of the total population, which didn't bode well. This is why Ben Gurion and the Zionist leadership embraced Partition and Transfer as well as open Jewish immigration (which the British had suppressed since 1939, and earlier from Arab countries). That they emerged from the war with 72% of the land in Palestine and an 80% majority ensured their survival, but it took some years after that before the lesson was impressed on the Palestinians and neighboring Arabs. Algeria, for instance, rejected the French only in 1964, and it took another 25 years for white South Africans to give up their system of Apartheid. So Zionism won the struggle for existence and statehood in 1948-49, but like so many successful people, they didn't stop there. They got greedy: both in terms of expanding their territorial grasp and in how completely they were able to dominate their opponents. The result has been an extraordinary human tragedy, both for the oppressed and for the souls of the dominators.

Blander's letter continues:

I do not think that these arguments (individually or in combination) dictate continued retention of the territories and perpetuation of the occupation. But it is frankly absurd to characterize the current situation as, say, akin to that of France in Algeria or the British in India.

Aside from demography, the other settler colony consideration is whether you can return, as the British in India and the French in Algeria clearly could. Boers in South Africa might have been able to return to the Netherlands, but (unlike the English in South Africa) were long separated from those roots -- which is one reason they hung on so dearly. Jews in Palestine/Israel had few other options -- Americans could come and go, and some others did move on to Western Europe, but the majority from East Europe and the MENA countries had few options and little appetite to return.

On the other hand, if you don't recognize Zionism to be a creed of settler colonialism, you'll miss the underlying rationales for why the Zionist settlers did what they did, and why they've gone on to create a regime that systematically denies the native population any semblance of human or civil rights, a system which it regularly reinforces with violence. Otherwise, you might just think their racism and militarism derive from some intrinsic evil. As a white settler American (albeit 4-10 generations removed from Europe), I can relate, but I also understand the trap such identity sets, and the need to outgrow that. Israelis have succeeded in transplanting themselves to the Middle East, but not for as long, and with a more precarious majority, than we have, so it's understandable that they're much more on edge (plus there's the Holocaust, which they've preserved memory of to an unhealthy degree -- kind of like the way the Civil War was remembered in the US South well into my lifetime, whereas we've done a pretty good job of sweeping traumas to minorities like slavery and the Indian wars under the rug).

I guess this is why I find the last paragraph of Blander's letter confusing:

One more thing. After a couple of pages of essentially holding Israel responsible for the continued occupation, the essay ends with a plea by Raja Shehadeh that until the Israelis "accept that the land must be shared and that both people have the right to self-determination, peace will remain elusive." Maybe so. But how to square that with Nir Baram's conclusion (apparently endorsed by Beckerman) that the conflict is not about "final borders" and there remains "total and irreconcilable difference" between the parties?

You can't really square away those and dozens of other things people say, each coming from a limited and parochial vantage point. It would helps to see where the Zionists came from, what they sought and hoped for and built, and how they coped with real and imagined threats, but one also needs to accept the Palestinians as they were and have become, to put their words and actions into a historical context and understand how their options have been severely constrained. The next line might be something about how if they could all just learn to understand and empathize with each other the conflict would be easy to resolve. But that won't happen, at least broadly: the views are too limited and the experiences too raw. It often takes distance to be able to see both sides clearly, to find some common ground or viable modus vivendi.

I think that's the point of Nathan Thrall's new book, The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine. Thrall is taking a line that Israelis have often said about Arabs -- one of many things Zionist colonizers learned from their British patrons (along with house demolitions and other forms of collective punishment, and indeed the legal code Israel built its Occupation on), and reflecting it back. The saying usually ends with "is violence," which Thrall left out, because he realizes that force can take other forms. In The One-State Condition: Occupation and Democracy in Israel/Palestine, Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir make a distinction between "eruptive violence" (what you normally think of as violence) and "potential violence" (what you feel when you see an Occupation soldier, or are arrested, or served with a warrant by a state that depends on arms for enforcement, or even a veiled threat). Israeli society positively seethes with "potential violence" like this. The closest analogy I can think of, one that Americans should (but often cannot) be able to relate to, is how the all-pervasive legal strictures of the Jim Crow South were reinforced with lynching (and note that many white Southerners had their own "Holocaust memories" dating from Civil War and Reconstruction, their own sense that their renascent power was only achieved through violent struggle).

As someone who abhors violence in all forms and degrees, I find it disturbing to note that Jim Crow was only dismantled because a superior force -- the US federal government -- intervened. (Same for slavery a century earlier, much more violently.) Similarly, it is hard to see any glimmer of hope that Israeli society might voluntarily dismantle its own "matrix of control" (Jeff Halper's apt phrase and thorough analysis) without the application of considerable external pressure. One problem is that the world isn't much good at this: partly because many powers are convinced they can solve their international problems through violence, and partly because the targets of that violence are more likely to hunker down and carry on than to give up. Germany and Japan gave up their imperial ambitions only after utter devastation, but Vietnam and Afghanistan suffered comparable ruin and carried on. And while economic sanctions seem less brutalizing, about the only case you can point to where they worked was South Africa (which at least is much more similar to Israel than such failed sanctions targets as Cuba, North Korea, Iraq, and Iran). The BDS movement is promising not so much because it punishes Israel for misbehaving as because it shows that the world no longer considers Israel's violent repression of millions of people subject to its power to be morally acceptable.

As fascinating as the past is, this is a conflict which can only be resolved in the present, and the key to that is to stop treating each other badly. To do that we need to condemn every transgression on every side, and we need to refuse to allow either side's misdeeds to justify the other. Most obviously, Israel's "right to defend itself" doesn't extend to bombing, shooting, bulldozing, kidnapping or starving -- all typical Israeli acts justified under the "self-defense" umbrella. One could even imagine a simple and elegant system where, for instance, every time someone in Gaza shoots a rocket over the wall Israel can present the authorities in Gaza with a bill for damages and a warrant for the arrest of whoever's responsible. Of course, Gaza could do the same every time Israel lobs a shell or drops a bomb on Gaza. While the warrants may be difficult to satisfy, the damages at least could be deducted from the streams of aid both Israel and the Palestinians receive. The formalities themselves would both publicize infractions and deter against them. Moreover, this wouldn't require a grand deal to establish a "final status" verdict. All it would require is mutual agreement that shooting and bombing is something that shouldn't be allowed or excused any more.

We also need to lighten up and let go of things. You can't go back and rectify the past, but you can start again and try to get it right from here on out. No one starts with a clean slate, and I'm not sure that one is even possible, but a little self-awareness and a little more effort to respect others can go a long ways. I know, for instance, that I'm not free of the racism and sexism and Christianity and American jingoism I grew up with, but I've managed to contain them to the point where I'm not much of a problem for other people. That much seems doable, even if it's not done often enough.

But one last point: we should understand why ending (or at least ameliorating) this conflict matters. It's not just that mistreatment anywhere is bad, or even that Israel is bucking a worldwide trend toward deconialization (not so much a return of settlers to Europe as a general blurring of racial and ethnic identities all around the world), but especially for us in America a recognition that Israel's all-encompassing belief in using violence to perpetuate inequality infects us as well (or in some cases, such as Jim Crow, even originated here). America's self-destructive lurch to the right parallels and feeds off Israel's, and it's unlikely we can stave off the one without at least separating it from the other.

For another review of Thrall's book and several others, see David Shulman: Israel's Irrational Rationality (or as the cover put it: "Israel: From Military Victory to Moral Failure"). Here's a quote:

By far the most cogent of the new books, however, is Nathan Thrall's The Only Language They Understand, which surveys the last five decades and comes to a remarkable conclusion: the only way to produce some kind of movement toward resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is to apply significant coercive force to the parties involved, and in particular to Israel.

No amount of coddling and reassuring, no increased bribes in the form of more money or military aid, will have any effect on Israeli policy for the simple reason that Israel considers any sacrifice that would be necessary for peace far worse than maintaining the current situation. As Thrall writes, "no strategy can succeed if it is premised on Israel behaving irrationally." In this reading of the worldview that has driven all Israeli governments -- right, pseudo-left, or center -- over these decades, "it makes no sense for Israel to strike a deal today rather than wait to see if . . . imagined threats," such as an apartheid state ruling over a Palestinian demographic majority, and thus the end of Israeli democracy, "actually materialize." The assumption that Israel genuinely wants a peace agreement is simply wrong; the costs of such an agreement are tangible, immediate, and perhaps overwhelming, involving the loss of territory, an end to colonization, and potential political collapse, whereas the costs of maintaining the status quo are for many Israelis, if at times unpleasant, eminently bearable.

Also, further down, after detailing the author's personal experiences with Israeli settlers near Hebron:

A diary that kept track of such assaults on Palestinians would run to thousands of pages, with daily, perhaps hourly, entries. And I have not yet mentioned the endless demolitions of Palestinian houses -- entire villages, such as Susiya and Umm al-Khair, are in danger of extinction -- or the remorseless processes of expulsion and ethnic cleansing that we see everywhere in the occupied territories. The occupation is also a surreal world of denial, where lies mask themselves as truth and truth can't be uttered, at least not by the officers and politicians who hold power. I recommend the graphic and moving descriptions of the current situation in the West Bank and Gaza in Kingdom of Olives and Ash, a volume of personal essays by well-known writers, including the Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, edited by Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman and published to coincide with the fifty-year anniversary.

The settlers themselves, however obnoxious, bear only a portion of the blame for the atrocities they commit. They carry out the policies of the Israeli government, in effect maintaining a useful, steady level of state terror directed against a large civilian population. None of this can be justified by rational argument. All of it stains the character of the state and has, in my experience, horrific effects on the minds and hearts of young soldiers who have to carry out the orders they are given. A few unusually aware and conscientious ones have had the courage to speak out; as always in such situations, most people just go along.

Shulman also mentions a "binational" scheme which is close to where my own thinking has led me:

There exist other templates for some sort of resolution. The most interesting and creative is probably the Two States One Homeland proposal by Meron Rapoport, Awni al-Mashni, and the group of Palestinians and Israelis they have gathered around them. They envision two states within a single geographical space and a movement toward simultaneous sharing and separation. The blueprint speaks of two independent polities with Jerusalem as their capital; freedom of movement and even freedom to settle on both sides of the border, subject to agreement on the number of citizens of each state who will become permanent residents of the other; a Joint Court for Human Rights, a Joint Security Council, and other common institutions functioning alongside the institutional structures of each state.

Of the other books reviewed, Matti Steinberg's In Search of Modern Palestinian Nationhood strikes me as possibly the most interesting. The author "served for many years as a senior adviser to the heads of the Shin Bet" and he seems to have made a careful, nuanced study of what Palestinian writers were actually thinking as their view of Israel evolved from "roughly 1973" on. There is an interesting movie called The Gatekeepers of interviews with five former Shin Bet heads, showing in each case a career evolution from youthful hawk to aged, wizened dove, so one imagines that even while they towed the standard political line, they actually learned real things about the people they were spying on. Unfortunately, the more they learned, the more they regretted, the more likely they were to be replaced with someone younger and more reckless. I think that rule often applies to Israeli politicians as well, although Netanyahu has managed to be single-mindedly obstructionist for what seems like forever.

Ask a question, or send a comment.