In my previous post I commented on the spectacle of pampered students and faculty at our elite colleges and universities cutting class, donning keffiyehs, LARPing as oppressed Palestinians (at the top of their lungs, and as disruptively as possible, which is always fun and exciting), and calling for the extinction of the Jewish state. (As far as I can tell, the extinction of the Jews themselves, as long as we’re at it, wouldn’t bother them much either: nobody’s saying much about where the Jews themselves are supposed to go, once the area is Judenrein “from the river to the sea”, but from what I’m hearing I get the impression that if they just kind of ceased to exist it would be a not-unwelcome lagniappe.)
We white males are by now well-accustomed to calls for our erasure, of course, but I think that suddenly a lot of blue-state American Jews — of the type for whom not voting Democrat would be a far greater offense to their faith than a bacon cheeseburger with a side of fried clams — are aghast to behold the monster they’ve nurtured. My post was, for the most part, a comment on watching this coalition on the Left fracturing and beginning to eat itself, along with some remarks about how the protests were obviously well-funded and highly coordinated, with the stroppy students acting as little more than an easily biddable mob, their excitable young brains washed clean of everything other than “Who?” and “Whom?“.
Although I hadn’t said much about the conflict in Gaza itself, our friend and always-insightful commenter Jacques joined the conversation, to focus on which side in that war might in fact hold the higher moral ground — which is of course relevant to how we should react to the protests.
As a thought experiment, imagine that no western kids had ever been subjected to woke indoctrination. Imagine that all of them were ideally rational and moral young people. How would we expect these kids to react to what the state of Israel is doing to the Palestinians? Would these rational and moral kids just shrug? Would they think it was entirely moral and decent to exterminate tens of thousands of civilians, including children, in the hope of killing a much smaller number of guerilla fighters? Would they have no objection to Israeli politicians referring to Arabs as “Amalek”? I think some of these imaginary ideal kids would be protesting too.
Jacques, is several places, indicts Israel for the severity of its military response. For example (my italics):
I don’t agree that the Israelis are doing much to avoid “unnecessary” civilian casualties. It looks like their goal is maximal civilian casualties. (As you’d expect when Israeli leaders openly invoke “Amalek” and the genocidal moral code of the Jewish bible.)
Is this true? Israel is at war. How does its conduct compare to other historical examples of warfare, especially urban warfare? It certainly isn’t hard, throughout the ages, to find examples of cities being totally annihilated — men, women, young and old — in the fury of war. It is also difficult — and I’ll come back to this — to draw a bright line, either in military or ideological terms, between civilians and Hamas; it could easily be argued that Hamas itself cares far less about the safety and well-being of Gaza’s civilians than Israel itself does, and that Hamas knows very well that every image or account of civilian victims is potent ammunition against Israel in the court of world opinion. (In the comment-thread at the previous post, I linked to a thread on X arguing that Israel is, at the very least, certainly not trying to maximize civilian casualties. I’ll link it again here; make of it what you will.)
Regarding “Amalek”, the term refers to an ancient people who were implacable, mortal enemies of Israel. Is the term inaptly applied to Hamas, who marinate their children from birth in the belief that the greatest possible good is the destruction of Israel and blood-vengeance against all Jews?
I should probably at this point make some sort of summary of my own thoughts about this war, and more generally, about the intractable conflict in the region that has festered since before I was born, and even more generally than that, about war and conflict as a whole:
First, I’ll say that I generally support the idea of distinct, cohesive and homogeneous peoples having homelands. The kind of Diversity worth wanting, I think, is the kind where one culture or ethny does things their way over here, and another does things differently over there, and every people gets to have a place where they can feel at home, create as much civic trust as possible, and let their commonalities of folkways, language, religion, cuisine, art, history, and myth shape their shared public life as much as their private lives at home. (I’ve written about this for years; see for example, my brief essay Simple Common Sense About Diversity And Immigration, from eleven years ago.) This arrangement preserves all the fascinating, distinctive characteristics of each culture in its own fertile soil, rather than throwing them all together into a gigantic global grinding machine to pulverize them into dust. The right way to experience real, “enriching” diversity in a healthy world is to travel. Let a thousand flowers bloom!
Unlike the “Palestinians”, the Jews constitute an ethnically distinct people, with a specific (and highly influential) cultural history originating thousands of years ago in the land they now occupy. I endorse their wish to have a national homeland. (I won’t call it a “right”, because most talk of “rights” is just a mess of conflicting opinions, but I’m glad to see them have a place of their own.)
The land area of Israel is smaller than New Jersey, and it is surrounded by neighboring Arab nations compared to whose vast expanses Israel is a tiny speck. These Arab homelands — Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iraq, and others — could easily have absorbed the displaced Arabs from what became Israel; there were fewer than a million in 1948. But none did, not then or in the following 75 years; the answer, instead, was war, in 1948, 1967, and again in 1973. After that, the interests of the pan-Arab cause, apparently, were better served by maintaining Gaza and the West Bank as a festering wound, as a bloody shirt to wave, and as a sensational public theater of oppression, than by succoring, resettling, and assimilating the fellow Arabs living there.
In 2005, Israel ceded control of Gaza to the Gazans, who found themselves with twenty-five miles of prime Mediterranean seacoast, a seaport, abundant international aid, and the political freedom to arrange whatever sort of government they liked. In the election of 2006, they chose Hamas, a creation of the Muslim Brotherhood whose charter is essentially a manifesto for ceaseless, exterminationist jihad against Jews, and against the state of Israel. There were no more elections after that.
With its natural assets, international aid flowing in, oil and gas resources, and assistance from Arab brethren around the region, Gaza could have become a solvent, even prosperous place, with a healthy tourist industry. But having Hamas in charge meant that the bulk of whatever assets became available would be diverted, not to the prosperity of the Gazan people, but to the jihad against Israel, in the form of weapons, tunnels, and of course the personal enrichment of the party elites. And because there’s nothing that unifies a people as well as an external enemy, millions of Gazans were raised to think of little else than their bitter anger against the Jewish nation next door. Israel now “had the wolf by the ears”; for it to relax its vigilance would be catastrophic.
And so it was. On October 7th of last year, Hamas launched an assault of almost unspeakable horror — indiscriminately and mercilessly attacking, raping, slaughtering, torturing, mutilating, and kidnapping Israeli civilians, male and female, from infants to the elderly. Picture the most gruesome and bestial atrocities you can imagine anyone unrestrained by conscience or decency carrying out upon another human being, and you likely will not have imagined half of what happened that day.
It is hard to imagine that any nation in history, so attacked — especially given that Hamas has steadfastly refused to give up the hostages it took (who include, by the way, several Americans) — would fail to rise up in incandescent fury, considering also that nearly three-quarters of Gazans stand in support of what happened on that day in October. And so Israel has. They will not tolerate the existence of this threat on their doorstep any longer, and they will not cease until Hamas is destroyed. (I think, honestly, that if any one of us were in Israel’s place, we would feel the same way.)
Hamas asked for a war, and so they have got it — and in Gaza, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of daylight between the combatants and the civilians. There is no plausible scenario in which Israel relents before this hydra is slain. The suffering is Gaza is awful, but war is war, and this is war. Had Hamas not done what they did in October — a truly monstrous eruption of the blackest cruelty and evil — this would not be happening.
Having said all that, however, my own feeling is that this war is not our war. Israel is rich and technically advanced, and has a top-tier military — its Iron Dome, for example, appears to be a better anti-missile system than our own. It also has access to a worldwide network of very wealthy people and institutions. It has been our stupendous folly to invite the world’s ancient feuds and grievances to play themselves out in our own cities and institutions, and we are now seeing right here at home the strife and disintegration that were the inevitable result.
Between our shameful meddling in Ukraine, the disastrous result in Afghanistan, and widening war in the Near East, this hasn’t been — to put it mildly — a very good few years for U.S. adventurism abroad. Perhaps we might, before further hell breaks loose, take a moment to reflect on the advice John Quincy Adams (then Secretary of State under James Monroe) gave the nation in 1821:
Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and
her prayers be.But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.
She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all.
She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.
She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.
She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence,
she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy,
and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.
Over to you, Jacques. Am I seeing all of this wrongly?
27 Comments
Hi Malcolm,
Thanks for the chance to explore these issues. Sorry for a long and rambling reply.
Let’s start here:
“Unlike ‘the Palestinians’, the Jews constitute an ethnically distinct people, with a specific (and highly influential) cultural history originating thousands of years ago in the land they now occupy.”
The term “ethnically distinct” is unclear to me. Most Jews regard themselves are members of a single vaguely defined group “originating thousands of years ago”. But I don’t see a good objective basis for this identity claim:
i. Most Palestinians are probably more closely related, genetically or ancestrally or even culturally, to the pre-diaspora inhabitants of the disputed territory than many diaspora Jews.
ii. “Jews” differ enormously in terms of language, religion, and culture. If they have some shared “cultural history” most of them know nothing about it, and it seems to have nothing to do with the cultures they’ve created. Compare a religious Yemenite Jew and an Ashkenazic atheist in California. What is their shared “specific cultural history” beyond the claim to be “Jewish”? (For a while now, it seems that the sole unifying theme is ethnocentrism and an unreflecting victimology.) I don’t see why the rest of us should care about it.
iii. To the extent that there are more substantial cultural histories shared by specific Jewish groups, these have little to do with Israel or the middle east. The Ashkenazim are a distinct ethnicity but their culture evolved only after many centuries of out-marriage and exile. They’re at least as European as “Semitic”, far less Semitic than the Palestinians.
iv. Granting that “Palestinians” are not an ethnic group in any interesting sense, they are an identifiable group of people who had been living in the disputed territory for many centuries prior to the creation of Israel. That fact has weight for me.
Yes, one reason for distinct homelands is to preserve distinct cultures. Another reason is simply that people shouldn’t be brutally evicted from homes and lands of their great-grand-parents. Whether their culture is interesting or distinctive (or influential) is irrelevant.
On that last point, your outline of the history of the conflict seems one-sided to me. I don’t know much about it, but it seems clear that in 1948 the Israelis engaged in a massive ethnic cleansing campaign (the “nakba”). There were all kinds of atrocities: massacres of women and children, expulsions of hundreds of thousands, even biological warfare. Almost certainly there were many incidents comparable to the worst things that Hamas did on October 7.
And as far as I can tell, the Israeli state has murdered, tortured, and unjustly imprisoned huge numbers of Palestinians over the last few decades–only a fraction of those being fighters or terrorists. Wikipedia tells me they destroyed 46,000 homes in just one “operation” a few years ago. When this latest one is finally over, the death toll could well reach 100,000 people. (For all we know the killing could go on for another six months.)
I’m not sure what conclusion to draw. Hamas committed atrocities on October 7. (Though many of these, it now turns out, were exaggerated or simply invented by the Israelis.) But those atrocities occurred within a larger context of many other atrocities over many decades, many committed by Israel.
If Israel is now justified in killing 20,000 children–a very conservative estimate–in response to what Hamas did in October, it seems to me that the next Hamas attack on Israelis will be similarly justified. (The “if” is important. I don’t think any of these things are justifiable.) If what Hamas did was “almost unspeakable horror”, so too is what Israel is now doing.
Jacques, you might want to consult the works of the Israeli historian Benny Morris (e.g. his “Righteous Victims”), who I think more than anybody else presents a judicious view of the conflict (for instance The Nakba-to what extent was the exodus of Palestinians in 47/48 premeditated?)
Hi Jacques,
I refer to the Jews as “ethnically distinct” for a number of reasons, besides mere genetics. Among them are:
You write:
I don’t think that’s true at all; they have the entirety of the Old Testament in common, and I think that even the disparate Jewish groups you mention keep that history very much alive. (Certainly even the atheistic Jews I know do — and I know a lot of them.)
I have to disagree. Even the most Europeanized and secularized of Jews, such as my late mother-in-law, who fled Vienna on the Kindertransport in 1938 (her Wikipedia article is here) keep a vivid sense of their people’s connection to their origins in the ancient homeland. My mother-in-law, an artist and Freudian intellectual who regarded scriptural religion as a fairytale, was nevertheless a staunch defender of Israel. (Admittedly, the idea of a safe place for Jews would obviously appeal to someone, like her, who lost most of her family in the Holocaust.)
Nevertheless, such conquests and displacements have happened throughout history, just as they did to the Jews themselves at the hands of the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Romans, etc. World War II displaced 60 million people; the partition of India displaced perhaps 20 million. For the most part, people “cast down their buckets where they are” and get on as well as they can, but 75 years later the cauldron of resentment has been kept at full boil as regards the Palestinians, in large part because it serves a greater pan-Arab narrative. As I mentioned in this post, life in Gaza, on the shore of the Mediterranean, didn’t have to be so awful; much of why the place is such a shithole is due to deliberate, and bad, choices.
The existence of the Israeli state is, at this point, simply a historical fact, one that is no more likely to be reversed than for the United States to return North America to the defeated remnants of the warring (and mutually enslaving and displacing) tribes it conquered. (The Jews also have far more of an “indigenous-people” claim to Israeli land than the European colonizers of America ever did.) Moreover, to digress for a moment into the philosophy of property, the Jews, since taking possession, have by now mixed a great deal of their labor into the land of Israel, and have made far more fruitful use of it than the Arabs ever did. There is simply no way in hell they are going to give it up without fighting to the death — or, after 10/7, to tolerate Hamas on their doorstep any longer — whether the rest of the world likes it or not.
The entire history of the modern Israeli nation has been a bitter blood-feud, and a ceaseless struggle of power, and I would never claim that the Israelis haven’t themselves acted harshly at times. But the saying that “if the Arabs laid down their weapons there would be peace, while if the Israelis laid down theirs, they’d be annihilated” rings true, nevertheless.
I didn’t mean to run on for so long here, but as a final note regarding civilian casualties in Gaza I’ll post this item from Twitter: a recorded dialogue in which the IDF is trying to warn a Palestinian man to evacuate in advance of a military strike. The man refuses, saying he prefers martyrdom, for himself and his children.
Thanks, Jason, for the link. I’ll also offer a recent article at AEI for consideration, which discusses the Nakba, and closes with these paragraphs:
Hi Malcolm,
It seems like there are so many disagreements it may be hard to keep track. For now I’ll just try to respond to two points you raise. The first has to do with the ethnic identity or distinctiveness of the Jews.
I also didn’t mean to imply that ethnicity was reducible to “mere genetics”. But genetics matters here. If you claim that Jews today–all of them, around the world–are roughly the same people as those described in the Old Testament as “Hebrews” (or “Israelites” or “Judeans”) you’re talking at least in part about their ancestry. That’s also how most Jews think of their claim to a continued ethnic identity dating back to Biblical times. But then it’s relevant that many modern-day Jews are less closely related to those ancient people than many modern-day Palestinians.
But you mention several other features that you take to be sufficient for the identity claim, such as their monotheistic religion and language, and their cohesion in Biblical times.
Now these may have been features of the ancient Hebrews, at least for a time in their history. (Abraham didn’t speak that language, and the people of ancient Israel and Judea were originally polytheists.) So they may be features that, thousands of years ago, defined a certain people group in the Near East.
But these aren’t features that are shared by all or even most Jews today. They don’t speak that language or practise that religion. They aren’t cohesive now (except perhaps in their ethnocentric moral code).
What is shared by most Jews around the world today is just the *claim* to belong (in some sense) to be the same people group who once spoke that language and practised that religion.
Likewise, there’s the claim or belief that the Old Testament is somehow “theirs”. But in what sense would that be true? It’s theirs insofar as they claim it, maybe; but Christians and Muslims also claim it, and their claims don’t seem any less plausible.
Yes, it’s true that even many highly Europeanized Jews have a “vivid sense” of a “connection to their origins in the ancient homeland”. But if that sense has little basis in reality, why should the rest of us care about it? Imagine people one thousand years from now who have some tenuous genetic and cultural link to the Iroquois tribes. These people live in Thailand but some of them still occasionally practice rituals which may have evolved from things the Iroquois did in the 15th century. They can think of themselves as Iroquois, of course. If it makes them happy that’s fine with me. But if they want to come in the millions to “return” to traditional Iroquois lands and displace everyone who’s already living there, their identity claim is not a good reason. (There might be good reasons, but this is not one.)
You’re taking an interesting angle here, Jacques. If I understand you correctly, your position is that modern Jews have no ancestral claim to identify themselves with the indigenous Jews of ancient times (whose story, I think we can agree, is a central, if certainly not the only, narrative of the Old Testament), and likewise no claim to be the bearers of either their genetic or their cultural heritage — and that, therefore, the land more rightly belongs to the Arabs who had more recently been living there, and who were forcibly dispossessed. (Is that about right?)
If so, then before examining whether modern Jews can or cannot rightly claim such a connection, I think three prior questions are:
1) If today’s Jews were indeed the legitimate heirs of the indigenous Jews of old, would that, in your mind, legitimize their claim to Israel today?
2) More generally: what criteria, if any, would you say make any people’s claim to a homeland legitimate?
3) How are disputes over such claims to be settled, especially when harmonious coexistence is a practical impossibility?
(Forgive me if I seem to be proceeding too cautiously here, but I think we’d need to get some kind of grip on these ideas before getting into more specific issues such as who has done what to whom, what levels of response are justified in the circumstances at hand, etc.)
P.S.
This is a good thought-pump (as I’d expect from you), and it frames the essential questions nicely. More tomorrow.
You might also want to consider the arguments of Tsvi Misanai, an Israeli Jew, born in present day Israel in the 1930s in what was British owned Palestine of Ukrainian Jewish immigrant parents. He said that the Jews and Palestinians are descendants of the same people from 3000 years ago amongst other things. I agree with him that the Jews and Palestinians are genetically related to each other and agree with him about many other things but do not believe that the Muslim Palestinians and Israeli Jews can be on friendly terms with each other any time soon. He is right that most of the Jews converted to Christianity after Emperor Constantine became Roman Emperor in 314AD then most of them converted to Islam after 628AD conquest of present day Israel and Palestine. He thinks the monotheistic Jews converted most of the Canaanites and interbred with them too. He thinks the Palestinians are mostly the descendants of Jews from 2000 to 3000 years ago who stayed in present day Israel and Palestine. I think maybe the Palestinian Christians might be able to be on friendly enough relations with the Israeli Jews but not the Palestinian Muslims. My views are similar to yours on this issue.
Obviously you can Google Tsvi Misinai whom I mentioned in the previous comment thread. Either the Israeli Jews will do any combination of subjugating, driving out or killing the Palestinian Muslims or the Palestinian Muslims will do any combination of subjugating, driving out or killing the Israeli Jews. I fail to see how one side or the other does not in some combination persecute, ethnically cleanse or genocide(exterminate) the other. I reluctantly and sadly side with the Israeli Jews as the lesser of the two evils over the Palestinian Muslims, but I side with the Christians over there most of all. The sad part is that the Christians over there are being crushed like shrimps between warring whales and no one in power cares about the Christians over there.
Those are good questions Malcolm. I’m not sure what my answers would be, but I’ll try:
1) If today’s Jews were indeed the legitimate heirs of the indigenous Jews of old, would that, in your mind, legitimize their claim to Israel today?
It would make the claim somewhat stronger, I guess, but only if there were other reasons for the claim. If I learned that I was directly descended from people who lived in Scotland three thousand years ago, I wouldn’t think I was entitled to move to Scotland–let alone to displace people already living there. In general, I don’t think these kinds of facts about ancient ancestry matter much. Imagine what it would mean to try to apply this kind of principle universally.
2) More generally: what criteria, if any, would you say make any people’s claim to a homeland legitimate?
I think your point about the sheer historical fact of a society or state existing and the related point about mixing labour with the land are good criteria. But I don’t know how to apply these criteria to a very messy case like Israel-Palestine. Instead of trying to figure out principles first, I might start with my gut feelings about the specific case. For example, it seems obvious to me that neither Jews nor Arabs are obligated to just pack up and leave. Both groups have *some* legitimate claim to *some* pieces of that land at this point.
I do think that ancestral connections can be relevant, up to a point and depending on other considerations. For example, if there really had been virtually no one living in much of the disputed territory in 1920, and if most Jews were descended from people who’d left that territory just a few decades earlier, it seems to me that their claim would be unassailable.
3) How are disputes over such claims to be settled, especially when harmonious coexistence is a practical impossibility?
That’s an even harder question. I guess in cases where harmonious coexistence is impossible, the best solution is a clear and brutal once-and-for-all partition. It can be arbitrary, but as long as it’s not *egregiously* unfair and brutal, it’s the only option. In this case, it seems to me that Israel has often chosen an egregiously unfair and brutal response which probably won’t end the conflict (unless virtually all Palestinians are killed or expelled).
Doclove,
I hadn’t heard of Misinai but this is the kind of theory I find plausible. Thanks for the recommendation.
I agree with you about the poor Christians. They’re the true victims throughout that region. And yes, they might be able to co-exist with the Jews (although there is deep and widespread Jewish hatred of Christians). The other two Abrahamic religions are largely just vehicles for tribal or racial supremacy. Arguably, of the three, Christianity is the only one that’s truly or simply a *religion*.
doclove, you wrote:
I think that’s correct. If the Palestinians of Gaza were not resolutely committed, down to the marrow of their bones (and the bones of their children), to the extermination of the Jews, there might be some chance of finding peaceable coexistence — but as matters stand, the only imaginable end to this will be as you describe.
But Jacques, if may butt in this conversation for a moment, the Israelis have supported “partition” since Oslo in 1993 (admittedly there might be some waning of support for this among Jews more recently). That’s what the two-state solution is. The Palestinians, with a noble exception of a minority, have always contemptuously rejected that.
Also if I may I believe your analogy to Scotland is flawed. Scotland has existed for a millennium, whereas Palestinian identity arguably stems as recently as the 1967 6 days war. There was no Palestine – but instead an Ottoman Empire, a British mandate, and control by the UN. (The last offered partition then, which the Jews accepted and the Arabs rejected). I’m curious, to avoid abstraction: especially after the Holocaust and Arab intransigence, what would you have realistically seen the Jews do in 1947/1948? Indeed, what alternative would you propose for them today if you think their current war acts are unjust?
Jacques,
I think your answers to my three questions above, and your hypothetical Iroquois example, are all helpful in getting at the important issues here. I want to work through all of this, so I’ll start here now with what I can and pick up again tomorrow.
Regarding the Iroquois, your example posits a group that is more or less role-playing for its own enjoyment, but otherwise living an assimilated life in Thailand. You also describe their connection to their Iroquois heritage as “tenuous”. I think it’s fair to say that you are leaning on linking this example to what you said earlier about how weak you consider the connection of modern-day Jews to the older Jewish nation and people. (And if today’s Jews were really just LARPing for fun, I’d be drawn to the conclusions you make.)
But there are some key differences. First of all, we don’t see Iroquois schools and temples all over the world, keeping alive texts and traditions and scholarly debates and rituals that stand in unbroken continuity stretching back thousands of years to the original Iroquois. (It would be admittedly be far more difficult, because American Indians never even developed a written language.)
An even more important omission in your gedankenexperiment, though, is that for the Iroquois in Thailand you left out what has in fact happened to the Jews in most parts of the world over the last century or so: that they have been driven out of the places they had settled by pogroms, persecutions, and campaigns of extermination. There used to be thriving communities of Jews all over the Arab world; in most of those places their numbers are now near zero, and those who remain do so, in places like Lebanon and Iraq, in stealth and fear. In the Holocaust, the absolute number of living Jews, which was never large, was reduced by half.
What’s more, if the Siamese Iroquois were to be hounded out of Thailand in search of a safe haven, they actually would have a place they can call their own, right where their ancestors lived: there are six Iroquois reservations in New York State, and two in Ontario. (In fact, the land area set aside for American Indians to call their autonomous homelands totals more than 12 times the land area of Israel, even though Jews outnumber Indians something like three to one.)
For ethnic Arabs there are Arab nations all over the Mideast, and if you count Muslim nations generally, all over the world. Jews, by contrast, have one tiny spot in the entire globe to call their own, the nation of Israel (which, as mentioned before, is about the size of New Jersey). Given their history of insecurity wherever they settle (and the threat against them is rising again now, here in the West), can we really begrudge them one safe haven?
I must acknowledge, though, that none of what I just said addresses some of the other deeply divisive moral, philosophical, and practical issues you’ve raised in your comments. I’ll have more time tomorrow to pick up the thread.
Jason, this is not an exclusive conversation; please “butt in” any time. You raise good points, and a pointed question.
Hi Malcolm,
It’s true that my scenario ignores the history of diaspora Jews. But if we’re going to get into that topic, we can add many other considerations that seem relevant.
Jews have often been persecuted, but for centuries they’ve also been an extremely wealthy and powerful minority throughout much of the world. It wouldn’t be surprising that an extremely powerful minority with a highly ethnocentric religion and culture tends to behave in ways that bring them into conflict with host societies. (It would be very surprising if that didn’t happen.)
The situation right now is a striking example. You rightly say that this is not really *our* problem. And yet the US government is sending billions of dollars to Israel. Blinken visits Israel and says he’s there “as a Jew”. American policy is largely controlled by AIPAC and the ADL. In effect, the US is run by a foreign government, or at least by American citizens intensely loyal to a foreign government. It’s not just evil bigotry for non-Jewish Americans to resent this. There would be far less hostility toward Jews as a group if they were not so willing to use their disproportionate power in this way.
It’s also important that in many societies Jews have not faced any significant persecution–or not for centuries at least. Jews are not a persecuted minority in the Anglosphere or continental Europe or Latin America, for example.
That’s fine with me, and I have no objection to a Jewish homeland. But there’s something contradictory in this whole situation. If diaspora Jews constitute a distinct and cohesive “nation” deserving of a homeland in Israel, how can they really be regarded as full and equal members of the non-Jewish societies where so many of them live? If they are a “nation within the nation”, they’re bound to be resented by the non-Jewish host society. After all, those people probably also think that they constitute a nation and want their own homeland. If Jews shouldn’t have to share Israel with Scots, why should Scots share Scotland with Jews?
For me this is not a particularly pressing problem because I doubt that Jews today are a “nation” in any meaningful sense. (I realize that I haven’t dealt with your argument on that point above.)
Hi Jason,
Thanks for the Morris recommendation earlier. I know a little about him and he seems reliable.
Is it true that Israelis have generally supported “partition” since 1993? I may not know enough to have an opinion, but it seems to me that the situation is complex and unclear.
Since 1993 there have been lots of new Jewish settlements, arguably illegal, which Israel encourages. Doesn’t it look like Israel is steadily expanding in the hope of leaving the Arabs with little or no land? Again, I don’t claim to be an expert but this is my impression.
I agree that for a long time it seems the Palestinians–their leadership–have rejected a two-state solution. But it also seems that this situation is partly the result of Netanyahu and others quietly supporting Hamas for cynical reasons. The Times of Israel reports:
“Netanyahu made a similar point at a Likud faction meeting in early 2019, when he was quoted as saying that those who oppose a Palestinian state should support the transfer of funds to Gaza, because maintaining the separation between the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza would prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.”
My impression is that many Israelis, including many powerful people, only pretend to want a two-state solution. Their real goal is something like ethnic cleansing (Eretz Israel). But they know it’s best not to publicly announce that position.
The current “war” is at least compatible with this hypothesis. Bombing a largely defenceless civilian population for months on end isn’t likely to defeat Hamas. (If anything, it will probably just produce a new generation of severely traumatized young men filled with hatred and bloodlust.) But if the goal is ethnic cleansing the operation makes a lot of sense. By the end of this, there will be far fewer Arabs, and no trace of their cities and villages.
You’re right that “Palestinian identity” is a very recent thing. But then so is “Israeli identity”. In any case, it doesn’t seem important. Whether or not there was a “Palestinian people” in the 19th century, there were large numbers of people whose ancestors had lived in that land for a very long time. They had a legitimate claim to live there, and Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign was (in my opinion) morally wrong and a terrible strategic mistake.
About the Jewish situation in 1947: I don’t know enough to have an opinion about what they should have done. But I’m pretty sure ethnic cleansing was not the right thing to do, and I’ll hold to that opinion unless there’s some very strong argument to the contrary. Probably there would have been less “Arab intransigence” had the Arabs not just experienced a massive influx of hostile ethno-nationalists intent on taking over roughly half the land which, until just a few years earlier, had been the home of those Arabs and their ancestors.
What do you think the Arabs should have done at that time? Imagine you’re watching your homeland being very rapidly transformed, demographically and religiously and politically? Should you accept the loss of 30 or 40 percent of your land (or whatever the number) trusting that these aggressive nationalistic newcomers won’t soon be asking for the rest? It’s not a rhetorical question. I just have some sympathy for “Arab intransigence” under the circumstances.
The debate above is tedious and beside the point. Israel is a European colonial project, the last and last remaining. The Ashkenazi Jews are the colonial settlers. They are Europeans by descent (50% germanic and slavic) and by culture. Israel was established by the forcible expulsion of the native Palestinians. The genocide and ethnic cleansing actually began before the formal establishment of the Jewish Israeli state, and it has continued up until today.
The era of settler colonialism was over by the end of WW II, and all the other European colonies were liberated by the end of the Vietnamese-American war. Neither the UK, the colonial master of Palestine, nor the UN, still a war alliance, had the authority to take land from the native Palestinians and to give it to the European Ashkenazi settlers.
Hamas are terrorists; terror is the weapon of the weak. They follow in the tradition of other terrorist/resistance groups: the Chinese Boxers, the Vietnamese Viet Minh, the Kenyan Mau Mau, the South African ANC, et al. The only way there can be peace in Palestine is if the Ashkenazi return to their European homelands, and if a native Palestinian state replaces the Israeli state.
Thanks Jacques for your response – I’ll try to get it.
Bob – just to raise one objection: how can there have been genocide against the Palestinians since 48, considering that millions of them still live in Gaza, the West Bank, and within Israel-proper? And that if they had negotiated with the Oslo Accords, they could have had their own homeland three decades ago (something never granted under the Ottoman Empire, not to mention Jordan which was and is at least partially ethnically Palestinian)?
Jacques,
I find much in your comment of 1:09 to agree with.
First, I have always believed that divided loyalty is an impossibility; all that’s possible is a ranking of loyalties, and which is higher will be revealed when any two come into conflict. This is why I have always rejected the idea of dual citizenship (having been born in Canada to expat British citizens, I could claim citizenship in either Canada or the UK, if I wanted, in addition to my naturalized U.S. status, but I will never do so). I find it appalling that our Secretary of State would announce, while visiting another nation, that he is there as anything other than as an American.
Any group that sees itself as “a nation within a nation” necessarily raises the question of how they rank their loyalty, and American Jews that feel a higher allegiance to Israel than to the United States should “walk the walk”, renounce their U.S. citizenship (and their U.S. voting rights), and either go to Israel or live here as aliens. (I’d say the same about any other group.)
It’s also entirely rational for any small group seeing itself as a “nation within a nation” — especially one with a history of persecution — to see the existence of an overwhelmingly dominant majority population and culture in their country of residence as a potential threat, and therefore to support with enthusiasm such things as “diversity”, mass immigration, and coalition-building with other minority groups as ways to dilute and counterbalance the power of the existing majority. American Jews tilt very heavily in this direction politically and culturally; the vast majority are left-leaning Democrat voters, and they also exert disproportionate power and influence in the elite strata of academia, government, and media.
All of this is why, as I wrote elsewhere, my opinion is that, despite my moral support for the existence of Israel as Jewish ethnostate, and my moral revulsion for Hamas, this should not be America’s war. Israel, though small, is a modern, wealthy nation with a top-tier military (their Iron Dome, for example, seems to be better than our own missile-defense systems), and they should be able to fight this battle without U.S. taxpayers being forced to fund it.
But the real question is: what happens now? How is this ever to end?
bob sykes wrote:
That won’t happen. Neither will Hamas, or the states that support it (which arguably includes, at the moment, the U.S as well) ever abandon their mortal antipathy to Israel. Any sort of ceasefire that leaves Hamas in power just “kicks the can down the road”.
This is now an existential conflict (as perhaps it has always been, and just now coming to full boil) , and whether we like it or not, it will only be brought to a conclusion by total victory on one side or the other. It’s brutal, and horrifying — but the truth is that a very great deal of human history is brutal and horrifying, and the idea that we modern types have somehow outgrown such things is nothing more than a flattering self–delusion. And the more of the world that is about to be drawn into the vortex, the greater the “blast radius” is going to be.
Here’s a link Jacques to an interview Morris did, https://fathomjournal.org/there-is-a-clash-of-civilisations-an-interview-with-benny-morris/ which I think nicely highlights a lot of the issues we’re talking about. To re-iterate an important point though, the Israeli historian argues that while there were certainly individual incidents of terror committed during the 47/48 War, there was no concerted general effort by Ben Gurion et. al to deliberately ethnically cleanse Palestinians. Rather, a significant portion of the latter decided to uproot themselves (at times encouraged by Arab leaders) in the expectation that they would return when hostilities ceased. Needless to say, the Jews won and wouldn’t allow these Palestinians to return, in the not unreasonable expectation that such a Fifth Column would endanger the security of the embryonic state. Obviously, it’s up to you to decide whether Morris is persuasive.
To get to the heart of the matter: What I suppose gets to me is the moral smugness, Manicheanism, Gnosticism, that is often brought to bear concerning this problem. As Morris says, there’s a lack of “concreteness,” where everything is just an abstraction to many parties. It’s not enough that Israeli Jews made an honest effort beginning with Oslo (in my opinion anyway) to rectify past injustices (very real ones as you’ve rightly pointed out). No, they must demonstrate an angelism, a vulnerability that is not demanded of any other nation with its inevitably flawed past. None of the messy ambiguity of balancing competing values, of trying to arrive at some equilibrium where both Jewish and Palestinian interests are affirmed, can be applied to this particular conflict. No sense that Muslims, as in the life of a mature individual, might also as peoples and nations show some empathy and let bygones be bygones. (Note the so-often undisguised condescension towards Arabs, that unlike Jews they’re apparently incapable of living in accordance with the values of the West, of displaying perspective, mercy, compromise.) Instead, universities should divest from Israel, while of course being free to continue to invest in Saudia Arabia, China, Venezuela, and other such human rights paragons. Or Jews can be subjected to the most vicious terrorism and they should just take it – because of their original sin that can never be atoned for or forgiven except through a right-of-return (i.e. Lebanonization of Israel) or the destruction of the Jewish state. It’s all so zero-sum.
Hi Jason,
I don’t think I’m engaged in moral smugness or Gnosticism. Certainly I don’t mean to imply that the Arab Muslim world is simply good, or morally better than Israel. But your description of the situation over there doesn’t make sense to me.
To say that Israel shouldn’t be bombing and starving to death something like 40,000 people–mainly civilians–doesn’t seem like a demand for “angelism”. Would it really take a nation of angels to stop at just 5,000 civilians killed in retaliation for the killing of around 300 Israeli civilians?
You say that no other nation would be held to similar standards. That seems plainly false to me. Imagine that the Russians were carpet bombing Ukrainian cities, killing tens of thousands of civilians. You really think there’d be no similar moral outrage?
I can think of many cases where nations other than Israel have been condemned for a tiny fraction of the civilian deaths in Gaza.
On the contrary, Israel is in the unique position of being able to carry out this massive campaign of death and destruction with the almost unanimous support of western states and mainstream media–all the same people and entities hysterical over the most dubious claims about Russian war crimes.
You say that Jews have been “subjected to the most vicious terrorism”. I’m assuming this is about October 7. Yes, that was vicious. But from an objective standpoint, what the Israelis have done since is (at least) equally vicious. And much of what they were doing to Arabs for decades before was at least equally vicious. Israel was founded on terrorism.
Maybe I’m missing something but it seems to me that you a strong bias in favor of Jews and Israel. You think the Arabs should just get over the expulsion of half a million Palestinians and many “individual incidents of terror”, and even the mass killing of Palestinians right now; regarding all this, they should grow up and “let bygones be bygones”. At the same time, you have no objection to Israelis killing indiscriminately for half a year in response to one instance of terrorism. Why shouldn’t they also “let bygones be bygones” at this point? If they’re entitled to keep going, why aren’t the Arabs entitled to retaliate for the utter destruction of their society and the deaths of tens of thousands of children?
I’m curious: Do you think there’s any moral limit on what Israel may do in this situation? For example, if they announced a plan to exterminate the entire population of Gaza or force the entire population into tent cities in the desert, would you think that was wrong?
Thanks again for your thoughts Jacques; I’ll write a response eventually, you can have the last word as Bill O’Reilly would say, and then we should probably leave it at that
Jason and Jacques,
We’ve given this topic a pretty good bashing here. After this wide-ranging (and refreshingly civil) discussion it’s not hard to see why it is all so contentious, has been that way for 75 years, and will doubtless continue to be.
I’ll close with a last brief summary of how I see it:
— I do support the idea of a Jewish homeland, and despite their long diaspora and diffusion, I think the area now called Israel, the home of Jewish ethnogenesis, makes sense as regards where that should be. It’s a tiny place, a little speck in the ocean of Arab and Muslim lands that surround it, which should easily have been able, by now, to resettle the Arab refugees that were displaced in its creation. That this hasn’t happened in all this time is due in large part, I think, to the political-strategic usefulness of a festering grudge for the pan-Arab coalition in the region. I also think that none of the Arab states in the area really give a rat’s ass about the suffering of their co-ethnics in Gaza; they are much more useful as a bloody shirt to wave.
— Rather than doing what they could to find some kind of modus vivendi with Israel, and to find a way to prosper in their prime Mediterranean real-estate, the people of Gaza elected, and overwhelmingly support, Hamas, who have relentlessly focused not on the welfare of their people, but the destruction of Israel, and have diverted all international aid to that end.
— The attack of October 7th was a hideous atrocity, and it is unreasonable to imagine that Israel would continue to tolerate Hamas’s existence after that. Keeping and killing their hostages only hardened Israel’s resolve.
— The conflict is at this point existential. Neither side will back down or accept a ceasefire that merely postpones a final resolution. Nothing we say or do over here will have any effect on that. It is brutal, and horrifying, just as so much of human history has been, and will be.
I could go on, but I said I’d be brief! I’m very glad to have had this discussion with you; it’s almost impossible to talk about this coolly and thoughtfully anywhere at all these days. Thank you.
Jacques, rather than giving another response I’m going to defer to Malcolm here and let you two have the last word. Thanks. I’ll certainly ponder what you’ve argued.
Thanks for the discussion Malcolm. In the end I’m half-convinced by your view. It was more or less my own view for a long time. And thanks Jason for your comments too. (To clarify, my closing question up there wasn’t meant to be rhetorical. I’m not sure what the best answer would be.) You’ve both reminded me at least that the simple “humanitarian” version of the Palestinian position is often too simple, and sometimes dishonest.
Thank you as well, Jacques (and Jason).
It was good to hear your side of this articulated so clearly, and it was especially good to be able to have a thoughtful and serious conversation about it all without it all devolving into shouting and insults, which is all that usually seems to happen when opinions about this subject collide online.
Now you and I can go back to agreeing about pretty much everything.