Slow News

Israel/Palestine: The Attack

October 22, 2023December 2, 2023 bklinger

1. Parable of Israel and Palestine

A man named Sky is on the second floor of a burning building.  He opens a window and jumps out to escape the flames.  He lands on and knocks over another man, named Earth, who is now hurt and, even more, infuriated that Sky jumped on him.  Earth is lying on the ground with Sky on top of him.  Earth has a knife and tries to stab Sky.  Sky holds down Earth.

Now they have reached an impasse.  Earth yells that he has no choice but to stab, because otherwise Sky will continue to hold him down.  Sky yells that he has no choice but to hold down Earth because otherwise Earth will stab him. 

Sky also believes, with some truth, that even though Earth says he wants to stab Sky because Sky is holding him down, really Earth just wants to stab him because Earth is angry about being jumped on.  Earth believes, with some truth, that Sky purposely chose to jump on Earth to break his fall, finds it comfortable to be on top of Earth, and wouldn’t want to get off even if Earth didn’t have a knife.

Onlookers exhort the two about what to do.  Some shout that Earth should fight harder in order to stab Sky.  Others shout that Sky should pull out his own knife and stab Earth.  Most people quietly say that the two people should simply disengage and stop fighting, but their voices are drowned out by the shouts.

Many aspects of the Israel-Palestine do not map exactly on to this parable, but I think that it captures the essence of the conflict.  A big part of the difficulty in ending the confict is that many people on either side of the conflict do not see themselves in this parable.  In their view, they are completely the victim, and the other side is completely the aggressor. 

People on both sides of the conflict have important blind spots – truths about the situation that they can not see and therefore can not acknowledge as true.  Here I give a brief synopsis of the history of the conflict followed by a description of some of the most significant blind spots.

Gaza image: https://news.sky.com/story/locked-in-the-devastating-effects-of-israels-gaza-blockade-11389198

2. Essential History – Zionism

Thousands of years ago there was a succession of Jewish kingdoms in what is now Israel and the Palestinian territories, but for over a thousand years the vast majority of the population there was Muslim and Christian, with Muslim empires ruling the land for most of that time.  Meanwhile, Jews mostly resided in Europe, North Africa, and other parts of the Middle East, with small Jewish communities continuing to exist in Israel/Palestine.

The late 1800s saw the beginning of the Zionist movement, which believed that the cure for the hostility and persecution that Jewish minorities often faced in Europe and elsewhere would be Jews having their own country in the territory of their historic homeland.  Large numbers of Jews began immigrating to Palestine, which at the time was a province of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans lost control of the territory in World War I and the League of Nations assigned Britain to rule Palestine – the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River – with the goal of it eventually attaining independence.  As Jewish immigration increased, the Arab majority opposed it, rightly fearing that Jews might take control of a territory that had long been Arab-dominated and Muslim-ruled.  Arab opposition also took the form of riots (and pogroms) in 1920 and a revolt in the 1930s. 

Britain, most of the Jewish community in Palestine, and eventually the UN backed a plan to split Palestine into two countries, one with an overwhelming Arab majority and one with a slight Jewish majority.  The population of Palestine as a whole had gone from nearly 800 thousand in 1922, of whom about a tenth were Jewish, to 1.8 million in 1945, of whom about a third were Jews. The Arabs argued that it was unfair to split up the territory for the benefit of a minority of immigrants.  The Jews were in no mood to hear that they were being unfair; over half the Jews of Europe had just been murdered by the Nazis, and many of the surviving Jews wanted to immigrate to Palestine.

The Palestinian Arabs and their allies from other countries went to war to prevent the partition, but were defeated by the new state of Israel.  By the end of the war (in 1949), Israel controlled somewhat more territory than had been assigned to it by the UN, including the western parts of Jerusalem, which the partition plan had reserved as an international city.  The Kingdom of Jordan took the West Bank, and Egypt took the Gaza Strip.  Over half a million Palestinians became refugees, primarily in Jordan (including the West Bank), Lebanon, Syria, and the Gaza Strip.

3. Essential History – The State of Israel

Arab countries continued to oppose the new state of Israel, and skirmishes between the two sides led to wars in 1956 and 1967.  In the 1967 war, Israel conquered the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Golan Heights (in Syria), and the entire Sinai Peninsula, and thus controlled all of the original British Palestine Mandate and then some. Additional wars between Israel and neighbors ended in stalemate, but Israel and Egypt signed a peace treaty in the 1970s which resulted in Israel giving the Sinai back to Egypt.

The 1949 borders of Israel contained an Arab minority, but in conquering the rest of Palestine, Israel obtained control over millions more Palestinians, many of them refugees from the creation of Israel.  An international consensus held the conquest to be illegitimate, whereas Israel argued that the conquered territory had an ambiguous status dating back to British rule.  In the 1980s, the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza rose up in the “Intifada,” in which they attempted to make the occupied territories ungovernable through a campaign of low-level violence.

The Intifada also ended in stalemate, but was followed by the Oslo accords, in which the Palestine Liberation Organization, representing the Palestinians, recognized the state of Israel, and Israel committed to self rule for many of the Palestinians. Though not stated in the agreement, there was an understanding that this should lead to an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. The Palestinian Authority was formed to govern the territories until a Palestinian state was formed.  However, a final agreement was never reached, due to deteriorating relations and the emergence of a faction, led by the Islamist group Hamas, that rejected the treaty.  In practice, since about 2006, Hamas has ruled Gaza, and the Palestinian Authority has been limited to the West Bank. Since then, the territories have remained under some level of Israeli control, and in Gaza continued skirmishes have led to periodic outbreaks of open warfare.

Over this period, political power in Israel has shifted to nationalist groups that oppose relinquishing control over the West Bank. Many Israelis felt that they could maintain military control and largely ignore Palestinian grievances.  This view was shattered by the mass murder operation conducted by Hamas in October 2023, starting a new war between Israel and Gaza and an impending invasion of Gaza.

I’ve also created an infographic summarizing the Israel-Palestine conflict since 1993.

4. Jewish Blind Spots

Blind Spot #1: Jews started the conflict.

Since the Jews think of themselves as benign victims who did not threaten anyone, they don’t see that it is Zionism that started the conflict in Palestine.  If a group of people move into a country against the will of the majority of inhabitants, demand to form their own country there, and fight the locals in order to take control, they are the aggressors.  That’s true even if they felt they were offering benefits to the locals, or if they would have preferred to take control peacefully. I doubt there is any nation on Earth that would welcome an influx of population so large that the new group defined the identity of the nation.

Blind Spot #2: Jews are not entitled to a Jewish state.

Every person is entitled to citizenship in a country where they can have safety, freedom, and the physical necessities of life.  There is not a universal right to have a country in which your particular ethnic group dominates.  Plenty of ethnic groups all over the world do not have their own nation. Jews can make a case for having created the state of Israel, and argue that they will not be safe in the Middle East unless Israel persists as a Jewish state, and declare a desire to have a Jewish state, but there is no principle that says they must have such a state independent of other considerations.

Blind Spot #3: Israel has not just defended, it has also attacked.

Because Israel’s neighbors have been at war with it from the beginning, Israel has endured a continuous low level of violence.  However, Israel has escalated the violence in some cases, including the 1956 Suez crisis and the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. This is not to say that Israel always attacked; many escalations, including the horrific violence of Hamas’ attack this year, were also perpetrated by Israel’s enemies.  In many cases, Israel and its enemies took turns escalating, so that a relatively small incident could (for instance) lead to major Israeli bombing or ground incursion.

Blind spot #4: Palestinians constitute a real nation.

I don’t know if in some time past Palestinians existed as a people distinct from other groups such as Arabs or Muslims, but if not, then perhaps it is Israel that has created a Palestinian people. Palestinians now have an identity that is distinct from say Jordanians or Syrians.  Plenty of national identities, including the US one of “American,” only emerged relatively (in Jewish terms) recently. If Palestinians think they are a distinct people who want to have a say in their own governance, than they are.

5. Palestinian Blind Spots

Blind Spot #1: Oppression does not justify all resistance.

Even if we accept that the conflict was started by the Jews (see Jewish Blind Spot #1), that does not mean that all resistance – for instance, massacring civilians comes to mind – is legitimate.  Perhaps Palestinians have no choice but to resort to murder?  The problem is that Palestinians do have a choice, their choices to commit violence has made their own situation worse (see Blind Spot #3), and the purpose of much of the violence is to prevent agreements that could bring peace and freedom to the Palestinians.

Blind Spot #2: Israel is not a Nazi state.

Germans, like the Spanish and British before them, had their own country which they left in order to conquer others for wealth and power.  The Nazis also added a virulent racism which they used to justify exterminating Jews, with Roma and Slavs next on their list.  The foundation of Israel by people fleeing persecution to live in their ancestral home does not fit this imperialist model, despite Palestinian talk of the “Settler Colonial State” and of “Zionism is Racism”.  Turning Jews into Nazis is a way to view them as evil incarnate, which then helps Palestinians justify atrocities against them and miss opportunities to reach compromise with them.

Blind Spot #3: Palestinians have not given peace much of a chance.

By the year 2000 I was already hearing Palestinians say that they had given peaceful compromise a chance and it had delivered nothing.  This was 7 years after the first Oslo Accord, and 3 years after a Hamas bombing campaign that had killed dozens of civilians on buses and in markets.  And it was after 80 years of violent resistance that had resulted only in catastrophe after catastrophe of Palestinian loss, displacement, and defeat. Since then, Hamas has been even more successful at replacing the peace process with permanent warfare. The failure of the Oslo process was not that peace is ineffective but that both sides continued to choose war.

Blind Spot #4: Israelis are not interlopers.

Jews started the conflict (see Jewish Blind Spot #1) – over 80 years ago.  No one alive today is responsible for starting it, though many on both sides have inflamed it.  Over 70% of Israeli Jews (and over 80% of those under 55 years old) were born in Israel.  Just as Palestinians do not need to have a history traceable to the Bronze Age to qualify as local inhabitants, individual Jews do not need to trace their families to the Ottoman Empire.  Israel is their home.

6. Mutual Blind Spots

Blind Spot #1: Your enemy reacts negatively to your aggression.

People often justify the use of force in terms of deterrence – we good guys must attack to convince those bad guys to stop attacking. At least as often, such attacks do the opposite.  Killing a teenager throwing rocks will not influence Hamas, which believes Israel should be destroyed whether it shoots Palestinians or not, but it can influence Palestinians who are not sure if they should support their own fanatics or support compromise. Bombing Jewish civilians may not influence Settlers, who think Jews are entitled to all the land west of the Jordan River, but it can influence Israelis who are not sure if they should vote for their own fanatics or for compromise.

I suspect that this is not a blind spot for the extremists themselves.  Hamas leaders know that their extremism will incite Israeli attacks, but consider that a good thing because they want the fighting to continue. Right wing Israeli leaders know that undermining the Palestinian Authority will strengthen Hamas, but consider that a good thing because it lessens pressure to relinquish control of the West Bank.

I call this cycle the Dialectic of Death.