November 14, 2008
face the reality
In the mainstream Zionist narrative—which includes liberal supporters—the State of Israel is the realization of legitimate Jewish nationalism. That project, having been sanctioned by the international community through both the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine (awarded to Great Britain with the understanding that the British would carry out their commitment described in the famous Balfour Declaration) and the UN partition resolution, was rejected by the Arab world. Because of this violent rejection, Israel has been forced to maintain a strong military and fight many wars as well as remain vigilant against constant terrorist attacks from its enemies. The liberal version here will admit that the settlement enterprise in the West Bank and Gaza was a mistake, and that often the Israeli government acts unwisely and unjustly. But the basic parameters of the narrative remain.On the Palestinian side (which includes many Jews who fall outside the mainstream Zionist camp), the fundamental theme is that Zionist settlement in Palestine was a colonial enterprise, which flourished behind the guns of a major world power that did not have the right to dispose of this land, and that in order to erect an exclusivist Jewish state, the Zionists, once they achieved sufficient power, threw out most of the indigenous population and treated those that remained as second-class citizens. By and large, the Zionist enterprise is seen as similar to the European colonization of North America and Australia.
These are obviously broad-stroke descriptions, but they will do for now. With regard to these conflicting historical narratives, I have two points to make: first, there is a fact of the matter about their relative accuracy, and second, that it matters.
more from Boston Review here.
Posted by Morgan Meis at 12:04 PM | Permalink
Comments
"Sober historical reflection shows that the Palestinian narrative is substantially correct. My purpose is not to make that case now, but rather to explore the consequences, assuming it is true."
This is the strangest paragraph by far in the entire essay. Why should we spend a lot of time with consideration of hypotheticals if the premise behind them is contested?
Let's say I disagree with this part of the Palestinian viewpoint:
"By and large, the Zionist enterprise is seen as similar to the European colonization of North America and Australia."
There was an essentially unbroken Jewish presence in Palestine throughout recorded history. The numbers weren't necessarily great, but they were there. Colonization increased markedly in the late nineteenth century under the Ottoman empire and then increased even more after the beginning of British control over Palestine. At no point until 1948 were Jews the controlling political authority of any substantial part of Palestine. In many ways you could compare Jewish emigrants to Palestine in this period to South Asian diasporas in the Caribbean or East Africa.
The other overwhelming fact is that the population of Israel now is majority Middle Eastern in origin, and a substantial minority is of Arab origin, since so many Arab and Middle Eastern Jews were forced out of the surrounding countries after the founding of Israel to add to Israeli Arabs. So these are groups with deep roots in the area who are refugees from their native countries, who want nothing to do with them. (This is also true of a substantial number of post World War II entrants into Israel as well.) This is quite distinct from the settling of the Americas, which involved either free choice, religiously-inspired settlement, or slavery and also distinct from the settling of Australia, which began with forced deportation of convicts but was largely made up of immigrants there by choice.
Claiming that Palestine is just like North America isn't even necessary. After all, the Native Americans and the Aborigines of Australia aren't going to get anything like what Palestinians are seeking. Maybe looking at places like Guyana or Fiji might be more instructive.
Posted by: Hektor Bim | Nov 14, 2008 3:35:19 PM
"There was an essentially unbroken Jewish presence in Palestine throughout recorded history."
This is certainly correct. The question is whether these people were Jews who happen to have lived in Palestine, or Palestinians who happened to have been Jewish.
In the Zionist narrative, the division is between Jews and non-Jews. Thus Jews originally came from the land, there have always been some Jews in the land, and Zionism encourages the rest of them to return to their ancestral homeland. And this ancestral connection takes precedence over any rights non-Jews may have to live there.
In the Palestinian narrative, the division is between European settlers and Palestinian natives. Thus Palestinian Jews have the same right to live where they've lived for generations as any other Palestinian, it's only the Zionist settler presence that lacks legitimacy.
Posted by: Sagredo | Nov 14, 2008 11:10:02 PM
That's very well done and helpful, Sagredo. Long time no see here,BTW.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Nov 15, 2008 1:33:12 AM
Bur Sagredo, your presentation of the Palestinian narrative doesn't account for the majority of Jews in Israel - that is, the majority of Jews not of European origin.
How precisely does one decide who is a Palestinian Jew and who is a Zionist settler? Is it by blood descent, time of arrival of one's ancestors, or what? The population itself tends not to make such distinctions, so one would have to impose them.
Posted by: Hektor Bim | Nov 16, 2008 9:53:08 AM
"That's very well done and helpful, Sagredo."
Oh indeed, Elatia?
"Thus Palestinian Jews have the same right to live where they've lived for generations "
Lets replace that with: "Thus Polish and German and Vichy French and Lithuanian Jews have the same right to live where they've lived for generations " Thats the oldest antisemitic trick in the book, saying, in effect: "lets suppose that Jews hadn't been persecuted for centuries..."
So now you've trotted into an Alternative Universe wihout antisemitism, and you've shown that Zionism is wrong. Clap, Clap Clap.
I really did imagine you were brighter than that, Elatia.
The Zionist movement however, lived in this, rougher, Universe where peoples are often obliged to build and struggle and fight to secure their most basic rights. Lord Balfour and later the United Nations, thought that if the Arabs got control of 99% of the decaying Ottoman Empire, then it shouldn't be too unjust to give the Jews 1%. The Arab countries (Morroco, Lybia, Egypt, Syria, the Yemen, Iraq), forced out their own long-existing Jewish communities and confiscated al property, so falsifying any claims that the "Palestinian" arabs are prepared to protect the citizenship of any native "Palestinian" Jews.
Posted by: aguy109 | Nov 16, 2008 10:34:19 AM
"your presentation of the Palestinian narrative doesn't account for the majority of Jews in Israel - that is, the majority of Jews not of European origin."
The Palestinian narrative is very much fixated on the Nakba, so the subsequent expulsion of Jews from Arab lands isn't really part of it. The narrative cannot move on from that fixation until there's a widespread understanding among Israelis of the depth of that loss.
"The population itself tends not to make such distinctions, so one would have to impose them."
It doesn't now, but it used to. European settler Jews once considered "Oriental Jews" already living there as inferior and lacking European enlightenment, and so on.
"Thus Polish and German and Vichy French and Lithuanian Jews have the same right to live where they've lived for generations."
Well, no one will argue against that, I hope. But in the Zionist narrative, all enemies of the Jews are essentially the same, part of one thing called "anti-Semitism", which is fundamentally inexplicable and inhuman, and all those who oppose the righteous national aspirations of the Jews are their enemies. Thus defeat of Arab opposition to Zionism is a victory against the Nazis and the pogroms and all the rest. Ahmadinejad is Arafat is Hitler is Haman.
In the Palestinian narrative, one set of Europeans persecuted another set of Europeans, so why should Palestinians have to give up anything?
Posted by: Sagredo | Nov 17, 2008 4:26:54 AM
Sagredo,
I still don't understand how one decides in the Palestinian narrative who is a sheep (Palestinian Jew) and who is a goat (settler Jew). There doesn't appear in the historical record to be much difference in treatment of one group over the other by the local Arab population, and post 1948, I can't discern much difference at all. Look at what happened to the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem, for example. There is a population of Jews (Neturei Karta) who identify politically with the PLO, but they are of European (Hungarian) origin. Groups like the PFLP don't seem to make this distinction - they just want something like South Africa where everyone stays on the land and there is a single government.
Most (maybe all) nationalisms have founding myths that ignore or suppress critical information about their enemies/competitors. But it seems somewhat crazy to have a basic Palestinian narrative that doesn't have anything to say about the majority of Israelis.
Posted by: Hektor Bim | Nov 17, 2008 10:26:48 AM
Elatia, thanks.
Hektor, you originally wrote
"There was an essentially unbroken Jewish presence in Palestine throughout recorded history. ... At no point until 1948 were Jews the controlling political authority of any substantial part of Palestine."
So Levine is discussing the narratives of the establishment of the State of Israel and the expulsion of the Palestinians. As I understand it, in the Palestinian narrative, the "unbroken Jewish presence" is simply Palestinian, but European Jewish settlers came and imposed a new division between Jews and non-Jews, eventually leading to the expulsion of most of the latter from their homes. In the Palestinian narrative, this new division was not of Arab making, but was the reality they had to deal with during the conflict that led to the founding of the State of Israel. And it has by and large been the reality ever since.
"There doesn't appear in the historical record to be much difference in treatment of one group over the other by the local Arab population,"
For instance, accounts of the 1929 massacre in Hebron say Arab violence was directed specifically at "new Ashkenazim" settlers rather than older Jewish communities. You are right to point out that these kinds of distinctions did not last.
Palestinians still claim the right of the expelled to return to their houses and villages now in Israel, but generally do not demand the expulsion of the Jews, nor attempt to distinguish modern Israeli Jews into settlers and natives.
Posted by: Sagredo | Nov 18, 2008 4:40:19 AM
I don't take issue with the contention that the Palestinian narrative is essentially right. As a good brown person I've always have seen the matter as being about colonial oppression. Israel might fairly been generated in the middle of Berlin, not squeezed out of Palestine. However, I see less and less clearly as each year fades into the next that Levine's conclusions really follow.
Present suffering qua suffering counts for a lot in my calculus, but past injustice doesn't much. For one thing, I don't care much to see moral deliberation retroactively imposed upon the outcomes of history, which has never really had an international moral order. More importantly though, redressing the wrongs done to dead people by benefiting their descendants is simply not an aspect of any moral theory I can take seriously.
Now obviously, present suffering and past injustice are well correlated, but it seems to me it's the former that matters ethically, and it's important to keep the ethical accounting straight. So, for instance, a good reason to try and uplift the Aborigines is that they're doing so badly and that they aren't given a fair chance to flourish, not that their lands were taken away by colonizers ages back.
The central issue in this scheme of thought is just how long we wait for the past to die - left to itself it certainly takes its time. If nothing else, people with vivid memories of 1948 are still alive today, and certainly their children are persecuted refugees in the millions. Clearly, as Levine himself takes for granted, oppression thousands of years old is idiotic to consider, and equally clearly you cannot take a man's land and expect his children to acquiesce quietly. The rest is working out a smooth and sensible interpolation between those extremes, and I haven't the foggiest how that might be done. In a purely personal sense, '48 is fairly recent, but is a lot older than I am. '67 I'm able to get worked up about, and think the settlers and the wall are an absolute outrage. Yeah.
As a tactical matter, I think pointing out the present oppression and sufferings of the Palestinians at the hands of Israel is more effective than thrashing out the details of history, however conclusively.
Posted by: D | Nov 18, 2008 10:52:21 AM
Hmm. I wrote a long comment that seems to have got lost in the ether. In brief, I was wondering to what extent we might find a place for past injustice in our moral calculus. It certainly wasn't interesting enough to say twice, so let me just ask: what is the appropriate "statute of limitations" in matters like these?
Posted by: D | Nov 18, 2008 11:04:12 AM
Sagredo,
You're underplaying the events of the Hebron massacre a bit. Attacks were originally directed at Ashkenazim, but when the Sephardic leader of the community refused to turn over Asheknazi yeshiva students to be killed, he and most of his family were killed on the spot.
Notice also that the Jewish quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem was attacked at the same time, and that was a center of Sephardic settlement.
I still want to hear what the Palestinian narrative has to say about the majority of Israeli Jews. Are you saying the narrative stops in 1948 and that is that? Developments since then are immaterial?
D,
To first approximation, no refugees ever have made it back to their homes unless they win a war. Post-Partition India/Pakistan no one really got their homes back. The Greek-Turkish population exchanges and the later pogroms and expulsions of Greeks from Istanbul were never changed. Germans didn't get their homes back and this was actually a significant issue during EU expansion. Same thing with Poles.
Even recently, refugees from the Karabakh wars have gotten no relief, and it's very likely that the Georgians ethnically cleansed from South Ossetia and Abkhazia will never manage to go back.
Since the Palestinians can't manage to win a war against Israel, the best they can hope for is monetary infusions and possibly some nominal return.
Levine is being incredibly disingenuous about the binational state plan. He doesn't think that that will necessarily be the result of his proposal, but since he favors it he can't be too choked up about it if that is the eventual result.
But everyone I have ever seen who supports the plan also confidently forecasts that Arabs will be in the majority in the new binational state. That suggests forcing the Israeli Jews to accept a position as a national minority, something they show no signs of acquiescing to.
Posted by: Hektor Bim | Nov 18, 2008 1:47:33 PM
"I still want to hear what the Palestinian narrative has to say about the majority of Israeli Jews."
Well, that's another matter. Quite a lot has happened since then and now...
Like Levine, I'm discussing narratives of the Palestinian exodus. I'm already doing this second-hand: for accounts of the rest of their history you'd be better off engaging with Palestinian sources directly.
Posted by: Sagredo | Nov 18, 2008 11:37:28 PM
"To first approximation, no refugees ever have made it back to their homes unless they win a war."
I think one should be careful with these "never happened before" arguments. Bear in mind that the examples you give are all of independent countries, while Israel still maintains control over the territories. One might consider the forced relocation of black South Africans into Bantustans in the 70s and 80s.
Posted by: Sagredo | Nov 18, 2008 11:50:27 PM
First, thanks to Hecktor for your well informed comments.
“In the mainstream Zionist narrative—which includes liberal supporters—the State of Israel is the realization of legitimate Jewish nationalism.”
The notion of a ‘legitimate Jewish nationalism’ is just what has being rejected by the Palestinian narrative, by Levine, and by Sagredo. If Jews have no such collective national rights, the argument goes, then anything they do in pursuance of such rights, whether it be farming, building or fighting, is illegitimate. Even the 3 generations of Israelis who were born and have grown up in Israel are to be denied any collective rights, especially if their skin is too white and they have Ashkenazi (European ) blood in their veins. At best, the Jews are to be at the mercy of the ‘returning “ Palestinians” (who will check their identities, we wonder) who were born and lived in Syria, Lebanon , Jordan or elsewhere and who, naturally, do have such collective rights.
So when that day comes, and I am forced to watch them rape and butcher my wife and children (as their religious leaders and lawyers have openly declared is their right) I shall at least be comforted to know that Sagredo’s standards of legitimacy and justice have been met.
Sagredo accuses Jews (oh sorry he uses the euphemism ‘Zionists’) of painting all their enemies with the same brush: ”Thus defeat of Arab opposition to Zionism is a victory against the Nazis and the pogroms and all the rest. Ahmadinejad is Arafat is Hitler is Haman.”
It so happens that the Mufti of Jerusalem ( at the time the leader of the Arabs in Mandate Palestine) traveled to Berlin to visit Hitler in 1941 to seek his support to solve the Jewish Problem as part of German military operations in North Africa. In return, many Palestinians and thousands of European Muslims volunteered on the German side (whereas the Jews in Palestine volunteered for the Allies Here is a quote from the Mufti’s memoirs:
"Our fundamental condition for cooperating with Germany was a free hand to eradicate every last Jew from Palestine and the Arab world. I asked Hitler for an explicit undertaking to allow us to solve the Jewish problem in a manner befitting our national and racial aspirations and according to the scientific methods innovated by Germany in the handling of its Jews. The answer I got was: 'The Jews are yours'."[127]
As for Ahmadinejad, he has linked himself to Hitler not just by calling for Israel’s destruction and developing atomic weapons, but by organizing a Holocaust Denial conference in Teheran.
Posted by: aguy109 | Nov 20, 2008 10:13:38 AM
"Even the 3 generations of Israelis who were born and have grown up in Israel are to be denied any collective rights,"
Oh no, they certainly have the right to live there. Most everyone agrees on that.
The question is how they get that right. Do they get the right to live in Israel because they are Jewish, regardless of the birthplace of their past three generations? Or do they get the right to live there because they were born there, regardless of whether they are Jewish or not?
Posted by: Sagredo | Nov 21, 2008 2:40:33 AM
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