In my post yesterday about the past 20 years of horrific Israeli behavior I noted that "There are reasons things have turned out this way, many of them the responsibility of Arab nations and the Palestinians themselves."
Unsurprisingly, many people asked just exactly what part of the historical record could explain or justify Israeli conduct. It's a fair enough question, because although this history is both contentious and well-known, it's also peculiarly unknown to a lot of people these days.
So here's a nickel summary. First off, this is the original 1947 UN map showing the partition of the old British Mandate in Palestine into two new states, one Jewish and one Arab. There are several things to notice:
Gaza is much larger than it is today and almost touches the West Bank.- Jerusalem is solidly within the West Bank and is designated as an international enclave.
- The city of Jaffa on the Mediterranean coast is an Arab enclave.
- Arab lands extend north to the border with Lebanon.
- All of these areas were to be connected by extraterritorial roads, guaranteeing free passage within each state and free passage of all to Jerusalem.
So what happened? Zionist leaders weren't thrilled with the partition but reluctantly accepted it. Arab leaders rejected it completely. Partly this was on the grounds that Israel had been given the best land, but mostly it was because they flatly refused to accept the establishment of a Jewish state. They declared war on Israel as soon as the partition was announced, with the stated intent of destroying it.
They lost, and by the time the war ended a lot of territory had changed hands. Israel took Jaffa, the northern Arab region, most of Gaza, and much of the West Bank—and forcibly expelled nearly a million Palestinians from Israeli territory in the process. Jordan seized the rest of the West Bank. Egypt took the remaining piece of Gaza. The extraterritorial roads, needless to say, were consigned to the dustbin of history.
From that point on the Arab states enforced a total air and land blockade against Israel while Egypt blocked its use of the Suez Canal. In 1956, Egypt's president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, blockaded the Gulf of Aqaba, preventing Israel from developing an alternate route to the Red Sea and Asia. At the same time he nationalized the Suez Canal, prompting an invasion from Britain, France, and Israel. They pulled back due to international pressure and Nasser reopened Aqaba.
During the rest of the 50's Palestinian fedayeen trained in Eqypt mounted repeated attacks across the border into Israel. In 1964 Nasser created the Palestine Liberation Organization. In 1967 he blockaded Aqaba again and planned an imminent war against Israel, joined by other Arab states.
They lost. During the war Israel seized the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights on the border with Syria. Israel then began building settlements on the West Bank in order to protect itself from further attacks.
In 1973 the Arab States attacked again. This was a close run thing, but again, they lost. The 1973 war shook Israel badly, and after it ended they ramped up the settlement program.
In 1988 Palestinians launched the First Intifada, a civil uprising against Israelis. This happened against a background, over the previous two decades, of hijackings, terrorist attacks, missiles launched into Israeli territory, PLO attacks across the Lebanese border, and the establishment of Hezbollah after the Lebanon War.
The Palestinians lost that intifada. Then, at the Camp David Summit in 2000, peace terms between Israel and the Palestinians seemed to be finally in sight, but the PLO pulled out and the talks collapsed. Shortly afterward, the Second Intifada started, marked by gunfights, suicide bombings, stone-throwing, and rocket attacks. The suicide bombings in particular produced an understandable panic among the Israeli population.
Nonetheless the Palestinians lost. In 2005 Israel withdrew from Gaza but Hamas won elections to run the territory. They declared their unconditional desire to destroy Israel, which was met by an Israeli/Egyptian blockade of Gaza. Since then Hamas has kept up a steady but intermittent barrage of missiles fired into Israel. In 2023 they launched a brutal cross-border attack against Israel.
To summarize:
1948: Arabs launch a war of destruction against Israel.
1956: Egypt blockades the Gulf of Aqaba and nationalizes the Suez Canal, touching off a war.
1967: Arab states plan a war of destruction against Israel but are stopped before it can begin.
1973: Arab states launch yet another war of destruction against Israel.
1982: PLO attacks from Lebanon incite a border war with Israel.
1988: Palestinians launch the First Intifada.
2000: Palestinians launch the Second Intifada.
2007: Hamas takes over Gaza and promises the destruction of Israel.
2023: Hamas launches a brutal attack on Israeli civilians, torturing and killing over a thousand people while taking 200 hostage.
History is contingent. It's not right to say that Palestinians today "deserve" ill treatment because of something that happened in 1948. But at repeated points since then, Arab wars have provoked reactions that eventually metastasized into what we have today. Each of these reactions was a response to an attack in recent memory, and only over time have the beginnings fallen away into mist.
Given this history—even if you take a different view of who started what—it's all but inevitable that Israel would take harsher and harsher measures to protect itself. This doesn't justify the past two decades of Israeli callousness and cruelty, especially against Palestinians in the West Bank, but it does make it understandable.
"Israel then began building settlements on the West Bank in order to protect itself from further attacks."
Maybe you could explain the logic behind this. Was it just that a fully ethnically cleansed West Bank would be safe for the ethnic cleansers? Because I can't think of a less objectionable mechanism by which settlement enclaves would protect anyone.
Yes, saying the settlements was "to protect" is absolute bulshit. It was for the purpose of taking the land.
yeah, this is the whole Abba Eban "the Palestinians have never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity" interpretation of events. the problem is that about half of it is nonsense.
take the Palestinian refusal to accept the terms of Camp David in 2000. most observers, including Israeli scholars, recognize that the Palestinians were being offered a shitty deal that they couldn't possibly accept: in return for giving up about 9% of the West Bank to Israeli annexation, the land they were going to get back in land swaps was both only 1/9th the total area of what they were giving up AND the land itself was likely to be worthless. Palestine wouldn't have been a state in any meaningful sense: it wouldn't have a military, would have no control over its own airspace, and wouldn't even control the main highway in the West Bank.
Shrug. At this point no serious plans for a two state solution will include a Palestinian military, Palestinian control of Palestinian airspace, or Palestinian control of major logistics infrastructure. That idea is now ludicrous.
Okay, so that's just Apartheid with a different name.
No. You obviously do not know what apartheid is.
Hint... it had nothing to with whether a country had a military or controlled is own airspace.
A better comparison would be to post-WWII Germany and for much the same reasons.
Here's the logic.
Israeli settlements were on hilltops, because they were defensible. Settlers were armed, and all of them were army veterans. If Arab armies invaded (again), there were local militia, familiar with the terrain, that could slow them down.
Remember, this is in the 60s and 70s.
No ethnic cleansing involved.
So these hilltop settlements were like medieval castles? Maybe they should have dug moats too. I need hardly point out that Israel has, and for that matter its enemies have, modern militaries with tanks and planes and all that, and they fight wars in which hilltop fortresses play little role.
So no, I don't think I buy the notion that small bands of settlers with small arms would play any significant role in defending Israel. They would be, and have been, quite effective in oppressing the inconvenient local population though.
So in your expert military opinion, holding high ground is irrelevant? Don't be ridiculous.
And yeah, Israel has a modern military. But as modern militaries have learned, those can be remarkably useless against infiltration by small groups...like the fedayeen referenced in the previous sentence! Similarly, y'know what stemmed the attacks on October 7th? Small bands of citizens with small arms.
None of which is to argue that the recent actions of Israeli settlers in the West Bank have been less than atrocious.
That's literally ethnic cleansing.
It's hard for Americans to understand the smallness and vulnerability of Israeli territory. At its narrowest point, the width of Israel from the West Bank to the sea is less than 10 miles. That's about the same as from where I live to downtown Chicago, and looking east I can see some of the downtown buildings from my house! I'm trying to imagine that many of the people to the west of me, for hundreds of miles, would like to see me dead.
It's also important to realize that in 1947, when the newly formed Jewish homeland was established, it was a mere TWO YEARS after Allied forces had discovered the Nazi death camps. Can you imagine the perspective of people first believing that FINALLY they might have a safe place to live, and then . . . here we go again! An onslaught of enemies from every direction calling for their extermination . . . again!
It's easy for us to judge from our point of view, a world away, never having faced obliteration.
Oh, the mythology!
https://newrepublic.com/article/177306/israel-colonialist-state-history-today
"One reason that the Israeli right came to dominate Israel’s politics is that the composition of the nation and its parties changed. Both the Labor Zionists and the Revisionists were primarily émigrés from Europe. They were Ashkenazi Jews, as were most Jews in British Palestine. They and their descendants were fleeing the Europe of pogroms and, later, the rise and triumph of the Nazis and other antisemitic parties. But after the creation of Israel in May 1948, Jews from Middle Eastern and North African countries began to emigrate en masse—by some estimates as many as 400,000 from 1948 to 1951. Many of them faced discrimination that had been stoked by Arab opposition to the creation of Israel, but others sought a better standard of living or the consummation of their religious views. These Jews, dubbed Sephardic or Mizrahi, now make up a majority of Israeli Jews. These Jews did not see themselves as part of a colonial project in the former British Palestine or as victims of European antisemitism. If they were fleeing from anyone, it was the Arabs and Muslims of the Middle East and North Africa. Many of them rejected any recognition of Palestinian rights, either within Israel or in the occupied territories. They formed the bulk of the settlers in the West Bank, where many of them did see themselves as “pioneers” staking out a Greater Israel. They have overwhelmingly supported the political descendants of Revisionist Zionism—the Likud and the national religious parties that make up the Israeli right. They provided these parties with their current majorities in the Knesset. They have contributed to Israel moving toward becoming simply another Middle Eastern ethno-theocracy."
The Zionist project had been officially under way with British sponsorship for probably twenty years before the first of the Nazi death camps was built, remember.
Add me to the "uh what" camp. This is straight bullshit.
And Israel "accepted" the UN settlement insofar as it was a stepping stone towards what the modern situation is working towards: complete dominion over the entirety of Palestinian territory, with no troublesome Palestinians around to make things awkward.
The New Republic article linked in the comments of the last post was a far more comprehensive history (and it's not exactly sympathetic to the Palestinians or Arabs, either). Kevin just should've linked to that, but that would've required him to read it first.
Guess you missed Kevin’s title, “a Brief History . . .”
It's not just brief, it's misleading.
A reasonable summary but you don't mention the Oslo Accords in 1993 and the Clinton Administrations attempt to get both sides to adhere to the Oslo Accords. You also don't mention Netanyaho's continual attempt to undermine the Palestine Liberation Authority which the Oslo Accords set up as the rightful governing Authority. There is a lot of blame to go around here but any reasonable discussion of the current crisis has to include Netnyaho's sustained undermining of any hope of a peace process.
And if you are going to place blame on Netanyahu, please be sure to include the people who keep voting for his party. The press believes so strongly in the Great Man Theory of history that they usually disregard the people who put & keep the great men in power. Cf. Trump & Trump voters.
Just as there are white American who would vote in favor of reinstating Jim Crow & all other forms of segregation, there are (apparently) Israelis who would & do vote for the party that will drive the Palestinians off their land.
I think Netanyahu's party got 20 something percent in the last election.
And yet he remains in power.
Moving the goalposts.
The number of Americans who would reinstate Jim Crow is minuscule. Maybe .000000001% of the country. Democrats say that to strike fear in especially the black community. It is not helpful. For instance, when Obama was running against Romney, Biden made a speech in which he told supporters that Republicans would "put y'all back in chains," I am sorry you believe the country is filled with racists. It must make it hard to live here.
.000000001% of the US is about 1/3 of a person. But nice try! Next time put some effort into the trolling response.
This country IS filled with racists. Is everybody racist? No (or at least, probably not). Among those who are racist (all of us have unconscious bias), does everyone act like a shit human being and a bigot? Nope.
Is there a substantial portion of the country that behaves as if they're racist, or gives cover to racists under the guise of other things? To say otherwise is to out yourself as either a fucking moron or as one of them. Congratulations, whichever one you are!
FFS.
Ok. I should have done more math. Yes, racism exists in America and all over the world, and we all have unconscious biases. All people of all races have biases. Racism exists in America and not just among whites. My point was that the number of Americans who dream of suppressing blacks by bringing back Jim Crow laws is ridiculously minimal. So why talk about it? It doesn't help the race relations.
...Because no one does talk about it, except racists.
You'd have more success with that story if the commenters were ignorant of racism and bigotry in this country.
Are you all the smart ones. I am not saying there is no racism or bigotry in this country, but I don't think it is as pervasive as most of the people on this blog.
In 2006, the Palestinians voted in Hamas to rule them, and we know what Hamas wants to do with Israelis. So if you want to talk about ugliness in voting, it doesn't get much worse than this. In fact, this caused Fatah, who was still in power, to cancel future elections. Then Fatah and Hamas had a small civil war in Gaza and Hamas won and took over. Hamas then established an authoritarian fiefdom in Gaza and started planning the next attacks on Israel. With Palestinian voters willing to elect Hamas to rule, it is hard to imagine any solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
You mean the election 17 years ago, after which Hamas hasn't conducted any elections at all?
The median age in Palestine is 19.6 years. The median Palestinian wasn't even speaking in sentences yet, let alone "voting in Hamas." But sure, tell me again how the Palestinians brought this upon themselves by voting in Hamas.
The median age in the US is 38 years old, so that would be like if George W. Bush had decided after the 2004 election to remain in power and suspend elections, and then saying that we all asked for it (nevermind that at least the median age US voter could have actually voted in 2004, instead of being barely out of literal infancy).
After coming to power in 1933, the post-Weimar regime never held a passably free and fair election.
In 1945, when the allied armies were entering Germany from both directions, no German under the age of 30 had voted for the government that was running their country's war effort.
My point here is that it sometimes happens that a people choose a government of murderous savages. And once that choice is made, it's hard to un-make, and the consequences often fall on people who had little to do with the choice. Uprooting that murderous regime was a bloody business, and a lot of innocents got hurt. But nobody took seriously the idea of leaving them in power and forgiving their awful crimes just because some of the civilians in their grip were blameless.
So yeah, I get that many of the Arabs of Gaza had nothing to do with Hamas coming to power. Nevertheless, Hamas is in power, and has outright rejected any cease-fire. They celebrate the atrocities of 10/7, and promise more of the same. Given that, I don't see how things could be other than they are.
Israel could comport itself with greater bravery and a commitment to minimize civilian casualties, REGARDLESS how they voted. The rules of war don't say, "You can kill a non-combatant who voted for the party leading the opposing army!"
Greater bravery? As you sit typing at your keyboard.
The number of Israelis killed vs the number of Palestinians, again?
About half the number killed at Pearl Harbor.
Except that almost everyone killed at Pearl Harbor was military.
"But sure, tell me again how the Palestinians brought this upon themselves by voting in Hamas."
They are partly at false, of course. You think the problems in this conflict are only due to Israel?
Not sure why you think younger Palestinians voters would vote wiser than their elders. If anything, I'd think they are more radicalized. Maybe I'm wrong, would hope I am.
"at false", meant "at fault"
In that one election, a majority of Gazans voted against Hamas.
Hamas won the January 25, 2006 elections in Palestine, winning 42.9 % of the vote (with 77 percent voter turnout), giving it a parliamentary majority with 74 of the 132 seats. Hamas is an Islamic party and is ideologically opposed to the existence of Israel.
Not sure why it matters if the "majority of Gazans voted against Hamas". Voters in the West Bank and Gaza together voted for Hama to take the lead in their government.
A problem that Israel faces is that its people are getting loonier and loonier.
The nice socialist Labor Party members are a tiny minority now, mostly due to the fact that they follow European patterns of having an average of two kids per family while the religious crazies are intent on repopulating the Land of Israel.
Just as my notion that W Bush would be the worst President of the US in my lifetime was brutally crushed, so might the notion that Netanyahu will be the worst of Israeli Prime Ministers.
I know it is all long and complicated, but I don't think it provides balance to leave out what leads up to all these (seemingly unprovoked, in your timeline) attacks against Isreal. As an example in this most recent escalation, you present a 16 year gap in events terminated by Hamas's horrific terrorist attack October 7 and even in your more detailed timeline all you have to say about this period is "a steady but intermittent barrage of missiles fired into Israel".
Just as nothing justifies what Isreal is doing to Gaza right now, nothing justifies what Hamas did October 7. And just as what Hamas did October 7 has brought this inhuman reaction upon their civilians, Isreal's behaviour very predictably brought on the rise of extremists.
In short, all those long pauses in the timeline represent a status quo that was not an equitable settlement to both parties, and in the case of the latest shattered status quo, was an ongoing suffocation, kind of like watching Derek Chauvin with his knee on George Floyds neck. That is a very biased view, IMO.
Yeah, it kinda skips over that Israel killed more Palestinians in that 16 year gap than the other way around, by like magnitude of at least ten.
If you want a more complete story, check out the 1929 Hebron massacre of Jews by Arabs, well before the establishment of the Israeli state. This is still very much in the Israeli psyche.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1929_Hebron_massacre
The official summary:
"About 9 o'clock on the morning of the 24th of August, Arabs in Hebron made a most ferocious attack on the Jewish ghetto and on isolated Jewish houses lying outside the crowded quarters of the town. More than 60 Jews – including many women and children – were murdered and more than 50 were wounded. This savage attack, of which no condemnation could be too severe, was accompanied by wanton destruction and looting. Jewish synagogues were desecrated, a Jewish hospital, which had provided treatment for Arabs, was attacked and ransacked, and only the exceptional personal courage displayed by Mr. Cafferata – the one British Police Officer in the town – prevented the outbreak from developing into a general massacre of the Jews in Hebron."
and part of the cause, not surprisingly...
"During the morning prayers, a nationalist preacher exhorted the Muslim faithful to fight against the Jews until the last drop of blood"
Odd that you don't mention any of the similar atrocities committed by Jews against Arabs.
Here is a handy dandy list of killings and massacres in Mandatory Palestine:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_and_massacres_in_Mandatory_Palestine
You will notice that most of the terrorism was Arab until Irgun got going. Menachem Began was the Prime Minister of Israel from 1977 to 1983 and was a member of Irgun. He was also the Prime Minister who signed the Camp David Accords.
Yes, it's interesting to notice that the terrorism by Israeli and Jewsih forces goes un-listed.
Yet if you count deaths, it almost always is 10x more Palestinians.
Exactly ... plus ... many of the Arab initiated attacks were against other Arabs.
Did you look at the table. Just see the column labeled "Responsible Party". It shows Jews vs. Arabs. Also, for deaths, see the "Notes" column. Jews vs. Arabs killed are listed. There is no 10x ratio.
Now, go through all of those attacks and tally up who killed more. Also note how many of the Arab attacks involved killing other Arabs. Let me know what the results are. (Clue: the results won't actually support whatever point it was that you were trying to make.)
How do you know if my information supports my point when you don't know what point I was trying to make? You said that atrocities the Jews have committed against Arabs are not mentioned. I sent you a list that documented some Israeli terrorist acts, along with Arab terrorist attacks. My point was that atrocities by the Israelis are documented.
The 1929 Hebron massacre was largely instigated by Arab leaders who recognized they were being screwed by Britain for the benefit of the Zionists.
Does that make it OK to kill children or civilians?
No.
But I do think it is an artifact of resistance to occupation.
Elides entirely the long history of Palestinian terrorism, their war against Jordan, their war against Lebanon and their alliance with the Soviet Union, Iran, alternating with their alliance with Saddam Hussein, as convenience dictates.
Elides the long history of Israeli terrorism and genocide as well. Why didn't you mention that?
More importantly though, about that map --it's completely preposterous. Can you imagine that patchwork design being stable for even a month?
Look at those choke points! It's like design for conflict.
Look at the map in Kevin's post.
"Palestine Plan of Partition" is the title. "Proposed by the Ad Hoc Committee on the Palestinian Question" is the sub-heading.
So it wasn't a "partition", it was a proposal for a partition. It was not an authorization, it was a plan.
And it had to be, because under the UN Charter self-determination is a human right. Honestly I think Kevin needs to include those words or it gives the wrong impression, that the proposed partition had the force of international law behind it.
This was intentional, it was sleight of hand by great powers who did not want to leave it up to the locals. So don't play into it.
Here's the partition as approved by the UN:
https://www.britannica.com/topic/United-Nations-Resolution-181
Seems like the same map.
Exactly. It was a "plan" that was "proposed".
"partition as approved by the UN" seems off. The sleight of hand works.
Since the UN Charter mandates self-determination the only partition that could be approved in any legal sense would be one developed by the locals.
I don't recall that the transfer of Silesia to Poland, or of Konigsberg to the Soviet Union, or of Alsace and Lorraine to France, were approved by the locals. The Allies won both World Wars, Turkey was one of the losers in the first one, and the Allies readjusted borders as they saw fit. Most of the borders of modern Europe, indeed of the entire modern world, would be illegal by the "local approval" standard. (The transfer of northern Schleswig to Denmark in 1920 might pass.)
So... all things that predated the UN, then.
Again, you are drawing a distinction without a difference. As a practical matter, what you call a "plan" was treated by everyone as an authorization.
I think we are coming at the same thing from different angles.
The UN map title is "plan". The subtitle is "proposed by..." I see this as legalistic sleight of hand, carefully chosen words that colorably stay within the Charter while misleading everyone (except the Arab League and the Arab Higher Committee).
It was "treated by everyone as an authorization" as you say.
At least to me realizing there was no partition legally approved in international law, only a plan proposed by a committee, gives the game away.
It was a trick, and it worked, but the words are still there right on their own map.
Was 1948 an "Arab War"? Let's see. The UN proposed a plan, which under the UN Charter locals were entitled to accept or reject.
Within Palestine the Jews declared independence and the Arabs said no way, we don't accept that plan.
The declaration of independence was not backed by international law, nearby Arab nations fought to prevent partition. I don't think you should call that an "Arab War".
The declaration of independence was not backed by international law, nearby Arab nations fought to prevent partition.
Of course it was backed by international law. Israel became a UN member, and remains one to this day. If you're claiming there was a gap between the outbreak of fighting and Israel's joining the United Nations, that's true. If you're claiming there were plenty of both Jews and Arabs who weren't happy with either the initial borders plan or the post 1948 settlement, that's also true. If you're claiming there was a substantial element of unfairness to the Palestinians in all this that's likewise true: for a very long time they lacked self-determination, and, had they possessed it, they might well have prevented large-scale Jewish immigration to their home, and thus Israel wouldn't have come into existence (or would have been located elsewhere). But the Jews have also dealt with substantial unfairness (to say the least: the destruction of their homeland by the Roman legions; centuries of exile; programs; persecution; the Holocaust; multiple invasions of Israel by their more numerous neighbors).
There's lots of unfairness to go around. But in 2023, the bottom line is that the most reasonable interpretation of the legal status quo is: A) Israel exists; B) Israel's post 67 land grab violates international law; C) The Palestinians have a right to a fully independent state in what is now Gaza and the West Bank.
re: "and thus Israel wouldn't have come into existence (or would have been located elsewhere)" Elsewhere? Where is that place where no other people live (or want to live)? Antarctica?
Around 750 BCE there was a nation called "Israel" located essentially where "Israel" currently exists. It's sort of the ancestral homeland of the Jews. You might even say they are the "indigenous people" of that region -- or were until they were either colonized or driven away by, in succession, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Turks, the Arabs, more Turks . . . have I left anyone out?
Does any of this justify what the Likud government is doing now? Absolutely not. But we cannot judge what we haven't experienced.
Elsewhere? Where is that place where no other people live (or want to live)? Antarctica?
Zero idea. It's obviously moot now because Israel does indeed exist as a Jewish state per international law. But it wouldn't have violated the laws of physics for a homeland to be found someplace that wasn't already populated by humans with centuries of local ancestry. But again, it's all moot now.
I fully support Israel's right to exist as a national homeland for the Jewish people, but let's not kid ourselves that the Palestinians weren't well and truly fucked over by what transpired in the late 1940s (as, of course, were the Jews in the early 1940s). Anyway, I try not to get too bogged down in notions of what constitutes "fairness" or "justice" in these matters, because they're inherently subjective concepts. It's best to simply stick to international law, and Israel very clearly A) is a fully legal state per international law, and B) is occupying significant swaths of territory in violation of international law.
You might even say they are the "indigenous people" of that region
Nobody who has done even cursory reading about that region would calls the Jews the "indigenous" people of what is now Israel. They weren't its first occupants—just one people among the many who have called it home.
If there were any justice, the Jewish homeland would be in Bavaria.
Still, we are where we are. And that's just another road not taken.
There is "we don't accept it, lets keep the status quo and talk about it" and there is "we don't accept it, lets get several large Arab countries to invade and take it all".
I think you can call that an "Arab War".
My nickel summary: Palestinians & Arabs were overmatched from the start. They were fighting rich educated people and a proposed partition plan developed overseas by great powers. Of course they lose. And, because they are being pushed off their land, of course they fight. Like the Native Americans, it sucks to be them.
And they keep fighting, and they keep losing, because they are militarily weaker. And as they lose they get progressively desperate, and their desperation corrupts them into terrorism. And that in turn predictably leads Israel to repress ever more harshly.
This doesn't conflict with Kevin's history, I just don't see how it leads to sympathy for Israel. The weaker side is getting pushed off their land and crushed.
Their land? That Jewish temple predates the Arab mosque they built in top if it by a couple thousand years.
Are you willing to give your house to the Indian nation who has precedence?
Your approach is a recipe for endless conflict.
The word is irredentism, it's a recipe for endless conflict, and Israel is the worst example of it in human history. There were already people in the Promised Land before Moses led the Children of Israel there to conquer and slaughter. Can you say that the present day Palestinians aren't descended from the survivors of those original occupants?
Maybe. But, as you said, God led the Israelites there.
That's not what they said.
Can you say they were? And the Moses story is a myth. Can you say that the Moses story isn’t a mythology to explain to the people who lived there of their origins.
Hey, lay off Moses. Next you'll be bashing Jesus, er, Yeshua.
> Can you say that the present day Palestinians aren't descended from the survivors of those original occupants?
Yes, we can say they aren't. The Arabs occupying the present-day Levant, including Palestine, are descended from the victors of the Muslim conquest, starting in AD 622, when the Arabs, who came originally from modern Saudi Arabia, invaded the area and (wait for it) murdered, displaced, or forcibly converted the earlier occupants.
"Forcibly converted" very probably leaves those people's descendants still there today. The Arabs were not numerous enough to replace the populations of the areas they conquered; their conquests did not normally involve genocide.
This. They probably changed the Y-DNA profile of the population somewhat by pre-empting the women who lived there, but they certainly didn't kill everyone and replace them wholly. But I'm pretty confident that the Autosomal effects washed out pretty quickly.
They didn't change the mt profile at all.
Their conquests led to taxation, a kind of protection racket. They were not the first or the last to do that. But they definitely did kill people to gain control of those very extensive areas from the Arabian Peninsula across the Levant, Northern Africa, and into Spain.
They also had slaves.
“The word is irredentism, it's a recipe for endless conflict, and Israel is the worst example of it in human history.”
That’s ludicrous. Insane.
Alexander? Caesar? Genghis Khan? The conquistadors? The British Empire? The United States, with manifest destiny? Hitler? Tojo?
Get. Some. Perspective.
That makes no sense. The people and empires you name weren't claiming territory because they used to own it and had it taken from them by force, or because they used to live there and were driven out by force. Conquerors are not irredentists; quite the opposite.
I agree. It is morally incumbent upon the United States to cut all ties with, and impose harsh economic sanctions upon the Roman Empire for their policy of ethnic cleansing.
That is the extent of your comment's relevance to anything, unless you are going to adopt this idea that everyone is entitled to reclaim the land that their ancestors lived on 2,000 years ago, rather than it being a one off justification for Zionism that no one else is allowed to invoke.
The argument of who has more right to the land based on history is rather sterile and generally unwinnable. According to most modern concepts of right and wrong, both the Israelis and Palestinians have the right to self-determination in the lands in which they live, which is roughly the '67 line, and the only legit and probably durable solution is the two-state solution.
We can only hope opponents of the two-state solution like Hamas and Netanyahu depart the scene so what rational people remain can come to some sort of agreement...
Assuming you live in North America, when will you be giving up your land to those who lived on it for thousands of years before you arrived?
I wonder if you've lost track of which way that argument is supposed to cut? If your view is that the current holders of land should be left in place, with the conflicts of generations past left to the history books, I'm strongly inclined to agree.
Is that really the point you meant to make?
No ... my point was that if Jewish people have a claim to land based on a claim that is thousands of years old, logic would suggest you should give up your land to the indigenous people who once lived there.
Asserting that the Jewish claim is thousands of years old is true, but elides the ongoing Jewish presence there. Jews didn't "just" live there thousands of years ago. Jews have lived there (despite repeated attempts to displace or "cleanse" them) from 2500+ years ago to the present time.
That's not based on biblical text, it's based on history and archeology.
So have non-Jewish Arabs. But the problem is focusing on “the land” as some type of monolithic area that belongs to one or the other. What the focus should be on is who actually owned the land.
In the 1890s, there were 500,000 non-Jewish Arabs in the area now known as Israel, there were significantly fewer than 100,000 Jews.
For more than a hundred years, part of the Zionist effort has been directed at taking, without compensation, more and more Palestinian land. And the extremists who now occupy many positions of power within Israel don’t want to stop at the Occupied Territories. They want the Sinai, and parts of Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan.
Resident, but neither sovereign nor exclusive …
And yet, the Arab claim to the land within Israel's borders is most of a century old, and getting staler by the day.
I don't know where the grandchildren of the people displaced from East Prussia are today, but I know they aren't still living in refugee camps along the border of Kaliningrad, living for the day that they get to murder the grandchildren of the people who took the land from their ancestors.
Your principle is, in general, a good one. Old claims should be dropped. To cling to them is to turn one generation's defeat into a calamity that consumes the lives of all their descendants.
When they take it.
It does suck for the Palestinians, but as Kevin points out, well prior to the partition, the Arabs had made it clear they were not interested in a peaceful solution. So, yeah, no sympathy for Israel, but none for the Arabs either, who have at every turn chosen violence over compromise.
It's not correct that the Arabs weren't interested in a peaceful solution. They weren't interested in a solution that involved the creation of a Jewish state. Israel is in no way a compromise; it's the imposition by the winners of WWII of their will on a colony.
> They weren't interested in a solution that involved the creation of a Jewish state.
You're saying the quiet part out loud. You're not supposed to admit that the Arabs fundamental opposition to Israel is based in anti-Semitism.
Say what? Not wanting a Jewish state makes you anti-semitic? If you think one state with equal rights for all is best you are anti-semitic?
That game is worn out.
You actually think the Arab states wanted one state with equal rights for all, and that’s why they opposed Israel?
The Zionists completely poisoned that well when the immigrated in large numbers and began immediately agitating to create a state that excluded the overwhelming majority of those who already lived there from full citizenship. Had the Arabs of Palestine been allowed to exercise sovereignty in their own land, rather than being dictated to by imperial powers, it might have been a different story.
Jews immigrating to Palestine with the intent of living peacefully within a multiethnic state is a counterfactual that we will never be able to test.
Which of the Arab states that opposed the formation of Israel had equal rights for all? More than half of Israelis are from the Middle East or North Africa. Some went to Israel to escape pogroms. Some went find a better life. Some were forced to go to Israel after Israel’s formation.
About 20% of Israel’s population is non Jewish Arabs. Can you even imagine such a thing in one of the surrounding countries?
The Arabs were murdering Jews legally living in Palestine well before an actual Jewish state was ever a legal possibility.
The majority of Jews immigrated to the newly formed Israel because they were driven out (cleansed?) from the Arab countries where they'd lived.
How about "no establishment of religion" in Palestine?
You can't separate that land from religion. The vast majority of the world (Jews, Christians, and Muslims) believe that God interacted with man and formed the basis of of the modern religions on those lands.
How does that prevent a modern secular state from being established that would give all religions equal rights?
They wouldn’t have cared if they were Jewish, or blue, or all football players. The issue was that Arab land was being taken.
If I understand this history, they don't just keep fighting, they keep starting the fight. This would make them the aggressor and not very smart. They've lost all the wars and the Infatada's.
That means that you haven't actually understood the history.
This is exactly correct.
Actually the first intifada got them control of the major population centers in the West Bank and the second intifada got settlements removed from Gaza. That is not much, but they are the only concessions they have ever gotten from Israel. In fact they are the only steps towards peace Israel has ever taken. When they have eschewed violence as Abbas has in the West Bank Israel has accelerated the death of the two state solution. So if the Palestinians believe that they never get anything without violence they have a reason.
I don't think borders should be redrawn by force.
Nevertheless, the various Arab nations have, at least three times now, endorsed the principle of redrawing Israel's borders by force. And once you've endorsed that principle, you don't have much standing to complain that it didn't go your way.
True, but the US, NATO and the UN ought to stand by the principle despite violations.
It's not at all clear that they should. It'd be unfair and unjust to do so.
Consider the clean hands doctrine in American courts. When a plaintiff has violated the principle that they seek to enforce against a defendant, a court may refuse to act because the plaintiff has "unclean hands." The principle at work is sometimes expressed as "those seeking equity must do equity."
Broadly, the Arabs of Palestine have long since lost any natural right to complain about borders being redrawn by force, because they've attempted to redraw the borders there by force several times now.
Had the Arabs won any of their 1948, 1967, or 1973 wars, the state of Israel would have been erased. All of Israel's land was in the pot every single hand. It's simple justice to recognize that, as a consequence, a similar amount of Arab land was in the pot as well.
You may think it is justice, but it is a recipe for endless conflict.
Israel's borders were drawn by force in the first place.
Correct. And have rejected any offers (or refused to negotiate) of a two state solution.
Um, Israel was up against several major Arab countries in 1948, with almost no help. Please look at the history.
1967 was similar, and Israel only won because they surprised the Egyptian Air Force. 1973 was also a very close thing.
Native Americans? Here we go with the ahistorical fiction that Palestinians are some kind of "indigenous people." And weaker? Have you noticed how wealthy the Gulf Arab states are? Perhaps they could have helped their fellow Arabs and co-religionists to fight against the "wealthy privileged" Jews.
That's pretty bigoted, mr 99.
They're not a colonizing force. They've lived there the entire time.
The gulf states are not Palestine.
Especially in the last sixteen years, Israeli forces and terrorists had killed ten times as many Palestinians as Israeli civilians who died on 10/7.
"They declared war on Israel as soon as the partition was announced, with the stated intent of destroying it."
Just stop Kevin. Seriously. Stick to topics that you've actually bothered to study.
First off, how could they declare war on Israel when Israel didn't even exist at that point? The partition plan was a plan only, it was never adopted since the UN had no authority to enforce the plan.
There WERE skirmishes back and forth at that point but no one declared war following the announcement of the partition plan.
War was only declared when the Jewish leaders announced the creation of Israel one day before the end of the British Mandate. And declaring war was hardly an unreasonable reaction to a minority popualtion declaring a country within Palestine and upending the right to self-determination within the territory. I mean, how does Kevin think they were supposed to react to that news???
emh1969, your tone is hot but I think you are right in the facts.
I hope Kevin takes on your question, it's a good one. For the reasons you cite I don't think 1948 should be described as an "Arab War"
The UN really screwed up with their "proposed" "plan". It arrogantly brushed self-determination aside, it gave the illusion of international law to a partition that was never approved by the locals.
Here is a question to ask yourself: Why didn't the UN follow its own Charter and try to facilitate self-determination?
Everything I wrote comes straight from Wikipedia. It's why Kevin's mangling of the facts annoyed me so much. It's not hard to find the correct information.
As for the UN charter, I've not found a conclusive answer regarding what it said re: self-determination in 1947. The League of Nations charter definitely was pro-self-determiniation. But I'm not sure what the UN said at that point. If you have a definitive source, feel free to link to it.
I also think about this. There are parts of Israel that are Arab majority. If those parts decided to form their own country, would Israel let them? Of course not. So again, why should the Arab reaction to Isreal declaring themselves a country be surprising?
Hey, you are right on the facts.
Wikipedia is amazing:
"The UN Charter and resolutions
Chapter 1, Article 1, part 2 states that purpose of the UN Charter is: "To develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, and to take other appropriate measures to strengthen universal peace."
Chapter 1, Article 1, part 2. Sounds like near the top.
As for the UN charter, I've not found a conclusive answer regarding what it said re: self-determination in 1947.
Chapter I, Article 2, Paragraph 7 reads:
Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state or shall require the Members to submit such matters to settlement under the present Charter; but this principle shall not prejudice the application of enforcement measures under Chapter Vll.
The Palestinian Mandate established Palestine as a state. Whether or not parts of it would be broken off to form a new state that was based upon the ethnicity of a minority within that state is definitely "within the domestic jurisdiction" of Palestine. The U.N. getting involved violated its own charter.
That part of the Charter has never been amended.
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter/full-text
> And declaring war was hardly an unreasonable reaction to a minority popualtion declaring a country within Palestine and upending the right to self-determination within the territory.
That was 70 years ago. Are they going to keep sacrificing their children for land that they'll never get?
Educating people on past injustice is the best play the Palestinians have. A 'South Africa' strategy of international could possibly lead to a sovereign state.
I agree it's the best play they have. Unfortunately they go too far and obfuscate facts inconvenient to their narrative, like the attack on legal Jewish settlements well before the partition.
That's the best you can do? Maybe it is time to reflect.
They go to far?
Israel has killed 10s of times more Palestinians. Settlers have burned and destroyed hundreds of buildings and ancient trees.
And that was just in the last two decades before 10/7.
Hmmm...I'm simply pointing out that what they did back in 1948 was hardly surprising or unreasonable. Kevin, though, seems to be taking a "bad Arab, bad" approach.
I mean, yeah. We are discussing history here. Kinda weird to say why are you guys obsessing about all this stuff that happened so long ago.
An act can be entirely understandable and still unconscionable.
Yes, the Arabs behaved understandably and unsurprisingly. That doesn't make it right.
Considering that Jewish irredentism lasted for the best part of two millennia, it doesn't seem unreasonable that Palestinian irredentism should last a century or two.
Sorry, but irredentism is stupid no matter who does it. It's extra stupid, however, when Palestinians do it, because they want us to reject Zionist irredentism while accepting their own.
How about Tlaib? She wants one state with equal rights for all.
Sounds great! While we're wishing for impossible things, I would also like a pony that can fart rainbows.
Drum's argument is that the horrible things that Israel has done to the Palestinians in the last 20 years can be understood on the basis that the good guys have faced the irrational people for 70 years. It is funny for you to turn it around and say what happened 70 years ago shouldn't matter. The problem, of course, is that it leaves the horrible things that Israel has done the last 20 years without much justification.
(I know Drum is saying that it isn't just what happened 70 years ago, but what he sees as having happened since. But oddly he doesn't see the things that have been done to the Palestinians between 70 years ago and 20 years ago. A very strange blind spot.)
If the Israelis lost that war what do you think would have happened? In fact, if they lost any of those wars what would have happened? The countries that lost are still there.
Do you think that Egypt and Jordan, having beaten Israel, would have established a Palestinian State?
Ummm. Jordan won the West Bank in 1948. Eventually they let go of it.
So, maybe n=1, but the answer is yes.
Uh huh. I know you know better. And I know why you didn’t answer the other questions.
No, I don't know better. Egypt didn't want Gaza, Jordan didn't want the West Bank. What is obvious to you is not obvious to me.
Eventually they "let go of it".
Holy Cow. You ever hear of the Six Day War? When Jordan invaded Israel and Israel took over the West Bank? Losing territory after you invade is "letting it go"?
After that, they would have had to recognize Israel to get it back, and they refused.
So you are saying that if Israel lost the war they would be in the position the Palestinians are of not having a state? And this is supposed to be awful because they are not like Palestinians, for whom it doesn't matter if they have a state?
No, I’m saying the Jewish Israelis would be refugees or dead.
As opposed to now, when tens of times as many Palestinians are dead vs Islraelis? And Palestinians are considered refugees or prisoners?
So, what would you have had the Jewish leaders do... NOT declare independence and not get their own state? It's like you are blaming the Israeli desire for self-determination as the cause for the Arab states trying to expunge them or something.
That would be correct; it was Jewish irredentism that caused this whole mess.
Yes, the desire for genocide and ethnic cleansing on the part of early Israeli leaders started that war.
How are they supposed to react? Don't recognize them.
You left off the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a Jewish extremist, which I think was a pretty key event. He was dedicated to finding a path to peace and was succeeded by a right-wing government which was anything but. This may have been one of the most successful political assassinations of the 20th century in the sense that the political goal of stopping a 2 state solution was complete achieved.
Pre-Neolithic hunter-gatherer bands were not a utopias, but they were socially harmonious. Individual bands were separate social systems because they were socially and economically autonomous. The system's size was stable at roughly a handful of families, and the number of systems increased for thousands of generations. And then the Neolithic Period began roughly 400 generations or 100 centuries ago due to a combination of increasing population and not-increasing terrestrial territory.
Every human is still a subject of a socially and economically autonomous social system, except that the number of social systems in the 21st century is precisely one. The world will change for the better when enough people acknowledge this reality by discarding any "us versus them" delusions.
The "system" was obvious in a pre-Neolithic context. It's less obvious now, but a lot more because it's something people don't want to know than for any other reason.
Kevin ... thanks for the history lesson. We can all be less ignorant a little bit at a time.
It strikes me that the entire history of modern Israel and Arab opposition to its founding is an extreme case of group polarization. Likud and Hamas are mirror images of one another.
But what's going on in Gaza now looks like ethnic cleansing in process. Hamas could never achieve that. Only Israel, with the support of its allies, chiefly the U.S.
Hamas and other Palestinian groups resisting Israeli acquisitive aggression mimicked Haganah, Irgun, the Stern Gang. Likud is an ideological party based on the supremacy of ethnic Jewish Israelis. Likud mimics the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.
A sordid history driven by hatred.
The 1967 Six Day War was a pre-emptive war launched by Israel after getting (dubious) intelligence reports that Egypt was getting ready to attack again. Claiming "Arab states plan a war of destruction against Israel but are stopped before it can begin" is beyond disingenuous.
Dubious? When Egypt orders the withdrawal of UN forces on the border and orders his troops to the border, while committing an act of war by closing the Straits of Tiran? And Egypt and Jordan signed a defense pact May 30, and brought troops from Iraq into Jordan.
Sure, no reason to suspect anything bad would happen, it was all Israeli aggression.
Got it.
Meh.
Moshe Dayan wrote something about how the IDF would keep sending tractors deeper and deeper into the neutral zone between Israel and Syria until they provoked an attack.
Was Egypt doing bellicose things? Yes, but a lot of them were probably performative.
The underlying truth, I think, was that Israel saw itself in an advantageous position and wanted war in order to secure and enhance that position ... which of course a pre-emptive attack would be ideal for.
Remember that Israel had invaded the Sinai before, in 1954, with the pretext that they, along with Britain and France, were just "protecting" traffic through the Suez Canal after Egypt had nationalized it.
Re: The map at the start of the page
The neighboring countries saw that map as another case of the Global North (the UN) drawing boundaries and establishing colonies.
Weren't some of the neighboring countries creations of the same kind of process after WWI? Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, e.g.
I don't see how this argument is different from saying to black Americans today: sorry guys, the time to fight against slavery was back in Africa when slave traders took your ancestors captive and brought them to America. Your ancestors lost those battles, so you have to accept horrible treatment, forever. You got a beef? Take it up with your long-dead ancestors.
Obviously I am exaggerating to make a point, which should be obvious. Treat people badly and they will make your life hell until you agree to treat them better. That's why I don't agree that Israel's behavior is "understandable" as this blog post argues. Is it really "understandable" that Israel would take actions that would make the lives of its citizens so fragile, unstable, and vulnerable for so long? Might be "understandable" if you are Benjamin Netanyahu and his pals, I concede, and your goal is to get a coalition together in parliament.
Remember that before the French revolution, the gentry and the clergy did not pay taxes. I guess that was the fault of the workers, who had allowed it to happen. They should have, therefore, just sucked it up and paid all the taxes themselves I guess. But did they?
There are thee kinds of between-human interactions. The ideal interaction is mutually respectful because it is constrained by the "treat others as you would like to be treated" principle. If you are the "do as I say and not as I do" person in a unilaterally respectful interaction, then you think everything is fine. Trust me, it is not fine. You think you are in control. You are not in control. Instead, you are incredibly frustrating. It seems fine because the other party is doing an effective job of controlling their anger because, although they know that a unilaterally respectful interaction is really bad, they also know that mutual disrespect is so much worse.
The shortest, simplest, and most obvious explanation (and hey, what did that fellow Occam say?) is the one that makes the most sense, namely that Zionists intended from the very beginning to seize all the land 'from the river to the sea' and they won't stop with their ethnic cleansing/genocide until they get it all.
This is shouldn't be any mystery, no matter how many people claim otherwise (some in good faith, most most definitely not). Note, BTW, that I called what Israel would do months ago (and before anyone tries to twist my words, that's shorthand for the current governing coalition), namely that they would push for all the land they could 'plausibly' get under cover of their enablers and kill as many Palestinians as they 'plausibly' could with the same said cover.
Was I right, or was I right 🙁
The most honest, I think, of the early Zionists was Vladimir Jabotinsky.
He made no bones about the Zionist intent of stealing the land, nor laid any blame for the Arabs resisting it. He was basically a fascist, but he was probably less racist than a lot of his peers, who essentially assumed that they could foist their designs onto primitive opponents.
Jabotinsky also had some interesting ideas about dual-nationality states that were never tried.
They declared war on Israel as soon as the partition was announced, with the stated intent of destroying it.
I don't know how many times I have to post this, but This. Is. Not. True. The U.N. Partition Plan was itself an act of war. It violated both the Palestinian Mandate and the U.N. Charter. Arguing that it was in any way valid can only be premised upon the idea that European powers (and the United States) have an inherent authority to divide up Asian and African territories as they see fit.
The Arabs didn't declare war. They responded to the fact that war had been declared against them.
In 1988 Palestinians launched the First Intifada, a civil uprising against Israelis. This happened against a background, over the previous two decades, of hijackings, terrorist attacks, missiles launched into Israeli territory, PLO attacks across the Lebanese border, and the establishment of Hezbollah after the Lebanon War.
Not mentioning that this also happened against a background of continuous land theft by the Israelis is obtuse to the point of dishonesty. Kevin, you have dug in and are now spewing what is nothing but propaganda. This set of posts is, by far, the worst you have ever made.
"I don't know how many times I have to post this, but This. Is. Not. True. The U.N. Partition Plan was itself an act of war. It violated both the Palestinian Mandate and the U.N. Charter. Arguing that it was in any way valid can only be premised upon the idea that European powers (and the United States) have an inherent authority to divide up Asian and African territories as they see fit."
I think people argue it because they have deeply internalized that yes, it was OK for European powers and the US to divide up other countries.
To get to Kevin's main point, I think this is where the generations differ. Young people aren't buying it. Not because they don't know the history, but because they see through the BS.
I can see where deeply vested people could argue a point that they know is wrong on the facts.
What I can't see and can't condone is people deliberately refusing to address those facts. In any way. That is deeply dishonest, and more to the point, a) this is an implicit acknowledgment they've lost on the basis of those facts, but b) they were never going to concede anyway, know matter how much the truth redounds to their case or not.
They mean to poison the well no matter the long-term conseqauences so long as they get what they want in the short term.
Good God! Please stop with the "colonization" narrative. Have you heard about the Second World War? The "European Powers" did not send a bunch of random Brits, French, Belgians, and Spaniards to "colonize" the Levant. The situation for Jews in Europe (and Soviet Russia) was dire. The Allied powers knew that what had happened so many times before would happen again without a Jewish homeland where they could defend themselves.
History is a funny thing. You can start at whatever point you want if it confirms your narrative. But it didn't start in 1948.
Strange you respond to a comment as the "colonization narrative" when the comment doesn't use the word.
The comment referred to European powers and the US dividing up other countries.
How is that not descriptively accurate? Do you believe in self-determination or not?
Self determination for me, but not for thee - seems to be this person's ethos. Just judging by their comments overall.
You just need to shut up and go away.
I frankly agree that the Jewish People have a right to have a state, and that the Europeans have an obligation to help them get one, as reparations for centuries of discrimination.
Where you cross the line into evil is that you accept that this makes it fine for the Europeans and the Zionists to have stolen land from the Palestinian Arabs in order to create such a state.
I'm trying to understand the logic of this position. Let's assume, as you seem to do, that since the founding of Israel Arabs have not initiated war but only responded to war being waged against them. What does that say about the attack of October 7? Was it just a justified attack against oppression that Palestinians are suffering? Was it an unjustified and heinous terrorist attack against innocent civilians? Was it something else? Was Israel justified in responding to the slaughter of its civilians? (I'm not asking if the specific military action of the past two months was justified but whether the nation of Israel had a right to respond to protect its people.)
That isn't what his comment said.
The reason we're having a discussion of events of the past is because of events of this fall. I'm trying to understand how his point about what happened then is relevant now.
The U.N. Partition Plan was itself an act of war. ... The Arabs didn't declare war. They responded to the fact that war had been declared against them.
Where does the logic of this lead? Does it in some way excuse / justify Oct 7 as a response to war or oppression waged against Palestinians? Or not?
It is broadly recognized that occupied people have the right to resist occupation.
Does this make it OK for them to murder children and commit rapes?
No.
But it does give them the right to use violence against their occupiers.
It shouldn't be necessary to note that the murders and rapes and hostage-taking of Jews on Oct 7 was not directed at occupiers or oppressors, but at innocent civilians. That's what Hamas did.
And it is not Hamas that's an oppressed party. There's plenty of evidence that the Netanyahu government has supported Hamas. It is the presence of Hamas that has given Netanyahu political support at home.
The victims here are innocent Palestinians and Israelis. Both groups are poorly served by the so-called leaders fighting in their name.
If you argue that Palestinians have the right to use violence against Israelis, then by a similar principle you might argue that Israelis have a right to use violence in retaliation to a terrorist attack. Everyone's got a right to use violence. And here we are.
Your information is contorted and your interpretations are wrong.
Life in general, and extremely so in this part of the world, is not so black and white. There is no justification for the kind of terror and slaughter of Isreali and other civilians on October 7. None, ever. But that does not mean there is no understandable motivation. Exactly the same applies to what Isreal is doing right now and for two months so far. There is no justification for the wanton slaughter of non-combatants and children, none. There is no justification for cutting off food, water, fuel, electricity, medicine to a population of 2 million people, none. As with Hamas, I can understand Isreal's motivations, its emotional ones at least. But again, as with Hamas's atrocities, I am heartbroken and outraged by Isreal's actions.
Stop killing the Jews. Stop killing the Palestinians. Down with Hamas, down with the Likud party and its even worse coalition partners.
Sadly, in the case of Isreal's war crimes, so much of the "civilized" west is fully or tacitly complicit. And Isreal's crimes are continuing and even escalating. We can not turn back the clock but we must try to avoid an even more horrific future.
Very well said.
"But that does not mean there is no understandable motivation."
Yes, there is understandable motivation. Too often, that gets mistaken for justification, and I think we can agree that it's not the same thing.
The "understandable motivation" is true for each side, whether people want to admit it or not. Much of this debate comes down to "the history of my side" trumps "the history of the other side." Nothing is settled. The heartbreak and tragedy continue.
The violence will end when both sides decide to make a better future for their children and grandchildren, instead of trying to avenge their parents and grandparents.
Pure sophistry. The Israelis were going to exercise their right to self-determination and the Arab states were going to attack to prevent that from happening. Legitimacy of UN partition plans is irrelevant to the key fact here guys.
And I am also trying to figure out how you all thought this should have gone down. Best as I can figure you do not think that Israel should have declared independence or something?
Basically right.
I'm a little younger than Drum, but I was brought up on the largely the same propaganda as he apparently was: "Poor little Israel good; powerful Arabs bad."
The West -- and certainly America -- has almost completely ignored the Arab version of the history of the conflict.
And the Arab version of the history of the conflict has the advantage of being more accurate and more recognizing of progressive notions of universal human rights.
Is there a formal name for argument through repeated pretend ignorance? And could I ask for the 999th (or is it the 9,999th) time for a downvote button, or failing that, the option to ignore certain people who have demonstrated a repeated and consistent pattern of bad faith?
The argument here seems to be that while people today are offended that Israel is claiming 78% of the territory, but back in the day their 33% of the population was only offered 55% of the territory, so it is all fine. He also oddly thinks it helps that Jerusalem was to be an international city, so the Palestinians 67% wouldn't even get the other 45%.
With every post Drum just reminds us he grew up being told Israel was the good guys and nothing is going to change that view. He also leaves out that the Jews were brought in by the occupying power, so even the 33% is imposed. It is stunning that he gave that map to show the partition was reasonable. The best one can do with that map is say the British were awful so conflict was inevitable and not the fault of the Jews who moved there.
But seriously I don't know how Drum could make clearer that this is a blind spot of his from learning to identify with the Jews and not the Arabs.
What territory are you talking about? The British Mandate? They gave 70% to Arabs (Jordan) then another 15% to Arabs (Palestine). Then the Arabs invaded to make it 100%.
Jews were "brought in by the occupying power".
Holy Cow. I'll make it easy for you. You don't need to read any boring books. It's an old movie called Exodus.
I see what you did that, you erased the Palestinians as a people.Very clever in a bigoted kind of way. Of course that still gets the population numbers wrong since it remains true that the territory that Jews wanted to create a state on had an Arab majority and only through creating a major refugee crisis could Israel get a Jewish state on the territory that was granted to it.
Did the Arabs in Jordan identify as Palestinian, or Jordanian?
If my calling the residents of Palestine Arabs offends you, I apologize.
I never mentioned population, so I don't know why you feel compelled to tell me I am wrong.
But here is my favorite:
only through creating a major refugee crisis could Israel get a Jewish state on the territory that was granted to it.
So you believe Israel created the major refugee crisis.
You may want to google something called the Holocaust. It was perpetrated by people called Nazis. They were the cause of the refugee crisis. They were not related to Israel.
Now that you know that, maybe you want to reconsider blaming Israel for the Holocaust. Otherwise someone here might call you a bigot.
> "Jews were brought in by the occupying power."
I don't think it's accurate to say that Kevin sees Israel as the "good guys" -- read his previous post about the conflict. My view is that there are no good guys in the current situation. But until Hamas and certain other fundamentalist Islamist factions (notice I didn't say "Arab" because Hamas is supported by the Persian theocracy as well) are willing to give up their devotion to complete obliteration of Israel, there can be no peace. Similarly, on the Israeli side, there has to be a rejection of their hard-core fundamentalist faction as well. This is very difficult because of their 80-year history of constant battle. I would be glad to see the overthrow of the Likud coalition.
But one thing is for sure: this nonsense about Israel being a "colonial power" that has displaced "indigenous" Palestinians has to stop. The effort to fit this conflict into a fashionable American progressive framework is not helping. Maybe some young people think it's cool to pick the Palestinian "side," but this is serious shit.
Why do you put "colonial power" in quotes? No one but you said that. Are you quoting yourself?
And "indigenous":
Do you realize only you used that word?
You are responding to arguments you are hearing elsewhere.
Have you read any of Drum's other posts, including the one above? Drum has a child's sense of the conflict that has the Jews as the good guys. In fact he has this to the degree that he is able to list the catalogue of horrors from his last post and still not blame Israel for the conflict. The post above is supposed to explain why being critical of Israel based on the list of horrors from the last post makes one ahistoric as if history can justify the things on that list.
He has it to the degree that he refuses to address repeated cites of the actual historical record.
Israel IS a settler colonial state that has displaced indigenous Palestinians.
Pretending that it is not so does not change that.
You seem just to be racist.
Israel's Jewish population has a majority who are from Arab countries.
If you want to call Israel a colonial state, go ahead.
Non sequitur.
You might as well just say that all the Israelis are from planet earth, so none of them are colonials.
Agreed.
Actually I said something wrong in my last comment there is a way to tell that Drum has simply embraced the Jewish fairy tale version. He actually claims that settlements were built to protect Israel. I have certainly heard that before, but it is completely inane. Why would anyone protect themselves by moving civilians into occupied territory? Settlements are by their nature an irritant to the occupied people, and guarantee more terrorism, not less. And civilians living among occupied people are comparatively easy targets, hard to defend.
But Drum doesn't even seem to feel the need to explain how, say, putting settlements in Gaza made Israel safer. Or how allowing radical religious settlers to take over religious sites next to a Palestinians city (an act that unsurprisingly led to the massacre of Muslims at prayer, which Israel used as an excuse to limit the movement of Palestinians in Hebron) is conducive to security.
If he had said "Israel decided to sacrifice the lives of some of its civilians by building settlements on occupied territory" it would have made more sense. But here Drum is actually trying to justify the main tool that Israel has used to prevent peace as if it was a security measure. Drum is an intelligent person. But that is hard to square with his repeating the utter nonsense that settlements were security measures.
(Part of the way this nonsense got started was that people would point to the thinness of Israel and argue that for the sake of defense Israel needs to be wider. Often it is said that Israel is indefensible with the borders that it has repeatedly defended at a time when its army was less dominant than it is today. But this ignores that Israel has not used its settlements to widen its territory, it has used its settlement to make the West Bank less cohesive which makes the idea of a Palestinian state less viable. So settlements have not protected Israel from the risk of violence, it has cost them some civilian lives while protecting them from the risk of having to give the Palestinians a state.)
Given this willingness of people in the state to reinterpret Israel's attempts to avoid peace as reasonable is it any surprise that Israel has felt willing to do the things Drum reluctantly criticizes. When even settlements can be twisted to sound reasonable Israel reasonably concluded that nothing it could do would lose supporters like Drum.
"Settlements are by their nature an irritant to the occupied people, and guarantee more terrorism, not less."
Yeah, and the settlers themselves tend to be millenarian fundamentalists.
I once talked to a settler in Hebron. He was about the most irritating person I have ever met. God knows what I would do if he shoved his way into my neighborhood. I guess nothing, you wouldn't believe how many soldiers with guns were assigned to a few blocks.
I spoke with non-fanatic people inside the green line. They didn't know how offensive the settlers were, and they didn't want to know. They could not imagine why I went to Hebron. They are "so done" with Palestinians. Their indifference was chilling because they were so nice. They so deeply did not care.
Nice Polite Republicans.
There were some settlements along the border with Jordan that were built with the intent that they would keep a Jordanian incursion from being welcomed with open arms by the locals.
So that's defensive.
Also, the West Bank -- and the Syrian Golan Heights, which get ignored a lot these days -- are higher ground than the coastal areas, making artillery attacks from them easier.
Occupying the Golan Heights does confer a military advantage, and doesn’t appreciably change the length of the Israel-Syria border. If the settlements were actually defensive, they would have been placed so as to shorten Israel’s borders. Instead, scattered settlements create far more border to defend, and prevent the concentration of, and hinder the redeployment of defensive forces.
As long as you are talking about Arab aggression, and inflating the number of Palestinians ejected from the West Bank, you can mention the hundreds of thousands of Jews ejected by Arab countries.
Israel absorbed them.
Arab countries forced the Palestinians into refugee camps, and they are still there to this day. Arab countries refuse to absorb them.
Arab countries forced Palestinians into refugee camps?
No, the people forcing the Palestinians out of their homes and to become refugees forced the Palestinians into refugee camps. Come on, man. You can't blame a bystander for the behavior of another.
No, Israel forced some Palestinians into Jordan, Lebanon, and I think Egypt. Some left on their own volition. We can argue about the relative sizes of those groups.
Arab countries forces some Jews out, and some Jews left of their own volition.
Israel absorbed the refugees. Arab countries refused to absorb a significant portion. Once refugees crossed the border, the choice of how they were treated was up to the receiving country.
Israel did not force refugees into camps any more than Arab countries forced Israel to absorb refugees.
I think this is the central driver of the ongoing conflict: the surrounding Arab nations have not let the Palestinians leave, and assimilate somewhere else.
If the Germans still kept the Silesians, Pomeranians, and Sudetendeutsche penned up in refugee camps on the border of Poland and encouraged them to think of themselves as refugees who would only have a home if they re-took their former homeland from the Poles and Czechs, there would be an ongoing crisis in Europe too. (And more Germans were forced to leave territory that had been German for centuries in the late 1940's than Palestinians were forced to leave Palestine.)
Um, I don't see how one can squint hard enough to have that POV. Obviously the central driver is that the Palestinians don't want to leave but Isreal is driving them out.
I'm not seeing the distinction you are making. The Russians and Poles forced the Pomeranians to leave Pomerania, with what they could carry in their hands. Whether they wanted to leave was entirely irrelevant.
The Germans didn’t have that choice because they were an occupied country.
Missleading.
Israel courted and welcomed Jews from Muslim countries, in large part so that it could argue that there was no room for the Palestinians to return.
Also, there was a rather racist notion among the Ashkenazi (European) Zionists that the Mizrahi (Middle Eastern) Jews would be primitives who could be moved into the labor positions Palestinian Arabs once held. In reality, a lot of the Mizrahi were more prominent in their home countries than the Ashkenazis had been.
Also, Arab countries recognized -- correctly -- that if they assimilated the Palestinians, Israel and the West would proclaim the problem solved, and the ethnic cleansing a complete non-issue.
Also, Arab countries recognized -- correctly -- that if they assimilated the Palestinians, Israel and the West would proclaim the problem solved, and the ethnic cleansing a complete non-issue.
Yes, exactly: that would have been a much better outcome. Just as the Potsdam plan was basically "we won, you lost, we're taking your land and you can go somewhere else" was the deal the eastern Germans got--the Arabs in Palestine would have been better off with the same deal.
And I take it your advice to women being raped is that they should just lie back and try to enjoy it.
One other comment on this string of posts by Drum. One of the reasons his framing is the college students who protest the behavior of Israel. But, of course, the split is not between the college students and historians. The split is between the college students and older non-historians like Drum. I don't doubt one can find historians pushing Drum's line, but it is by no means a line generally accepted by historians.
One highlight is that the cleansing of a large population of Palestinians never actually makes it into his account. I suspect that is because when Drum was learning the story Western historians generally accepted the idea that the Palestinians made themselves refugees to get out of the way of a hoped for Arab victory. It was only when Israeli historians started calling BS on that account that it was not simply taken for granted in the West. (The fact that Palestinian historians did not make this make this mistake didn't matter because who cared what Palestinians said back then).
As a historical context, 1948 is way too recent a starting point.
As a way of illustrating the (highly influential) lived experience of their twenties for someone now in their mid-to-late sixties upto their mid-eighties, its pretty good. But - as Kevin clearly recognises - the lived experience of anyone under about forty is very different.
I’m obviously not a great fan of Israel (and especially the right wing settler government) but I do understand the basically Israeli anger and I don’t think it’s realistic to expect their response to be something along the lines of “we deserved this”. The problem from my perspective is how to respond to an attack launched mainly from underground tunnels under a densely populated area. I don’t see a way for the Israeli army to hit back without the massive civilian casualties we’ve seen (and particularly of non political innocents like children) but neither do I see them just walking away to continually suffer similar attacks in the future. I think from the moment that Hamas decided to make their attack, the brutal Israeli response was predetermined.
Israel responded in rage, which maybe is understandable, but which maybe is also what Hamas was hoping for.
In any case, if you accept as I do that essentially the only legitimate reason that the deaths of innocent civilians and children can be justified is if it serves to preserve the lives of an equal or greater number of innocent civilians and children, Israel's attack on Gaza is completely unjustified.
The October 7 attack was so devastating mostly because Israel had almost completely dropped its guard. The Gaza destruction is maybe preserving a few innocent lives that would have been lost to rocket attacks from Gaza that were not intercepted, but other than that, just increasing the security around Gaza would prevent a repeat of the attack with probably no innocents killed at all.
A brief history that leaves out the Nakba is brief indeed.
Aside from that, more relevant than a brief history of Jews vs Arabs might be a brief history of extremists vs the rest. Then I think the killing of Rabin might make it onto the list of events. And also the fact that Israel, far from taking "harsher and harsher measures to protect itself", CEASED to protect its Gaza border in order to take harsher and harsher measures against West Bank innocents.
Aside from even that, what is happening in Gaza is inexcusable whatever the history.
It is excusable to protect yourself, but it is inexcusable to treat others like you would not want to be treated if you were in their shoes whatever the history.
Authoritarianism is not a valid response to terrorism. Terrorism is an inexcusable response to authoritarianism, and authoritarianism is an inexcusable response. Full stop.
Time for some cites again, I guess. Here's what a tru-blu fer real fer sher Zionist has to say:
But hey, that doesn't really mean that Israel is bent on ethnic cleansing and genocide, amirite 🙁
1988: Palestinians launch the First Intifada. They lost
No they did not lose. If they had "lost" there would not have been the Oslo Accords. The last thing Israel wanted was continued unrest and continued wearing down of the IDF in occupation duty. Thus they came to the negotiating table because they had enlightened, smart leadership looking out for its best interest.
The Second Intifada did indeed fail and failed miserably and is why we have a full scale war between Israel and Hamas on our hands. Because it took place in the immediate aftermath of the failed peace treaty, its basically destroyed the peace party in Israel and ultimately destroyed the Labor Party itself which has led to the extreme Israeli government. In the past I had always noted the peace deal was less than optimal for the Palestinians and they were right to walk away from it. In retrospect that was wrong-headed thinking. Yes it was a shitty deal but sometimes you have to take the shitty deal in order to take a step forward at least and keep working until you get a better deal as any Irish revolutionary will tell you. Wrecking the peace deal ultimately wrecked Fatah itself and led to the rise of Hamas (cynically aided by the Israelis themselves.). Everyone acted poorly in this regard because as you can see, it was simply history repeating itself.
Kevin's summary of Palestinian history reads sort of like American Indian history as written by President Grover Cleveland.
Perhaps I'm being naive here but I generally accept Kevin's timeline of events. My really concern is where does Israel and Palestine go from here? What are the solutions and barriers to peace? We can talk about the past and who is responsible for what, but where do we go from here? Israel isn't disappearing and Hamas seems to continue to thrive. Removing Bibi would be a great start but I'm not sure that's gonna happen anytime soon and Hamas remains as committed as ever.
Where do we go from here? Blink. I would have thought it obvious, and have said so more than once. Peace will happen when Israel gets all the marbles by forcible displacement and mass murder of the Palestinians. We're close to the endgame now, as these things are measured: I'd say not more than fifty years before the Zionist project is brought to a successful conclusion (with much handwringing and wailing by the usual ineffectual parties, of course). And then, fifty years after the fait accompli, long, long after anything can be done to redress the injustice, Israel will be safe to at long last denounce the atrocities upon which it was founded and say that the people who did those were very bad people, let's give the surviving Palestinians a meaningless holiday to make up for it.
TL;DR: IOW, same as it ever was.
Missing pieces:
1918: Britain decides to deny the people of Palestine self-government in order to allow the creation of a "Jewish home" in their territory. A big part of Britain's intent with this is to thwart the creation of a unified Arab state.
1936-39: Britain fights a minor war against the Arab population of Palestine, disarming them.
1947: the United Nations passes Resolution 181, calling for the creation of a Jewish and an Arab state in Palestine, with Jerusalem designated an "international city." The boundaries of the two states are prejudicialy drawn to maximize the territory of the Jewish state while allowing it to have a comfortable Jewish majority.
1948: Folke Bernadotte, appointed the United Nations Mediator in Palestine, is murdered by Jewish terrorists prior to him being able to file a report noting that the partition plan was grossly unfair to the Arab population.
Without that background, starting in 1948 and blaming the Arab regimes for refusing to lie back and enjoy being raped is just pretty racist.
Another missing piece of 1948 was that Truman didn't want to acknowledge Israel as a state and initially refused to do so. But hey, 1948 is also an election year and a coalition of Zionists and their backers paid him a friendly little visit and said hey, that's a nice little Presidency you have there, be a shame if you'd lose it, which you will if you don't get the Jewish vote in those Northeast states you need to win ...
Extoration, pure and simple. So I really don't see how anyone can say with a straight face that the United States was a willing sponsor of Israeli staehood.
ScentofViolets
"be a shame if you'd lose it, which you will if you don't get the Jewish vote in those Northeast states you need to win"
Can you provide sources for that? I highly doubt it.
Here's the result of the electoral college votes in 1948.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2f/ElectoralCollege1948.svg/700px-ElectoralCollege1948.svg.png
Spoiler: he lost every goddamn state in the northeast, except for MA and RI. Even if he lost them, he would have won. So your statement is fantasy.
The Jewish population was about 3% at the time, almost half of that in NY, which he lost.
The Jewish vote was almost inconsequential.
What drove politics then as now was campaign contributions.
Gore Vidal: "Sometime in the late 1950s, that world-class gossip and occasional historian, John F. Kennedy, told me how, in 1948, Harry S. Truman had been pretty much abandoned by everyone when he came to run for president. Then an American Zionist brought him two million dollars in cash, in a suitcase, aboard his whistle-stop campaign train. ‘That’s why our recognition of Israel was rushed through so fast.’ As neither Jack nor I was an antisemite (unlike his father and my grandfather) we took this to be just another funny story about Truman and the serene corruption of American politics."
ProbStat,
Why do you date the decision to create a "Jewish home" to 1918?
The world-famous document that used the term "national home for the Jewish people" was written in 1917, as I am sure you know.
And I am sure you know that the single sentence declaration also contains the phrase "it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine"
But that part of the document completely contradicts your point, doesn't it? However, if you move it to 1918, you can just generalize something about "Jewish home" blah blah blah.
The old joke was, "Why does the sun never set on the British Empire?"
"Because God doesn't trust the British in the dark."
In 1907, a commission convened by British Prime Minister Campbell-Bannerman issued a report declaring "There are people who control spacious territories teeming with manifest and hidden resources. They dominate the intersections of world routes. Their lands were the cradles of human civilizations and religions. These people have one faith, one language, one history and the same aspirations. No natural barriers can isolate these people from one another ... if, per chance, this nation were to be unified into one state, it would then take the fate of the world into its hands and would separate Europe from the rest of the world. Taking these considerations seriously, a foreign body should be planted in the heart of this nation to prevent the convergence of its wings in such a way that it could exhaust its powers in never-ending wars. It could also serve as a springboard for the West to gain its coveted objects."
(Didn't answer your question in time for edit to be accepted.)
As you probably know, the British made contradictory promises to the Arabs and the Zionists. It was at some time between 1917 and 1919 that it was decided that they would go with the promise to the Zionists, and the plans were made to create the Palestinian Mandate ruled by Britain.
1918 fits that time frame, but in any case the year doesn't matter much, does it?
And the British commitment to protect the rights of non-Jews mattered even less.
Good thread. One of these days, I will be able to stop obsessing over the history of what the Romans called Syria Palaestina. I know Israel is no angel. But the Arab countries are worse, and I place most of the blame for the conflict on them.
Anyway, I have wanted to share this with you all for some time now. It is a fascinating history of the 1967 war summarised by the BBC in 2017. Totally insane. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-39960461
You should bear in mind that most of the Arab countries are ruled by brutal dictatorships that America supports because they curtail the anti-Israel sentiments of their populations.