There follow some comments on Samuel Fleischacker’s second post in a series on the Israel-Palestine conflict which is appearing over at Normblog. You’ll find my response to his first post here.

1.

Fleishacker says,

There are non-Jewish, and anti-Zionist, citizens of Israel. There are also many Jews outside of Israel who see themselves as bound up with its fate and therefore support it as fervently as its most hardline citizens. Again, there are both Christian and Muslim Palestinians, and there are also Muslims across the world who identify with the fate of Palestine. I’ll therefore often characterize one side of the conflict as ‘Jews’ or ‘Zionists’ rather than ‘Israelis’, and the other side as ‘Arabs and Muslims’ rather than ‘Palestinians’. No single term for either side is a completely happy one, and it is well to keep in mind that the people who see themselves as having a stake in the conflict cut across a number of different religious, ethnic, and political lines: it is not simply a struggle between two groups living in a small sub-section of the Levant.

I agree with the last phrase in this quote but I don’t think that there is a legitimate analogy to be drawn between the interest in the fate of Israel taken by Jews who live outside it and the identification with the Palestinian cause felt by many Arabs and Muslims who have no direct interest in the conflict themselves.

The reason that I think this analogy is not legitimate is that the number of  Jews in the world is tiny and a lot hangs on the existence of Israel for many of them, both in terms of family connections and, bearing in mind their history of being  victims of expulsions, massacres and genocide,  as a refuge of last resort.

The number of both Arabs and Muslims in the world vastly exceeds the number of Jews and there are a number of states that characterize themselves as being Arab or Muslim. So, while the Palestinians themselves and Arabs and Muslims living in countries neighboring Israel have an obvious and legitimate interest in the Israel-Palestine conflict, I find it hard to accept that the interest in it of a Muslim living in, say, Cape Town or an Arab not of Palestinian descent in Buenos Aires ought to be accorded the same status in the debate as that of Jews living in the same cities.

I’m not saying that the intense interest shown by Arabs and Muslims throughout the world in the Israel-Palestine conflict can be ignored or that it is necessarily illegitimate. On the contrary, I think that the question of why some many people who are exercising their own national and religious rights with notable vigor and in a variety of contexts throughout the world are so obsessed with the existence of one, very small, nation state whose existence and activities have no effect whatever on them, is of very great importance but it’s an importance of another sort. Of course, this is a phenomenon noticeable among a great many people who are neither Arabs nor Muslims too.

2.

Referring to the Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war Fleischacker says,

It’s hard to see, therefore, why they and their children should not have a right to return to their old homes.

The return of those who fled or were expelled in 1948 and their children (why not their grandchildren too?) would spell the end of Israel as a nation state for its Jewish inhabitants. While repairing an injustice for one party to the conflict it would inflict a very grave injustice on the other party to it. Furthermore, if someone believes, and it’s not clear from his comments so far whether Fleischacker does or not, that justice requires all of the 1948 refugees, and some or all of the their descendants, to be allowed to live inside Green Line Israel, then that person is saying that the solution to the Israel-Palestine consists of the extinguishing of the right of Jews to self-determination and the replacement of  a state where they are predominant with one where Palestinian Arabs are predominant. Given the history of Jewish people living in Arab countries in recent decades one would not be optimistic about the long-term survival of any Jewish presence in such a state.

Also, if justice demands that the 1948 refugees have the right to move to Israel, does it not also demand that that all other refugees from conflicts related to the birth of new states, before and since, have the same right?  Or to put it in different terms; non-comparative analysis of the Israel-Palestinian conflict is subject to grave limitations when it comes to both examining the past and thinking about the future.

3.

Fleischacker, referring to the events of 1948, presents the task he has set himself in coming posts like this,

So the justice and injustice of what happened in 1948 really depends on the justice and injustice of the Zionist project as a whole. Israel’s legitimacy depends, not on the expulsion of Palestinians in 1948, but on whether the move to build a Jewish state on the land before that point was legitimate or not. By the time we get to 1948, so much hatred and violence had been built up between Arabs and Jews that both sides were trying to expel the others out of the land. The question is, who is responsible, or more responsible, for the circumstances that bred this history of hatred and violence?

While it’s good that he proposes to take a longer view that looks back before 1948, the idea of assessing the intrinsic justice of the Zionist project, and not only that of  things  done by it or on its behalf, seems more than a little odd. I mean, what prima facie grounds might exist for calling into question the Jewish national movement and not the national movements of say, the Irish or Armenians? I know that Fleischacker is only concerned here with the Israel-Palestine dispute and not the whole of modern world history, but nevertheless, why examine the justice of the national movement of only one side in the dispute? Is there something intrinsically just about the Palestinian cause that makes it unnecessary to examine it?  Fleishacker might respond to this by saying that the Palestinians were there first, on the ground, in what is now Israel. Who was where first is, of course, a relevant consideration in any dispute such as the Israel-Palestine one but having been there first doesn’t constitute a knock down argument with regard to the justice of any particular national cause.

So, leaving aside the question of whether examining the justice of the Zionist project doesn’t implicitly concede that there might be something odd or unnatural about Jews having national rights, we come to the question of how it might be done.  Confining the discussion to Zionism itself, how and where it arose and what has been done in its name, while essential, if done on its own will only end up creating and reinforcing a false impression of singularity about Jewish nationalism.

As we have no independent yardstick for assessing the justice of national movements the most  productive way to do so would be to compare Zionism with other national movements in the modern period. By doing this we could examine similarities and differences between Zionism and the national movements of other peoples and, perhaps, be able to draw tentative conclusions about the moral and ethical dimensions of its various activities and manifestations.

4.

Fleischacker concludes his post like this,

Who had title to the land of Palestine originally - whose land was it, anyway?

This question  suggests a rather hypostatized view of history. National sovereignty and rights are not like the title deeds to your house. If startling new archaeological evidence  was to demonstrate that some Roman emperor had ceded not only the land occupied by  Israel today but Gaza and the West Bank too, to the Jewish people for all eternity,  could that be taken to mean the extinction of Palestinian national rights? Of course it wouldn’t. Who occupies a given territory, who exercises sovereignty there, how the people identify themselves and what they want are all factors that must be taken into account when examining the political history of any region. However, there is no “originally” in history, no virgin moment when everyone was in their place and there was a place for everyone; there is only a certain state of affairs at a certain date and a certain balance of forces, with a scaffolding of class, national, ethnic and religious interests, yearnings and desires underlying them.