Over at Normblog and under the title ‘A Cool Hour on the Israel-Palestine Conflict’, Samuel Fleischacker begins what promises to be an extremely interesting series of posts here. Although I share his overall view that what is involved in this conflict is a “tragic clash of just claims”, I’d like to take issue here with some of the points he makes.
Fleischacker says,
Moreover, almost all Arabs and Muslims believe that the establishment of a Jewish state in what had previously been an Arab, Muslim area was a great injustice, to which there is no counterpart in the behaviour of Arabs and Muslims toward Jews.
This would indeed appear to be the case; the fact it is so is relevant to the debate. I think, though, that it is a belief open to serious challenge and on its own terms. If the establishment of non-Muslim and/or non-Arab sovereignty over an area that had long been under Arab and/or Muslim sovereignty is something that Muslims regard as being a great injustice, and the establishment of the Israel is only one example of a general category of such injustices, then there wouldn’t be too much, in this context, to say about the matter. However, if there are other examples of such historical developments and these do not seem to be regarded as examples of injustice, then we may reasonably ask ourselves whether there is a legitimate claim for justice inherent in this aspect of Arab and Muslim beliefs about the birth of Israel.
If there was genuine Muslim and Arab concern about all cases of Arab and/or Muslim land falling under non-Arab or non-Muslim sovereignty, then it’s easy to think of two cases which should have Arabs and Muslims greatly exercised but, in fact, about which they appear strangely untroubled. The first is the Turkish province of Hatay, which, with a substantial Arab population, was ceded by the French mandatory authorities from Syria to the Republic of Turkey in 1939. It might be argued here that the there is no perception of injustice because the Turks are Muslims. Well, the great bulk of Turkish people are Muslims but the Turkish state most certainly isn’t and there remain, the present AKP government notwithstanding, considerable impediments on Turkish citizens who want to openly profess their Muslim faith and at the same time participate fully in public life.
The second case is that of Chechnya. It enjoyed de facto independence from Russia between the ceasefire that ended the First Chechen War in 1996 and the fall of Grozny at the end of the Second Chechen War in February 2000. Putin’s war to crush the nascent Muslim nation and reincorporate it into Russia cost, at a minimum, tens of thousands of civilian lives.
I’d be really interested to know how, applying general principles applicable to all Arabs and Muslims, cries of “Unjust!” with regard to the existence of Israel can be reconciled with the comparative silence on Hatay and Chechnya.
Fleischacker also says,
I’ve also come to think that many of the claims Jews make on behalf of the justice of Zionism actually make the problem worse: pour salt in Arab wounds, as it were, and give people more reason to think that Zionism is based on force, not justice.
Surely the main point here is the soundness or otherwise of the claims made for the justice of Zionism. If those claims do indeed appear to be sound, then it falls to those who oppose Zionism to offer reasons to question their apparent soundness and if they cannot, to adjust their political position to take account of the fact that their rival has some measure of justice on his side.
Furthermore, the fact that Israel has had to resort to force to sustain itself on a number of occasions, or that it has developed a large and complex military infrastructure, says nothing at all about the justice or otherwise of the Zionist project. All nation states, to a greater or lesser degree, and either on their own or in consort with others, sustain their sovereignty by maintaining the means and reserving the right to do so by force.
The reason I make these points is that I detect, especially in the phrase about pouring salt in Arab wounds, a hint of a failure to take Arabs and their arguments entirely seriously, a feeling that arguments in favour of Zionism should be put forward with more care than one would use when, say, putting forward arguments for the independence of Catalonia, a whisper that if one finds some part of the anti-Zionist argument to be unconvincing them one should soft pedal how one expresses this lest the person making it be made to feel bad. This simply won’t do. In any debate worth having, one must start from the position that one’s rival is one’s equal and as serious a player as oneself and abstain from showing him the false mercy of condescension.
A final quote,
If the Jewish hegemony in Israel is an injustice, then Palestinians will - and should - continue unendingly to resist it. Only if they can see some justice in Zionism can they cease to feel aggrieved by it, and be willing to work towards a long-term co-existence with a Jewish state.
I agree that Palestinians recognizing some measure of justice in Zionism would be a good thing, as would more Israelis recognizing the existence of Palestinian national rights. However, I find the idea that Palestinians might have a beef about Jewish hegemony in Israel a bit odd. I share the reservations about nationalism that Fleischacker expresses elsewhere in the post but, both for better and for worse, the nation state seems to be the vehicle that most groups of humans who conceive of themselves as a people see as most appropriate for their self-realization and, in effect, for achieving a position of hegemony with regard to minority groups. That is the position with regard to Jews in Israel and I hope that sometime soon it will be the position of Palestinian Muslims in a new state of Palestine. I need hardly say that in neither case do I think that his justifies restrictions on the rights of minorities.
There is also the question of whether it would be necessary for Palestinians to see some justice in Zionism in order for it to be possible for them to “work towards a long-term co-existence with a Jewish state.” I have no doubt that it would be preferable for both sides to see some justice in the other’s cause, but I don’t think it’s an absolute prerequisite for peaceful co-existence. When confronted with what one perceives as injustice one may react in a number of possible ways; one may choose to fight it indirectly or directly, one may decide that the costs involved in undoing the injustice outweigh the benefits, one may decide to do nothing for now and reassess the situation later and a range of other things besides.The Palestinians, to the extent that they may be victims of injustice, are certainly entitled to struggle against it, but I think it’s going too far to suggest that that is the only valid option open to them.
I have often railed against the drawing of false analogies between the Israel-Palestine conflict and the Northern Ireland conflict, most recently here. However, in this case it offers a useful example. Given the fact that most Catholics in Northern Ireland vote for either the SDLP or Sinn Féin, parties dedicated to the achievement of a united, 32 county, Ireland, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that most of them think that they are victims of some sort of historical injustice dating back to the Plantations in the seventeenth century and the partition of the island in 1921. Nevertheless, they have resigned themselves to participation in political institutions in a political entity which they believe should not have come into existence in the first place.
So, even if a community feels itself to have been the victim of a political injustice that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s never going to accept long term co-existence with the community it believes to have been responsible for the injustice.
I await the rest of this series of posts with interest.
Concerning the single question you pose about the comparative silence on Hatay and Chechnya: I’m not aware of a substantial body of refugees from the conflicts in those countries that are actually forbidden from returning by the current rulers.
The matter raised by Fleischacker does not concern refugees.
I don’t understand why you left out Spain.
Spain was founded on the expulsion of Muslims from their land.
And to satisfy Dave Bush’s need for taking refugees into account, I wonder if the descendants of the Moors, coming back to the coasts of Spain as economic and political refugees from Morocco which are repelled by the Spanish Coast Guard would do the trick?
The “tragedy of al Andalus” was, in fact, cited by Bin Laden - as a parallel with Israel/Palestine.
Greece is a good example of a country, founded on ethnic cleansing (or population exchanges), which used to be Muslim land.
Fabian (and DAvid T for that matter):
The expulsion from Al Andalus wasn’t an expulsion of Arabs from native soil. It was a “reconquesta”, which is why the King of Spain offered the Sephardic Jews who fled the Inquisition an apology back in the 1990s and denied one to the Muslims who were compelled to leave. And Greece is not a good example either. Islam was a Johnny-come-lately compared to Judaism and Christianity throughout the Mediterranean.
A fairer example may be India-Pakistan, where Hindus and Sikhs had to leave what became a Muslim polity and vice versa, in order to satisfy Muslim “nationalists”. Fleischaker seems quite unaware that there was always a Jewish presence in Israel, despite the Roman Empire’s best efforts and not only did Jews from Europe return in numbers, so did the Jews of north Africa and Asia Minor because of systemic persecution that reached its apex with the establishment of the State of Israel.
What Fleischaker also ignores in his ‘imbalance” argument is that Trans-Jordan, which covered over 80% of the original Mandatory Palestine is really a Palestinian state over which a somewhat foreign Heshemite monarchy was installed by the Brits.
Yes, many non-Jews felt compelled to flee Israel to escape the violence perpetrated by both sides, but often they were only returning to villages on the other side of the Jordan from whence they came to enjoy the economic boom that Jewish settlement brought with it. To claim the asymetry between Israeli Jewish and Palestinian Arab circumstances is all that great is something of an exaggeration.
Dave Bush:
Palestinians and other non-Jewish “Arabs” are not barred from taking up Israeli citizenship. Neither are they prevented from entering the country unless they represent a security threat.
I put quotes around “Arab” as there are Mizrahi Jews who identify as “Arab Jews”, though it would be fairer to call them Arabized Jews and Ashkenazim as Europeanized Jews.
“The expulsion from Al Andalus wasn’t an expulsion of Arabs from native soil. It was a “reconquesta”,”
Yes, but the Arab Moors had been the rulers of Andalucia since the Islamic conquest of the Christian Visigothic kingdom in the eighth century and were defeated in 1492, bringing the entire peninsula under Christian leadership.
I doubt the Muslims see any essential difference between their eight century-long ownership in Iberia and their seven or eight centuries long rule over Palestine.
_____________
“…which is why the King of Spain offered the Sephardic Jews who fled the Inquisition an apology back in the 1990s and denied one to the Muslims who were compelled to leave.”
Not exactly.
Between 1391 and 1492, amid the murderous mass rioting of 1391 tens of thousands of Jews who faced militant priests and direct threats to their life and property, opted for conversion.
The next stage was the establishment of the Inquisition in 1482, with its specific mandate to excise from the Church the heretic conversos who were still secretly engaged in Judaizing.
Ten years later, the final episode in this drama saw the edict of expulsion of the remaining Jews from Spain, a measure that was calculated at severing once and for all any ties between Judaism and the vulnerable New Christians. The expulsion of the Jews was a traumatic event that sent shockwaves throughout European Jewry as well as Christendom.
The toll of that disastrous century came to this: a third of the entire Iberian Jewish population were exterminated in riots, another third accepted Christianity, and the last third, the remaining Jews, were expelled in 1492.
The expulsion of the Jews from Spain was grounded in mainly religious concerns. The expulsion of the Mooriscos might have had something to do with extirpating a potentially subversive minority.
It was the Conversos, not the Jews, who were persecuted by the Inquisition, and some of whom fled Spain and Portugal. Some, but not all, returned to Judaism (Amsterdam). Many crossed the Atlantic to South America, where th einquisition still pursued them.
Your analogy is very dodgy.
If Northern Irish Catholics do consider themselves, as you say, ‘victims of some sort of historical injustice’, and vote accordingly, simultaneously accepting the existence of political entity with which they do not agree, they do so because political conditions permit them to do so.
Most recently, the successes of the civil rights movement in the North of Ireland were partly rooted in the fact that, whatever the faults of the Northern state, a Northern Irish Catholic, as a UK citizen, had precisely the same rights under law as a Protestant Ulster Unionist. No such framework exists in Israel/Palestine, since Israel is the state of the Jews, and it will most likely stay that way for the foreseeable future. So what you are proposing as a possibility -the long term acceptance of co-existence- is in fact the opposite of what happened in Northern Ireland. In the territory of Northern Ireland, which is the home of most Northern Catholics, both unionist and nationalist have equal rights before the law. This is not true of the territory of Israel, which is the home of the Palestinian refugees.
Whereas many Northern Irish Catholics came to terms with the Northern state to the extent that they could put up with it without taking up arms against it, based on the fact that they were entitled to equal treatment under law, you expect Palestinians -assuming you want Israel to continue to exist as a Jewish state- to accept a political entity in the absence of equal treatment under law. And to state the obvious: No NI Catholics were expelled from their homes and prevented from returning by a unionist government. So how Palestinians might then see some justice in Zionism, I have no idea.
“If Northern Irish Catholics do consider themselves, as you say, ‘victims of some sort of historical injustice’, and vote accordingly, simultaneously accepting the existence of political entity with which they do not agree, they do so because political conditions permit them to do so.”
Erm, yes and ?
“Most recently, the successes of the civil rights movement in the North of Ireland were partly rooted in the fact that, whatever the faults of the Northern state, a Northern Irish Catholic, as a UK citizen, had precisely the same rights under law as a Protestant Ulster Unionist”
This is nonsense. Until the end of the Stormont regime , Catholics were subject to a thinly disguised system of formal legal discrimination. Direct rule ended this but Catholics are only now, post GF agreement, starting to play a relatively unrestricted role in public life in NI and only now is some respect being given to the Irish language and culture by the NI state.
“No such framework exists in Israel/Palestine, since Israel is the state of the Jews, and it will most likely stay that way for the foreseeable future.”
Israeli Arabs are twenty percent of the population. They are equal before the law, their language has official status, their religions benefit from state subsidies and decide on the civil status of their followers, openly anti-Zionist parties are represented in the Knesset, Arab officers command Jews in the IDF, there is an Arab on the Supreme Court etc. The contrast with the historical experience of Catholics in NI could hardly be more pronounced.
Is no discrimination against Arabs in Israel? Of course there is. Just as there is against travelers in Ireland, blacks in the USA, Bolivians and Paraguayans in Argentina etc.
The position of Arabs on the West Bank is entirely unsatisfactory but still, Israel is negotiating with their leaders in search of a settlement.
“In the territory of Northern Ireland, which is the home of most Northern Catholics, both unionist and nationalist have equal rights before the law. This is not true of the territory of Israel, which is the home of the Palestinian refugees.”
As I said above, they do now and that’s good. However, the Provo campaign was not fought to achieve a laughable bourgeois notion like equal rights before the law; it was fought to destroy the NI state. Now they have contented themselves with a role in administering it.
And as regards the “home” of the Palestinian refugees. If you think it’s Israel then you must also think that the home of the Sudenten Germans is the Czech republic, the home of many millions of Pakistanis is in India and the home of many millions of Indians is in Pakistan, the home of millions of Israelis is Yemen, Egypt and Morocco; you get my drift…
“you expect Palestinians -assuming you want Israel to continue to exist as a Jewish state- to accept a political entity in the absence of equal treatment under law.”
No I don’t. I don’t expect them to do anything in particular. I think they are able to decide what’s best for them on their own with me telling them what I think they ought to do.
And one more point before I forget, equality before the law in NI has its limits. Access to many civil service and security jobs in the UK requires Brit. citizenship, a fact which effectively excludes NI Catholics who feel themselves to be Irish and not British
“No NI Catholics were expelled from their homes and prevented from returning by a unionist government.”
You are displaying your ignorance here.
“The expulsion from Al Andalus wasn’t an expulsion of Arabs from native soil. It was a “reconquesta”, which is why the King of Spain offered the Sephardic Jews who fled the Inquisition an apology back in the 1990s and denied one to the Muslims who were compelled to leave.”
There was a moment in Spain, between the fall of Franco and the beginning of the Islamist terrorist threat in that country, and cultural sense of threat because of the African immigrants, that Spain was able to look at its past and shed the pretense of believing in a Reconquista. The españoles were able to see the founding of their country as a result of nothing more than brute force and no justice. With the renewed prejudices against Muslims, that moment has passed, and the myth of the Reconquista (where were the Visigoths in 1492?) is having a revival.
So Spain is a good case of a double myth-making and myth-believing: on the part of the Spanish Christians who think that somehow the capture of territory they never had was somehow a Reconquista, and on the part of the Islamists who think that that land belongs still to the Umma. Therefore it is relevant to our case.
Spain doesn’t excise the far left as much as Israel, and that is because of the antisemitism of the far left. But tell a español that his country should let in every Muslim that crosses from Africa because they need to repair the injustice they did when they conquered Al-Andaluz and he will get very, very nervous.
*Spain doesn’t inflame the far left as much as Israel*
It sounds odd to me that you should say that ‘Catholics are only now, post GF agreement, starting to play a relatively unrestricted role in public life in NI and only now is some respect being given to the Irish language and culture by the NI state’ since my own (Catholic) family has played a relatively unrestricted role in public life since the 1960s. Fair enough, none of them joined the police or the British army, but those are the sort of restrictions many were able to live with. Yes, there was discrimination and maybe there still is. As for Irish language and culture: when was Irish not taught in NI schools?
Anyway, the point is that there were large sectors of the NI Catholic population who came to terms with the existence of Northern Ireland because the UK provided a framework against which their rights could be guaranteed. Israel does not, can not by definition, provide such a framework for the Palestinians, a grouping which, in defending your analogy, you appear to have reduced to Israeli Arabs and Arabs on the West Bank. But the Palestinians are more than just that. Aren’t they?
Well, let’s persist with the NI Catholic analogy, shall we? Suppose, in 1948, my mother’s Catholic family was expelled by Unionist forces from her home town in County Down, fled across the border and was, and is, forbidden by NI law from returning. At what point should she stop calling her home town home? At what point should she see ’some measure of justice’ in what was done to her? Quite simply, it wouldn’t be up to you to decide whether it’s her home or not. So, yes, the territory covered by Israel is the home of the Palestinian refugees, because that’s where they or their families used to live. Otherwise they wouldn’t be refugees.
You are displaying your ignorance here.
Why don’t you ‘abstain from showing me the false mercy of condescension’ and give some examples that bear comparison with the expulsion of Palestinians?
I’m not going to get into a point by point refutation of this shite for two reasons.
1. Your painful ignorance. That’s not condescension by the way. It’s a cool assessment based on what you have written here.
2. I wasn’t attempting, in my original piece, to essay a broad comparison between the NI and I/P conflict.Furthermore in that piece, I linked to a long post in which I rejected the validity of such comparisons. I was making one single point which I will now repeat in a slightly different form.
Northern Ireland is an entity specifically invented by the British government to suit the needs of the NI Protestants and to guarantee them hegemony over the NI Catholics. Various attempts to destroy the NI state by force having failed, NI Catholics have now decided that the struggle to defeat Protestant hegemony isn’t worth it and have contented themselves with a role in administering a statelet that many of their leaders spent thirty years saying was *by the very fact of its existence and not only by the denial of specific rights to Catholics* artificial, discriminatory, colonialist and what have you.
I guess your claims about my ‘painful ignorance’ and the ’shite’ I have written would be more compelling if you provided a shred of evidence to support them.
I have resorted to no such characterization of your claims about Northern Ireland, even though you appear not to have demonstrated anything approaching an acquaintance with ‘facts on the ground’.
You make it seem as though the majority of NI Catholics had,on various occasions, supported attempts to destroy the NI state by force. In fact, it was only after the IRA ceasefire in 1994 that SF became the foremost nationalist party. There was never widespread support for such a thing.
- Marianne Elliott, The Catholics of Ulster.
Anyway, my basic point here is that there is little similarity between the relationship of NI Catholics to the Northern State and that of Palestinians to Israel, in terms of the analogy that you draw here (I have not considered the general appropriateness of such an analogy).
And while the point in the concluding paragraph of your original comment is true in so far as it can happen anywhere given the right conditions, the conditions simply aren’t there in I/P. Furthermore, I don’t think they will be there any time soon.
May I ask SF Stoop if citizens of Ireland (the southern, independent country) have also, or are demanding the right to vote in North Ireland? Because that would be similar to what the Palestinians are demanding with the “Right of Return”, namely, the “right” to outvote the Jews and transform Israel into another country completely.
If the Irish from Ireland are content with voting in Ireland only and not also in NI, then the situation would be similar as those Palestinians who demand their own state, without also demanding the “right” to change another into their own state too.
So, for example, what would SF Stoop say if Israelis were to agree to establish an independent Palestinian state but demand also the right of Jews all over the world to vote in that country’s elections?
Fabian,
if citizens of Ireland (the southern, independent country) have also, or are demanding the right to vote in North Ireland?
Interesting question. Basically, if you’re a citizen of the Irish Republic, you have the right to vote in the United Kingdom if you are resident there.
Because that would be similar to what the Palestinians are demanding with the “Right of Return”, namely, the “right” to outvote the Jews and transform Israel into another country completely.
But citizens of the Irish Republic don’t need a right of return because no-one expelled them in the first place and they are free to move between the UK and the Republic as they wish.
what would SF Stoop say if Israelis were to agree to establish an independent Palestinian state but demand also the right of Jews all over the world to vote in that country’s elections?
I don’t think it would work, but that’s not quite the same thing. Palestinians claim their right of return because there is a basic injustice that has not been addressed - the fact of their expulsion and continued exile. Once the injustice is addressed, or at least there are signs that it is going to be addressed, then the chances are that the claim will become less important. But the injustice is not being addressed. Palestinians are being told to accept that their expulsion was right and proper. What remains of their land is still being annexed. Why would you expect them to relinquish the right of return under such circumstances?
Hi SF Stoop:
I disagree in what you say that there was an injustice. It was not the Jews who started the war after rejecting partition. But lets leave this aside.
Even if there was an injustice towards the Palestinians then, it would not do to create an injustice with the Jews now.
No Jew will consent to lose its right to self-determination, and especially not when it would be part of an arrangement in which Palestinians are to gain theirs!
“Interesting question. Basically, if you’re a citizen of the Irish Republic, you have the right to vote in the United Kingdom if you are resident there.”
Yes, but that would be similar to a possible future federation based on mutual consent between independent states. It is not similar to abolishing the State of Ireland, the territory of Northern Ireland (I am not sure which status it has) and England to solve the problem in NI. Do you understand?
No citizen of the Republic of Ireland can vote for the NI Parliament. It would immediately create a situation in which the Protestants are outvoted and they will not accept that.
Arab Palestinians on the other hand, want to have the “right” to outvote Jews in Israel AND their independent Muslim -read their proposed Constitution- Palestine in the WB and Gaza.
I wonder if given that Europeans colonized the American Continent and killed the Indios (native Americans), Argentina is a country in which its population is mostly of Spanish and Italian descent and Bolivia has now a President with aboriginal-roots reflecting the preponderance of the aboriginal populatin, should Bolivians get the right to vote in Argentina’s elections?
“If the Jewish hegemony in Israel is an injustice, then Palestinians will - and should - continue unendingly to resist it. Only if they can see some justice in Zionism can they cease to feel aggrieved by it, and be willing to work towards a long-term co-existence with a Jewish state.”
Theauthor would be right if it were true, but his premise is false, assuming Jews are somehow interlopers in the Middle East when Jews have lived in this part of the world for millennia.Half of the Jews in Israel are native to the region. You fail to see the Middle East as the mosaic of peoples, ethnicities and sects it really is: the Arab-Muslim word is actually a mythical concept and it is a nonsense to assume that only Arab Muslims have political rights. This is the real injustice: the Arabs have 22 states - some not even states but statelets - by some arbitrary decision of the colonial powers. Why do only the Arab Muslims deserve justice and the Kurds, Assyrians and Berbers do not?Lebanon is the only other state, apart from Israel, where non-Muslims exercise power, but it is a matter of time before it collapses.
Just arrived here directly from Normblog, and am delighted to see that you provide a forum here to discuss this indeed very interesting first installment of Samuel Fleischacker’s planned series of posts.
I very much agree with the sentiments you express here, i.e. that there is much in what Samuel writes that can only be appreciated, but there are some flaws, and indeed, I would also pick out the points you chose here.
There are a number of problems with the first point,i.e. Samuel’s apparent acceptance of:
“almost all Arabs and Muslims believe that the establishment of a Jewish state in what had previously been an Arab, Muslim area was a great injustice, to which there is no counterpart in the behaviour of Arabs and Muslims toward Jews.”
First, of course, the idea that historic Palestine should be rightfully considered “an Arab, Muslim area” amounts to denying the historic multi-ethnic/-cultural/-religious character of the area, a point that also lyn makes in her post. It also tempts me to ask: outside of Samuel’s “cool hour”, we hear so much about “Jewish supremacism” just because Jews want a state of their own, so why are there no complaints about “Arab/Muslim supremacism” if apparently any territory where Arabs/Muslims live must be ruled by them?
But the question also is: what does it mean to say that “there is no counterpart [to the establishment of Israel] in the behaviour of Arabs and Muslims toward Jews”. After all, Arab Islam of course came to acquire most of the territories in which it is now dominant by brutal military conquest that displaced/absorbed many minorities.
And obviously, the Arab states had no qualms to dispossess and drive out the Jews in their midst, starting from 1947. It’s worthwhile to remember that the group Justice for Jews from Arab Countries claims that alone the lands to which Jews from Arab countries had deeds, and which they lost without any compensation, amounts to about 5 times the size of Israel…
Another important point you make here is the objection to Samuel’s admonition not to “rub salt into Arab wounds” — it sure is meant well, but as you rightly point out, it simply is patronizing as long as it is not an expectation addressed to both sides.
I very much agree with Samuel’s view that a peace agreement will require both sides to give up on demands for “justice” — in fact I wrote a piece about it some time ago for Cif (Peace of the Pragmatists), which also mentions the Irish “precedent” that is debated here so hotly.
But one could argue that if pragmatism prevailed, many of the issues Samuel raises wouldn’t be all that relevant.
Brilliant post, Petra.