Ben has already had his say on the Democratiya debate between Martin Shaw and David Hirsh here. I now want to add a couple of thoughts of my own.

1.

Martin Shaw says,

Israel’s foundation in 1948, as Israeli historians like Benny Morris and Ilan Pappé have shown, was based on the deliberate, brutal destruction of the larger part of Arab society in Palestine.

I’m not going to get into what level of credibility the work of Pappé and Morris might have but statements like this do seem to be based on the notion of one party being entirely passive and the other active in the events surrounding Israel’s birth. Feckless, indolent natives getting clobbering by brisk and efficient colonisers is a classic orientalist trope and it’s a bit odd to be hearing it from someone who would, I presume, see himself as a friend of the Palestinian cause.

Shaw also seems to underestimate the very great difficulty inherent in predicting the outcome of a war, especially when compared with the ease with which one may be started. Recent history is littered with examples of sure things that have come spectacularly unstuck. You can ask Mikhail Saakashvili for details of the latest one.

This being the case, we would do well to try think about the events of 1948 without taking advantage of hindsight to condescend to the parties, who can have had no sure idea how things were going to turn out. And some counterfactual consideration of what might have happened had the other side won wouldn’t do any harm either.

2.

Shaw also says,

So Israel is - not uniquely, because many societies, settler and other, have genocidal histories - based on genocide, and much of its history to the present day represents the slow-motion extension and consolidation of that violent beginning.

The recognition that Israel is not the only country to have been founded on the defeat of a people with different national aspirations is quite progressive by the standards of much anti-Israel discourse and this deserves to be recognised. With the second part of the sentence however, we enter into difficulties. Israel is not seen as unique in the circumstances of its foundation but much of its history since amounts to an attempt to carry out genocide by other means. This seems an odd statement, to put it lightly, when one compares the lot of Arab citizens of Israel to that of ordinary Arabs in Israel’s neighbours and it is difficult to see the genocidal intent in the withdrawal from Gaza and the current settlement negotiations with PA. But perhaps I am simply not perceptive enough to see the devilish subtlety of the Zionist scheme. And no, I am not denying the existence of discrimination against Arab citizens in Israel but better to be a citizen of a democracy than a subject of a tyranny; ask the teachers recently fired by Hamas in Gaza if you doubt that.

3.

Another quote from Shaw,

Yet the relatively recent occurrence of the destruction of Arab society in most of Palestine, the ongoing dispossession of the Palestinians and the facts of Palestinian resistance, non-violent as well as violent, all make the consequential issues particularly acute.

There seems to be a hint of a reason here for boycotting Israel and Israel only. As Shaw puts it, the destruction of Arab society is relatively recent, Palestinians continue to be dispossessed and continue to resist.

Rather more recent is the Turkish invasion of Cyprus and the subsequent de facto incorporation of parts of the national territory of what is now a member state of the European Union into Turkey. This process - do I have to spell it out? - was accompanied by complete, not partial, expulsion of the Greek Cypriot population and their replacement with settlers from Turkey proper. I cite Perry Anderson,

Having taken two-fifths of the island, inhabited – after invasion and regroupment – by less than a fifth of the population, Turkey had a huge stock of empty houses and farms on its hands, from which their owners had been expelled. To fill them, it shipped in settlers from the mainland. What proportion of the population these now represent is a matter of dispute, in part because they have since been supplemented by temporary workers, often seasonal, and students from the mainland. Official Turkish figures suggest that no more than 25-30 per cent out of a total of some 260,000 persons come from the mainland; Greek estimates put the number – there were just under 120,000 Turks on the island in 1974 – at more than 50 per cent, given that there has also been substantial emigration. Only scrutiny of birth certificates can resolve the issue. What is not in doubt, however, is that the Turkish army maintains 35,000 soldiers in the zone it has occupied since 1974, a much higher ratio of troops to territory than Israel has ever deployed to protect its settlers in the West Bank.

It would be interesting to know why Shaw thinks that the case of Cyprus doesn’t produce a fraction of the emotional effervescence so visible among people who, though they have no personal interest in the issues at stake, demand a boycott of Israel.

4.

A final point directed beyond Shaw to the wider debate; there’s too much emphasis on what did or didn’t happen in 1948 and to what degree it was or wasn’t planned. Those sympathetic to the Palestinian cause seem to think that if they could prove that there was something uniquely illegitimate about Israel’s birth then they would be taking a big step towards the formation of a Palestinian state, either beside Israel or instead of it, according to taste, while those sympathetic to Israel sometimes seem to believe that if they can show there was nothing very unusual about how Israel came into being, then the tides of Jew hatred will recede and they’ll be closer to full peace and a normalization of Israel in the middle East.

They are both wrong. 1948 was only one moment, though a decisive and bloody one, in the struggle of two peoples over the same territory. We’re a long way from the beginning of that struggle and probably some way from the end too. Look at Ireland; we’re only now putting behind us events that occurred in the first quarter of the twentieth century, events with their own roots going back to the 17^th century.