I have already commented on the first four posts of a series by Samuel Fleischacker - hereinafter SF - on the Israeli-Palestinian dispute currently appearing over at Normblog here, here, here and here. The fifth in the series, dealing with the validity or otherwise of the historical claims of the parties, appeared yesterday and here are some comments on it.
1.
I think SF is broadly correct to reject the idea that Jewish domination in ancient times of what is now Israel and Palestine, and the presence of small communities of Jews there in the intervening centuries, can be translated into political rights for Jews there today. As he says,
The question is, what political difference does all this make? Many peoples were formed in a place far from where they currently live: Turks in East Asia; Celts in central Europe; Sinti and Roma peoples (so-called ‘Gypsies’) probably in India.
From this he draws the conclusion that,
…the Jews had no right to displace the inhabitants of Israel/Palestine just because they once lived there - even if they lived there for a long time, were expelled unjustly from it, and cared deeply for it ever afterwards. We might apply, to the historical claims we’re considering, the rule I suggested for religious ones in the last post: is the principle that underlies them one we would be willing to uphold as a general rule for the international order? How would we feel about a general rule that peoples have a right to return to, and govern, any land that in the past they inhabited, and that mattered to their historical development? The international order would become a scene of constant, irresolvable violence.
I’d like to signal two doubts here. The first is that I am not sure that the same concept of justice that would rightly condemn me if I tried to expel SF and his family from their home and live there myself in their stead, can be usefully applied to historical processes such as the rise of Zionism and the creation of Israel. No doubt these processes involved many separate acts of injustice but I am not sure of the extent to which they can be judged just or unjust in themselves. To this SF might reply, “I didn’t say that the rise of Zionism and the creation of Israel were unjust, I said displacing the original inhabitants was.” Quite so, but I am not sure that this makes any difference to the argument as a considerable number of the successful national movements that have sprung up since the middle of the 19th cenury have built their state over the crushed national aspirations of some part of their pre-existing populations and, in not a few cases, slaughtering them wholesale. In other words, there’s a danger here of presenting something that was typical as being worthy of specific note.
Also, Palestine isn’t the only place in the world colonized by foreign Jews, it’s just the only case anyone cares about today. In 19th century Argentina thousands of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe set up a large number of agricultural settlements in the provinces of Santa Fe and Entre Ríos. Of course, the indigenous inhabitants had previously been slaughtered and marginalized by the Argentine government and the Spanish Empire before that, but does that make any difference to the justice or injustice of the process? Could they not be said to have profited from a genocide committed by others? It might be objected to this that these Jews didn’t come to build their own state but rather to contribute to the building of another one, Argentina. True enough but irrelevant to the argument here. They came and replaced the slaughtered - not displaced - indigenous population.
Also, and at the risk of boring readers to death by repeating this point every week, there’s nothing remotely out of the ordinary in Israel having been founded by immigrants from distant lands who displaced previously existing populations. If that is going to be the standard for measuring the justice or otherwise of national movements or actually existing nation states then I think that very few indeed are going to pass the test.
2.
SF later says,
When Jews talk of a Jewish ancestral home, and want to revive the Jewish presence there, they don’t mean that it was once filled up with people of a certain genetic stock and should be filled up with such people again. They mean that it once had a certain collective identity and should have that collective identity again. That’s also what Muslims mean when they speak in favour of a Muslim state and Arabs mean when they work for an Arab state.
This may be indeed what the actors say but I don’t think we can take their descriptions of their motivations as being the last word on the processes whereby nation states come into being. It would be more correct to say that certain 19th century European Jews invented an identity for themselves as Zionists and the bearers of historical rights to a nation state. What real basis or justification for this there was doesn’t really matter. A comparable process took place in Ireland at the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th; many Irish people who had previously been happy enough to see themselves as citizens of the British Empire took it into their heads that the particularly Irish part of their identity was the one that counted and began to act accordingly. The same goes for the Palestinians; it really doesn’t make much difference to the current political questions that need an answer whether the Palestinians were conscious of themselves as a nation six decades ago or a century ago. The critical point is that they are now. Israel was imagined into existence as, I hope, Palestine soon will be too. Neither state will be a whit less legitimate because of what their ancestors might or might not have done, nor where they lived.
It’s not, therefore, a question of this or that piece of land having a collective identity but rather of how disparate groups made up of millions of people come identify themselves as forming a nation and of having certain rights and seeking to vindicate those rights in certain places and, usually, not being unduly worried about the rights of other peoples who they perceive as different to themsleves.
3.
SF moves towards a conclusion saying,
I think there is a moral asymmetry that favours the Palestinians. Not because they are, or might be, descendants of the ancient Canaanites or Jews - that, even if true has to be irrelevant - but because they made up the bulk of the land’s inhabitants in the 19th and 20th centuries, when Zionism got started, and most had roots in it going back long before that. Current occupants always have the best claim to a particular piece of land, as long as they did not acquire it violently or dishonestly
Now this is interesting. SF dismisses, correctly in my view, attempts by contemporary Jews to justify their claim to what is now Israel on the basis of the majority status that they probably lost - against their will - in the 6th century, and endorses the claim of the Palestinians based on their being the majority in what is now Israel up to the middle of the 20th century. It seems that what he is defending here is an attenuated version of a view that he rejects elsewhere in the post; that peoples have particular rights over particular territories based on their ancestral relations with it. If that’s false for the Jews going back to the 6th century then I’d be interested in hearing an argument that would make it valid for Palestinians in the 19th and 20th centuries. If it’s because it’s nearer in time, then where are we going to draw the line? If the line is to be drawn at living memory, then are all the other tens of millions people throughout the world who have suffered a similar fate to that of the Palestinians since 1948 to be afforded the same rights and restitutions that the Palestinians are seeking now?
A word about the last sentence in the post; how many people in the world today can be sure that they are not living on territory acquired violently or dishonestly at some point in, just to keep the timeframe reasonable, the last century and a half?
Point 1 is my argument exactly, but better said.
Your point 3 is right too, but it is very common for some people to draw a line arbitrarily in time and act as if whatever came before is not subject to discussion and whatever came afterwards is an unjustice that is for some others to compensate.
What I wonder is how SF can ascertain that the Arabs living in the 19th century in Eretz Israel did not acquire their land by violent or dishonest means. I think those were the only means available to acquire land before the rule of law in democratic states.
“What I wonder is how SF can ascertain that the Arabs living in the 19th century in Eretz Israel did not acquire their land by violent or dishonest means.”
Very good point. There’s always the danger of portraying Ottoman Palestine as a land of perfect justice and harmony until the first new Jews arrived in the 1880s
What intrigues me is how SF can talk about a majority Arab population when there were only 300,000 people living in Palestine in 1800, and there are 15 million now. What is missing in his analysis is any sense that this is an Israel-Arab conflict (and increasingly an Israel/Islamist conflict), not an Israel-Palestinian one. There were displaced people on both sides, and in fact a greater number of Jewish refugees from Arab lands. The displacement was no less unjust of Jews from Baghdad or Tripoli (one third Jewish), and these were indigenous communities predating the Arab conquest by 1,000 years.
Is there any acknowledgement here that the major reason some Palestinians lost their land because they and the Arab states that supposedly fought on their behalf failed, despite their best efforts rhetorically and militarily, to utterly destroy the nascent State of Israel? To nip it in the bud? To eradicate it? To erase it from existence?
(Or should we ignore this? Or should we acknowledge it but declare it unimportant, irrelevant, a very minor detail, etc.?)
And while we’re at it (or not), should we acknowledge that following the war of 1948/49, no Jew living in areas conquered by Jordan or Egypt was allowed to stay and live in those areas; although there was and continues to be a sizeable Arab population living within pre-1967 Israel?
(That’s right: there were Jewish Palestinian refugees in 1948/49. Wondered what happened to them….)
Maybe, too, we should overlook the significant Arab influx into British-mandate Palestine, lured there by the increasing economic prosperity and opportunities offered by Jewish (and British) renewal and rebuilding of the region, and swelling the ranks of the indigenous Arabs living in Palestine? (And who, when they were forced to leave, were also considered Palestinian refugees?)
(And should such non-indigenous Arabs be considered “colonists” as well? Or is that an irony that simply can’t be countenanced?)
Eamonn McDonagh writes:
In writing this, McDonagh ignores that dark lines have been drawn in the sand already. Since the time of the European conquest of America and Africa, laws have been created forbidding precisely such conquest. There is no need to resort to arbitrary ideas such as drawing a line at “living memory” because we have the Nuremberg Tribunals, the Geneva Conventions and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court providing firm legal guidance on what behavior is lawful and what is unlawful.
To Norman Geras’s credit I found the Fleischacker/McDonagh discussion interesting - partly because Fleischacker’s thoughts were so unexpected on his blog. However, I found this response disappointing in that McDonagh essentially pretended there was not a significant body of law covering precisely how the Israelis need to handle the Palestinian population in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. We do not need to invent lines in the sand or anywhere else to understand the legal and moral implications of that occupation.
For the record. I believe that the creation of the State of Israel was an appropriate exceptional response to the Holocaust. However, this gave both Israel and the rest of the World an exceptional responsibility to ensure that this had as little impact as possible on the aboriginal inhabitants of the area. The last 60 years have shown we have failed the Palestinian people, but that failure should not be cause for supporting, now or in the future, the Israeli su
The end of the last paragraph was missing from my previous post. The paragraph in its entirety should have read:
Let me just stress that I was focused in this piece on a *single* type of argument: the argument that Jews have a right to the land because they used to live there. I did not say anything about whether Jews acquired the land legitimately when they immigrated in the 19th and early 20th centuries (on the whole, I believe they did, and will address this when I come to the case for Zionism - the 9th post) or on the other hand about whether Arabs in the land held their lands legitimately or not (although on the whole I believe they did as well). Eamonn thus misquotes me, slightly but significantly, by starting section 3 with the words “I believe there is a moral asymmetry that favors the Palestinians.” What I actually wrote was: “ON THIS ISSUE, I believe there is a moral asymmetry that favors the Palestinians.” IF we talk in terms of which group “owned” the land at the beginning of the Zionist movement - IF we assume that one of the two groups did own it - then the fact that Arabs actually made up the majority should count for more than the fact that Jews lived there many centuries earlier. But I don’t know that we should talk in these terms: I’ll be getting to that in the next post.
On the main issue, Eamonn and I seem again to agree: that the “ancestral land” argument (very often used in internal Jewish discussions of the subject!) is not a good one. (We also agree that if one does want to look at group attachments to land, the group needs to be defined by cultural factors rather than genetics.)
However, this gave both Israel and the rest of the World an exceptional responsibility to ensure that this had as little impact as possible on the aboriginal inhabitants of the area.
First Nations/Native Americans in the Americas and Aborigines down under are aboriginal inhabitants. Palestinian Arabs are not aboriginal inhabitants.