Over at Normblog you’ll find the latest installment of Sam Fleischacker’s series “A Cool Hour on the Israel-Palestine Conflict”. On this occasion Fleischacker deals with “Self-Determination: The Case for Arab Sovereignty over All of Palestine.” I think that though Sam makes many telling points along the way, the overall conclusion he draws is not correct and in the following remarks I will try to show why.

1.

Sam starts by saying,

Last week I talked about the pros and cons of nationalism. I ended by saying that the desire that many people have for a public space in which their culture can be expressed is a reasonable one. The question is, given the unclarity of the very notion of ‘culture’, how should this desire be realized? And the main answer to that question, in the early 20th century, was the principle of self-determination: the idea that the people who actually live in each area of the world should determine for themselves whether they want to form a nation-state, and, if so, which cultural group - nation - their state should represent.

And later in the text he adds,

Meanwhile, we should remember that self-determination was in fact the primary basis for settling national claims after the First World War.

I don’t think that Sam is correct about the importance of self-determination in the early 20^th century. Certainly, the defeat and collapse of the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and German Empires left a lot of territory and peoples in need of a new government and the Treaty of Versailles, for all that it might be criticized for, made some attempt to take into account the wishes of the subject peoples of these entities in the decisions that it made. Nevertheless, even in the limited context of Europe, it still left plenty of people in the “wrong” place, in cultural or linguistic terms.

Furthermore, the first quarter of the twentieth century didn’t exactly see the victorious powers in WWI demonstrating much interest in the question of the self-determination for the peoples that they themselves ruled. Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations is eloquent on this point with its frank mention of “natives” and Class A Mandates (Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine) supposedly being allowed the privilege of having their wishes taken  into consideration with regard to which of the victorious powers should rule them while supposedly preparing them for full independence.

It’s true that Ireland achieved a limited form of independence in 1922 but that was only after a guerilla war had convinced the British that the cost of keeping it within the Union was too high, both in terms of financial and military resources and also in terms of Britain’s international reputation; methods that served for keeping “savages” under control in distant corners of the empire could not be contemplated for use against white Europeans.

In fact, self-determination didn’t become a crucial factor in nation making until after WWII and didn’t reach its apogee until well into the 1950s. The British abandonment of India and Pakistan in 1947 is certainly a key landmark here. However, it is to some degree anomalous with regard to the behavior of other empires and indeed of the British themselves, who hung on for a decade or more afterwards in most of the rest of their empire. The first thing the Dutch did after being liberated from the Nazis was to seek to reassert their control over Indonesia, a folly from which they desisted only in 1949. The French also lost no time in attempting to regain control of their empire and even their expulsion from Vietnam after their defeat at Dien Bien Phu didn’t deter them from subsequently fighting a horrendously bloody, seven year war to keep Algeria French. The Portuguese were only obliged to divest themselves of their vast overseas empire well into the 1970s and even the United States did not grant full independence to the Philippines until after WWII.

To say, therefore, that self-determination, became the “main answer” in the early 20^th century to the question of how peoples should be given their own space to express their culture is, at best, an exaggeration. Certainly, seeds of future revolutionary nationalist activities were sown in this period - Sukarno was born in 1901 and Ho Chi Minh in 1890 - but they didn’t grow and blossom until after the WWII.

2.

…the principle of self-determination is not a particularly good way of settling nationhood in a hotly-disputed area. Nevertheless it was the primary basis for nationhood at the time of the Balfour Declaration and for many decades thereafter. Palestinians therefore had every right to think there was something unfair about the fact that they were denied the right to appeal to it in the process leading up to the formation of the state that would govern their homes.

I think this is wrong. If there was no generally applied principle of self-determination functioning in international affairs at the time, and there wouldn’t be one for decades to come, then the Palestinians could scarcely appeal to it. Of course, this argument cuts both ways, if there was no such generally applicable principle available for the Palestinians to appeal to at the time then there can’t have been one for the Jews either. None of this means that Jews and Palestinians don’t have the right to self-determination now.

The existence of the Balfour Declaration does not disprove my argument. It was made at a time when there was no end in sight to the war against Germany and when the British were extremely anxious to get help from wherever they could get it, and not too fussy about what they promised, or to whom. In their efforts to defeat the Ottoman Empire - Germany’s ally - the British also encouraged and assisted its Arab subjects to revolt against its rule, in return for a promise of support for a unified Arab nation of some sort when the Ottomans were sent packing. Of course, as soon as the war was over the British forgot about whatever undertakings they might have given the Arabs and set about consolidating their own direct or indirect control of much of the territory that had been freed from the Ottomans, including Mandatory Palestine.

In any case, the text of the Declaration speaks of a “national home” for the Jewish people, rather than a state and it also says that nothing will be done to “prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” It can, therefore, be taken to mean pretty much anything the reader cares to, the effect that was doubtless intended when it was being composed.

Finally, it may be of use to recall to the circumstances in which the British actually left Mandatory Palestine in 1948. They left because they were forced to, because a sufficient combination of armed and political pressure left them with no other choice. If the Jews had waited for the British, or anyone else, to provide them with a Jewish state, they’d be waiting for one yet.

Nations have sometimes been lucky enough to come into being without bloodshed or strife but, more commonly, a combination of political savvy and armed force is required from the people that want a state of their own. Appeals to putative rights and the better nature of the current hegemon usually don’t do the trick and though foreign allies may be important, relying on them to do the heavy lifting may do more to delay than to speed the creation of the yearned for state.

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You’ll find my comments on previous installments in the Sam’s “Cool Hour” series behind these numbers: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.