The Land Of Israel
Our Conversations About Israel And The Palestinians Must Not Be Black And White
“One death is a tragedy; a million deaths are a statistic”. Joseph Stalin gets credit for this bon mot, and he would have been serious about it. It’s more likely that Kurt Tucholsky, a Jewish German writer and journalist, created this in his signature sarcastic style. Tucholsky was a critical and often satirical intellectual who served reluctantly in World War I, opposed Germany’s militarism, right-wing judiciary system, and rising National Socialist movement. His books were among the first ones to be burnt in 1933, at which point he had already fled to Sweden. He died there from an overdose of sleeping pills in 1935, at the age of 45.
Tucholsky was one of many brilliant Jewish people who got lost to persecution, suicide, murder or emigration — a tragic loss of life which has impoverished culture in Germany, Austria, Poland (incl. Ukraine), Hungary, Czechia, Romania and others until today (Jewish life in Russia has a much longer and complicated history, with only 145,000 remaining in Russia today, down from an estimated 5M at the end of the 19th century). On the other hand, the United States and to some degree the UK owe much of their spirited intellectual life to the influx of brilliant Jewish people from the rest of Europe, incl. Russia.
I have always had an affection for Jewish culture and history. My sympathy can border on sentimentalization[i]. Stories of terrorism in connection with or against Israel have followed me since childhood: 1972 (the Munich Olympics kidnapping), 1973 (Yom Kippur war), 1977 (the hijacking of Lufthansa’s flight 181 by the PLO), attacks on synagogues and Jewish people in Austria in the 1970s and 1980s, 1985 (the hijacking of Achille Lauro in the Mediterranean), 1992 (the assassination of Yitzak Rabin, by an Israeli extremist) and many others are imprinted in my brain.
Admittedly, I have had only little involvement with the Arab world of which the Palestinian people are a part — but I am very familiar with Iran, the puppet master of terrorism. The Palestinian’s fate hasn’t left me cold — i.e., the Sabra and Shatila massacres in 1982, carried out by Lebanese Christian militias, tolerated by the Israeli Defense Forces; the expropriation of land for settlements; the many deaths on both sides, resulting from a never-ending spiral of attacks and revenge. And I admit to having become disenchanted with Israeli politics after the old guard (Rabin, Perez, Weizman) died, and hardline leaders increasingly entrenched the country in stubborn and unrelenting positions. This year, I noticed a sense of fatalism in myself, after reading the reports of revenge killings in Huwara by settlers. Even the Israeli military commander for the West Bank couldn’t help but label these acts pogroms. If both sides resort to terror, revenge and celebration of murder[ii], what’s the difference between them — morally and politically?
The horrific events from Oct 7 revived my strong feelings for Israel, and I am afraid of things to come that may taint our memories for years. But for now, I am as much appalled by the reaction of the Western world’s left-wing intellectuals (US universities at the forefront) as by the openly antisemitic celebrations of terror by people in the Middle East and the terrorists’ supporters and sympathizers in the West — Chicago being no exception. For anyone who tells me that Israel is an illegal occupying force in Palestine which needs be decolonized, I am writing this as a collection of arguments that I wouldn’t be able or willing to calmly articulate during a dinner conversation. The topic of Israel and the Palestinian population in Israel, West Bank and Gaza doesn’t lend itself to black and white arguments in any form.
Whose Land?
The question of who gets to rightfully govern the land is a legal one at first and certainly not a religious one. On May 14th of 1948 (after the first Jewish-Arab war, following the UN partition plan of 1947), Israel declared its independence and established a Jewish state on land of the former British Mandate of Palestine. On March 4th of 1949, the UN Security Council voted 9 to 1 in favor of Israel’s membership and May 11th of 1949, two thirds of the UN General Assembly approved the application to admit Israel to the United Nations.
Irrespective of the considerable trouble it took to get to this moment over the preceding 50 years, this is as formal and binding as it gets under international law[iii]. The alternative to a de jure recognition would have been the less preferrable de facto recognition, as it applies to states or statelets like Northern Cyprus, Abkhazia or Transdniestria — all dependent on a patron state for services and military protection. Palestine is such a problematic de facto state, although it was granted non-member observer status to the United Nations by resolution 67/19 on November 29th of 2012. It is composed of the Westbank and Gaza and recognized by 138 of 193 UN members, with Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, the United Kingdom, the United States and Israel being notably absent from the list.
Those who prefer a historical (i.e, Putin’s Kievan Rus), ethnical or even religious definition of statehood are either accepting a world that’s governed by the law of the jungle (la loi du plus fort) or trust in an outcome that’s based on the normative power of the factual[iv].
People may disagree with this for different reasons, but the legal problem of Israel is the definition of a very small piece of land and not its existence as a sovereign state per se. Its borders have been constantly in flux and disputed since Israel has been fighting with the surrounding Arab nations (Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq) for its survival. It is also a much more complicated problem than anybody can compress into one book, although it’s been tried.
Which land?
“There are many kinds of borders, those of soldiers, economists, lawyers, or geographers. They seldom overlap[v].”
The history of the land is a fascinating and confusing story, but it is essential to grasp some of it to understand the present.
Zionism derives its name from a hill in Jerusalem, Mount Zion, which according to the bible held a fortress of the same name that was conquered by David around 1,000 BCE. The Hebrews, also known as the Israelites, an obscure people who worshipped one god[vi], settled and built a kingdom in the narrow land of Canaan. The history of the land and its inhabitants is a discontinuous one, with different tribes, empires and religions changing hands in mostly violent ways. Egyptians, Babylonians, Persians, Macedonians, Romans, Christians, Arabs, Crusaders, Mamluks, Ottomans, French and the British fought over it and variously occupied it — with Jerusalem being the “universal city, the capital of two peoples, the shrine of three faiths; it is the prize of empires, the site of Judgement Day, and the battlefield of today’s clash of civilizations” (Montefiore).
If you want to pick a good starting point to understand the present, it’s the Ottoman empire which governed Palestine for 700 years until the end of World War I. The beginning of Zionism and the first Jewish settlements in Palestine in the late 19th century happened under Ottoman rule.
Being a colonial empire like the European powers, the Ottoman empire was no purveyor of humanitarian ideals over the centuries, but it developed a surprising amount of tolerance towards other religions in the 19th century. “Nowhere in the Muslim Orient did Jews face anything comparable to Europe’s rising tide of religiously motivated antisemitism. Indeed, until the First World war, they enjoyed the protection of the Ottoman state, which for its part regarded them as pillars of support”[vii]. Parts of the Arab world referred to 1920 as “the year of the catastrophe” — the year when the allied WWI powers separated the Ottoman empire into areas of their own influence. Other parts, led by King Hussein-bin-Ali, ruler of Hejaz (the narrow strip of land along the Red Sea) were allied with the British in the Arab Revolt, being promised the support of an independent state from Aleppo to Aden. Then and now, no shortage of disappointments.
The Ottoman empire had joined forces with the wrong partners in WWI — Germany and Austria-Hungary — and lost four fifths of its territory, as it was customary for defeated empires in those days (Austria lost 60% and Germany 13%.). It was during that war — in 1917 — that Chaim Weizmann (Israel’s first president from 1949 to 1952) convinced the British Foreign Secretary Lord Balfour with great charm to establish a Jewish protectorate in a conquered Palestine[viii]. Balfour told his cabinet in March 1917 “I am a Zionist”[ix] and in November of 1917 issued a written declaration that recognized the right of the Jews to establish a “national home” in Palestine[x].
The Ottoman empire was divided into areas of influence and after much haggling, the British Mandate was established and lasted from 1920 until 1948. 100,000 British soldiers were stationed in Palestine, eager in the end to get away from Jewish and Arab terrorism (both against each other and against the British too) amidst political pressure to end the significant financial burden that came with the mandate.
Neither under Ottoman rule nor under the British mandate was Palestine a state with its own government, it was a rather neglected outpost without much strategic significance for its rulers, with the exception of Jerusalem as a religious center (Ottomans) and Palestine’s location close to the oil reserves of the Middle East (British). A distinct Palestinian identity seems to have emerged in the middle of the 19th century[xi].
After WWII, Britain went into a social and economic crisis, and the United States under Truman became a necessary source of support for the Zionist movement.
Against Arab protests, the UN approved the partition of Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state, immediately followed by civil war: One of the two envisaged States proclaimed its independence as Israel and in the 1948 war involving neighboring Arab States expanded to 77 percent of the territory of mandate Palestine, including the larger part of Jerusalem. Over half of the Palestinian Arab population fled or were expelled. Jordan and Egypt controlled the rest of the territory assigned by resolution 181 to the Arab State. In the 1967 war, Israel occupied these territories (Gaza Strip and the West Bank) including East Jerusalem, which was subsequently annexed by Israel.
The following years saw a succession of often frustrated peace attempts[xii], with both sides deserving the blame. The most recent rapprochement between Israel and parts of the Arab world (U.A.E., Saudi Arabia) has been encouraging. We will see what remains of that.
What remains, is an unsustainable state of affairs in the land of Israel and the Palestinian territories, reviving calls by the world’s leading experts for a two-state solution:
- The internationally recognized territory of Israel has 9.364M citizens (World Bank, 2022) of which approx. 20% are Palestinian. A certain level of societal, economic, and political discrimination exists, as acknowledged by the US (not just Amnesty International).
- The Gaza strip has been run by a Hamas government since 2007 (with brief but ultimately failed efforts to create a joint government with Fatah) and has about 2.4M people living on 141sqm — the size of Las Vegas. Its population is one of the youngest in the world and has nearly doubled since 2000. Its GDP per capita would rank 164th in the world, if it was a country, and half the adult population is unemployed. Israel has no military presence in Gaza (as of this writing), but controls air and sea access under the Oslo accord (unrecognized by Hamas).
- The West Bank has an estimated (Palestinian) population of 2,75M and over 700,000 Israeli settlers, of which approximately 220,000 live in East Jerusalem. Most of the international community considers Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem to be illegal under international law, 127 of the settlements are considered legal under Israeli law.
Beyond the law
The conflict between the law and ethics can be condensed into “something may be legal, but that doesn’t make it right” — borrowing this thought from Abraham Lincoln.
The law should be considered as the minimum of rules that govern our actions. Ethical considerations should lead us to a higher standard of behavior, especially when we are in a position of power.
When I see the reactions to the atrocities of Oct 7, I fear that we have stripped off 250 years of enlightened civilization in the West. Dancing on the graves of other people’s dead children is depraved and barbaric, even if permitted by free speech rights in the United States. Those who ordered, supported, or committed the mass killing of 1,500 civilians, accompanied by rape, burnings, beheadings, and kidnappings have ceded the moral ground forever.
The other thing that keeps shocking me is the undifferentiated attribution of blame to the global Jewish population (i.e., threatening the homes of Jewish residents in Berlin). Not even the Jewish population of Israel stands united behind their own government and its actions. How come that seemingly educated people in the Western World think it’s ok to throw the Israeli government and the entire global Jewish population under the same bus? That includes Stanford academics who are normally adamant about the elimination of harmful language. There is no other word for this but antisemitism.
By the same token, the attribution of collective guilt is always wrong because it legitimizes collective punishment, which is both illegal and unethical. Israeli President Isaac Herzog said that all citizens of Gaza are responsible for the attack Hamas perpetrated in Israel last weekend that left over 1,200 people dead. “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible,” Herzog said at a press conference on Friday. “It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true. They could have risen up. They could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’etat.” When a reporter asked Herzog to clarify whether he meant to say that since Gazans did not remove Hamas from power “that makes them, by implication, legitimate targets,” the Israeli president claimed, “No, I didn’t say that.”
On the other hand, it is encouraging to see Palestinians and even Saudi Arabian public figures articulate differentiated views in carefully selected words (i.e., Saudi Prince Turki bin Faisal denounced and excoriated both child-killing Hamas and the “awful” Israeli government; an Al-Arabiya reporter grilled the Doha-based leader of Hamas on TV etc.). Words matter, now more than ever.
Ethics and laws in times of conflict
For most of its 75-year existence, Israel has been in a state of war. 1947–1949, 1956, 1967, 1967–1970, 1973 mostly in defense against its Arab neighbors (Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Jordan), followed by fights with Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah in the 80s, 90s and from 2000 onwards. The Palestinians were not at the heart of the Israeli-Arab wars, which were mainly over the control of the Holy Land. “Ever since they had fled and been deported during Israel’s War of Independence, the Palestinians had ceased being considered an enemy force and were mentioned only as a diplomatic nuisance: refugees whose affair came up for discussion once a year at the UN. Terrorist attacks were mostly attributed to the Arab states, not to the Palestinian national struggle”[xiii].
The Nakba and the permanent displacement of over 700,000 Palestinians were a tragedy, a humanitarian catastrophe and probably illegal under international law. In size and loss of lives the Nakba ranks close to other catastrophes of the last centuries, although one should be generally careful with the use of the word genocide[xiv]. If there is a defense — and I am not going to engage in moral relativism — Israel’s motives were grounded in survival after the holocaust, and 50 years of fights with its Arab neighbors and not in imperial ambitions that mostly guided other nations to commit atrocities (i.e, Russia, Turkey, China, Britain and also the United States).
War throws up complex, highly polarizing situations, which make it difficult and contentious to draw the lines. Israel’s current operation against Hamas has already led to an estimated 5,000 deaths (probably majority civilian), triggering outcries and accusations of war crimes around the world. Slightly more differentiated, Robert Adams wrote in the Economist “Is Israel acting within the laws of war?” (Oct 14th): Israel’s initial actions have prompted a wave of criticism. B’tselem, an Israeli human-rights group, has accused Israel of “a criminal policy of revenge”, arguing that the scale of its air strikes and blockade constitute “war crimes openly ordered by top Israeli officials”. Médecins Sans Frontières, a humanitarian organisation, has accused Israel of unlawful “collective punishment” of Gaza “in the form of total siege, indiscriminate bombing, and the pending threat of a ground battle.”
In practice, though, international law and the specific rules that govern warfare — the law of armed conflict (loac), also known as international humanitarian law (ihl) — give Israel considerable latitude to attack Hamas, according to legal experts. Article 51 of the United Nations charter gives states the right of self-defence against armed attack, provided that, according to customary international law, the force they use is necessary and proportionate. Proportionality does not mean symmetry in the type of weapons used or the number of casualties caused. It means that the defending state can use as much force as is needed to address the threat — and no more.”
Sponsored by Iran[xv] (and Russia, as we know now), Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah have embedded themselves deeply in the society and infrastructure of their territories and countries (Gaza, Lebanon, Syria), making it impossible to target them effectively without harming the civilian population which they use as a human shield. Israeli war tactics can be brutally efficient, but its government is aware of its legal and humanitarian responsibility: ”…Mr Sari (a lecturer at the University of Exeter) says that the IDF, in his experience, is “world-class” in its legal expertise and professional ethics. “I have a lot of faith in the Israeli military, lawyers and their system. It is very robust.” Military lawyers are present at Israeli military headquarters from the brigade-level up to advise on targeting. “Every target is legally examined,” insists Mr Mandelblit (a former Israeli chief military advocate general, MAG). Legal policy is set by the MAG and civilian attorney general together, with the latter getting the last word.[xvi]”
I anticipate the IDF to cross the line on several occasions, because this happens to attackers and defenders in all wars (Ukraine included). But the (legal and moral) difference between the two seems very clear to me. It is not fundamentally wrong to accuse Israel or its government of oppressive behavior, an eye for an eye revanchism, brutality in war or other mistakes in the past and present. But it is faced with a terrorist enemy that not only denies its right to exist as a state but also has the annihilation of every Jewish person in the world as its stated goal.
Realpolitik is needed
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict will not be resolved in a fight over historic guilt or moral principles. Pseudo-intellectual name calling (“anti-colonialism”, “apartheid”) has no basis in reality and is an insult to the real victims of colonialism and apartheid (where approx. 25M black people were oppressed by approx. 4M white people from 1946 to 1990). The Palestinians have always provided a welcome projection map for the world’s minorities’ own grievances (half my school wore Palestinian head scarves in the 80s and we knew or cared little about them).
Any solution requires the search for common grounds first, which can only be the safety and prosperity of the Israeli and Palestinian population on a mutually agreeable allocation of land. I do not profess to know the solution, nor am I convinced there will be one. But I can imagine a list of indicators that would demonstrate that we are headed in the right direction:
- A total elimination of incompatible religious arguments (i.e., my temple is holier than yours, God gave us this land, death to all infidels, etc. etc.)
- Economic development for Gaza and the West Bank, thus eliminating terrorism as a source of jobs and incomes
- A total cut-off of terrorist funding by the usual suspects, forcing the various groups into a reconciliation process that worked more or less elsewhere (i.e., Northern Ireland, Colombia?)
- Much better governance in the Palestinian territories, maybe under international supervision or guidance
- A continuation of the reconciliation process between Israel and Saudi Arabia
- A stronger economic involvement of Israel’s Arab neighbors in the welfare of the Palestinians (of the $40B of economic support between 1994 and 2020, the majority came from the EU, the US, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Germany, UK, the World Bank, Norway, Japan, France, and very little from Israel’s Arab neighbors)
- Many sacrifices and compromises on both sides, including equal rights for Palestinians in Israel and a stop to settlements in the West Bank
The biggest obstacle to all of this will be the continued influence of Iran and Russia in the area. The clerical-military government of Iran and its ally, the Russian mafia government, have become a cancer on humanity everywhere. They need to go.
Footnotes
[i] Over the years, many of my friends have received a book by Herlinde Koelbl from me, “Jewish Portraits — Photographies and Interviews”, 1989. It contains interviews with leading figures who survived the holocaust, politicians, scientists, philosophers, artists and others. Unfortunately, there is exists no English translation.
[ii] The payment for killings by the Palestinian authority was an especially despicable measure (https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-07-01/the-palestinian-incentive-program-for-killing-jews?sref=SLUwC4lw)
[iii] Interestingly, Ukraine was a founding member of the United Nations in 1945, as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (with the right to secede from the Soviet Union). This happened to give the Soviet Union two votes in the United Nations. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Ukraine maintained its membership as an independent nation.
[iv] The Normative Power of the Factual: Georg Jellinek’s Phenomenological Theory of Reflective Legal Positivism, from Part III — Central Figures, Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 January 2021:
Starting out from the assumption that legal positivism is premised on the assumption of a strict separation between the world of law, the world of morals and the social or ethical world, Kersten explains that George Jellinek’s phenomenological theory of reflective legal positivism aims to answer the question of how the world of law is connected to and can respond to changes in the social world. The general idea of Jellinek’s legal positivism, Kersten explains, is that a state has two sides — a legal side and a social side — and three elements — people, territory and political power — and that these elements have to be structured and defined with the help of the concept of legal auto-limitation of political power, that is, the concept of the state’s capacity to limit its own power by incurring legally binding obligations. On this analysis, Kersten points out, the central element in Jellinek’s legal positivism is that of political power, which structures and defines the territory and the people (the citizens) and also structures and defines the state by binding it to legal rules, especially constitutional rules.
[v] Juergen Osterhammel, “The Transformation Of The World — A Global History Of the Nineteenth Century”, Chapter III — Spaces, 2014
[vi] Simon Sebag Montefiore, “Jerusalem — The Biography”, 2012
[vii] Osterhammel
[viii] Tom Segev, “A State At Any Cost, the life of David Ben-Burion”, 2019
[ix] Dito President Biden on Oct 12, 2023 (Reuters)
[x] Ben Gurion termed this recognition a “great marvel” without parallel since Bar Kokhba’s rebellion against the Romans (Segev)
[xi] During the Peasant revolt against Egypt. Others date it later, early 20th century.
[xii] 1978 Camp David accord between Israel and Egypt to establish a framework for an autonomous regime in the West Bank and Gaza; the Oslo peace process from 1993 until its failure in 2000, which resulted in a mutual recognition of Israel and the PLO and several other initiatives
[xiii] Tom Segev, “1967 — Israel, the war, and the year that transformed the Middle East”, 2005
[xiv] UN Resolution 96(1), 11 December 1946: Genocide is a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups, as homicide is the denial of the right to live of individual human beings; such denial of the right of existence shocks the conscience of mankind, results in great losses to humanity in the form of cultural and other contributions represented by these human groups, and is contrary to moral law and the spirit and aims of the United Nations. Many instances of such crimes of genocide have occurred when racial, religious, political and other groups have been destroyed, entirely or in part.
[xv] And inadvertently by the West as well: https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/hamas-gaza-humanitarian-aid-diverted-cf356c48
[xvi] The Economist, Oct 14
