[I]n conversations with Israelis on the left and the (moderate) right in academe, the military, the government, and the security services, I've been struck by their grim declarations that they as a people aren't going anywhere, but also by their foreboding about the country their children will live in. Most of all, though, I've been struck by the frequency with which these men and women—patriots all—have wistfully said, "We should have taken Uganda" (which Britain offered to the Zionist leadership in 1903). History shows that many problems have no solution—a fact all but unfathomable to Americans. Nevertheless, the century-long Palestinian-Zionist conflict is a story of two peoples, each with reasonable claims to the same piece of earth; and nearly every aspect of that story suggests that in the end—and to the detriment of those peoples, their region, and perhaps the entire world—their aspirations are not amenable to compromise.
July 29, 2006
"Will Israel Live to 100?"
That's the title of an article, by Benjamin Schwarz, published in The Atlantic in May 2005. It's currently #1 on the "Top fifteen most-read articles online this week," according to email I just received from the magazine. Conclusion:
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This reminds me of a piece I read in the Financial Times 3-4 years ago by, I believe, Ron Unz (the guy who bankrolled an initiative in California to end mandatory bilingual education).
A strong supporter of Israel, Unz believed the country had a dim future because the implacability of Israel's enemies would eventually wear down the resolve of its citizens to stay there. Unz, who I'd call an economic determinist, saw the disincentives of staying in Israel as ever-rising, and that this would chase away, over time, a critical mass of the population needed to sustain a country.
Plus -- now this is me talking -- I see much despair among the Israeli left and its peace movement, as it has now sunk in that there is little hope of their preferred method of dealing with Israel's enemies ever working out.
In the US, 9/11 convinced a few leftists that anti-Americanism could be, under certain circumstances, evil. But not many American leftists were heavily invested in reaching accomodation with radical Islamists, so the disappointment wasn't too severe. In Israel, elements of their left saw accomodation and negotiated peace as the centerpiece of their political identities. With that gone, what has taken its place is not a conversion to Likud-nik-ism, but a kind of gaping chasm of existential despair. In the U.S. former liberals feel a little lost and confused, but there is room for us in the massive grey areas of American politics. In Israel, one can't take moral comfort in saying things like "well, I'm a hawk on the war, but I favor gay marriage and the environment, so I'm still not a right winger." There is one issue; to be wrong on that one issue is to be cast out of your own life history.
About ten days ago one of the other Richard Cohens wrote in the WaPo:
The greatest mistake Israel could make at the moment is to forget that Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism . . .
He took a lot of flak for that. I can remember thinking the same thing way back, though -- that the Europeans out of guilt for letting the Jews of Europe be slaughtered had now displaced another people to give the remaining Jews back their Biblical homeland -- an act so artificial and so bloodstained that it was bound to trigger a long and perhaps finally circular fall of karmic dominoes -- circling back, one fears, to another slaughter of Jews. There's something in that structurally like the story of Oedipus who, fleeing from the prophecy that he would kill his father and marry his mother, on the road accidentally killed his father and married his mother. Trying to make the best of amends to the surviving Jews has only put them in death's way again.
According to Schwarz' article,
"The century-long Palestinian-Zionist conflict is a story of two peoples, each with reasonable claims to the same piece of earth; and nearly every aspect of that story suggests that in the end—and to the detriment of those peoples, their region, and perhaps the entire world—their aspirations are not amenable to compromise."
There is ample precedent in the 20th century for solving similarly intractable land disputes by relocating some or all of the populations involved. Two notable examples: Greece and Turkey exchanged their ethnic minority populations after World War I; and after World War II the Czechs expelled the Sudeten Germans. In neither case was full justice done to everyone, but war was averted and the displaced persons moved on with their lives.
In contrast, the displaced Palestinians of 1948 were permanently consigned to squalid refugee camps. Barred from ever having productive lives, the Palestinians were artificially maintained as tools of grievance and revenge, first by corrupt Arab governments, and then by extremist religious movements.
How different the Middle East would be now if Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon had absorbed the first generation of Palestinian refugees and let them lead normal lives.
If the problem now has no solution, the blame should lie less on the founders of Israel than on the intransigent Arab response.
Supposing Israel is, indeed, too small and isolated to survive - maybe another alternative would be to build a critical mass around Israel by renewed 'Western' colonization of the Middle East - and Africa too?
As a long term goal there is a logic to this, and I think it would greatly benefit _most_ of the people in the colonized countries, just as it would usually be better to be an ordinary Arab living in Israel than living in any of the Arabic countries around Israel (or in any plausible future Palestinian state).
This is because (ethnicity aside) the mass of ordinary people are _much_ better-off in liberal democracies (such as Israel) than they are in military dictatorships, absolute monarchies and theocracies.
Local political and cultural elites (clergy, military officers, teachers, civil servants etc.) are status-disadvantaged by colonization - because the colonizers prevent them from becoming a ruling class. But local elites have different interests from the mass of the populations they rule, or aspire to rule.
The point is that other things are more important than ethnicity - 'other things' including democracy, rule of law, economics, science and technology.
So - perhaps Israel's supporters should set aside ethnicity (downplay it), and acknowledge that it really is too unstable to have a single liberal democractic state in the Middle East. But the answer should be having more of the same. Local elites would certainly resist, but if appeal could be made over-their-heads to the mass of people who would almost certainly benefit hugely from liberal democracy, Western colonization might well be welcomed.
Okay, the idea is a very long shot, and would require much more solid support to the USA-UK from European nations than seems likely at present, but a new wave of Western colonization seems both possible and probably very beneficial.
Geoduck said,
"And if the two state solution is not a possibility -- the one state solution, with all adults holding equal citizenship rights, then becomes the obvious outcome."
Geo, after the first election, the governing party in the new single state would be Hamas. What are the odds that a triumphant Hamas would shed its core beliefs that Jews must be killed or driven into the sea? Your new single state would not long remain a place where Jews, or anyone else for that matter, would want to live.
geoduck2, you omit another possibility, a regional, nearly global conflagration in the aftermath of which, if we win, relocation of populations will become politically feasible. Remember, it would not have been politically feasible to relocate the Germans from the Sudetenland or Silesia prior to WWII, but in the aftermath it was easy. In the same way, circumstances may someday permit the relocation of the Arab populations from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
By the way, in case someone wants to quote George Orwell, let me say that "relocation of populations" means that millions of German civilians were driven from their homes with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Their possessions were stolen and given to their enemies. Thousands, most of them women and children, died on the way. Those who made it suffered terribly. That is what our side did after WWII, and it doesn't trouble me.
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