The Grand Illusion
Part I
The Jewish people have had a difficult time in holding on to their identity and their presence in what is now Israel. Back in the eighth century BCE, a portion of their population was expelled from Samaria (Israel) over the period from 733 BCE to 722 BCE. That was followed by the Babylonian captivity in the early sixth century BCE. The Jews revolted against the Roman Empire in 66 BCE in the First Jewish-Roman War, which culminated in the Siege of Jerusalem and the destruction of most of Jerusalem and the Second Temple. In 132 CE, Bar Kokhba led a rebellion against Hadrian, and after four years of warfare, the uprising was suppressed, and Jews were forbidden access to Jerusalem.
The Jewish community in Palestine regrouped and remained numerous, until the Byzantine–Sasanian War in 614 CE, when Jewish rebels aided the Persians in capturing Jerusalem, where the Jews were permitted autonomous rule until 617 when the Persians reneged on their alliance. After Byzantine Emperor Heraclius promised to restore Jewish rights, the Jews aided him in ousting the Persians, after which Heraclius subsequently conducted a general massacre of the Jewish population.
Following the Muslim conquest of the Levant area, Jews were initially allowed to re-enter Jerusalem, but subsequent taxes and restrictions on non-Muslims significantly reduced the Jewish population. Depredations by European crusaders and others over the years further reduced the Jewish population so that by the beginning of the Ottoman Empire in 1517, there were only some 5,000 Jews in Palestine.
Matters weren’t that much better in much of Europe. In 1290, English King Edward I expelled all Jews from England. Shortly thereafter, Philip IV of France ordered all Jews expelled from France, with their property to be sold at public auction, and some 125,000 Jews were forced to leave. Then in 1315, Louis X lifted the ban on Jews, but later in 14th century Jews were accused of poisoning wells in France, and five thousand Jews were killed, after which Charles IV expelled all French Jews. Spain expelled all Jews in 1492. A great many Jews fled eastward and ended up in Poland and Lithuania.
In Russia, in the early 19th century, matters became worse, due to a series of Czarist decrees, beginning with the Pale of Settlement, establishing where Jews were allowed to live, which immediately uprooted 100,000 Jews, and forbade the Jews from living in any of the main cities. Next came the Cantonist Decrees which effectively forced military service and “indoctrination” on the Jewish population. By the end of the 19th century and into the 20th, Russian pogroms were intermittently ongoing.
The last and most horrific of attacks on Jews, of course, was the Holocaust, which almost no nation in the world even mentioned while it was occurring and which killed six million Jews, as well as five million others, the Nazis found “undesirable.
This summary is far from inclusive and doesn’t include the hundreds if not thousands of smaller incidents since 1945,
Part II (which may seem irrelevant, but isn’t)
The United States has mythologized itself as a bastion of freedom and a “shining city upon a hill,” and more than a few (older) histories have described North America before colonization by Europeans as a wilderness and sparsely filled with savages.
In fact, neither was ever true. Recent studies show that, before Europeans arrived, North America likely had between ten and twenty million inhabitants, that is, before gun powder, horses, greed, and European diseases ravaged the continent and destroyed more than ninety percent of the population because they lacked immunity to European diseases and because they didn’t have the tools of power – especially usable beasts of burden. It wasn’t that they didn’t know. There’s evidence that Indians were smelting copper on the banks of Lake Superior 6,000 years ago. But they gave it up because, without any supporting technology and beasts of burden, it wasn’t cost or labor effective, which also limited the development of weapons.
Historically speaking, what human beings can do without domesticated animal power is extremely limited, and there weren’t any powerful and domesticable animals in the western hemisphere.
So the indigenous peoples couldn’t compete with Europeans, initially. But some indigenous tribes went to work, and by 1830, the “Five Civilized Tribes” (the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee, and Seminole) began to compete on the white man’s terms… and were successful enough that Southern whites got “good ole boy” President Andy Jackson to pass the Indian Removal Act (which the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional and which finding Jackson ignored) and to use power – the U.S. Army, in fact – to force 60,000 Indians onto the Trail of Tears, killing thousands along the way.
But this abuse of white power wasn’t limited to the indigenous peoples.
In the century after the Civil War, almost every time a successful black business community developed, white men destroyed it. In 1921 mobs of white residents destroyed homes and businesses of the Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma, burning and destroying more than 35 square blocks of one of the wealthiest black communities in the United States, colloquially known as “Black Wall Street.” More than 800 people were admitted to hospitals, and as many as 300 may have died. While the most notable massacre occurred in Tulsa, there were at least fifty others, with twenty-five occurring between 1917 and 1923, with an estimated death toll in the thousands.
The Point of All This?
History is littered with discarded or ignored principles that fell by the wayside or were pushed there by the unbridled desire for wealth or power or both, and the history of even great nations has more than a few despicable acts.
No people can rely on the promises of others unless it has at least a modicum of power.
This is a fact that nearly 3,000 years have taught the Jewish people, and asking them to forgo that power when they’ve been betrayed over 3,000 years is not only unwise, but, frankly, insulting, even if Netanyahu is little more than a corrupt street thug in tailored suits.
While I don’t dispute your well-reasoned and well-researched analysis, the fact remains that unless Israel is finally willing to move ahead with a two-state solution, it is difficult to see a path forward where the nation of Israel can remain both Jewish and democratic. Keeping their present territory “Jewish” leads inexorably to apartheid at minimum.
You’re likely correct, but the challenge will not only be to keep the Palestinian state from merely replicating the situation in Gaza, but also getting acceptance on all sides.
Thanks for putting this together. It’s really unfortunate how the vast majority of commentators, or at least the loud ones, are unable to discuss this with any nuance or sense of context.
I’m not disputing your historical analysis, but most people aren’t looking that far back while trying to process the present-day situation. This may indicate a lack of education or long-term sight in most of the people of the world, but it is something anyone working towards a solution will have to take into account.
If you only look back to the start of the state of Israel, other comparisons seem obvious.
The Israeli settlers arrived in a country that already had long-established (Palestinian) inhabitants.
They drove out a lot of those inhabitants, penned them up in small areas with limited resources, and enacted laws and rules upon them that took away a lot of their rights. In this they were supported by foreign powers like the UK and USA, who made sure the Israeli people were a lot better armed and could exert their hegemony over the territory granted them by those foreign powers by force.
Those displaced and dispossessed tried to fight back (at first just by boys throwing stones at armed soldiers and getting shot in retaliation) but are never able to exert as much force as is brought to bear against them, and are destined to lose their lands, their homes, their lives and their rights, any time they protest their discrimination and exclusion.
Sound familiar?
How about the American settlers taking the land from the native Americans, supported by the might of European colonisers and advanced weaponry? Segregating the native Americans on reservations, subject to the rules of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, that were both discriminatory and not benevolent. With the new powerful invaders dictating the terms, and breaking any treaties they made whenever it suited them.
How do people nowadays look at how those natives were treated by the incoming settlers? I don’t think that is seen as a template for good conduct of a displaced native population by an incoming conquering settler nation.
Yet the way the incoming Israeli settlers have treated the Palestinians who lived in the area before it was given, by outsiders, to the Israeli people to start their own state, shows parallels to the settling of America, and other such conquerors versus natives situations.
Having been badly treated historically as Jewish people is not a universal pardon to treat others in the same way: locking them up in ghettos, driving people from their homes and lands by force, severely limiting their legal rights and access to water, food, healthcare (including contraception) and education, jobs and freedom of movement even within what is supposedly their own Palestinian territories (also look at the West Bank, not just Gaza, for many examples of all those things).
Locking people up in ghettos without reliable access to most basic needs and any kind of hope for a better future, consistently and constantly increasing the pressure on those locked away, is practically guaranteed to create the preconditions for a violent explosion. An attempt towards an equitable integration and inclusion from the start could have diffused a lot of the resentments and tensions by now*, but it is way too late now to achieve anything like that within a meaningful timeframe for those suffering at this moment from the violence.
* For example, getting all the Palestinians equal access to basic needs, education, healthcare (including contraceptives), and jobs that reliably pay a living wage would have been very likely to lead to a more equal birthrate, as educated moms with access to jobs have less kids. That would diminish the Jewish citizens’ fears of being demographically replaced if their Palestinian neighbors got any kind of democratic stake in Israel’s government.
The pressure cooker that Palestinians have been kept in for decades by the Israeli laws lead to the kind of demographic imbalance seen in the Palestinian territories, with children being a much larger part of the population – like in pre-industrialisation populations, where kids are more likely to die and are seen as the only possible support for when parents age.
And that demographic imbalance then further ups the pressure, and makes violent uprisings much more likely. The one is a foreseeable end-result of the other, though the outcome is perhaps less certain.
I have no solution, but excusing present-day excesses of violence and war crimes because of historically suffered persecution (on both sides, even if one goes back farther than the other!) does not seem to be compatible with a non-tragic outcome.
I would agree with most of what you said, except for one aspect. The Palestinians aren’t “penned up” by just the Israelis. They’re also penned up by the surrounding Muslim nations who won’t allow them to leave.
Our human interactions, are not in a place, but in a time. Time is the past. Meaning this in a literal sense. The layers of artifice that mediate our interactions mean that everything that comes to us from other humans comes to us from the past—sometimes the very recent past, but the past nonetheless. “Because we live in the past (when we are online),” L.M. Sacasas suggests, “we will find ourselves fighting over the past.” This is the cost of “History”.
Is there a benefit from “History”? Only if our interactions construct a future that is new and at least appears better for everyone.
“If you only look back to the start of the state of Israel, other comparisons seem obvious. The Israeli settlers arrived in a country that already had long-established (Palestinian) inhabitants.”
Respectfully, I don’t think the colonizer narrative holds up. The Jewish people were already there; did they colonize themselves? We are barely a week away from a widely-celebrated birthday of an infamous Jewish carpenter who was born in Bethlehem 2023 or so years ago, after all.
It is true that the Jewish population in the area almost doubled after 1917, when the Ottoman Empire crumbled in the British, took over, but many of those were people who had been kicked out by the Ottomans. Also, a number of the settlers were actually refugees. Jews used to live all over the Middle East, and were systematically kicked out of many countries.
While it’s tempting to analogize through the experiences within America, whether as to displacement/colonization of native Americans, or the treatment of minorities, the history of Israel and Palestine is extremely complicated and these comparisons not only don’t really hold up, but they tend to distort or prevent understanding of what is actually occurring.
As to the other points, there is no tit for tat exception to war crimes and crimes against humanity nor is the military occupation and colonization of the West Bank, or Israeli settler terrorism there in any way OK.