What Is To Be Done About the Israelis and Palestinians?

If you feel the need for a backgrounder on the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians, brought into the news for the umpteenth time by the Obama Administration’s decision not to veto a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning the Israelis’ settlements in the West Bank, you could do worse than George Friedman’s at RealClearWorld. On the competing claims which he characterizes as “moral arguments”, he writes:

Moral arguments are made, of course. The moral argument for the existence of the state of Israel is that it rectifies an injustice committed by the Romans 2,000 years ago. But 2,000 years is a long time, and the half-life for moral rectification seems past. The claim that the Israelis wanted peaceful coexistence with the Arabs was true, but limited by the fact that they wanted that peace to be on Israeli terms. The claim that this was merely the return of a people to a land where their rights were morally unambiguous strains credibility.

The Arabs’ moral argument is that Israel was made up of European people occupying Arab lands and displacing and oppressing the native population. The problem with this argument is that the history of Islamic expansion was the history of the imposition of its religion and political control on other people. Moreover, the history of the immediate region is one of violence, population displacement and oppression. The state of Jordan was created by the British-supported Hashemite tribe that was forced to leave the west coast of what is now Saudi Arabia and settled there. As for the argument that the creation of settlements in the West Bank is uniquely oppressive, that can only be made by willfully ignoring the slaughter and oppression in the rest of the Arab world.

There are some deficiencies in that account, of course. The modern colonization of Israel by Jews began just about a century earlier while the Ottoman still ruled Palestine. European, African, and Asian Jews began coming to Palestine to live in land that had been purchased from its owner, the state, much of it with money from the Rothschilds.

There is no really good accounting of the countries of origin of the present Jews of the land of Israel but they appear to descend in roughly equal thirds from Jews of Europe, Jews of Africa and Asia, and descendants of Jews who’ve lived there for a couple of millennia.

Similarly, there is no good accounting of the origins of the non-Jewish people of Palestine. Some are Arabs, some are Egyptians, some are from other places.

Genetic studies have found that the people who most closely resemble the ancient people of Palestine are the Maronites of Lebanon. In other words, neither side has a really good historic claim and what good is a historic claim anyway?

Here’s his account of present Israeli and Palestinian nationalism:

Israel is a settler nation, as are the United States and New Zealand. It settled in a stretch of the eastern Mediterranean coast that Israelis had some historic connection to. Part of it was a response to the rise of nationalism in Europe. If every European cultural entity had a moral claim to a state, so should the Jews. The theoretical position turned into a practical one in World War II. They had thought they were simply Europeans with a different religion and discovered that wasn’t true. The theoretical argument for nationhood and statehood surged. The Jews were a nation. They needed a land on which to build a state. They migrated, partially displaced a population and created a state.

Palestinian nationalism had the same origin in European nationalism. Palestinians had two identities. One was Muslim. The other was Arab. But until the fall of the Ottomans, they were subjects of the Turks. When the Ottomans fell and the Jews began to arrive, so did the idea that they were a distinct people requiring an independent state. Their claims against the Jews were at first ambiguous and based primarily on Muslim or Arab identity. Over time, as with the Jews, the objection to Israel and the basis of their claims against Israel were refined into the idea of nationhood and statehood. They had a land, and they needed to be a nation and build a state. To understand the region, therefore, a historical, not a moral, perspective is needed.

Here’s his account of the situation on the ground now:

There are now two realities. The first is that the Palestinians are weak. No great power or Arab state has an overriding interest in the creation of a Palestinian state. The Russians are indifferent and the Arabs are concerned about the radicalism of such a state. The Palestinians are also divided, split into the relatively secular West Bank and religious Gaza – the Palestinian National Authority and Hamas. Without unity among the Palestinians, no one can sign an agreement authoritatively or coordinate resistance to the Israelis.

The second reality is that it is impossible to create two states. The Israelis cannot give up the Jordan River line since it is their main defensive position. Nor can they accept a westward shift of the border toward the 1948 lines, as it would make the Israeli heartland (the Tel Aviv-Haifa-Jerusalem triangle) vulnerable to the kinds of rockets fired from Gaza.

The Palestinians can’t accept a state divided between Gaza and the West Bank, without any transport under their control. Nor can they accept Israeli control of the Jordan River line, as that would mean that they remain isolated except for Israel permitting movement – and would mean the Israeli army moving through Palestinian territory. Finally, such a geography would be economic insanity. Palestine would remain dependent on Israel, with its population employed in menial jobs in Israel, passing through Israeli checkpoints.

In other words it’s an intractable mess with no fair, foreseeable solution. As long as the Israelis continue forcible resistance, they can hold the land. As long as the Palestinians continue forcible resistance, mayhem continues.

I understand the Israelis’ position. I understand the Palestinians’ position. The one thing I don’t understand is why it’s our problem to solve.