The Israel/Palestine Conflict: How did it begin? Will it ever end?
(Talk to a Service Club)
We all follow the news and we all think about the Israel/Palestine conflict, I believe, but it is not much discussed in this country. Our politicians leave it to the Americans. General Petraeus, in a statement to the US Senate Armed Services Committee, last year, listed this issue as one of the "major drivers of instability, inter-state tensions, and conflict" in the Middle East. "The conflict foments anti-American sentiment," he said, "due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel". Because Australia closely follows the US in foreign affairs, our relations with the Muslim world are affected also. There are many Muslims living in Australia. The country with the largest Muslim population in the world is our neighbour, Indonesia.
How did the conflict begin?
There is a common belief that Israel was founded after World War II to compensate the Jews for what was done to them by the Germans and other Europeans during the war. But this is incorrect. British government support for a Jewish state in Palestine dates back to the Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917.
The declaration was contained in a letter from Arthur Balfour, British Foreign Secretary, to Lord Rothschild, as representing the World Zionist Federation. The text is quite short:
His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country. (Emphasis added.)
Nationalism
The background to this declaration is the political philosophy of nationalism in Europe. In English "nation" just means the population of a country, but in 19th century Europe a nation meant an ethnic group. Ethnic nationalism began with the French Revolution. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), article 3, says: "The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation". This is not just the medieval idea that the rights of government depend on the consent of the governed: the reference is not to those who live under French government, but to those who belong to the French nation. The word Nation in French derives from the Latin word nasci, which means to be born; a nation is a group formed by birth, i.e. by descent. Post-Revolution European nationalism, developed first in France and later in Germany and other parts of central Europe, was the belief that each ethnic group ought to have its own state, and each state should be based on one ethnic group. This is the concept of a "nation-state". An associated idea is "self-determination". The "self" here is not the individual, but the ethnic group-each such group has the right, it was claimed, to determine itself, i.e. to govern itself. (On the idea of "national" self-determination, and an alternative, see my paper "Self-determination and the right to establish a government".)
The argument in favour of nationalism is that political institutions won't work well unless individuals are willing sometimes to subordinate their own interests to the interests of other members of the political community. Identification with a community, according to the nationalists, requires common language and outlook, and common language and culture requires historical continuity going back to some remote time, i.e. it requires descent from common ancestors.
The argument against nationalism is that ethnic groups always are mixed on the ground: it is simply not possible, and probably was never in history possible, to draw reasonable borders between ethnic, linguistic or cultural groups. The opposite of nationalism is multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is the acknowledgement that every state will normally contain a plurality of cultures, and that no one of these groups should claim a privileged place. It suits some to define multiculturalism as the fostering of social division, but this is a travesty. Multiculturalism is the recognition that human beings have a right to go on living where they are living-where they were born, or where they have moved to legitimately-and a right, while living in that place, to be treated with equal respect. Multiculturalism means no discrimination, no ethnic cleansing, no genocide.
In Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries the upsurge of nationalism was a disaster for the Jews. For centuries they had been discriminated against on religious grounds, because their ancestors had killed Christ. (Mt 27:24-25: "His blood be on us, and on our children".) Nationalism gave another ground of discrimination. The Jewish scriptures were full of the idea of the Jews as a people descended from common ancestors, a nation over against the other nations. In fact, the nationalist idea came to Europeans partly through the Jewish scriptures, which they read as part of the Christian Bible. But if Jews were a nation themselves, they could not also be part of other nations. On these grounds they were excluded from many European communities, which led eventually to the Nazi attempt to kill all the Jews in Europe. Nationalism prompted discrimination, discrimination led to genocide.
Zionism
Zionism was a nationalist counter-movement among the Jews, a Jewish ethnic nationalism provoked by the exclusionary attitudes of the European nationalisms. The main proponent of Zionism was Theodor Herzl, who in 1896 published a book entitled The Jewish State. The Zionists believed that Jews would never be safe in Europe until somewhere in the world there was a Jewish nation-state. They did briefly consider locations in Africa and South America, but clearly the right place was Jerusalem. From the 1890s the Zionist movement aimed at the establishment of a Jewish national state with its capital in Jerusalem. The First Zionist Conference in 1897 in Basel declared: "Zionism seeks to establish a home for the Jewish people in Palestine secured under public law." By "secured under public law" they meant "recognised by other states". "Home" did not necessarily imply "state", but a Jewish national state is what they had in mind. After the First Zionist Conference, Herzl remarked, "At Basel I founded the Jewish State...perhaps in five years, and certainly in fifty, everyone will know it".[Note 1] From then until the Israeli independence declaration it was just one year longer, fifty-one years.
The early Zionist movement got a surprising amount of support from the German government, including the Kaiser himself. The government's motives were mixed. German nationalists acknowledged that every nation should have a state; Jews could not be Germans, but Germans had no problem with Jews having their own state somewhere. Also, the German government did not want an influx of Jewish refugees from anti-Jewish persecutions in Russia and Eastern Europe; a Jewish state in Palestine would give persecuted Jews somewhere else to go. Also, Germany was engaged in a "drive to the East", in which they sought political and economic influence in the Ottoman Empire; most European Jews spoke Yiddish, which was akin to German, German was the usual language of educated Jews, as consumers their customary consumer goods were German; it would be good for German economic and political penetration into the Ottoman empire if European Jews settled there. However, the Ottoman government was definitely not interested. The Turks welcomed Jews anywhere in the Ottoman Empire except Palestine-they did not want a Jewish settlement that would eventually try to become a state.
The Zionist movement had committees in several countries, including a German Committee, a British Committee, and an American Committee (led by Louis Brandeis). The German and British committees moved in somewhat different directions.[Note 2]
If they had won the Great War (which in 1917 they very nearly did), the German government would have opposed any break-up of the Ottoman Empire. The Germans would have wanted to retain their alliance with the Turks, anticipating another war with the British. The German Zionist committee adapted their position to the policies of the German government. They suggested that Jerusalem would be a centre of Jewish culture, but not the capital of a state; Jews should be allowed to migrate there, but they would accept the responsibilities of Ottoman citizenship. They would not displace the existing Arab population, they wouldn't even buy land currently farmed by Arabs; they would use modern scientific farming methods to farm land that was currently uncultivated. Jewish skilled immigration would lead to a development of the Palestinian economy from which everyone would benefit, including the Arabs. Jewish financial skill and international banking contacts would rescue the finances of the Ottoman Empire, which was nearly bankrupt. If Germany had won the war, something like this might have happened.
The British and American Zionist committees favoured an independent Jewish state. Under the burden of the war, the British became desperate for American help, especially for dollar loans to buy munitions. The British government calculated that if it announced support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, American Jewish bankers would help the British finance their war, and America would be more likely to come in with troops. In 1917 the British nearly lost the war. The crisis of 1917 explains why the British government made the Balfour declaration then.
The Balfour declaration was rather vaguely worded: the British undertook merely to use their "best endeavours" to foster a "national home". The declaration did not seem to commit the British to anything much. But it turned out the British were serious. The declaration had not been made just for the crisis of 1917; the British had a longer-term interest in the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.
The League of Nations mandate
To understand this interest we need to think of India. The British wanted to defend their Indian empire against the Russians, not to mention the Indians. They needed to be able to transport reinforcements and supplies to India rapidly from every part of the Empire. The Suez Canal and the Cape-to-Cairo railway were vital transport links. The British expected the German-Turkish alliance to continue, and they wanted a Jewish buffer state in Palestine, allied with Britain, to protect the Suez Canal and the Egyptian railway system against the Germans and Turks. Such ideas had been in the minds of British politicians for some time. For example, Winston Churchillwrote in 1908: "The establishment of a strong, free Jewish State astride the bridge between Europe and Africa, flanking the land roads to the East, would not only be an immense advantage to the British Empire, but a notable step towards a harmonious disposition of the world among its peoples".
So by the end of the Great War the British were seeking to dismantle the Ottoman Empire. But they could not be open about their desire to appropriate parts of it, since they needed American support, and national "self-determination" was President Wilson's principle for post-war settlement. So the British made use of the new idea of a "League of Nations mandate". Under a mandate, they would have temporary control over people considered not yet capable of self-government, charged with the task of preparing them for self-government-they hoped as "dominions" within the British Empire, like Canada and Australia. After the war, the British secured a League of Nations mandate for Palestine. But their aim was not to prepare for government by the Palestinian Arabs. The League mandate incorporated the text of the Balfour declaration. The British would prepare Palestine for self-government as a Jewish state within the British Empire.
A single democratic state
In administering the League mandate, the British did not originally intend to divide Palestine between Jews and Arabs. They imagined that the whole territory would eventually attain self-government as a single independent state. It would be a Jewish state in the sense that the majority of its citizens would be Jews, but the existing Arab population would go on living there, with their civil and religious rights unimpaired, though in elections they would always be outvoted. (Note that the Balfour Declaration made no mention of the political status of the Arabs.)
The difficulty was that when the British got the Palestine mandate, the Jews were a minority in Palestine, about 10% of the population. In a memorandum written in 1919 Lord Balfour acknowledged a "flagrant" contradiction between the Palestine mandate and what was supposed to be the nature of League of Nations mandates: "For in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form [i.e. go through the motions] of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country...The...great powers are committed to Zionism, and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder importance than the desire and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land."[Note 3]
As Lloyd George, who was British Prime Minister when the Balfour declaration was made, explained, "It was contemplated that when the time arrived for according representative institutions [i.e. democratic self-government] to Palestine, if the Jews had meanwhile responded to the opportunity afforded them by the idea of a National Home and had become a definite majority of the inhabitants, then Palestine would thus become a Jewish Commonwealth".[Note 4] (By "Commonwealth" he meant state.) The Zionists understood it the same way: "The establishment of a National Home for the Jewish People...is understood to mean, that the country of Palestine should be placed under such political, economic and moral conditions as will favour the increase of the Jewish population, so that in accordance with the principle of democracy, it may ultimately develop into a Jewish Commonwealth".[Note 5] Self-governing Palestine would be unified, democratic and predominantly Jewish.
Partition
But this plan failed, leaving us with the present situation. It failed because the flow of Jewish immigrants was never strong enough to achieve a majority, and the Arabs resisted the British plan by force. Through the 1920s and 1930s there was violent conflict in Palestine, culminating in what the British called "the Arab revolt" of 1936. The British back-pedalled and, in response to Arab pressure and in violation of their assurances to the Jews, started to restrict Jewish immigration. They established a Royal Commission, the Peel Commission, which proposed for the first time what we now call the "two state solution". It recommended dividing Palestine into a Jewish state, an Arab state, and a neutral area around Jerusalem that the British would continue to administer. Since the Jewish and Arab populations were intermingled, the Peel Commission recommended a "population exchange" which would have involved the transfer of approximately 225,000 Arabs and 1,250 Jews (an upheaval obviously much more troublesome to Arabs than to Jews). The Commission's proposals were rejected by the Arabs and by the world Zionist organisation.
During World War II the conflict in Palestine died down, but it revived after the war. Various Jewish terroristorganisations tried to force the British to withdraw, and eventually they did. On US initiative, the UN in 1947 adopted another partition plan, once again calling for a Jewish state, an Arab state, and an internationally administered zone around Jerusalem. Even with complicated boundaries there was no clear division between Jewish and Arab areas-the proposed Jewish territory would have contained 500,000 Jews and 400,000 Arabs (again, an arrangment more disadvantageous to the Arabs).[Note 6]
In 1948 the British abandoned the Palestine Mandate and left. On the day before the British mandate ended, Ben Gurion proclaimed the independence of Israel. Arab countries soon afterwards declared war on Israel, and there were wars again in 1956, '67 and '73. Israel won these wars, and as a result Israel now controls the whole area of the former British mandated Palestine. The part of Palestine that is controlled by Israel but not internationally recognised as part of the state of Israel is usually referred to as the "occupied territories", but many Israelis prefer the term "disputed territories". The most important part is the West Bank, which Israelis usually call Judea and Samaria.
The territories
Among Israelis there are two opposed opinions about the future of these territories. On the day Shimon Peres became President of Israel, in 2007, he said: "We have to get rid of the territories", and claimed that most Israelis agreed with him. But on the other hand many Jews, on what is usually called "the right" of Israeli politics, regard the whole of mandated Palestine as rightfully theirs, by God's eternal gift. It is their "promised land". God promised it to the Jews forever; it was taken from them by the Greeks, the Romans and the Arabs, but now Jews are taking it back.[Note 7] The area claimed by Israelis who think this way is sometimes referred to as Eretz Yisrael, usually translated as "Greater Israel", or "the entire land of Israel"; it includes the West Bank and parts of Lebanon and Jordan. This claim is supported by many dispensationalist Christians in the United States, who are usually mis-called Evangelicals.
But many, I understand most, Israelis are secular, so many on the Israeli right don't base any claim on the Bible. They believe that control over all or most of Greater Israel is necessary to their security.[Note 8] The present Prime Minister of Israel, Mr Netanyahu, belongs to the Likud party. The first plank of the original (1977) Likud party platform reads: "The right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable and is linked with the right to security and peace; therefore, Judea and Samaria [i.e. the West Bank] will not be handed to any foreign administration; between the Sea [i.e. the Mediterranean] and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty." Hence Mr Netanyahu's remark made a few years back about a Palestinian state: "Not today, not tomorrow, not ever".
One reason why the so-called peace process will never get anywhere is that many Israelis won't accept a Palestinian state, ever, under any circumstances. And on the Palestinian side also there are people who don't want peace. Some of them believe on religious grounds that the whole world should be ruled by the Muslims, or at least that no territory that has ever been ruled by Muslims should be surrendered. Others oppose peace because they want to "maintain the rage" among peoples oppressed by the US and the West; Israeli rule over Palestine, and US support for Israel, helps recruitment to their cause, as Gen. Petraeus pointed out.
American and Australian "Friends of Israel" generally say the conflict can only be resolved by bi-lateral negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Many who say this really don't want any resolution--they want Israel to continue to control the territories indefinitely. Even if this is not their aim, it will be the outcome. Bi-lateral negotiations can never resolve the conflict, because on both sides there are people who raise demands they know the other side cannot accept, which they do precisely for the purpose of preventing any agreement.
However, indefinite Jewish rule over the whole of Palestine would negate Israel's aspiration to be both democratic and Jewish. If the territory ruled by the government of Israel includes too many non-Jews, then Israel must either (1) become a multicultural state, and cease to be a Jewish national state, or (2) withhold voting rights from non-Jews, and cease to be democratic, or (3) engage in massive "population transfer", voluntary or involuntary, to remove non-Jews from Greater Israel (Israel's critics sometimes talk of "soft ethnic cleansing", meaning minimal killing, but life so unpleasant that the Arabs emigrate.) If Israelis don't want ethnic cleansing, but do want their state to remain both democratic and Jewish, then they must (4) adopt the "two state solution", i.e. restrict the borders of Israel to the mainly Jewish areas and allow the other areas to rule themselves. (See here, here, here,here and here.)
Will the conflict ever end?
Because negotiations with Israel are getting nowhere, the Palestinians have recently been talking about approaching the UN Security Council to ask for UN recognition of Palestine as a state. The US Congress hascalled on the Obama administration to veto any premature recognition of Palestine.[Note 9] And indeed international recognition would be premature at present. International lawyers generally say that an entity cannot be recognised as a state unless its government has effective control over its territory, so that it can perform the duties international law requires of states, notably the duty to prevent its territory from being used to launch illegal attacks on other recognised states. While the Palestinians are divided into warring factions, a government of Palestine could not control all its territory.
But as I have argued elsewhere, there might be another possible approach. Under US constitutional law, the US President-without needing approval from Congress-can recognise a foreign state.[Note 10] President Obama could offer US recognition of a Palestinian state, and support for its admission to UN membership, provided certain conditions are fulfilled, namely--
(1) election of a new Palestinian government by the whole Palestinian population, including residents of both Gaza and the West Bank;
(2) an undertaking from the new government that it will abide by the obligations international law imposes on states, notably the obligation not to make attacks on other recognised states and not to allow such attacks to be made from its territory; and
(3) a credible plan from the new government for achieving control over its territory (credible in the judgment of the US President).
Such a conditional offer of US recognition, publicly made and publicised repeatedly, and left on the table while the various parties think it over, would provide the Palestinian factions with a motive to sink their differences and work together to fulfil the conditions-if statehood and self-government matters enough to ordinary Palestinians, they would urge their leaders to do that. Mr Netanyahu might not like the proposal, but the Israeli public would urge their leadership not to stand in the way. Apart from not obstructing, Israel would not be asked to do anything. In particular, it would not be asked to dismantle existing West Bank settlements.
The basis of the course of action I am suggesting is hope, one of candidate Obama's favourite ideas. President Obama should offer Palestinians a realistic hope of independence, as an incentive to do what they need to do. Instead of saying to them, as in effect President Bush did, "These are the things you must do to achieve agreement with Israel, though even if you do them Israel may not agree", President Obama would be saying, "If you do these things, I will give you US recognition immediately." Hope for some clear benefit within reach is a stronger motive than hope for something distant and uncertain.
Independent statehood would not be the end of the story. Palestine and Israel would still have much to negotiate-the future of the West Bank settlements, the return or compensation of the 1948 refugees, the precise location of the borders, and much else. A two-state solution would not guarantee an absolute end to the conflict, but it would win at least an interval of peace during which cultures might change and institutions develop capable of moderating future outbreaks of violence. I think that would be as close as we can get to an end to the conflict.
References
Friedman, Isaiah, Germany, Turkey and Zionism 1897-1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977).
Friedman, Isaiah, The Question of Palestine: British-Jewish-Arab Relations 1914-1918 (2nd edn., London: Transaction Publishers, 1992).
Shlaim, Avi, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (Penguin Books, 2000).
Fromkin, David, A Peace to End All Peace, The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (New York: H Holt, 1989).
NOTES
Note 1. Isaiah Friedman, Germany, p. 95. [Addendum: for an interesting recent statement of a version of Zionism, see Michael Walzer's article.]
Note 3. Similarly, Balfour wrote to Lloyd George: "The weak point of our position of course is that in the case of Palestine we deliberately and rightly decline to accept the principle of self-determination...we regard Palestine as being absolutely exceptional...we consider the question of the Jews outside Palestine as one of world importance...we conceive the Jews to have an historic claim to a home in their ancient land"; Friedman, Question, p. 325.
Note 7. The boundaries of the territory given to them by God can be ascertained from the Bible. There are several relevant Bible texts, which don't all give the same boundaries. One of these isExodus 23:31, KJV: "And I will set thy bounds from the Red sea even unto the sea of the Philistines [understood as the Mediterranean], and from the desert unto the river [perhaps the Euphrates, which runs through Turkey, Syria and Iraq]: for I will deliver the inhabitants of the land into your hand; and thou shalt drive them out before thee." Thus the Bible envisages ethnic cleansing. See my article Medieval Political Theory, 4.2, Warfare.
Note 8. Security against whom, and against what sort of attack? If this were the stone age, when attacks would be made by people on foot using primitive weapons, security would be provided by a wall or fence. In the 19thcentury, security might have required defence of river crossings or mountain passes. How far out would Israel's borders have to extend to provide security against modern forms of attack? If security is sought against the Palestinians, will this need an uninhabited buffer area? Many countries do not have borders defensible against rocket or drone attacks. Security is provided by the country's intelligence, police and armed forces, and beyond that by friendly relations with neigbours, the support of allied countries and the international rule of law (such as it is).
Note 9. US law requires that the US stop paying dues to any UN body that admits Palestine as a member, as UNESCO did recently. See here and here.
Note 10. "Under the constitution of the United States, the President has exclusive authority to recognize or not to recognize a foreign state or government"; Restatement (Third) of the Foreign Relations Law of the United States§204, p. 89. The executive governments of Australia, Britain and most other countries have a similar power (for us it comes under the Royal Prerogative).
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