Middle East Peace Notes

Eyes on the prize

2008-03-15T12:55:00.000-07:00

www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1204546409772&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

30 Adar I 5768, Friday, March 7, 2008 0:22 IST

Eyes on the prize

Sir, - "Defeating Hamas" (Editorial, March 3) was absolutely right that the "facts are simple: Israel is fighting to stop the bombardment of its cities." When the far Left ignores Palestinian human rights crimes against Sderot and Ashkelon and concentrates on the inevitably ugly side-effects of the Israeli response, it uses deplorable double standards and does not serve the truth.

And yet one can still wish Israel would recognize more the difference between what it has every right to do, and what it is prudent to do.

Israel is a tiny dot on a huge and still-hostile map, and the inescapable conclusion to draw from that hostility is that the war of 1948 continues. The only way to security and peace is to change the map from hostile to friendly, or at least for the map to be amenable to overall agreements - on withdrawal, the 1967 borders and east Jerusalem.

Mutual concessions that generated larger peace agreements would eventuate in the resolution of so many problems, like in Gaza, which would be enfolded in the more basic momentum and pressure toward moderation and peace and security.

As the American Civil Rights song goes: "Keep your eyes on the prize."

JAMES ADLER

Eyeless in Sderot and Gaza

2008-01-28T17:11:00.001-08:00

Sometimes the conflict seems like a house of mirrors. Is it possible to see what is going one beneath the excruciating suffering in order to help end it?

One source emphasizes that the power outage was only in Gaza City. Another emphasizes it says Gaza because Gaza city is the main and largest city. One emphasizes that Hamas, not Israel, shut down the power. Another says Hamas shut the power because it says Israel denied it the fuel to maintain the power. One says this is Hamas grandstanding. Another says the fuel shortage is real and bitter. One says all the Gazans need to do is stop the Qassams on the innocent Israeli people of Sderot to get their fuel. Another says it's not the Gazans but Hamas, and Gazans shouldn't suffer for Hamas. Another emphasizes that the people support Hamas, and that both want to destroy Israel. One emphasizes that the people wanted Hamas for its clean government and social services and despair over decades of unjustified poverty and refugee camps dating from 1948 and "gated community" affluent finger-in-their-eye Israeli settlements, and that the people never deserved this and built up cumulative anger that any other people would have also built up and accumulated, and have expressed their anger through Hamas.

One emphasizes that the shelling of Sderot is also collective punishment and an outrageous war crime against innocent civilians, and notes this is a poor and ungrateful and scandalous response to Israel for the pullout of the settlements and total withdrawal from and renunciation of the occupation of Gaza; and there could have instead been a peaceful response, and peaceful responses all along, from long before now up through today, that could have made by now -- and still could make -- a garden of peace and prosperity; but that Israel will defend its citizens like any other country and people, such as the United States after 9/11 with its own airport checkpoints and military retaliations against Al Qaeda in Pakistan. And that especially Jews after the Holocaust: that the few surviving Jews who were able to flee from Hitler's ovens to Israel, and now their children and grandchildren, will under absolutely no circumstances permit Jews to be victims of unprovoked and pogrom-like attacks again, either by inflamed mobs or armies from the ground or by lethal missiles from the air-- and even more, never again as a reminiscent and humiliating and passive and acquiescent potential first step down the Road to Hell of a Second Shoah. Absolutely--Never Again. Another emphasizes the long injustice and displacement and occupation of the Palestinians back to the 1948 partition of Palestine and back even farther to the First World War-era Balfour Declaration that colonially stole from them their own country, and has disempowered and impoverished and ethnically cleansed and made refugees of them in successive stages since, and that it is the return of the refugees and one free and democratic country that would have made by now -- and still could make -- a garden of peace and prosperity. One turns it around and says Israel's 1948 defense was a defense against Arab ethnic cleansing and a still worse imminent genocide. Another says it was the Balfour and Partition and Statehood plans, not mere and innocent immigration, that led to legitimate war from the Arab side. One denies and says the mere immigration and flight from persecution and without anywhere else to go but to Palestine led to violence against those peaceful immigrants. Another denies and says the immigration was never a mythical "pure immigration" but always inextricable from Balfour and planned Partition. One says, Americans, look at yourselves, in your condominiums and homes on stolen Indian land. Another says, that that is by now "ancient history."

One says that Balfour in 1917 and the Partition of 1948 are also by now "ancient history" and that the Gazans, like Palestinians in general, have, in Abba Eban's words, "never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity" to move beyond the past and look to the future and show that their people can concentrate on their own nation-building. They say that not only has Israel now withdrawn from Gaza, but further that most of the West Bank as well would by now have been freed from occupation if the Gazans and the Palestinians in general had looked ahead and worked more comprehensively and positively toward that free and prosperous nation of their own. And they quote Golda Meir that if only the Palestinians would try to build up their own country and raise wisely their own children rather than try to destroy Israel and murder Israel's innocent children--once again innocent Jewish children. Not Never Again, but Again and Again. Another denies that this case is "ancient history," and claims that instead it is a case of one of the world's last colonial outposts, and foresees that violence and massive civil unrest will not end, any more than it did in French colonial Algeria and during the Algerian War, or (they say) apartheid South Africa, until this very late (they say) outpost of segregation and colonialism and apartheid also ends, and claim it to be just another basic pulse and actuation -- in the broadest possible strokes -- of all (--they say--) recent modern history's anti-segregationist and colonial and post-colonial struggles. One denies this and says it is singled out, that the Jews are so conveniently and as usual singled out for media lynching and condemnation, ignoring the long historical perspective and plight of the Jews, who only want peace and security... Another denies this and says that the media lynches the Arabs and Muslims and ignores any historical understanding and the current plight of the Palestinians, who only want their land...

One says... The other says... This sometimes seems a house of mirrors, and Gaza, as many other aspects of the conflict, crystallizes it. Sometimes it brings me to despair about how most objectively for it to be analyzed, and then for it to be resolved in order eventually to bring healing, reconciliation, justice, security, and hope and peace for all.

Despite All, Israel's Cogent Case

2007-12-31T09:59:00.000-08:00

www.harvardsquarecommentary.org

adapted from

HARVARD SQUARE COMMENTARY

December 31, 2007

James Adler

On the same day and page last week that the online Jerusalem Post reported that Ha'aretz Daily's Editor-in-Chief said to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that "Israel wants to be raped,"* and that it had always been his "wet dream" to tell her, which was David Landau's horrifically offensive way of speaking the truth that pushing Israel would be good for peace, The Jerusalem Post also reports Daniel Pipes telling in his view "why a Palestinian economic collapse would be good for peace."**

So basically, on the same day, it reports Landau and Pipes saying essentially the same thing: That there will be required pushes to get to peace. But ironically, although Landau's phraseology was so horribly offensive as to be beyond all belief, it is possible (though a bit sickeningly) to get behind it to his actual idea, which would then seem benign, that a friendly US should push to help get peace and security for both peoples; while both Pipes' language and his idea as well were offensive, that one side (the Palestinians) to suffer an economic collapse would be good for peace.

Sadly Pipes' offensive comment does not surprise me. But Landau's does.

Consider the reaction if anyone said that Israel that needed an economic collapse to bring peace, in order to see how callous it would be to wish it upon either people. Neither side deserves an economic collapse to bring peace. As for Ha'aretz's David Landau, when freed of his deeply insulting and offensive mischaracterization of his own idea, he is correct that a trustworthy and honest friend, the United States, is needed to push both sides forward a bit to help to bring peace and security for everyone.

But for all people who want the US to intervene more compassionately and persuasively and urgently on both sides of the conflict in order to help Israelis and Palestinians alike, not hurt them, this could be one of the most harmful and insulting comments in the history of the conflict. It is appalling. And how "sophisticated" could what he has said been, as The Post reports he insists it was, if he actually made use of such language?

It was a grave and outrageous insult to women (as well as to Rice personally, and to all men who support women); it was a grave and outrageous insult to Israel; and it was both a crude and outrageously inaccurate political analogy, because rape fundamentally harms, and the goal of US involvement is fundamentally to help.

One wonders whether Landau will be able to keep his Editor-in-Chief's job at Ha'aretz after such a comment to Rice.

The biggest tragedy could be its injury to the region's people if it causes significant damage to the progressive cause of getting the United States more forcefully to prevail upon both sides to bring about confidence-building, compromises, binding agreements with verifiable internal steps and external guarantees, and lasting peace. Since these steps are indispensable for any future of Israeli and Palestinian peace, there is no telling how much (or, hopefully, little) Landau, by perhaps so preposterously setting back their realization, has set back peace and security for both Israel and Palestinians.

*Article on David Landau's comments (Link)

**OP-ED column by Daniel Pipes (Link)

Does Post Editorial Page Editor Saul Singer really believe that Israeli settlements have been only minor and Palestinian radicalism by far the most major obstacle to peace?

That 550,000 settlers and Likud's claims to the Palestinian lands have not in fact further radicalized the Palestinians and made peace harder over forty years? Israel did need a defensive army in the Territories after 1967, but not civilian settlements, and without any settlements ever, peace momentum produced by just any small bump or nudge could have easily generated peace.

The Sadat-Begin peace process could have ended in peace if Begin had not claimed what he called "Western Eretz Israel" along with the settlements.

Before Jordan relinquished the West Bank to the West Bank, Israel could have relinquished it to Jordan, except that the always abiding Likud Platform claims Greater Israel's eastern boundary to be the Jordan River and the Kingdom. Sadat championed peace in the Knesset, and without Israeli claims and settlers it could have happened, and then also perhaps Sadat would have lived as part of less general Arab radicalization. Israel has peace with its two main 1967 foes Egypt and Jordan, and if there were no settlements, then with a returnable West Bank and no Settler movement's fury, there could have long easily been peace. When Sharon denounced the occupation, his Likud Party was also furious, and Netanyahu and others pointed to a basic same Likud Platform. Now rightists call for an independent state of Judea and Samaria. Similarly the Oslo process and later Camp David in 2000-- if built on a more solid and long foundations of moderation and trust with Israel always in its '67 borders--could have much more easily produced both a groundswell of moderation (the withering of radicalism) and peace.

Sharon and his cabinet repeatedly expressed fear that disengagement of just 30,000 settlers in Gaza could produce full-fledged Civil War. If that was so hard, how ever could there be a half a million further settlers returned back to Israel?

How could there have even been 30,000 without Ariel Sharon himself doing it?

In sum, how much simpler peace without the settlers. Israel has peace with Jordan and Egypt; and Sadat might have still been alive: How can Singer claim the 550,000-strong settlements are not at least as big an obstacle to peace as radicalism but also itself a major factor in the continued radicalism?

Saul Singer's column (Link)

III

Israel has a cogent case that would more appeal to the modern West if didn't use so many endlessly repeated false arguments that only undermine it.

Recently I've read these things in Post opinion pieces, letters, and talk-backs:

1. That it was "unfair to excise Jordan from Palestine in 1922." But Daniel Pipes notes (in "Commentary", Oct. 1988) that Jordan was part of the Palestine Mandate "for a mere eight months, from July 1920 to March 1921". Eight months is a nanosecond in historical time. Pipes also points out that the Balfour Resolution only first became legal with Britain's formal reception of Mandatory responsibilities 16 months later, in July 1922.

And even this response concedes too much. Why should the 85% of Palestine that was at that time Palestinian, and had been for eons, have accepted the Balfour Resolution in general, even for Palestine itself, much less for Jordan as well?

And what if instead the Balfour Mandate had indeed included Jordan?-- or included even more lands like Syria and Iraq? Even the Occupied Territories have proven too large to absorb, and Israel should thank its lucky stars that in 1948 and 1967 it didn't capture or annex them, much less try to swallow those still larger outlying elephantine nations.

2. That "we (Jews) created Jerusalem." But the Bible says David took for a capital a pre-existent city (2 Sam. 5:6-7, 1 Chr., 11:4-9).

3. And that the Canaanites, Philistines, and Jebusites "all disappeared and only we continued." But nobody "disappeared." Instead everyone simply intermarried with everyone else, including later with the Arabs, to become today's Palestinian melting pot with its ancient roots.

And there is no reason to think this intermarriage and melting pot of all ethnicities would not also include those of the "Ten Lost Tribes of Israel." Which could be a startling but rather inspiring lever for reconciliation between the two peoples, since it would then make sense that the Palestinians were themselves a little Jewish.

And any rate these types of apologetics, the first based on modern land claims and the second on alleged historical ancient precedents, rightly appear deeply problematicto the modern west, and so do not help Israel's case but harm it.

But, as I've noted before in this space, in virtually the same words, Israel's has a cogent case, as seen in Theodor Herzl's, Old/New Land, that it was a peaceful and liberal movement of refugees fleeing for their lives with a dream of a multiculturalism in for them a new land. If there had been no native Arab anti-Jewish-refugee violence that began -- and this is significant -- many decades before partition, and included the 1948 war of attempted genocide against a people understandably and understatedly sensitive about having been already recently almost exterminated, a war Arabs fought not for any return of Arab refugees since there were no Arab refugees anywhere but all remaining in their own homes and villages throughout the Mandate, and also no Arab expulsions of Jews to Palestine from all other parts of the Middle East, then the area would now be so heavily and peacefully Arab in population, and the Jewish refugees likewise so peaceful and liberal, that the area would be so completely peaceful and demographically mixed as to be completely unrecognizable today.

For instance there would be no violence-- Palestinian or Arab no terror, invasions, bombings, or vile and foul threats; and there would be no current -- very strong -- Israeli need for security fences, checkpoints, by-pass roads, and border and access impediments; and again, and most fundamentally, there would have been no Arab refugees in the first place. And instead there would be the fruits of peace-- everyone in their own homes, and economic modernization and prosperity and dignity for everyone.

And now Israelis are now mainly either Sephardic Middle Easterners from time immemorial or innocent Sabras -- Middle East native-borns. Russians and some American Jewish idealists or right-wing adventurists probably constitute the main exceptions.

So that in sum, it was the Arab anti-Jewish-refugee violence, and not the peaceful and liberal Jewish refugees, that destroyed Herzl's liberal dream. And it is this that constitutes the "Case for Israel." (Rather than all the tendentious and spiteful and petty and expansionist territorialist and historical arguments). It is precisely this case for Israel that the modern liberal West could empathatically understand, and the terrible Palestinians' plight as well, and whose decisions getting them into this nadir were made by dictators (as the Israelis themselves claim) long since dead.

And it is now an ethnic conflict, a "cycle of violence" between, on the one hand, the Occupier Establishment and Settler Extremist maximalists, and, on the other side, and Hamas and Islamist and secular terrorist and likewise extremist maximalists.

The proof of the comprehensibility of Israel's case is that the modern liberal West did understand and outright (even) "loved" Israel before the more recent post-1967 decades of extravagant land claims, settlement, incessant building projects in Palestinian Jerusalem and on other central Palestinian land, and occupation.

If these issues were resolved, there is no reason the West could not love Israel again, as it did in those quaint and innocent and yet hopefully -- not beyond hope -- rehabilitable pre-1967 days. And Palestinians could get back their lives and their entire future.

What's the best Annapolis can yield?

2007-12-31T09:55:00.000-08:00

Ha'aretz Daily
Tel Aviv

Wed., November 14, 2007 Kislev 4, 5768|

|Israel Time:

14:07 (EST+7)



			Efforts like at Annapolis, though at best they may advance us just one small step, would seem grounded not on some empty vapid idealism, but on the most tough-minded of concrete necessities for the long-term future of Israel.
			James Adler, Boston, U.S.A.

Sometimes the pundits claim that the difference between the liberals and moderates, and conservatives, is that the first see negotiations such as at Annapolis as potentially -- even if only at best -- one small step toward peace and security, and conservatives don't see anything constructive about them.

But if conservatives are correct, that Israel is at war with the Palestinians and seventeen Arab states and a world of a billion Muslims, and that these are implacable enemies who will be determined sooner or later to acquire Iranian and also Arab nuclear weapons and never rest until Israel ceases to exist, then according to the conservatives' own logic, it becomes inevitable that sooner or later Israel will -- terrifyingly -- cease to exist.

The irony is that conservatives raise alarms so fatalistic and terrifying that they box Israel into this long-term self-destructive cage. If conservative anti-Annapolis pessimists and cynics are right that peace plans will never work, because there are only two alternatives, a Palestinian Terror State or Israeli absorption of the Occupied Territories, how again is Israel not ultimately doomed?

Moderates and liberals ask Israel supporters of all political views this: Before hopelessness radicalizes, and turns to Islamism, all the Palestinians and Arab countries, including Egypt and Jordan -- makes them implacable and also ultimately nuclear-armed enemies, why not put aside our differences and negotiate for Israel's peace and security?

Efforts like at Annapolis, though at best they may advance us just one small step, would seem grounded not on some empty vapid idealism, but on the most tough-minded of concrete necessities for the long-term future of Israel.

James Adler

Had Rabin lived, would he have forged peace?

2007-11-04T09:07:00.000-08:00

www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ArticleNews.jhtml?itemNo=916161&contrassID=13&subContrassID=1&sbSubContrassID=0

Fri., November 02, 2007 Cheshvan 21, 5768|

Israel Time:

12:20 (EST+7)

Had Rabin lived, peace?



			All the dominoes were lined up for peace and security for Israel and Palestine. Both sides would have likely made the further needed concessions.
			James Adler, Boston, U.S.A.

It is impossible to know. But peace was never more likely. It was before the second intifada, before 9/11, before the spread of Islamic extremism, before the ascendancy of Hamas. The Israeli public was less cynical, less skeptical less tired, less beaten down, and was for giving peace a chance.

The giant peace demonstrations in (now) Rabin Square show how much the Israeli public wanted peace.

Arafat was a strong unchallenged leader, unlike Abbas, and his total power went unchallenged by Hamas or Islamist extremism, and so he could have
delivered. The handshakes in front of the White House were high-profile and world-famous and the world pressure was visible and intensive.

The Gulf States and Saudi Arabia were in recent deep debt to the United States and Western powers and Arab coalition for the First Gulf War and liberation of Kuwait. Even Syria had fought for the allies in the war. Russia was still in the middle of its pro-Western Boris Yeltsin days and
was as helpful as it has been before or since. The indomitable King Hussein of Jordan was still on the scene as a powerful, influential, and trusted moral force for peace in Jordan, and just as much in Palestine and Israel alike. President Clinton was at the height of his power and influence, still in his first term with the second to go, and as far from being a lame duck as you could get.

All the dominoes were lined up for peace and security for Israel and Palestine. Both sides would have likely made the further needed concessions-- for example Israel about division of Jerusalem, and Palestinians about getting no more than a face-saving but only symbolic and token right of return.

There were even some ingenious possibilities being floated as trial balloons, such as God being declared sovereign of Jerusalem and the Israelis
and Palestinians making a division of Jerusalem into merely pragmatic administrative districts, and God recognized as in charge of an officially
united Jerusalem.

Maybe that specific idea wouldn't have worked, but it shows the creativity and optimism and spirit of peace of that era. Tens of thousands of ordinary
Israelis held a massive peace demonstration in central Kings of Israel Square, led by the Prime Minister of Israel himself. And then a brutal
fanatical right-wing assassin destroyed the hope and possibility.

James Adler

Muslim hearts & minds

2007-09-02T13:37:00.000-07:00

www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1188197178878&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

15 Elul 5767, Wednesday, August 29, 2007 0:33 IST

Muslim hearts & minds

Sir, - Barry Rubin and David Horovitz have both recently written wise pieces on our not learning from the failure of various peace processes and hopes, and our not being able to get it together in the Middle East ("Come and let us reason together," August 27, and "Wishful thinking," August 17). But still I think both pieces are ultimately unsatisfactory.

I agree with the writers' frustrations but see no alternative to trying for peace and reasonableness, however long it may take.

The enemy is not like in World War II. Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were each compact, insular, isolated, centralized states that were unpopular, even despised, on their respective continents. This enabled us to try to defeat them militarily and unconditionally, using any means, and to do what we wanted to them afterward. So to win we used atomic bombs and indiscriminate urban firebombing; and afterwards, the changing of Japan's state Shinto religion and the denazification of Germany.

Today could not be more different. There are a billion Muslims worldwide, whose (often irrational and extremist) anger is decentralized, amorphous and comes from the street. They are not in small, centralized, isolated states but represent a worldwide and popular state of mind. Muslim groups could become increasingly more militant, and want nuclear weapons. In any war we fought Israel would be the first target.

If there was ever a situation in which a people's "hearts and minds" must be won over, skillfully and with determination, this seems to be it - however frustrating the process, however much time it takes.

JAMES ADLER

Beyond the Blame Game in the Middle East

2007-05-25T12:21:00.000-07:00

First, it is safe to assume is that neither Israeli opinion leaders like Israeli progressive novelists and essayists Amos Oz and David Grossman, nor Palestinian opinion leaders like PA President Abbas and PLO ambassador to the US Afif Safieh, are moral imbeciles.

For centuries the Palestinians were 95% of the people and land of Palestine, and then Jews from Europe took over.

But the Jews were refugees fleeing persecution who were peaceful and liberal.

Without decades of Arab anti-Jewish-refugee violence including a war against partition, which was not fought over return of Arab refugees, since there were then no Arab refugees, the area would be so demographically heavily and peacefully Arab, and the Jewish refugees also so peaceful and liberal, it would be unrecognizable today:

Without these Palestinian refugees out of Israel (and without the Jewish refugees from the rest of the Arab world into Israel), there would probably long have been two (yes, two) peaceful Palestinian-majority states — Israel, majority Arab but with a large and safe- and-sound minority of Jewish refugees, Jews back home, and Palestine, largely Arab but also with a large number of safe and secure Jews, and also back home.

In such currently entirely unrecognizable circumstances, they may even have reunited or federated by now.

As seen in Zionist founder Theodor Herzl’s classic, “Old/New Land,” Zionism was originally a peaceful and liberal movement of fleeing refugees and a dream of a multiculturalism in one land. It was Arab anti-refugee violence, not peaceful and liberal Jewish refugees, who ruined the liberal dream.

The refugees’ right to have children who did not have all their throats slit open forced them to circle their wagons.

But the Arabs, to be blunt, had the right not to welcome strangers and immigrants-- they had the right to be inhospitable, the right to be xenophobes, the right to be unwelcoming, the right to be isolationist.

On the other hand, the Jews, facing extermination in Europe, had the right to live, the right to life, and the right to escape where they could-- come hell or high water.

And so it became both hell and high water-- the basis of this terrible conflict.

Still, since the Arabs had the right to sovereign resistance to immigration, and to a state, it would be unfair not to ask ourselves how many Third World countries have enough trouble with their states and societies without their people also having been squeezed into a 20 per cent corner of their land, covered with camps of their own refugees, and with their administrative infrastructure repeatedly smashed to pieces by an external settling and occupying power, as the Palestinians have suffered over recent years.

Both sides have been scared and suspicious of each other, and sometimes treated each other mercilessly-- the Arabs often merciless to the escaping Jewish refugees from the European pogroms and then the holocaust; the Israelis often merciless as occupiers.

But the Israelis have probably treated the Palestinians better than the Arabs have treated the Jews, and better especially than the Arabs would have if they had instead been winners, since the Jews would probably have faced mass slaughter.

But if the Jews have probably behaved better, it was the Palestinians’ land first, and they rightly feel cheated of their country. But the Jews went because they were fleeing for their lives.
What a terrible conflict.

If only people’s sympathies extended to both sides, especially since much of what anyone says, if qualified by the other side’s case, is true.

Though weighted toward the Palestinian need to stop the violence.

Partisans for the Palestinians need to understand that much of the undoubted — and ongoing — Israeli harshness during the occupation has, underneath, been a terrified response of Holocaust survivors to the threat of violence, and their deep-seated panic that at any time it could escalate out of control into a genocidal nightmare.

Ironically, but understandably, many Palestinians don’t see why they shouldn’t violently revolt, including immorally against innocent Israeli civilians themselves, which also makes things much worse.

And also ironically, and just as understandably, many Israelis don’t see why they should withdraw when (as after the withdrawal from Gaza) it doesn’t seem to lead to cessation of threats and violence.

But which doing so anyway would still in the long run things better.

And finally, even the moderates, who realize each side needs respectively to refrain from violence against Israelis and and to withdraw from Palestinian land, think the other side should go first.

While extremists don’t think their side should have to do anything.

And therefore, on the one hand, with each side’s extremists, and, on the other hand, with both sides’ self-righteous and defiant and mistrustful attitude that “the other side should have to do it first,” this nightmarish mother of conflicts continues with no end in sight.

The Gaza rocket attacks on Israel

2007-05-23T19:50:00.000-07:00

www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ArticleNews.jhtml?itemNo=861478&contrassID=13&subContrassID=1&sbSubContrassID=0

Ha'aretz Daily
Tel Aviv, Israel
Mon., May 21, 2007 Sivan 4, 5767 Israel Time: 03:01 (EST+7)

How should Israel deal with the Qassam fire?

Israel should never have been in Gaza for forty years, or have claimed Gaza for forty years, or have put settlers constituting 1% of the population of Gaza into Gaza who took over 30% of the land, and lived in middle class comfort in the midst of 99% of the people in squalor. This has generated much hatred.

The hatred and anger and desire for retaliation cannot be expected to go away overnight.

That said, Israel did withdraw, and Sharon and Olmert had a plan for further withdrawals from the West Bank as well, and Gaza created a possibility for the Palestinians to show what they can do. They have disgracefully botched their chance, both in their internal infighting and the Qassam attacks on Sderot, which is both Israel "proper," and against the civilian population of Sderot.

The long Israeli claim on Gaza, and the occupation and seizure of 30% of the land for middle class settlements amid squalor makes the anger at Israel understandable, but it is still a war crime and against all international law to make these immoral attacks on innocent people, and a tragedy for both them and Israel -- and especially Israel's civilian community of Sderot -- that they can't look forward and optimistically ahead rather than remain backwardly stuck in the past.

For Israel's own sake it needs to do three things at once that are hard to fit together: To be decisive in stopping it. Not to get bogged down in an exhausting "Vietnam" or "Iraq" or "Lebanon" in Gaza. And while being decisive, not to generate still more hatred and another generation of terrorists.

I don't know precisely how to calibrate it to include all three, and expect Israel's decision-makers don't either, and I don't envy them as they try to go about combining all three elements in doing this.
The Saudi peace plan is the best long-term way to stop it, by the Arab League and Jordan and Egypt putting pressure on the extremists to stop, and maybe even doing some temporary (or indefinite) administrative taking over of these areas. But this still leaves the short-term and difficult three-way balancing act for Israel's leaders for stopping the attacks.

James Adler

The Far Left and the Present

2007-04-11T14:34:00.000-07:00

The Far Left and the Present

The problem with the far left for me is that it used to make sense-- but doesn't seem to me to make as much now.

There was a time in which:

The occupation seemed endless, especially in 99% Palestinian Gaza where the 1% of settlers got 30% of the land; the politically then-dominant Likud's Party's platform claimed Greater Israel from the "sea to the river"; Netanyahu was quashing Oslo as much as Arafat was; there seemed to be apartheid with no security reason for it; and the Palestinians were soon to become a majority in an apartheidist Greater Israel which this "Likudist Israel" claimed and occupied eternally.

Finally in an ongoing rebuke to the two-state solution, even during the heyday of Oslo and Barak Israel doubled its number of settlers.

In short, Israel seemed to be increasingly maximalistic and ideological, while for their part the Palestinians seemed to be increasingly moderate and pragmatic, recognizing Israel and wanting just a state on their occupied land.

Critics of the left who don't see what the situation was seem to me to be in deep denial.
But-- since then has occurred a turn. Barak's and Clinton's offer was rejected -- without commitment to continue negotiations with a counteroffer. The 2nd Intifada came with orchestrated suicide bombings. Al Qaeda appeared on the scene. Islamism grew.

Still, Sharon came to reject the occupation and "Greater Israel." And he had Israel leave Gaza. The imminence of a Palestinian majority and a consequent full-fledged apartheid state in the so-called "Greater Israel" of historical Palestine between the Mediterranean sea and the Jordan River disappeared from view, and Sharon (and next current Israeli Prime Minister Olmert) planned to leave most of the West Bank-- and they brought along with them most of Israel's public.

But this ended with Ahamedinejad's threats and Hamas in power and last summer's kidnappings, and missiles from Hamas in the south and Hizbollah in the north, a poor reward for leaving Gaza. The other side now seems to be the more maximalist and ideological -- which is just what the far left used to note -- accurately -- that the Israeli side appeared to be.

For elementary justice for the Palestinians and for security for itself, Israel needs as much as ever to withdraw. But the far left's special critique of Israel -- which I shared at the time -- just doesn't seem to make as much sense to me. I feel somewhat long-term betrayed by the Palestinian leadership. I am running out of excuses for it.

The Continuing and Urgent Need for a Negotiated Solution

Not only negotiate with the Palestinian coalition government, but Israel should also have agreed long ago to negotiate on the basis of the Saudi-Arab League offer. It would be naive for anyone to think offers are any more than opening negotiating positions. Israel is not naive and knew this too, but still rejected it. And pretended the Arab offer wasn't a perfect final position as an excuse not to negotiate.

We all know what an agreement will be like-- a symbolic and insubstantial right of return involving the few token remaining elderly refugees from 1948 who may still want to go, and Israel's keeping the large adjacent settlement blocs in exchange for equal amounts of Israeli land--and some recognitions of partial responsibility and a lot of international aid and security guarantees.

In the past Israel may not have wanted peace enough for it to have to remove a lot of settlers.
The Lebanese and Palestinians are rightly seen as weak in their failures to rein in Hizbollah and Hamas, but Israel has seemed just as weak in its own failure to reign in the ultra-right orange settler movement.

Olmert had to tell the settler movement he would abandon "convergence" in order for the settlers to fight the Lebanon war. More basically, if the settlers caused the Israeli government to fear civil war over Gazan disengagement and withdrawal of only a small fraction of the settlers, how much more would the government fear a civil war over a much more substantial withdrawal?

This may also be why Israel took off the table the Barak-Clinton offer after Arafat's rejection, even though the Arab League has kept its own offer still standing on the table long after Israel's initial rejections.

It may be that only that Iran nuclear program finally made Israel realize that a "managed conflict," i.e., Dov Weinglas's notorious boast that the "peace process was frozen in formaldehyde" is not good enough for Israel's security, and obvious fact the Arab offer would some open-mindedness about regional negotiations for peace.

I sympathize with Israel's smallness, sense of beleaguerment, terrorism, last summer's attacks and kidnappings, -- again, a poor reward for the withdrawal from Gaza -- and the government's solemn duty to protect its people in view of past Holocaust and present conflict, as reasons for caution.

But this same solemn duty suggests now is the time to proceed--before it becomes too late for Israel ever to have security-- if it is not tragically already too late.

Reflections on "Fact and Passion: A Case for Israel" and a Passover Rumination

2007-04-09T11:18:00.000-07:00

Two weeks ago I put out there "Fact and Passion: An Experimental, Modern, and Anti-Anti-Semitic Case for Israel."

One thing I was -- and have all along been -- trying to do is to dig down into the barest bones of this conflict, penetrate into its core, on the assumption that neither people like Israeli progressive novelists and essayists Amos Oz and David Grossman, nor leaders like PA President Abbas and PLO ambassador to the US Afif Safieh, are moral imbeciles.

Amos Oz once wrote that the Arabs think the Jews were European colonialists, when what they were were panicked survivors of an Israel that was and is actually one giant refugee camp.

What he doesn't say is that even if he's right, traumatized and panicked survivors can be themselves dangerous. And then I wonder whether if it were anyone but the Jews -- say, Evangelicals in Palestine -- or like Afrikaners and Brits in South Africa -- everyone would say, bite the bullet and reunite. And sometimes I think that too. Bite the bullet, like the Afrikaners did.

Then sometimes I think that this conflict is just unique, that the fact that they're Jews is relevant, the fact that they were chased out (to their homeland is of perhaps some but even then secondary importance) is relevant-- again, my formulaic nub of the conflict, the immovable object of the Palestinians who had every right to stay put, to resist, and driving this to the farthest wall that they even had every right under the sun to be xenophobes, while, on the other hand, the Jews had every right to flee for their lives and to live and try to survive.

Ironically, the "irresistible force" of adrenlinized energy and momentum that may have helped the Jews survive in 1948-9 may harm them now, as well as raising anti-Semitism once again. Martin Buber and especially his colleague Judah Magnes rather predicted that such a destiny could follow.

What polarizations here-- not only the polarized partisans in the conflict, but also the disparate interpretations of it.

Right now the "right to be an immovable object" and "right to be an irresistible force" is the best that I can do -- and added to it, that one side being an "irresistible force" nevertheless is going -- self-evidently -- to generate profound resistance. And especially because of the overwhelming demographics against the Israelis from the Arab and Persian and Muslim worlds, one may wonder whether, if the Israelis do not someday relent and become part of a reunited or federated historical Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, if instead we may see the resistance bring about the unutterable anguish and hell of Israel's destruction-- that the Jewish short-run "irresistible force" could be in the short run precisely "resistible," and so perhaps instead lead to its quick and horrific and hellish destruction (say, from Iran or neighbors radicalized into Islamists) or toward its long-run fatigue and enervation and decline.

In the period of Holocaust and partition and war, 1939-1949, perhaps the Jewish people of Palestine did urgently feel that they had no choice and were faced with prospective extermination. They were certainly threatened with it-- by both the Germans and Arabs.

Moreover, whether they were right or wrong, this Holocaust and post-Holocaust traumatized --and therefore so unprecedentedly burdened--leadership was far from perfect.

In sum, who has ever been put in a similar existential bind about what to have done?

Then the Palestinian leadership wasn't (and isn't) perfect either. And also who has also been put into as much of a bind as that "immovable object," the Palestinians, about what to have done in the face of this "irresistible force"?

Perfect leaderships would of course have avoided the conflict, and could have resolved and healed it all along, and could resolve and heal it now. But such leaderships exist nowhere and never have ever existed.

So where do we go from here?

Ha'aretz asks what Passover is about. One thing it is about is freedom-- from slavery and war. Abraham Lincoln said that "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master", and he "who would be no slave, must consent to have no slave." Passover means freedom from slavery, from mastery, from conflict, from swords, from Jews oppressing Palestinians and Palestinians oppressing Jews.

But how? For centuries the Palestinians were 95% of the people and land of Palestine, and then Jews from Europe took over. But the Jews were refugees fleeing persecution who were peaceful and liberal. Without decades of Arab anti-refugee violence including a war against partition, which was not fought over return of Arab refugees since there were no Arab refugees, the area would be so demographically heavily and peacefully Arab, and the Jewish refugees so peaceful and liberal, it would be unrecognizable today: Without any Palestinian refugees from Israel, there would long be two (yes, two) peaceful Palestinian-majority states -- Israel, majority Arab but with a large and safe- and-sound minority of Jewish refugees, Jews back home, and Palestine, largely Arab but also with a large number of safe and secure Jews. In such currently entirely unrecognizable circumstances, they may even have reunited or federated by now.

As seen in Theodor Herzl's classic, "Old/New Land," Zionism was a peaceful and liberal movement of fleeing refugees and a dream of a multiculturalism in one land. It was Arab anti-refugee violence, not peaceful and liberal Jewish refugees, who ruined the liberal dream.

The refugees' right to have children who did not have all their throats slit open forced them to circle their wagons.

But the Arabs, to be blunt, had the sovereign right not to welcome strangers-- the sovereign right to be xenophobes, to be unwelcoming. But not any right to be murderous against innocent people. On the other hand, the Jews, facing just such mass murder in Europe, had the right to life, the right to live, the right to survive, the right to escape to wherever they could come hell or high water.

And it has become for both peoples both hell and high water. One side that has the right to be an irresistible force and the other that has the right to be an immoveable object.

Can they share the land? Even by 2000 Japan and Russia had still not signed a peace treaty ending World War II, because of a "handful of small islands off the northern coast of Japan's Hokkaido island, which are part of the Kuril Island chain" [from geography.about.com]. The islands are far less than 1% of the area of each country. Britain and Argentina went to war over the Falklands, thousands of miles from Britain and again far less than 1% of the area of each country; as have India and Pakistan over Kashmir, which is less than 1% of the land of each of these countries.

So how does anyone expect Israelis and Palestinians to succeed in the superhuman feat of reasonableness over emotion of sharing Palestine, when the whole, entire, 100% of the land of Palestine is what is at stake?

Passover is a reminder of both sides in bondage and the absolute miracle required for both sides -- and also with the world's steady help -- to "learn war no more."

The Arab peace initiative: Should it be amended? -- Ha'aretz, Mar 29, 2007

2007-03-29T11:26:00.000-07:00

www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ArticleNews.jhtml?itemNo=842112&contrassID=13&subContrassID=1&sbSubContrassID=0

Ha'aretz Daily
Tel Aviv, Israel
Thu., March 29, 2007 Nisan 10, 5767
Israel Time: 14:30 (EST+7)

I have frequently said that Israel should have agreed to negotiate on the basis of the Arab offer. It would be naive for anyone including Israel to believe an offer should be taken only at face value and not used as the mere opening bargaining chip for further negotiations, for Israel to make a counter-offer, until an agreement is made-- probably token and symbolic recognitions about right of return without it actually happening (or only a few elderly refugees from the period who wanted to), and withdrawal to ‘67 with some modifications, i.e., Israel getting its large adjacent settlement blocs and giving equivalent amounts of Israeli land.

Since Israel is not naive and knows this, the only available reason it did not accept the offer as the mere basis for further negotiations is that it did not want to negotiate, using excuses to the credulous west that the offer (with right of return, etc.) was unacceptable, even though opening offers are always unacceptable.

Israel may not want peace badly enough because it would involve the removal of settlers. If the ultraright “orange” settler movement caused Ariel Sharon and the Israeli government to fear civil war over the Gaza disengagement and withdrawal of a small fraction of them, 9,000 settlers, how much would the government fear civil war over much more substantial withdrawals of settlers and land?

James Adler

Should Israel negotiate with the new Palestinian Coalition Government?

2007-03-23T06:20:00.000-07:00

www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ArticleNews.jhtml?itemNo=838999&contrassID=13&subContrassID=1&sbSubContrassID=0

Ha'aretz Daily
Tel Aviv, Israel
Thu., March 22, 2007 Nisan 3, 5767

Israel Time: 14:36 (EST+7)

Of course Israel should negotiate. Not only is a reader right that "we should not wait for Palestinians to become Zionists to agree to talk with them," and Rabin right that people have to negotiate and make peace with their enemies, not with their friends; but also, if Israel negotiated with groups regarded by Palestinians as sell-outs, or even Quislings, the agreement would assuredly fail. Only by negotiations with strong Palestinian nationalists can any agreement ever succeed.

That doesn't mean that Israel should negotiate in the middle of a rash of Hamas-caused suicide bombings. We should always be morally unambiguous, even during conflicts and even during negotiations with a group that is our enemy, and such actions are always unambiguously abominable. But that doesn't mean that Israel shouldn't negotiate with a group with whom it as a war; most wars do not end with unconditional surrender (World War II is unique and a misleading example for almost all other wars), but with negotiations between the opposing sides in the middle of those wars.

The United States not only negotiated with but even formed an alliance with Joseph Stalin and his Soviet Gulag during World War II as a trade-off for a different moral good, fighting Hitler. During the Cold War, the U.S. negotiated constantly with the Soviet Union and Leonid Brezhnev and their ongoing Gulag, and made "detente" with Brezhnev despite the Berlin Wall, innocent civilians shot to death who crossed it, psychiatric torture hospitals, etc. Just as Reagan negotiated with Yuri Andropov, the KGB predecessor of Gorbachev.

It's a moral trade-off - as many unavoidably are in the messinesses of life - but usually the larger morality of future peace and cessation of suffering gets served. And not to negotiate only serves the larger immorality of the protraction of conflict and suffering.

James Adler

Passion and Fact: A Modern Case for Israel

2007-03-17T22:26:00.000-07:00

There is only one case for Israel, but it is an undefeatable case for Israel.

Every educated and enlightened Westerner in a position of political power from 1900 to 1945 thought migration into Third World lands (that phrase didn't even exist), which were largely colonial lands, was all right, and they approved the petitions of the Jewish Westerners who sought it -- in the League of Nations British Mandate Balfour clause and in UN partition.

The Western overseers did not have to approve it, and they did.

The Western overseers who approved it were largely themselves anti-Semitic and sat at the top of the heap of 2,000 years of Western persecution of the Jews whose petitions they approved. Like it or not, that's what happened.

Western overseers wouldn't approve such a petition today, and would have no colonial power to do so, but they did back then, and thought it was morally all right back then, and the Jews were suffering under the heel of both Western governments and anti-Semitic pogrom-animated mobs. Then the biggest European anti-Semitic pogrom of all occurred in the last 12 years of the period 1900-1945, 1933-1945, when 3/4 of European Jews (1/3 of the Jews in the world) were wiped out.

The European and UN masters of the world, including of the British Mandate, then approved partition. And by that time, due to the prior 50 years, Palestine did have a huge Jewish population. Like it or not, it did, and the Western powers approved it, and they didn't have to, but they did.

And unlike the Jewish petitioners, the Western powers did either for reasons of anti-Semitism or patronizing sympathy, and combined with the colonial mentality of might makes right and they could do whatever they wanted. At least the Jewish petitioners did it only to escape 2,000 years of European persecution by the European overseer class of peers of these same overseers, persecution they had tolerated for 2,000 years and which had worsened in Russia and Eastern Europe in the late 1800's and would soon culminate in the Holocaust. And the petitioners work saved thousands of Jews from the Holocaust.

To blame the Jewish petitioners and not the European overseers who gave the authorization is a gross double-standard, especially since the powerless Jews just wanted out of a European hell-hole, and the European overseers had all the power, did all the persecuting of the Jews, and were the ones who approved it in their capacity as the colonial masters of the world.

So, again, the Western world colonialized the outer world as well as persecuted its Jewish inner world, and approved the Jewish plea for an escape. And it's the Jews who get blamed. Swell. How convenient, that after 400 years of European colonialism since Columbus, and 2000 years farther back if one includes Europe from the Roman Empire to the Crusades and only then on forward to Columbus, it is the Jews who are now put in the position by the world as sticking out like a sore thumb as the one, the one and only people, accused of colonialism.

How convenient. How traditional and habitual.

It is the Western overlords with their colonial philosophy and their colonial power to implement that philosophy, who approved and provided for this escape hatch from their own persecutions that were about to turn into their own outright ovens. And now does the Arab world blame Europe? No. Does Europe blame Europe? Either for the persecutions or for their colonial philosophy and overlordship of the world that approved of and created all the conditions for this plan? Oh, no. Everyone blames the Jews, only the Jews.

In this "mother of double-standards," the blame doesn't go to Europe for the persecutions that gave rise to the plan of mere escape, the colonial philosophy that permitted approval of the plan as moral and feasible, and the colonial raw power that forcibly executed the plan: no, the blame goes to the Jews being persecuted for buying into the pervasive and inescapable colonial philosophy of their own colonial overlords and world masters. The Jews get blamed for accepting the philosophy spoon-fed them and everyone else in Europe by Europeans at least since the time of Columbus, and for using the same philosophy everyone else accepted, except in their case not to conquer per se, but merely to escape persecution, and who still required the stamp of approval and the raw colonial overlordship of the European world masters to happen; Europe doesn't get blamed for the philosophy, the world overlordship, the persecution forcing the Jews to use the European Overlord's Philosophy that they accepted in the same way everyone else in Europe did and still used only as a desperate escape-hatch (the even further proof of the desperation for escape arising in the Holocaust); no, the Jews get blamed for Europe's philosophy, the Jews get blamed for accepting Europe's philosophy, the Jews get blamed for Europe making them desperate to ask if they could use Europe's philosophy for the purpose of an escape-hatch from Europe just before their actual near-obliteration by Europe.

The Arabs blame them, they are little and more vulnerable than Europe. Europe blames them. Western anti-Colonialists blame them. Blamers, blame yourselves, not the Jews; blame your society and history and power, not the petitions and weakness and desperations and impending Europe-caused implosions of the European Jews.

And since Jews since the Prophets have been among the most morally self-critical and self-examining of peoples, a large portion of them blame themselves, blame Israel, and also re-enact a classic situation of victims blaming themselves; this case where victims blame themselves, combined with the exceptional moral scruples defining Jewish culture for millennia, have produced the situation where so many Jews are concerned about what has happened, so many Jews are critical and self-critical. They are NOT self-hating Jews. They are Jews being their BEST selves, but mistakenly misattributing the blame to themselves when the blame goes to Europe and the West.

The Jews caught in the vortex of the philosophy and reality of European internal persecution of them and equally of external overlordship of the world, were pawns in this vortex; chronology shows them superficially as "actors", when they were pawns, pawns powerless and petitioning seeking an escape-hatch based on the European overlordship philosophy immersing them even as persecuted victims and pawns and seeking not to overrule but just to escape (Jewish scruples at work), whereas the infrastructure was European colonial philosophy and power, European approval of their subject Jews' petition and execution of that power to get rid of them and consistent with how Europe executed that power for Europe's own colonial greed and colonial entitlement to colonial domination -- rather than to escape persecution -- for their own naked raw lustful domineering (rather than the Jewish weak and escapist) interests all over the world.

The Jewish Zionist actors were just the "superstructure" and passive, powerless, petitionary pawns; the vortex and ideology of European universal outward domination and inner persecution of its Jews was the infrastructure, substructure, and at the heart of its morally wrong colonialism everywhere, including the morally wrong but uniquely exculpatory Jewish effort to make use of it to escape, and even then the European same old nakedly dominational philosophy and power of approval and enforcement of the Jews' weak and desperate petitions in the face of the same European criminality both as directed inward to Jews and outward to the rest of the world. And the Jews get blamed.

How convenient. How nice. How millennially entrenched.

Zionism was in many ways wrong, at least by today's standards, though not by those of that time. It was Europe that was both actively persecutory of its Jews and actively colonialist to everyone and everywhere, including in Europe's own Zionism. And so it is Europe that bears the responsibility, including the responsibility for the security and defense of Israel whose Jews they had both killed and run out; the Jews' plight is, as it were, the bed Europe laid for them.

It is Europe that must face and come to terms and accounts with the Palestinian Arabs and Arab world on this; it is Europe that must compensate and clear the moral and political and financial decks with the Palestinian Arabs and Arab world on this. The last things it may do is be indifferent, and, even worse, co-blame along with the Palestinians' and Arabs' blaming, the Jews.

It was Europe that was both actively persecutory of its Jews and actively colonialist to everyone and everywhere including in its Zionism; and so it is Europe that bears the responsibility, including the responsibility for the security and defense of Israel whose Jews they had both killed and run out, and whose bed it is Europe that had laid for them. It is Europe that must face and come to terms and accounts with the Palestinian Arabs and Arab world on this; it is Europe that must compensate and clear the moral and political and financial decks with the Palestinian Arabs and Arab world on this. The last things it may do is be indifferent, and, even worse, to blame, along with the Palestinian and Arab blame of, the Jews.

The Palestinians and other Arabs have at least some excuse to from the narrower geographical scope of their experience of what happened.

It is Europe that has no excuse and should be in abject shame, first, for standing aside, and second and far worse, for casting its stones as well at its own colonially laid out bed of vomited-ut Jews.

Now let us be more specific and explicit about some things. In the years 1492-1949 (1949, by which time Europe had killed 3/4 of its Jews who had stayed there, and had left Palestine and India, and around the time the British Commonwealth of Nations was replacing the Empire) but when Europe still assumed and maintained its ideological and actual overlordship of the world, some of the Jews who had escaped with their lives, mainly from the 1888s to 1948-9, had been approved to escape with their lives beneath Europe's authorizing ideological and colonial overlording auspices to Palestine.

First. Therefore this migration was like every other migration and as legitimate as every other migration made during those years-- to North and South America, to India, and everywhere else. (The only difference being that the Jewish was one of the only ones made not for personal economic reasons or economic aggrandizement on behalf of Europe, but for political escape, of which the stakes were nearly and soon to become life-or-death in Europe's clutches.

Second. By the end of these 450 years, and specifically the last 75 when the Jewish escape under Europe's thumb took place (under Europe's thumb in both senses of under its ideological and colonial authorization like all other European peoples' 450 years of migrations, and under its thumb about to crush them like a bug), the migration (like all the migrations, while this one was, as well, a migratory escape), the Palestinian population was incontestably 45% Jewish and 55% Arab, unless the Jews are to be singled out for blame among all European peoples for that period of 450 years under the most egregious of conceivable double standards).

Third. For those 450 years, and actually on to around 1962 when almost the last African colonial enclaves had received their independence, or for about exactly 500 years, Europe had carved up, frequently into arbitrary and artificial constructs, most of the nations of the world under its 500 years of colonial dominion, these carvings and artificial constructs were often made with little or no regard to the peoples living within and overlapping them, including most of the artificial constructs that became the independent nations and UN members of Africa. No one questions the legitimacy or boundaries or territorial integrity of these nations today.

Fourth. Some of these European constructs took the form they did with some actual ethnic and religious logic behind them, rather than the more frequent European disregard and heedlessness of them, including European partitions of peoples who seemed not to be able to get along, including between India and Pakistan. No one questions Europe's partition of India and Pakistan, and no one questions it even though Europe gave it to the Pakistanis who wanted it and not the Indians, because the Pakistanis did not want to be a permanent minority under permanent Indian hegemony and rule. No one questions this European partition or the Pakistani reasons for wanting it-- at most, perhaps, the specifics of its boundaries in Kashmir.

Fifth. Only when Europe gave it to the Jews of Palestine who wanted it do people object throw stones at the Jews. And no one throws stones at the World Overlords of Europe for doing it, and the World Overlords of Europe join it at throwing stones at the Jews. No stones at the artificially constructed countries and peoples of Africa, and not the Hindu and Muslim peoples of India and Pakistan, but stones hurled only at the Jews. And only after Europe had exterminated three quarters of those of its own Jews who had stayed.

Sixth. And again the World Overlords of Europe didn't have to give it to the Jewish population of Palestine, didn't have to do it, but they did do it. And again, still, everyone, including Europe itself, after having done it, doesn't throw stones at anybody else, including its own other peoples living all over the world, but throws stones at the Jews, and only at the Jews. The one migratory people who out-migrated during Europe's 500 years of world overlordship, to avoid persecution and ultimately extermination by Europe itself. But it is only the Jews who, struggling after near-total extermination and then struggling again without a moment's breather or pause or rest to survive the hostility in the partition that Europe gave, and even though the whole European Overlorded World was transformed into nation-state outcomes based on much more artificial constructs and partitions than in Palestine, it is only the Jews who receive -- and continue to -- the pummelings of stones from their former European Overlordship Masters and Mass Murderers. Nothing is more disgraceful. If war is the continuation of politics by other means, one wonders how much of an exaggeration it can be (some, to be sure, but how much?) to call Europe's perpetual hail-storm of stones against the Jews its continuation of its own holocaust against the Jews by other means.

Seventh. The European -overlorded and -ruled Jewish migratory population of Palestine became partitioned from the Palestinian population of Palestine not even by the European Overlords but by the new and post-overlord United Nations. It is the United Nations, concerning whose power and authority the Arab states were members and signatories, not to mention Europe's that as an international institution voted to make this particular partition. In a world filled with manifestly less democratically done, and manifestly more heedless, arbitrarily colonially drawn and European-made new national constructions and partitions. But only the Jews get pummeled with the stones thrown at them, with Europe standing near the head of the line of the stone throwers.

Eighth.

It is claimed there was arm-twisting to obtain the UN vote for partition.

In the first place this only shows that it was done by inevitably imperfect democracy, rather than by completely authoritarian arbitrary fiat as was the case over most of the rest of the world's peoples including European peoples that have some been exempted from these stonings. Just the escaped survived Jews.

In the second place, just because the U.S. may have bent countries into the UN vote doesn't delegitimize it, since how many laws in democratic countries like the US or Britain or Israel itself would have to be delegitimized and taken off the books just because it were shown that wheeling and dealing and "politics" and pressures were involved--80% of the standing laws ? No one can arbitrarily delegitimize legislation this way, or decide what laws are valid or invalid this way, or life in the democratic world would be a madhouse.

And again and in sum on this, how many states began and gained their populations and boundaries in pre-Constitutional and European Colonial Overlordship situations, much more arbitrarily than the UN General Assembly vote ? One can't just pick on and single out Israel this way, into which more of the world's democratic enlightened planning and self-conscious sense of fairness went than in the formation of most states of the world.

And it isn't Israel's fault that the Arabs and Arab Palestinians rejected the self-conscious democratically voted-on decision for formation and legitimization by the world community as represented in the world's universally internationally recognized international legislative body.

Ninth.

The Jews are a legitimate migrant population in Palestine, made during the almost Half-Millennium of European World Hegemony, the approximately 470 years, 1492-1962. Or are the Jews alone and by themselves going to be singled out for delegitimization? More than in most cases of the Colonial and Post-Colonial carving up and constructing and partitioning of the world into nations, artificial constructs never questioned by anybody, this one, again, was done by the UN, to which, again, the Arab countries were sworn and solemn signatories.

But the Arab countries mocked the UN and attacked the UN partition and state of Israel, Israel created in a way manifestly less contrived and often absurd than a host of new nation-states on the earth-- attacked the UN decision they were sworn to uphold, and attacked the UN member, a UN member which, like all, the UN was sworn to defend against attack. And more than ever since the UN itself had created that member.

The UN intervened to defend partitioned Korea when the North attacked the South. Did the UN intervene to defend Israel, which it had itself created, and whose decision for creation its Arab members were deliberately flouting, and to the extent of waging war? Of course not.

Such defense of members from attack was the main raison d'etre for the UN's existence, and it even created Israel itself, and both the United States and the Soviet Union helped vote it in, but the UN did nothing. Europe authorized this among the multitudinous migrations of its peoples over the face of the earth for half a Millennium, but it did not defend this population that the UN had afterward partitioned and from which it had developed a state in this time which was more than ever before or since one of worldwide nation-state building, and so the new Israelis had to do it themselves, and against a people hundreds of times more numerous than themselves on land hundreds of times vaster then theirs.

Tenth.

About the refugees. Another basic fact. Did the Arab nations attack to restore the refugees? No. There were no refugees. The Palestinian Arabs lived where they had been living until then. It was the attack on Israel by 17 nations and an army dozens of times larger and with a potential to become thousands of times larger, that created the refugees, and whether they fled on Arab orders carrying nothing with them because with the expectation that in a few days they would return, or because they left because the population of Palestinian Jews, forming the new UN-created state of Israel, felt, after decades of hostility from them and with their kinship to the 17 Arab nations hundreds of times larger in population and land mass attacking them from all sides in violation of UN law and the UN's reason for being, and on their own with no defense from the UN, this traumatized and panicked people induced or outright hurried them out as a potential and literal fifth attacking army column in their very midst, a traumatized and panicked people felt a potential knife right in its heart and microscopic-sized heartland, so, in the fog of conflict and genocidal attacks, they moved -- and were moved -- a few miles -- and no more than a few miles -- out.

This would ordinarily be little or no cause for concern, or even occasion a ripple of notice, in a world upheaved by turmoil and convulsion on a scale many times vaster all over the world, from those occasioned by World War II, to the construction and reconstruction and deconstruction and partition of new nation-states all over the earth at that time, such as Pakistan and India.

Israel attacked on all sides by potential forces thousands of times larger, and the UN that had made its population into a state doing nothing in its defense, and in the panic also of 3/4 of its European people and 1/3 of its people worldwide having just been exterminated, in this trauma and panic and facing another catastrophe and facing it alone, it removed the overtly hostile same people as were its attackers just a few miles away from where they were.

And the world, and UN that created Israel, that did nothing to defend it against the all-out and all-sides and massively larger than it attack on it, now decides to go haywire about the removal of people a few miles away. Never mind recent and continuing convulsions all over the world.

This time it was the Jews, albeit it they were the ones whose very national existence had been attacked, were the ones who did it. This time the Jews did it. What's new? Europe, Overlord of the World for 500 years and recent exterminator of 3/4 of its Jews, and the world as a whole, goes into a fury. You see, the Jews did it. The Jews did it. This time it was the Jews who did it.

Who of all peoples had never hurt a fly for at least 2000 years, and had been persecuted for 2000 years and even hounded out of Europe in migration by the European World Overlords just before and during which time they had been almost exterminated there in the millions.

This most harmless of peoples on the face of the earth, a population living there, hurting no one, incurring decades of hostility, the UN making a logical ethnic partition during the post-Colonial age of nation-construction, then not defending it from a national existential catastrophe -- it would be like not the defeat of France, but the delegitimatization, de-countrification of France, and possibly, to these traumatized people and perhaps in reality, a physical existential catastrophe by a people thousands of times larger, in other words a possible continuation of their physical extermination even if not "only" their political de-legitimization (again, imagine if France or Britain in defeat were threatened with de-legitimization as a actual country), and so they moved a few people (or the people moved) a few miles.

After France and England and Russia were threatened with defeat --but neither national nor physical existential defeat -- by Nazi Germany, they moved millions of Germans hundreds of miles. But they're the Overlords. They are numerous, powerful, and can do what they want.

But these were the few and weak and nearly-obliterated Jews.

The UN creates them, does not defend them from all-out onslaught, the Jews remove the people belong to those of the onslaught out of harm's way -- the Jews' and their own harm's way, just a very few miles, and the French and British and Russian overlords and UN and rest of the world absolutely "go ballistic."

Who are these Jews? After all, this time it was the small and weak and habitually persecuted Jews who were the ones who did it. Europe says: outrageous of those uppity and upstart Jews.

Eleventh.

As for the letter of the law, the Jews were even within the letter of the law in removing people from battle conditions. They were also within the letter of the law in letting them come back in only when they are prepared to live in peace and amity and respect with the country the UN created and to which they would return. Israel was even within the law on both counts. Not that the Europeans were in forcibly displacing Germans and forcibly rearranging populations all over Europe after World War II to protect themselves, with no right of return, no international laws observed or even pretended to be observed.

But these were the weak and powerless and hated and almost exterminated Jews.

So Europe says: They should be forced to observe the absolute letter of international law to the most infinitesimal degree, even though their political existence was at stake and even possibly and so soon after Europe had murdered millions of them, their physical existence possibly again at stake, and even though they had faced all-out attack by UN members hundreds of times larger in defiance of the UN that itself created them and who were sworn to their defense but did not come, just as the Arabs had been sworn as UN signatories not to attack.

These actual foundations of the law and foundations of ethics and decency, threatening a population's political and possibly (and so soon again) physical survival were being savaged by both the indifferent UN and the all-out attacking Arab UN members on all sides. Never mind that the Jews could face destruction again. At least political--as well as the UN's partition's destruction-- and maybe physical.

But the panicked Jews moved people -- or the people moved -- a few miles away.

Europe says: An outrage; they must observe the absolute and literal and technical letter of the law. (Which they very well may even have.) And the UN allows and Arabs attack the very foundations of decency as well as of the law, and as the European Overlords rearrange at their will the populations of Europe, with millions dying in the process. But the Overlords are not Jews. The Jews must be watched, and they must obey scrupulously. And even then the Jews did obey international humanitarian law, even when they were at risk of their lives, to its very letter.

It shouldn't even matter, this traumatized people facing life or death again, removing some people a few miles, after all the other European and world's continuing convulsions and displacements and disruptions. But they did obey the law. They had a "legal" right to remove the people who were the same people as the attackers on all sides a few miles out of battle lines.

And that's even assuming the people didn't leave on purpose on Arab orders and plan to come straight back behind victorious Arab armies. And if they fled or were removed, they had a right to come back, even though the Germans don't have the right to go back to the Czech Republic or Poland or Hungary, if only they will respect the new state that the UN created.

The Jews were all-out attacked by the Arabs from all sides, and this people vowed continued and perpetual war against the population of Jews because of the state which the UN created. All-out against the partition and the Jews, which the UN had given -- and which it didn't have to, but did -- , just as Muslim Pakistan received partition from Hindu India. So there was never a chance they would acknowledge and respect and be reliably loyal to the new state, though, also in accordance with the letter of international law, they could not return until they did. A

And recall on top of this that the all-out attack on all sides against the UN decision to partition into two states two conflictual ethnic groups, but without displacing anyone, notwithstanding all small (and large) displacements that were taking place in Europe and the world without an outcry from anyone, this all-out attack was not to restore the displaced refugees, this all-out and illegal attack against the UN decision for partition is what created the refugees being removed just a few miles in the first place.

And who mainly and above all-- could just as well have stayed where they were and not moved an inch, stayed in the new state; and as some did; this was the substance of the two UN decisions, but both were rejected, and all-out war against Israel (and against the UN, which pretended not to notice either the rejection of the UN or all-out war against both a UN-created state and its actual civilian population) was preferred and undertaken, and which is what created the refugees, that is, people who moved -- or were removed -- a few miles.

And who couldn't go back because of the Pan Arab world's, of which they were a part, vow to destroy the new state-- and its people, again its civilian population.

So the frightened, bullied, threatened, just almost-obliterated and Jews had every reason.

And in the time of displacements and convulsions and of the worldwide plethora of artificial constructs involved in nation-building across the newly post-Colonial world.

Except the Jews needed to be examined with a microscope to monitor whether they were violating microscopic legal technicalities-- when, anyway, they probably were -- but just in case.

While the Arabs ripped up the UN decision on partition and the UN charter on non-attacking, mortally endangering the fledgling state as well as its population, creating a displacement of Arabs where there had been none and never would have been and not a single Arab would have ever had to move an inch, an Arab Nation that continued to attack Israel both with terrorism and armies again and again, and in 1967 explicitly threatening a Mongol-invasion-type second extermination, a second Shoah.

These basic transgressions against the foundations of UN law and basic fiber of decency and morality are ignored by Europe and the world. Whether Israel adheres to microscopic nuances is strenuously monitored and Israel weathers furious criticism from Europe. And the demagogic dictatorships of the Arab world against the UN-created only democracy in the Middle East.

These are the migrant Jews escaped from the ovens either by several decades or for just few minutes.

Europe says: Continue to watch them closely. They've never harmed a fly in 2,000 years. They've sometimes overreacted in 60 years of unceasing and illegal brutal terrorist and regular army attack, affronts against the most basic standards of international law and central human morality, from without and within. They are the escaped harmless weak persecuted almost exterminated Jews.

Europe says: They are the ones to be watched closely. Watch them with care, and criticize them with fury, and especially let us in Europe do it, we in Europe who persecuted them for centuries, almost killed them all, and let a few escape as we overlorded the world. Watch them with a microscope. Watch with indifference or amusement or solidarity those who tear off limbs and mangle to pieces their women and children on their buses and in their cafes and playgrounds.

(Also on these matters see my blog at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/middleeast/ )

A Left-Wing Case for Israel

2007-03-17T20:24:00.000-07:00

I am constantly struggling with the history of Israel, and trying to reconcile my love for Israel and the Jewish people, with various constrasting views of the history of the period. In various writings and printed letters to editors and online messages I have been inconsistent about it, reflecting my internal struggle, especially about the possibility that there was a displacement of Palestinians in 1948-49 and unjust "refusal of return."

I grew seriously interested in the period at the Barak Offer and a near-miss for peace, the start of the Second Intifada and 9/11.

Often I say, that Israel, while it has done many things wrong (such as the occupation and setttlements, "has a case."

As I, on the left, see it, what is that case?

Here it is.

Jews migrated in the period, 1490s-1940s, of worldwide migration, the same migratory period that led to the Western Hemisphere nations (North and South) and Australia and New Zealand. They came near the tail-end and so have had more problems. But 1900 was the high point of world migration. By period standards, they did no different than what European migrants did in the Americas and North Americans to the western half of the continent.

Moreover, they did not use war or slaughter or extermination or conquest, but the mechanism of peaceful land purchases and international organizations. And not to persecute but to escape persecution; and not go leave home but to go home. Their land purchase covenants (only to resell to Jews) is questionable in this period, but again was normative by period standards. American real estate zoning codes operated just the same way, and no one suggests that the permanent effects that they have had be rolled back.

The Balfour incorporation into the Palestine League of Nations Mandate was, again, wrong by today's standards, but not by those of the period-- the same period that created Australia and North and South America. Nationalism, the urge to statehood, was also part of the period, the period influenced by the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder as much as Theodlor Herzl, of the historical and moral priority of languages and nations.

For the Jews it was especially urged on by persecutions -- millennia of pogroms culminating in the Holocaust, motives not driving most world nationalisms. And if the Arab world has a bone to pick, it is with the international community -- the League of Nations in the 1920s and the United Nations in the 1940s, and not with the Jews, who alone could have done nothing, and only did by the mechanism of international organizations--again, the peaceful way not of conquest and slaughter but purchases and international law.

The Jews were a tiny minority, and 3/4 in Europe were exterminated; they could do nothing; it is Europe and America, the main carriers of international organizations and law in the earlier period, that authorized and enabled both the drives to migration and to nationhood, and all done peacefully.

So it is with The League and the UN, not Jews or Israel, with whom anyone who has problems with what happened, should take their problems. Jerusalem was already majority Jewish from the middle of the 19th century. The terror and violence came from elsewhere, and against international law: against the League of Nations Palestinian Mandate, and against the United Nations 1947 partition recommendation and 1948 admission of half of the place they partitioned into the United Nations as a country. All done peacefully.

As for the refugees and naqba, if it had not been for the pan-Arab and Palestinian multi-national and indigenous assault on the Jews in 1948-9, in violation of international law of the UN partition and with a declared aim of genocide, in even further violation of international law, there would not have been a single Palestinian refugee. And if the violence and civil war started before the partition date, it was mainly the Arabs against the Jews, and against international law (the League of Nations Mandate), and mainly taking the form of terrorism and massacre, such as in Hebron.

Any violent Jewish responses were sporadic and organizationally marginal, with only a couple of major episodes (Deir Yassin, King David Hotel), whereas the Jews were constantly threatened en masse and the constant victims of slaughter and terror and torture and massacre. This only accelerated the Jewish sense of the need for partition and statehood, again taken up through international law (the United Nations partition and admission to the UN of Israel). If international law had been followed, there would have been no Palestinian Arab refugees.

And if the Jews were threatened and constant victims of violence in Palestine, consider that 1/3 of them around the world, and 3/4 in Europe were in the process of systematic slaughter, fueling their fears to an incomparable magnitude. Considering how violent their neighbors were, consider how extreme and panicky the Americans, or the Germans, or the British, or the Arabs would have been and behaved if 1/3, or 3/4, of them had just been systematically slaughtered.

But even as if was, and nobody being perfect in an imperfect world, the Jews almost entirely acted with entire peaceableness-- peaceful methods of purchases, no proactive aggression, and the mechanisms of international organizations and international law.

Even the 1967 war was preceded and conducted with a promise of genocide, this to a people who had only recently suffered a near-extermination (again, imagine how the Arabs would have felt if they had just suffered a near-extermination), so that the occupation, at first, was wholly understandable and defensive. And it was not an occupation of Palestinian land but, at the time, an occupation of captured Jordanian and Egyptian land, by two nations who had threatened genocide on Israel or attacked or both -- and if they had won would have accomplished a genocide.

The only mistake I can see is the settlements. But even the settlements were largely done because of the experience of the 1948 war, when the (then) outlying kibbutzim and Jewish settlements helped thwart the Arab attacks and were decisive in winning the war -- which simply meant staving off genocide. Whereas if the Arabs and Palestinians had obeyed internatinal law, not a single one would have ever left their home or farm anywhere in Israel.

So that the post 1967 settlements were considered, first, settling Jordanian and Egyptian land, not Palestinian land, and, even more, were (wrongly, as it turns out) were considered defensive bastions against further Jordanian and Egyptian prospective genocidal attacks, just as the 1948 outlying settlements had been, only 19 years before. And only 23 years after the Holocaust.

This is the Jewish case. And it is not racism but cold fear of genocide, by a people who would not have touched the hair on a single Arab head of any and all who had remained.

The settlements were stupid, not aggressive-- or displacing-- or violent. And not only would there have been not a single Palestinian Arab refugee without the constant violence and massacre and threat of violence and massacre, against the Jews, in violation of international human rights and done for political ends (against the League of Nations and the UN) in violation of international law, but afterward, without the further wars and threats, there would be today no occupation, no settlements, and, since the settlements happened, no by-pass roads, no checkpoints, no border or access impediments, no security barrier, no nothing.

And, to repeat endlessly, there would have been no Palestinian refugees in the first place. And anyone with a bone to pick, has to pick it with the international community who created the Mandate and the Partition, not with the Jews.

And all this seems to me it seems to constitute a what I've been calling the fact that "Israel has a case."

2007-02-22T14:22:00.000-08:00

[from http://www.harvardsquarecommentary.org/ ]

A Letter in the Somerville Journal -- and a Postscript [Part 2]

It may be wondered why I still have sympathy for Israel's case, since their beginnings are so bound up with the League of Nation's betrayal of the Palestinians by the intrusion of the Balfour Resolution into the Palestine Mandate.

Perhaps also for these three further reasons.

First, this wasn't the Jews' fault, it was the world's ruling powers, in this case Europe, and mainly its victorious powers in World War One, Britain, France, and the United States. Second, that was a different era, and many bad things happened back then-- such as, just half a century earlier, what we were still doing to the Indians.

And if we calmly and even self-righteously condemn our own history, condemn our treatment of the Indians, condemn our Columbus Day, as the Israelis cannot condemn their "Balfour Day", the reason is probably that we do not feel in danger for our lives, and they do.

Self-justification (and also "security and defense") mistakes that we may make will always be at bottom harmless. But Israeli Jews, at least in their minds, and with much justification, live along an exceedingly thin existential margin of error. For them, mistakes in self-justification, resulting morale, and hence security, could lead to a bloodbath and even genocide.

Third, the mistakes or moral oversights of the Zionists refugee movement were mistakes of their times, which almost everyone else also made. On the other hand, especially in comparison with its time, it was peaceful and liberal. Gibbon might have said of it, as he did of a historical figure (I can't locate which one), that its vices were those of its age, but its virtues were its own.

And so these Jewish refugees, who fled to escape persecution, were peaceful and liberal. Without decades of Arab anti-refugee violence, including a war against partition, which was not waged on behalf of Arab exiles, since then there were no Arab exiles to fight about, the area would be so demographically heavily and peacefully Arab, and the Jewish refugees would be so peaceful and liberal, that everything would be unrecognizable today.

There would have long been two (not one, but two) peaceful Palestinian-majority states - one of them would be Israel, majority Arab, but with a large minority of Jewish refugees, all safe and sound and back home, and the other Palestine, largely Arab and also with a large number of safe and secure Jews.They might even have federated or reunited by now.

As seen in Theodor Herzl's classic, "Old/New Land," Zionism was originally -- and again, especially for its time -- a peaceful and liberal movement of fleeing refugees and a dream of a multiculturalism in one land. It was Arab anti-refugee violence, not peaceful and liberal Jewish refugees, who ruined the liberal dream. The refugees' right to have children who did not have all their throats slit open forced them to circle their wagons.

But the Arabs, to be blunt, had the right not to welcome strangers-- they had the right to be xenophobes. On the other hand, the Jews, facing extermination in Europe, had the right to live, the right to life, and the right to escape where they could, come hell or high water. And it became both hell and high water-- this basis of this terrible conflict.

Still, since the Arabs had the right to sovereign resistance to immigration, and to a state, it would be unfair not to ask ourselves how many Third World countries have enough trouble with their states and societies without their people also having been squeezed into a 20 per cent corner of their land, covered with camps of their own refugees, and with their administrative infrastructure repeatedly smashed to pieces by an external settling and occupying power, as the Palestinians have suffered over the past few years and decades.

Both sides have been scared and suspicious of each other, and sometimes treated each other mercilessly-- the Arabs often merciless to the escaping Jewish refugees from the European pogroms and then the holocaust; the Israelis often merciless as occupiers.

But the Israelis have probably treated the Palestinians better than the Arabs have treated the Jews, and better especially than the Arabs would have if they had instead been winners, since the Jews would probably have faced mass slaughter.

But if the Jews have probably behaved better, it was the Palestinians' land first, and they rightly feel cheated of their country. But the Jews went because they were fleeing for their lives. What a terrible conflict.

If only people's sympathies extended to both sides, expecially since much of what anyone says, if qualified by the other side's case, is true, especially about the Palestinian need to stop the violence.

And partisans for the Palestinians do need to understand that much of the undoubted -- and ongoing -- Israeli harshness during the occupation has, underneath, been a terrified response of Holocaust survivors to the threat of violence, and their deep-seated panic that at any time it could escalate out of control into a genocidal nightmare.

Ironically, but understandably, many Palestinians don't see why they shouldn't violently revolt, including against the civilians in the population themselves, while the many threats to and sometimes successful efforts at which only make everything worse. And also ironically, and just as understandably, many Israelis don't see why they should withdraw, when (--as with the withdrawal from Gaza--) it doesn't seem to lead to immediate cessation of threats and violence, but which doing so anyway in the long-term would still make everything better.

And finally, even the moderates who realize that each side needs respectively to refrain from being violent and to withdraw, they think it is the other side which should have to first. While extremists on each side don't think their side should have to anyway.

And therefore, on the one hand, with each sides' extremists, and on the other hand, with both sides' self-righteous and defiant and mistrustful attitude that "the other side should have to do it first," this nightmarish mother of conflicts continues with no end in sight.

2007-02-21T16:14:00.000-08:00

A Letter in the Somerville Journal -- and a Postscript [Part 1]
www.harvardsquarecommentary.org

James Adler

Inspired by John Turner's overview of the Israeli-Arab conflict in last week's issue of Harvard Square CommentaryI'm going to try my hand at it. But I'm not going to do the same thing, or he would win ! One thing that struck me in John's piece: an epiphany: I knew it was a *conflict*-- and that's a serious thing, in the full meaning of the term --, in Hegel's sense, in which "the worst conflicts are those between right and right" and to say, when asked why so-or-so did this-or-that: "Well, it's a conflict, stupid !" John gave a new and epiphanic slant to this, however-- not to moralize. When the conflict is so much between right and right (and wrong and wrong), what's the point of moralization?

I begin with a letter from last month printed in the The Somerville Journal. I've removed the name of the interlocutor and omitted the link, for the sake of his anonymity, and have revised the letter for purposes of clarity. And after the letter-- a basic Postscript.

The Somerville Journal
Letter: Response to opinion was a personal attack
Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - Updated: 05:49 PM EST

To the Editor of the Somerville Journal:

The response to my letter about supporting Israel, opposing divestment [from Israel], but with honest pain over Israel’s history, was a personal attack. V. “smells a rat.” I am “just another fabricator.” What I say are “crafty fabrications,” and “shameless propaganda,” falsifications,” and “lies.” I am part of “Adler, Ron Francis & Co.,” [apparently Francis led the Somerville divestment campaign--JA] though I have never heard of Francis until now.

I even was against divestment also (which he omits to mention), and I attack nobody.

The Journal’s choice for a title for V.'s letter that captures its essence: "Feeling uneasy about letter-writer.” The personalization is telling. I am surprised the Journal published it in current form.

I recognize that truth and facts can be ambiguous. This is the human condition. But since things are so ambiguous, and especially here, there is especially no need for personal attacks.

Space precludes saying much, but suffice that V. does not challenge the central fact: In 1900, Palestine had already been more than 90 percent Palestinian for many centuries, and yet within five short decades, 75 percent of the Palestinians were displaced from 80 percent of their land.
This is unique in the modern world.

V. implies the Romans invented the name “Palestine,” which is to admit it is a very ancient name, and he also admits that even the Jews there in the 1920s called themselves Palestinians-- so they called themselves by the ancient Roman name. They did so presumably because it was customary, and hence reasonable, (the legal name of he Jerusalem Post is still “The Palestine Post” ), and just as the early Arabs took up and adapted the customary name of Al Quds.

Though it is unclear how the Romans could have originated calling the area Palestine, since the first great Greek historian and “father of history,” Herodotus, mentions it in ancient Greek times, many centuries before Roman times, for example that “part of Syria, and all the region extending from hence to Egypt, is known by the name of Palestine.” (Herodotus, 7.89, Tr. George Rawlinson, Modern Library, 1942)

Notwithstanding all this, V.'s recourse to “names” seems anyway irrelevant.

Roses are roses, uprooted roses are uprooted roses, and uprooted people are uprooted people, under any name or category under which they may fall-- or assigned by others who (may) wish to harm them.

V. also says: “In 1922, most of British Mandate Palestine was given to Hashemite family from Arabia, with Abdullah imported and enthroned as King of Transjordan by the British. The very same League of Nations (U.N.’s precursor) that endorsed re-establishing Jewish homeland in Palestine, created Transjordan.”

First, there is a key difference between two things:

On the one hand, multiple shifts of the rulers or borders which overlie indigenous people, in a way such that the indigenous peoples stay where they are, uninterrupted and unmoved, always in their own stable homes and communities, throughout all the "moving and shaking" transacted over their heads.

And, on the other hand, fundamentally differently, going where one doesn’t live, but the indigenous people do, and displacing them out of their homes and communities, turning them into refugees in exile.

Second, V. is wrong that the British took most of British Mandatory Palestine out of the British Mandate. Daniel Pipes [a conservative scholar] notes that Jordan “was part of the Palestine Mandate for a mere eight months, from July 1920 to March 1921 [but that] the League of Nations formally bestowed the mandatory responsibility on Great Britain only [much later] in July 1922.” [“Is Jordan Palestine?”, by Daniel Pipes and Adam Garfinkle, “Commentary”, Oct. 1988)]. [Incidentally, Pipes' answer to his question is: "No"--JA]

Third, the Palestine Mandate was a betrayal of League of Nations Mandate purposes. League Mandates were established in Article 22, which begins:

“To those colonies and territories which ... have ceased to be under the sovereignty of the States which formerly governed them and which are inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world, ... [t]here should be applied the principle that the well-being and development of such peoples form a sacred trust of civilization .... The best method of giving practical effect to this principle is that the tutelage of such peoples should be entrusted to advanced nations ... as Mandatories.”

Even apart from the “white man’s burden” paternalism, why wasn’t it the people of Palestine of 1922, who were 85-90 percent Palestinians, whose “well-being and development” would have been precisely that which was “entrusted” to the British until the Palestinians could “stand by themselves”?

Also why couldn't the Palestinians "stand by themselves" in their own independent state, right then and there, in 1922?

But a Mandate was created where they lived instead, and the "Balfour Resolution" was inserted into it. Indeed the Mandate virtually begins with the word-for-word Balfour Resolution:

"[T]he Principal Allied Powers have also agreed that the Mandatory should be responsible for putting into effect the declaration originally made on November 2nd, 1917, by the Government of His Britannic Majesty, and adopted by the said Powers, in favor of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, it being clearly understood that nothing should be done which might prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing nonJewish communities in Palestine."

So the Palestine Mandate, purportedly a sacred trust for the well being and development of the people inhabiting Palestine, i.e., the 85-90% Palestinians, since they allegedly could not yet stand by themselves" because of the presumed "strenuous conditions" of the modern world, does not once mention Arabs or Palestinians, but only "non-Jews," and the purpose of the Mandate isn't for them at all, but only for the approximately 10% population of Palestine, most of them newcomers from Europe.

Again, why couldn't the Palestinians have "stood by themselves" immediately?

The answer is that if it had been recognized that they could have, the outsiders couldn't have come in and taken it over.

The League of Nations Mandate System's Charter says that they couldn't immediately stand by themselves due to the "strenuous conditions of the modern world."

But it was the opposite: There were no strenuous conditions at all, until, in an Orwellian reversal, it was the strenuous conditions that were imposed upon them by the Palestine Mandate itself.

In a summation of this ironical, cruel, Orwellianism:

The inhabitants were told they could not stand by themselves, and that their inability was due to "strenuous conditions," but they were told this only in order to create conditions that were so strenuous that they would not be able to stand by themselves.

The Mandates of all the other ex-Ottoman colonies, however much they were infected with the "white man's burden" mentality, and however unnecessary the League's "help," actually with old-fashioned patronizing and paternalistic sincerity did try help them to stand by themselves.

And so were consistent with the benevolent paternalism of the League of Nations Mandate
purpose and system.

Only the Mandate for Palestine was different. And a basic betrayal of the inhabitants: The Palestine Mandate, and this one alone, was deliberately designed in order precisely to prevent the inhabitants ever from being able to stand by themselves.

How was the League’s insertion of the Balfour Resolution into the Palestine Mandate *not* a basic betrayal of the League of Nations’s purposes, norms and values?; a betrayal of the League's benevolently paternalistic raison d’etre of the Mandates in the first place?; and a fundamental betrayal of the Palestinians?

V. says great Jewish opponents of partition and ethnic cleansing, such as Albert Einstein, Martin Buber, and Erich Fromm “never claimed to be historians,” showing V.'s anachronistic error in thinking they needed to be: this wasn’t “history” but contemporary for them, just as we may oppose the Iraq War as critics of our times-- and certainly not as historians of the past. So when Einstein, Buber, or Fromm speak, they are also relevant not as historians of their pasts, but as great voices of moral examination of their own times.

V. calls renowned Israel historians Benny Morris and Tom Segev “historians" in disparaging and insulting quotation marks, putting the egg on his face as they are among Israel’s most preeminent historians, who have raised Israeli history from cheerleading stanzas to scholarly history, with conclusions confirmed by most objective professional historians.

V. says Benny Morris changed his historical views. This is false. Instead Morris became conservative, and now believes early Zionists didn’t execute enough ethnic cleansing but should have taken it all the way to the Jordan River.

Recent popular expressions of his views are found in the Los Angeles Times (Jan. 24, 2004, B11), significantly called “In ‘48, Israel did what it had to do,” where he describes and supports the cleansing, and Ari Shavit’s interview of him in Israel’s influential daily paper, “Ha’aretz” (Fri., January 9, 2004).

In Ha’aretz, when Morris tells Shavit the Israelis “perpetrated ethnic cleansing,” Shavit responds, “The term ‘to cleanse’ is terrible.” Morris’s reply is: “I know it doesn’t sound nice but that’s the term they used at the time. I adopted it from all the 1948 documents in which I am immersed.”

This brings us to David Ben-Gurion. Here V. gets his “gotcha.” I accidentally misquoted Ben-Gurion-- either from where it was phrased wrong, or a confusion in my notes. Does it matter? Of course not.

Shavit asks Morris: “(Shavit:) ‘Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for a deliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion?’

Morris: ‘From April 1948, Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transfer. There is no explicit order of his in writing, there is no orderly comprehensive policy, but there is an atmosphere of [population] transfer. The transfer idea is in the air. The entire leadership understands that this is the idea. The officer corps understands what is required of them. Under Ben-Gurion, a consensus of transfer is created.”

Shavit: ‘Ben-Gurion was a ‘transferist’?

Morris: ‘Of course. Ben-Gurion was a transferist. He understood that there could be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in its midst. There would be no such state. It would not be able to exist.’” (The Ha’aretz Interview, Jan. 9, 2004)

A recently scholarly expression of his views is in the 2nd ed. of his landmark history, “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (2004, Cambridge Univ. Press), and is replete with documentation that “transfer” was inbuilt into Zionism, and basic to Ben-Gurion, though his views vary depending on time and circumstance, and he is often ambivalent.

Morris asks: “How was the Zionist movement to turn Palestine into a ‘Jewish’ state if the overwhelming majority of its inhabitants were Arabs? ..... The obvious, logical solution lay in Arab emigration or ‘transfer’. Such a transfer could be carried out by force,i.e., expulsion, or it could be engineered voluntarily.... The logic of a transfer solution to the ‘Arab problem’ remained ineluctable; without some sort of massive displacement of Arabs from the area of the Jewish state-to-be, there would be no viable ‘Jewish’ state.” (p. 40-41)

And Ben-Gurion? “‘The compulsory transfer of the Arabs from the valleys of the proposed
Jewish state could give us something which we never had, even when we stood on our own during the days of the First and Second Temples...” (p. 47)

“Ben-Gurion confided to his diary. ‘We are being given the opportunity that we never dared to dream of in our wildest imaginings. This is more than a state, government, and sovereignty-- this is a national consolidation in an independent homeland .... We must grab hold of this conclusion as we grabbed hold of the Balfour Declaration, even more than that-- as we grabbed hold of Zionism itself .... (p. 47; also Righteous Victims, p. 142) In his book “Righteous Victims”: Complete transfer without compulsion -- and ruthless compulsion at that – is hardly imaginable.” (RV, p. 169).

“With compulsory transfer we [would] have a vast area [for settlement]... I support compulsory transfer. I don’t see anything immoral in it. (RV, p. 144).

Morris sums up: “My feeling is that the transfer thinking and near-consensus that merged in the 1930s and early 1940s was not tantamount to pre-planning and did not issue in the production of a policy or master-plan of expulsion.... But transfer was inevitable and inbuilt into Zionism,-- because it sought to transform a land which was ‘Arab’ into a ‘Jewish” state and a Jewish state could not have arisen without a major displacement of Arab population...” (p. 60, “Refugee Problem Revisited)

Certainly there’s the danger of “quotation-mining,” and certainly what Ben-Gurion and other Zionists’ thought changed over time, was in response to specific historical circumstances, and, at least for Ben-Gurion, had ambivalences. He would have preferred the transfers to be voluntary.

But he and the rest were pro-transfer, because, as Morris says, it was “inbuilt into Zionism,” because of the “ineluctable” ultimate problem of how else to build a Jewish state in a land where most of the people were Arabs.

I say this, supporting Israel -- and am confused and suffer with it.

But apparently because of this V. says that he “smells a rat,” and that I am “just another fabricator,” and that what I say are “crafty fabrications,” and “shameless propaganda, “falsifications,” and “lies.”

He says “Adler, Francis and co.,” but I had never heard of Francis until now.

And “follow the call of his blood rather than that of the truth.” What does that even mean?
I support Israel (and Palestinians) and wrote to oppose divestment. (Which again V. omits to mention.) I oppose it because of the horror of the Holocaust and millennia of persecution and pogroms against the Jews in Europe, that they were chased out of Europe-- and even the rest of the Middle East-- into Palestine, and Israel justifiably feels tiny, beleaguered, threatened, and severally attacked. Israel was not “rewarded” for withdrawing from Gaza except with missiles. Scandalous. Israel is now there, and so has every right to exist, not to be attacked, and not to be singled out for boycott.

I admit to confusion and agony in how to support and love Israel, because of the historical record, but I still support Israel-- and the Palestinians as well.

I criticize its bashers, oppose boycotts against Israel, support Israel’s security fence to protect innocents from bombs on buses and at bus stops, coffee shops, nightspots, and weddings, support Israel’s right to have responded in Lebanon, and support time-consuming checkpoints to prevent terrorism, including Gazan checkpoints, which seem no different from our -- time-consuming -- airport checkpoints. And again Israel has been poorly rewarded for withdrawing from Gaza.

I wish V. was right on history. I wish conservative historian Efraim Karsh was right. And I wish Benny Morris was right that Zionist Jewish leaders had no choice. And admittedly I am torn about this. I realize it is humanly understandable to avoid pain by denying or ignoring unpleasant history, and I want to almost as much as V. seems to want to.

One thing I do is oppose divestment against Israel, and to support Israelis' security and reasonable measures to sustain it.

But also criticize Israeli settlers-- all 500,000 of them, on the 20% left of Palestinian land. For example the Palestinians are blamed for caring so much whether they moved only 30 miles east, such a short distance, but in 2005 Israeli settlers were up in arms with Ariel Sharon and the Israeli government about moving 30 miles to the west and north, which is the same allegedly short distance. If the modern settlers didn't want to go the short distance, why would the indigenous Palestinians have wanted to?

And though I’m happy V. has apparently found an easy answer for himself, I just haven’t been able to about the morality issues surrounding Palestinian displacement.

And I can’t believe many or most knowledgeable liberals are not beset with the same problem, even if some have humanly understandable difficulties in admitting it.

Both Israeli and Palestinian extremists need to understand there can be no maximal absolute justice. As Madeleine L’Engle, in “Glimpses of Grace,” says:

“Cursing is a boomerang. If I will evil towards someone else, that evil becomes visible in me. It is an extreme way of being forensic, toward myself, as well as toward whoever outrages me. To avoid contaminating myself and everybody around me, I must work through the anger and the hurt feelings and the demands for absolute justice to a desire for healing.”

I love Israel and the Jewish people of Israel, and I wish both Israelis and Palestinians, and many of us, could learn from L’Engle’s simple truth.

God bless Israelis, Palestinians, and cool heads and compassionate hearts among us all.

James Adler
Cambridge
Former Somerville resident

2007-02-06T17:00:00.000-08:00

The Jerusalem Post printed a letter of mine in Sept. 2004 that still sums up about as well as I can both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/Printer&cid=1094094925435&p=1006953079865

Letters to the Editor

THE JERUSALEM POST
Sep. 2, 2004

Sir, -

The double bus bombing in Beersheba stretches me to the limit as I try to put it in the context of the entire conflict.

Everyone knows that the last century in that small area is endlessly controversial; that the European Jews wanted to emigrate to their ancestral land after 2,000 years of European anti-Semitism and pogroms, culminating in the Holocaust; that this was approved by European colonial powers and the League of Nations under norms that are not today's.

Under modern standards, there is a question whether the Jews had the right, but they weren't modern standards, any more than the standards by which Europeans came to the Americas.

Everyone knows that Arab states tried to destroy the UN partition.

On the other hand: Everyone also knows that the Palestinians weren't responsible for the persecution of the Jews in Europe. And everyone knows Israel helped create the Palestinian refugees who still live in refugee camps, and has conducted an occupation that is wrong and excessive in duration and form.

Unlike what Balfour's Britain or the 1920s League or even the 1940s UN made possible, these simply have to be judged by modern standards, or else there is no such thing as modern standards.

What is even more infinitely awful about the Nazi Holocaust that created the drive toward emigration, after all, is that it took place within our same climate of opinion amid modern, Western standards.

Both sides have cases, both have grievances. In the meantime, the innocent individuals caught up in the mess desire nothing more than to live and raise their families in relative happiness.

So by what insane, amoral logic do they - adults and parents, elderly, young, and little babies - deserve to get blown to smithereens?

The "Nazi" analogy is long overdue for retirement. But the temptation is compelling. If everyone does not agree that this act was Nazi-like in its systematic, organized and deliberate anti-humanitarianism, specifically how and where does it differ?

JAMES ADLER
Cambridge, Massachusetts

2007-02-04T17:08:00.000-08:00

Before last month's January's birthday celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King falls too far away from us, it may be good time to consider some close connections between King's message of nonviolence and at least one common Jewish view of the Middle Eastern conflict.

King's view was that the end does not justify the means.

That we try to love those whom we seek to change. And that deliberate violence against innocent people is as hurtful and awful as any perceived injustices it may seek to ameliorate. And so that means and ends are not necessarily even that different from one another.

In King's own era, most liberals understood this.

But today some people seem to think that certain things -- "social conditions" -- are more real and important than whatever may be used to try to change them.

But I believe for many Jews that this is not true. Violence is as real and important as anything else. It is itself an actual and immoral "social condition." Many Jews, maybe even above most other people, after millennia of pogroms and mob attacks, and at last the Holocaust, are especially sensitive to being targeted by this--equally--real and important social condition.

In fact, most of the past century of this conflict could even be seen as the history of the Jews' response to violence. It seems to me that the left needs to understand this.

For most Israeli Jews, I would think, violence isn't a "symptom" of some "deeper social reality." Instead that there is itself no deeper and immoral and more real a social reality than violence.
And this may even be where the left most acutely misunderstands the conflict-- and least from the viewpoint of many Jews. For many Jews, near the core of the conflict is the violence itself.

After all, from this point of view, there would, today, be very little to criticize -- no security fence, no checkpoints, no by-pass roads, no border or access impediments, and -- mainly -- not even any displaced Palestinian refugees in the first place -- if it were not for the repeated pattern of the onset of threats of violence and actual violence against innocents.

For some people and in some circumstances this may be considered an affectation. But for many Jews, and after the millennia of pogroms and mob violence and at last the Shoah against them -- it should by no means be considered an affectation.

This may get at the heart of the psychology of the conflict from the vantage of many people on the Israeli "side" of it. It may be why this view, and the view people who have other ways of looking at it, including many onlookers on the left, go past each other without any encounter or communication, like the proverbial pair of ships passing each other in the night.

And it is this matter of nonviolence that is at the core of King's legacy-- the idea that a pattern of violence which targets innocents is itself as profound an injustice, as much an actual and evil social condition as that of any other injustice.

It is not to say Israel and its progenitors haven't made unethical errors -- as they have -- to say, nevertheless, that this Jewish perspective ought to give to those people who only criticize Israel, but never the other side, something lengthy and important and serious to contemplate.

But Palestinians have a case too. Each side has a case. One purpose of this blog is to try to understand and appreciate and sympathize with both sides in this wretched, tragic, conflict.

2007-02-04T09:40:00.000-08:00

This blog is going to be mainly concerned with peace, security, hope, justice, and healing for the Middle East, especially Israelis and Palestinians, and just as much with peace and security for the United States in its relations with the Middle East and all its peoples.