God is on No One's Side
Israel-Palestine conflict in brief
Today’s date coincides with the historic visit of former Egyptian president Anwar Sadat to Jerusalem from November 19-21, 1977, to speak to the Israeli Knesset, or parliament, a journey that was followed by the Camp David Accords in 1978 and a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. For his courage, which was viewed as a betrayal by Islamic fundamentalists around the world, Sadat was assassinated on October 6, 1981, during a military parade in Cairo celebrating Egypt’s early successes in the 1973 October War against Israel.
It’s a fitting day for me to address the current Israel-Gaza war, then. I’ve been disappointed by most reporting on the war so far, not so much because I think this or that outlet or site is biased one way or another, but I don’t think many of the reporters, editors and producers know much about the history of the ongoing conflict. I’ve followed the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians closely for sixty years, and I consider myself to be both informed and even-handed. The following short primer of necessity cannot be complete, but I aim for it to be historical, accurate, and unbiased.
Israel was founded in May 1948 on the basis of United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181 (dated from 1947) that called for the partition of the territory between Syria, Egypt, Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea into two states – Palestine, and a Jewish state to be named. The territory had previously been administered by Great Britain under a mandate authorized by the League of Nations shortly after World War 1. The proposed partition followed earlier, similar suggestions, most notably that from Great Britain’s own Peel Commission in 1937, though the ensuing borders were determined by war.
The claim some rightwing and ultra-Orthodox Israelis make that Israel is “the promised land,” while it may have inspired some support for the new Jewish state, in fact was never an enforceable contract under any theory of law, nor could it be. The Covenant with God may be religious dogma, but it is not a legal instrument. There certainly was sympathy in many countries, especially in The West, for Jewish suffering during World War II and earlier persecution originating in the Christ-killing charge, but it was the 1948 War that really created Israel, and which created the massive Palestinian refugee problem.
The following claim is contested and/or widely misunderstood, but there was no independent country or state named Palestine before Great Britain took over administration of the territory in 1920. Palestine was a name on a map. When the late Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir once claimed, “There are no Palestinians,” she was very clear that she was referring to the nationality, not the existence of people living on the land. Having said that, the majority of people living on the land in the early 20th century were not Jewish, and they were not consulted on whether they wanted the British Mandate or, later, whether they would agree to United Nations Resolution 181.
Dar al-Islam
Palestinian Arabs were the majority population in Palestine at the time the British took over administration of the territory in 1920, and were still in the majority (by a roughly 2:1 ratio) at the time of the 1948 War. “Demographics rule” is a favorite expression of political scientists, and it’s worth noting that Jewish immigration to Palestine in the intervening years was restricted by the British, including during the critical World War II years. Yet thousands of Jews managed to come, and sometimes bought up farmland that previously had been worked by Arab farmers or had lain fallow, and there were several massacres of Jews over the years, sometimes linked to alleged defilement of Muslim shrines. Part of the issue was dispossession, but also that all the territory was part of Dar al-Islam – the “House of Peace” and the “abode of Islam” – that had to be protected. The religious dimension to the conflict cannot be overestimated – it was not so much the issue of Arab land or Palestinian land being lost but Muslim land being lost to the Jews. To this day the most ardent members of the Palestinian resistance are the fundamentalists, Islamists and Jihadists around the world. I’m providing only one link in this missive – to the Hamas Covenant – read it, please. You’ll see that Hamas is not a national liberation movement, but a movement of zealots intent on establishing its brand of Islamic rule everywhere, but starting with Palestine.
The Oslo Accords
Now, I’ll jump ahead to the Oslo Accords (1993, 1995) that built on earlier efforts to bring the two sides closer to a true peace agreement and settlement. The Accords established a Palestinian Authority with a de facto seat of government on the West Bank of the Jordan River, which Israel occupied at the time, while delaying action on the thorniest issues dividing the two sides, such as the fate of the Palestinian refugees (and their descendants) and the status of Jerusalem.
The Palestinian Authority, with administrative headquarters in Ramallah, accepted the two-state solution (i.e., partition). Israel formally accepted the two-state solution, but its settlement policies in the West Bank, particularly under successive right-wing governments, is clearly at odds with any such commitment, and it’s long been feared that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and some of his far-Right coalition partners have no intention of honoring the commitment to a true, functioning Palestinian state anyway. Perhaps most crucially, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and other theocratically inclined states or movements have refused to accept any right of the State of Israel to exist, at least in the long-term, including often not even using the name “Israel” but “Zionist entity,” or referring to all of Israel as “occupied Palestine.” Israeli leaders seem to think they “own” the word terrorism and can use it against their enemies, but terrorism is not the real issue. It is the true intentions and goals of the adversaries, at least in the long-run – all, or nothing at all, a zero-sum game.
Now, I want to say something about Hamas wantonly slaughtering Jews on October 7 of this year, which is widely seen as “terrorism,” but also as “resistance” by many. I am heavily informed in what follows by a fellow graduate student I knew at Southern Illinois University in the 1980s by the name of Khalid S. Khalid hailed from the Hebron area of the West Bank and had lost several relatives in an earlier Israeli raid. One thing he noted was that he was taught the goal of every Palestinian child must be to regain lost territory for Islam, i.e., the theocratic imperative, not just because they had homes inside Israel that had been lost.
Khalid also was taught that because Jews (as well as Infidels per se) cannot “experience Paradise,” that is, persist in some form forever after death, it does not matter if they die now, or in 50 years, or are killed as babies, or whatever, because once they’re dead they’re just dead, like carrion in the road. This is the identical position of the ISIS people still active in Iraq and Syria. They can experience Paradise and you cannot, so what does it matter when, where or how you die. Khalid was clear that he did not personally support the murder of anyone, but non-Muslims would have to accept dhimmi status, that is, a “protected” status that amounted to second-class citizenship such as paying a special tax.
Khalid also was instructive in identifying which Jews might be allowed to stay once a theocratic Palestinian state would be established, albeit as a dhimmi people. No Jews (or their descendants) who came after 1948 would be allowed to stay – there was a consensus on this point, he said. Some factions accepted that Jews who arrived between 1917 and 1947 would be allowed to stay, however, but this was not the majority opinion. The year 1917 is an important one because that was when the Balfour Declaration was issued, which announced Great Britain’s support for “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine (without defining what a “national home” was) as long as nothing was done that “may prejudice” the non-Jewish communities there. According to Khalid, there was some modest support for allowing Jews who had arrived after 1881, another important date in Israeli history, and there was general support for allowing Jews to stay if they could date their ancestry to a date prior to 1881.
“Only Dead Men Have Seen the Last of War”
We have a horrible war going on in Gaza now. The promise is made by the Israelis that they are going to destroy Hamas once and for all (very unlikely to succeed because, while they may kill some of the fighters, many will have escaped already, and Israel cannot do anything to stop the overarching Islamist and Jihadist movements worldwide). Critics of Israel say the country is really committing “genocide” against the broader Palestinian population, and that at a minimum is trying to depopulate Gaza, i.e., is guilty of ethnic cleansing. I support both a ceasefire in the current conflict and a two-state solution, or possibly a binational single state, but I must address the charges of genocide and ethnic cleansing.
Israel has over one million Palestinian Arabs as citizens of the country with full rights (but they do not serve in the Israeli Defense Forces unless they are Druze Arabs), and many thousands of young Israeli Arabs attend any of its colleges and universities. Many have been born in Israeli hospitals, and government documents in Israel are typically published in both Hebrew and Arabic. There are Muslim Arab members of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, to this day. This is not genocide, and to make that specific accusation against the remnants and descendants of the largest genocide in modern European history not only cannot be supported by the facts, but can only be seen as intentional hate speech.
The charge of depopulating Gaza, or ethnic cleansing, cannot be so easily dismissed, however. There were between 600,000 and 700,000 refugees from the 1948 War – most received special United Nations cards commemorating their status and those cards are never thrown away, including by the descendants of the original refugees. Most refugees from that war were never allowed back into their homes, often treated by Israel as enemy combatants even if they were not. The popular appeal of groups such as Hamas and other Palestinian Islamist groups, other than their religious dogma, is enhanced by their call to return all refugees to their earlier homes, something that will greatly upset local demographics and which Israel clearly fears.
Jerusalem
I don’t have much optimism about the future of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but I think I know the cornerstone or lynchpin of any true, lasting and final settlement. Whereas the Oslo Accords put the status of Jerusalem at the back end of any future negotiations, I say it should come first, and I say the city should be internationalized, just as earlier partition plans envisioned. Make the whole world a stakeholder in Jerusalem and, by extension, parties to peace between the Israelis and Palestinians. The Israelis and Palestinians could each have their capitals there, and residents could choose their nationality, but the administration of the city otherwise would remain neutral. Even the problem of the Israeli settlements would be partly solved because the heaviest concentration of settlements by far are essentially Jerusalem suburbs. This idea, with some detail differences, was first proposed to me by Palestinian-American scholar Rashid Khalidi, whom I interviewed once while reporting for The Indianapolis Star.
This would still leave the situation of earlier Palestinians refugees extant, as well as the status of Gaza (but the Palestinian Authority would have to take it over again, no easy task as it was kicked out by Hamas in 2006), and I don’t see signs of real, long-lasting compromise coming from the pure Islamists (they might accept the existence of Israel but only as part of an interim settlement), yet I can’t think of a better building block toward peace than the internationalization of Jerusalem.
If you enjoy reading this Substack please see my short story collection, “Don’t Go,” published by The Stephen F. Austin State University Press in 2022, ISBN 978-1-62288-929-7, and available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble online, or order at any bookstore.