Writing in the Boston Globe, Jeff Jacoby points to the intellectual hypocrisy promoted by many critics of Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria:
[…] few Israelis dispute the right of their Arab countrymen to justice, dignity, and equity. The spirit of Israel’s Declaration of Independence, which appealed ‘to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the state on the basis of full and equal citizenship,’ is still a core ideal. Nearly one Israeli in five is an Arab, and the consensus across Israeli society is clear: Arabs have every right to live among Jews.
If only there were an equally clear consensus that Jews have every right to live among Arabs.
Sadly, there is anything but.
After all, who in this world is more roundly despised than the 225,000 Jews who have settled in Judea and Samaria over the past 25 years? (Judea and Samaria are the age-old names for the territory Jordan renamed ‘the West Bank’ after invading it in 1948.) If there is one thing that Europe, the State Department, the United Nations, and most of America’s media big feet agree on, it is that the settlers are an intolerable affront who must be uprooted and removed if there is ever to be peace in the Middle East.
Yet why should that be? If it was repugnant to propose that Arabs be kept from moving into certain Jewish towns, it is even more repugnant to demand that hundreds of thousands of Jews be ethnically ‘cleansed’ from their homes and communities. The Nazis had a word for this: ‘Judenrein.’ And as Palestinian terrorists make clear every time they commit an atrocity like Tuesday’s slaughter of passengers on the Tel Aviv-Emmanuel bus, the Nazi comparison is entirely apt. Anyone who called for expelling every Arab from Israel would be seen as a bigoted extremist. Those who call for kicking the Jews out of Judea invite the same description.
It’s certainly rare to hear a defense of Israeli settlements — particularly one that draws its power from this line of reasoning. Imagine — holding both Arabs and Israelis to the same standards of tolerance!
I can hear the post-colonialists howling already…
The only slight problem with Jacoby’s argument is its baldfaced dishonesty. He implies an equivalence where there is none. Jewish settlers aren’t just demanding the right to “live” in Judea and Samaria. They are demanding the right to live there under perpetual Israeli sovereignty. The actual equivalence would be arabs who demanded to move to land inside Israel’s ‘48-67 borders and live there under arab sovereignty. There are arabs who demand just this – they live in camps in Lebanon or Jordan. What they want is either called “the right of return” or “demanding the destruction of Israel” depending on how dyspeptic they are. I do not see Israel opening its doors to these people. In fact, they rather wisely do not. (Rather stupidly, they’ve never seriously pursued buying them off.) The difference would be that the folks in Lebanon or Jordan were were at least born within the borders of what became Israel or had parents or grandparents who did, while the folks in the expensively-guarded compounds in Judea and Samaria likely have no recent family ties to any specific piece of land.
It’s still unfair to most of the settlers to despise them, since in a lot of cases they’re just responding to statist economic incentives the Israeli government dangled before them. That same government refuses to help resettle even those settlers who want to move out of the territories. It’s a sad story.
Jim makes a good point; I was going to point out the difference myself.
That said, however, let’s be clear: the Palestinians are not demanding sovereignty over the Jewish settlements in the territories; they want the Jews gone, as does the rest of the “international community.” That’s a crucial difference: they aren’t arguing that Israel has no right to extend sovereignty over the land in the West Bank—they are saying, quite directly, that Jews should not live east of the Green Line. This should be repulsive all on its own.
Conversely, the Israelis do not dispute the right of Arabs to live in Israel; just not the nearly five million “refugees,” most of whom have never set foot on Israeli land.
As an interesting aside, I believe Moledet (one of the most right-wing parties in Israel) actually had a plan where the Jewish settlers in the territories could choose their citizenship (PA or Israel), as could Arabs living on Israeli territory. Provided the PA could actually guarantee the safety of the Jews in the West Bank, the Israeli army would withdraw, and the people could continue to live there, as citizens of whatever entity they wanted, with the rights and privileges of citizens or expats; ditto for the Arabs of Israel.
Jim —
The next couple lines in Jacoby’s piece (which I didn’t quote) are these: “The claim that the settlements are illegal is bogus. Israel took the West Bank in self defense in 1967, and nothing in international law prohibits Jews from moving there.” For Jewish settlers to wish to live under Israeli sovereignty on land taken by Israel in war hardly troubles Jacoby’s argument. When you write, “The actual equivalence would be arabs who demanded to move to land inside Israel’s ‘48-67 borders and live there under arab sovereignty,” you are making the argument, however offhandedly, that settlers are living on Arab lands, which begs the question, I think.
Jacoby was clearly (at least, to my way of thinking) making the point that Jews aren’t welcome in any land controlled by Arabs, whereas Arabs are welcome to live in Israel (under Israeli sovereignty).
The history of the situation is brain-bendingly complex, but here’s by far the best source I’ve found:
A Guide to the Arab-Israeli Conflict
Lavishly footnoted and annotated, just in case anyone wishes to dismiss it because of the source.
My take after reading the history is that the Palestinians should be in the Transjordan–not the West Bank or Gaza–and have no supportable right to any of the disputed territories at all.
Jacoby mentions that “Jews have lived in Judea and Samaria since antiquity.” He does not mention that for <a>about 1,200 years</a>, these lands were controlled by Arabs, or non-Arab Muslims. The Jews and Samaritans who lived in the Levant did so for centuries as guests of the Arab/Muslim rulers.
While Jews in the Levant may not have been treated well at all times, the record of the Muslims in those days towards the Jewish people was certainly no worse than that of the Europeans.
The issue is not a cultural issue, as Jacoby would have it, but one of sovereignty, as Jim Henley pointed out.
Today, the occupied territories are not lands “controlled by Arabs” as you wrote, Jeff. They are lands controlled by Israel. The Palestinians there are subject to the might and whim of the IDF.
This is not about Jews being welcome in a land controlled by Arabs, but about the settlers bringing control with them when they come to the land.
The Palestinians do not have the choice of welcoming the settlers without accepting Israeli sovereignty in their territory—the two are linked, at least currently, by Israel and the settlers themselves. In such a case, opposition to settlements is natural and proper.
Jacoby says that the settlers do not want “to displace the Arabs living there but to dwell among them.” This feel-good vision is completely disconnected from reality.
The problem is that the people the Israeli settlers are living among have no rights. The settlers have all the freedoms and protections of Israeli citizens, while the Palestinians are not citizens but subjects.
Citizens cannot live side-by-side with subjects on equal terms. Domination of one by the other will be and has been the natural result.
While Palestinians in the territories are taxed, they cannot vote. Settlers, on the other hand, can vote, and they receive tax breaks and other financial incentives to live beyond the green line.
Palestinians in the territories cannot become citizens of Israel, because Israel is intent on preserving its character as a Jewish state. Therefore, the only hope for the Palestinians is their own state.
And here the reason for Palestinian resistance to the settlements becomes obvious—the settlers do not want to be part of a Palestinian state, they want to be part of Israel. Israel, too, demands that at minimum 80% of the settlements remain under its sovereignty.
If Jacoby looked at maps of Gaza and the West Bank (those are from Shalom Achshav—Peace Now), he would see that there is no way to maintain the territorial contiguity of any future Palestinian state while also preserving Israel’s sovereignty over the settlements.
In other words, the settlements are an obstacle to the existence of a Palestinian state.
Such a state is the Palestinians’ best hope for achieving rights. The settlements prevent the Palestinians from having rights—perpetuating their status as subjects.
This would be reason enough for any Palestinian to oppose the settlements, but it wouldn’t be right for us to ignore the way that Israeli settlers “live among” the Palestinians.
Settler violence against Palestinians is routine—and made worse by the fact that it occurs with the tacit consent of the IDF (another consequence of citizens and subjects living side by side). The documentation of this phenomenon is plentiful:<ul><li>The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has published two reports on the subject</li><li>Amnesty International published a report in September of 2001 called Broken Lives: A Year of Intifada which includes a section on settler violence against Palestinians.</li><li>A Human Rights Watch case study of Hebron catalogues both Palestinian and Israeli abuses. Here’s the section on settler violence, but read the entire report—its citation of Palestinian abuses also deserves attention</li><li>The Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group (PHRMG) put out a report on IDF complicity in settler violence in March of 2001</li></ul>
Violence is a dramatic subject to lead off a list of complaints with. And it is a two-way street. Settlers attack Palestinians, and Palestinians attack settlers. So why focus on violence at all? Even the PHRMG report points out that not all or even most settlers are violent.
As any defender of Israel would say about Palestinian terrorism, the issue is not only the violent act, but the system that supports it.
In an article about B’Tselem’s report originally published in Ha’aretz, Gideon Levy wrote, “[the] report … documents 199 cases of manslaughter and murder of Palestinians by Israeli citizens; only six yielded murder convictions. In six cases of death the police did not initiate an investigation, and in another 39 the cases were closed.”
Settler violence is as real as suicide bombing, and is often perpetrated with impunity. It casts light on the nature of an occupation that allows and perpetuates a great deal of injustice.
But ultimately, violence is a narrow issue. Israel’s settlements cause a great deal of structural harm to Palestinian society—and this harm is justly resisted by the Palestinians when they oppose the settlements.
The U.N.’s Commission on Human Rights issued a report in 1997 about human rights violations in the occupied territories. In addition to mentioning settler violence against Palestinians, the report describes the way in which Israel’s settlements are established:
Can Jacoby possibly be surprised that Palestinians resist this?
The reality is that when a settler village is built in the occupied territory, it is often built on land where Palestinians were already present. When the bypass roads that service these villages are built, they may cut off a Palestinian farmer from his fields—and it is illegal for Palestinians to cross a bypass road. When a settler village is built, water that once served the Palestinians is diverted away from them, without compensation.
Since 1967, 56% of the land in the West Bank and Gaza has been expropriated by Israel. Israel has bulldozed agricultural land, uprooted trees, demolished houses, and criss-crossed the country with bypass roads. In Gaza, settlements are placed in order to deny Palestinians access to the coastline.
Israel builds settlements on the best farmland, and over water tables. Over 86% of the water in the West Bank and Gaza is used by Israelis.
There are a number of sources documenting the nature and consequences of Israel’s settlement activity:<ul><li>The Palestinian Center for Human Rights’ August 2000 report on settlements in the occupied territories</li><li>LAW’s January 2000 report on the environmental consequences of occupation</li><li>More on the PCHRG web site, which is down right now (http://www.pchrgaza.org)</li></ul>The pattern evident in all the reports is one of land confiscation without any just due process, of the razing of agricultural land, and of house demolitions. Someone with the time to devote to serious research on the subject will no doubt be able to find a wealth of material.
In this context—that is, in light of reality—Jacoby’s position is almost absurd.
On what planet is the Nazi attempt to make Germany (and Europe) “Judenrein” comparable to Palestinian demands that Israel stop settling their territory?
Did foreign Jews enter Germany, confiscate the land of German citizens, raze fields and demolish homes? Were the Nazi atrocities responses to the presence of a Jewish army on their land?
The analogy is ridiculous, and by obliterating the distinction between unprovoked aggression and <a>resistance to aggression</a> it dishonors both Jewish victims of the Nazis and Palestinian victims of the occupation.
The Israeli settlers are not moving in as neighbors, they are supplanting an existing population. There is no hypocrisy in opposing such an invasion.
Jim writes:
Yes, though “controlled by” is not the same as “populated by.” Having these lands be part of the Ottoman Empire or other Muslim kingdoms is hardly relevant to the fact that there has been a Jewish presense there since before Islam existed.
As for your rather long and well-documented treatise on the abuses of the settlements, while the UN is always a suspect source, I don’t doubt that there have been abuses. I would suggest that you keep in mind that the West Bank and Gaza Arabs are “subjects” of an “occupation” that followed Israel successfully taking that land from Jordan in 1967. As such, the Israelis are entirely within their rights to send all the Palestinians packing and keep the land to themselves; nasty, but them’s the consequences for attacking another country (and losing). Except this isn’t what happened, and until the 1980s, settlement in the West Bank was virtually nil, as it was expected to be returned to Jordan.
Measures such as uprooting olive gradens and building bypass roads are necessary because the Arabs are hostile—not just hostile, but murderous. And frankly, it’s not the fact that they “resist” that’s appalling—it’s how they resist.
Finally, this changes nothing about Jacoby’s main point: namely, that there is no law that says Jews cannot live in the West Bank under any circumstances, other than the Palestinians’ own insistence on it. I would understand if they demanded the surrender of Israeli sovereignty over the settlements, while permitting the residents to live there, if they so choose. But no, they insist that the West Bank really be Jew-free—and kill little girls in their beds to achieve that goal. They are weaker than the SS, thankfully, but that doesn’t mean they don’t share the goals.
The Arabs lost any claim to Judea and Samaria after Jordan lost it in the war of 1967. Israel did not have to let anyone stay on that land, but did so anyway—their remaining there is a privilege not a right. Israelis have the right to live on that land or use it as they see fit; since the population is hostile, they are entitled to take measures of self-protection, even at the native population’s expense. (They do not, however, have the right to wantonly murder Palestinians; that is abhorrent.) Contrary to your claim above, the occupation is not aggression; it’s a consequence of an Arab attack on Israel. Sorry, no free passes here.
Frankly, I don’t think the current situation is tenable, and neither do the Israelis, which is why we had the peace process, and why Netanyahu talks about self-government for the West Bank even today. But nothing says that the West Bank has to be Jew-free (just as Israel doesn’t get to be Arab-free), and if that’s a condition the Arabs insist on, they will (once again) lose, and lose huge.
Jim (not Henley) wrote: “Today, the occupied territories are not lands ‘controlled by Arabs’ as you wrote, Jeff. They are lands controlled by Israel. The Palestinians there are subject to the might and whim of the IDF.”
Oops. Looks like E.Nough and I posted nearly simultaneously. Sorry for any repetition of points.
Jimseses,
Just for the sake of argument. let’s assume that you facts are correct. They are not, and I ignore any international “human rights” groups, because I disagree with them on a fundamental point. I believe that the right to live is a vital human right for all people, they don
Hi all. Thanks, first, for a very civil discourse. I’ll try to respond to as much as I can.
Eric the CR, I “pick on Israel” in this comment simply because I am writing a response to Jeff’s post which is about Israel. I’m staying on-topic, which is only polite.
But as an aside, some other things I pick on here at home are drug laws that fill our jails with non-violent offenders who happen to be mostly Black or Latino; eminent domain abuse; government surveillance of civilians; and school reform.
Like many Americans, I probably spend too little time thinking about world affairs. Israel gets my attention for the same reason it gets the attention of many Americans: we have a strong connection with it. In my case, that connection stems from the fact that my family on my mother’s side is from the West Bank (Nablus).
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with writing about an issue you have a connection to. Why does Jeff post about Israel in the first place?
E.Nough, you write:
I am accepting for the sake of argument that Israel’s first strikes in 1967 were indeed pre-emptive, and that they fought a war of self-defense. This contention is quite debatable. But those sorts of debates drag you back into history, to 1956, and 1948, and even earlier. I’ve rarely found such debates to be productive for either participant.
However, my point is that even accepting the Israeli contention that 1967 was a defensive war still does not give Israel the right to expel the Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank.
What Israel won in 1967 is sovereignty over the land and its civilian population. With that sovereignty comes an obligation to recognize and protect the rights of the people. Victory in a defensive war grants the right to expel the old government, but it does not grant the right to expel the governed. Civilians are not to be treated as pawns of war.
Israel inherited the West Bank and Gaza’s civilians when it conquered the land, and it has a responsibility to them, as any government has a responsibility to people under its sovereignty. The West Bank and Gaza came into Israel’s control with an existing structure of civil society: with established property rights, among other things. Israel’s control of the territories includes the duty to protect the institutions of civil society and the people who built them.
References to what Israel can do
“This September 2000 intifada began with IDF soldiers using live ammunition on unarmed civilian protestors who posed no threat to the soldiers’ lives. It did not begin with suicide bombers—these were a response to the brutality of the IDF.”
The 2000 intifada was planned by the PA as a response to the Camp David negotiations, as some PA officials have admitted. I assume you are referring to the killing of Muhammed Dura, where there is considerable evidence that he was killed by an PA bullet rather than an IDF one. But as in Jenin, the world media rushed to judgment.
“Jews were as welcome in Arab and Muslim-dominated lands as they have ever been in a land they did not control.”
Setting aside for a moment how well they were treated by their rulers (not very, most of the time), let us remember that in many cases the Jewish communities predated the Muslim conquest, often by 1000 years. The Jews were settled in Medina, for example, long before Mohammed showed up. So who occupied who? Who took whose land?
“Human Rights Watch has issued similar indictments of the IDF. It was their report on Jenin that confirmed that no large-scale massacre occurred, so again, I would be skeptical of accusations that they are biased.”
However, after they reluctantly admitted that no massacre had taken place, they kept alluding to Israeli “war crimes” which they never identified or proved.
I could go on, but this will become one of those 85 message comment sections that lgf is becoming famous for. I will not respond again, but I will second Toren’s website recommendation for A Guide to the Arab-Israeli Conflict.
Since the last commenter stated that he (or she) wouldn’t respond again, I won’t go into a refutation of the points made above.
If any readers are genuinely curious how someone would respond to those points, my blog has a link to my e-mail address.
I will point out that the previous commenter did not address the single most important point of my previous comments, which is that as the sovereign power in Gaza and the West Bank, Israel has an obligation to guarantee the rights of the Palestinians there, including their rights to property and representation in government.
The settlements as they have been implemented are unjust because they have been founded through the abrogation of Palestinian rights.
Good people can and do oppose the settlements for this reason, not out of any existential problem with Jews living on one side of the Green Line or the other.
If Israel will not allow the Palestinians under its power to have rights, then it should withdraw its power over them and let them live without interference.
Jim (not Jim),
My point was that these international standars that everyone claims to like are only used to pressuser certain groups—the ones people don’t like.
For example, you say that “Israel is obligated to recognize all the rights of the Palestinian civilians under its control”. Fine, they should do that after the Palestinians living in Lebanon, Syria and Egypt get the same rights as the citizens of those countries. Why should Israel be held to a higher standard than even the brothers and sisters of the people in question? This is an example of the international double standard.
Until the Palestinians in Lebanon and Syria get equal rights, please, let’s not even talk about Israel. And when the citizens of those countries get half the rights of the Arab citizens of Israel, then you may have some moral standing.
I’d like to thank Eric for stripping away the thin veneer of legalism in the original Jacoby article and getting us down to the nanny-nanny-boo-boo level. There is something of a valid point lurking in there: it is weird when Europeans find the situation in Palestine more worth their handwringing than other trouble spots. However, there are at least four groups of people to whom Eric’s “think about something else, why don’t you?” injunction doesn’t apply:
1. The Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, because their situation not only touches on their self-interest, it is their self-interest.
2. The Israelis, for all kinds of reasons, including the fact that scoring arguable rhetorical points just may not be better than sustaining a ruinous dirty war, that any country whose ambition amounts to being no worse than Lebanon and Syria will or ought to suffer a self-respect deficit, and something close to two thirds of its own citizens now consider the settlements a bad deal.
3. American taxpayers. The bunch of us in this discussion are not paying China to maintain its prison labor system. We’re not paying Mugabe to dispossess his “subjects.” (If we are we should stop.) We are paying to maintain Likud’s quarter-century-old territorial ambitions.
4. American policy makers, since they’re the ones with the supposed responsibility to the folks in group 3.
Now then, since I am certain that Jim, Jeff and I are American taxpayers, and assume that the other posters are as well, the discussion may proceed.
I’d like to thank Jeff Jacoby for stripping away the thin veneer of “security” from Israel’s reluctance to give up the West Bank. To read Charles Krauthammer blather about how the PA could “invite “Iraq’s tank armies” into its territory is, unless you have the brains of grout, snort-inducing. (They get there how, Iraq’s mighty airlift capability? They get permission to drive across Jordan, entailing what Jordan knows perfectly well Israel would consider an act of war on Jordan’s part? They do this despite the fact that the Krauthammers of the world tell us, when trying to encourage us to overthrow Saddam, that iraq’s military is an order of magnitude weaker than it was in 1990?)
I’d like to thank Jeff Goldstein for providing this fine forum and an interesting point of discussion. I can’t agree with (non-me) Jim that Arab rulers have been motivated since 1948 by their feelings for the Arabs of Palestine. I think that, like rulers everywhere, they took the creation of Israel as an insult to their status. (I can believe that fellow-feeling for the Palestinians motivates the general population of Arab and Islamic countries.) But Jim’s central point looks unassailable. To repeat:
Jacoby is simply wrong that there is “no occupation.” So long as Jim’s “subject and citizen” distinction remains, there is one. The notion that the Palestinians themselves would or even should cease to be aggrieved by this is bizarre. (The notion that the Palestinians should find ways of prosecuting their grievance that do not entail committing war crimes – targeted killing of civilians – is not bizarre.)
Final thanks to both Jeff and E. Nough for their civil and able representation of the Other Side of this discussion. I now return this weblog to its rightful owner.
Apologies for not vamoosing quite as immediately as I said I would. I want to clarify a poorly constructed sentence. I wrote
Obviously, “rulers everywhere” did not take the creation of Israel as an insult to their status. I could more clearly have written
“Like rulers everywhere, they were motivated by status, and took the creation of Israel as an insult to it.”
Now, I swear, I’m gone.