polemicon

What are they playing at?

Israeli authorities have recently authorized the building of 1600 new dwellings – intended for Jewish settlers – in East Jerusalem. Under the United Nations charter the General Assembly of the United Nations decided in 1948 to partition the United Nations (formerly League of Nations) Mandate of Palestine, establishing a Jewish state (in fact, the Israeli movement that had resisted the British mandate administration, declared independence immediately after the partition was agreed by the General Assembly) and passing the rest to the Kingdom of Transjordan (today’s Jordan). Jerusalem was divided, with the Temple Mount falling to the Arab side. This may seem odd, but the reason lies in a fundamental historical fact: the bulk of the Jewish population living in Palestine during the Roman occupation were expelled by the Romans after the Bar Kokhba rising of AD 132-6, and they were even barred from visiting all Jerusalem except for one annual festival. In any case, there were few Jews left in Roman Palestine to visit Jerusalem. Those who did remain often gave up strict observance of Jewish law, or became Christianised. The centre of Judaism in the Near East moved to what is modern Iraq, and a great number of Jews were scattered in the Mediterranean basin and spread throughout Europe – the beginning of the Diaspora. The relevant point here is that after Bar Kokhba’s rising there were no resident Jews in Jerusalem until the beginning of the modern era. After Islam appeared, and Omar, the second Khalif, conquered Jerusalem in AD 638, the site of King Herod’s temple became the a centre of Islamic prayer, marked by the building of the Al Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, also known as the Mosque of Omar (built in AD 691ff. ). The people of Jewish descent who remained in the area from then onwards were either Christianized or, more likely, became Muslims – for which there were excellent pragmatic reasons, since non-Muslims had to pay extra taxes and did not enjoy the full rights of a Muslim citizen. After AD 136 there were very few, after AD 638 practically no Jews in Jerusalem, until the successive waves of immigration in the 19th century. This means effectively at least 1300 years of absence of Jews from Jerusalem, and the loss of all legal titles to possessions in Jerusalem (after 136 AD) for a period of ca. 1700 years. Those who form the present-day Palestinian population of the area are the immediate descendants of the people who remained after Bar Kokhba, or who immigrated afterwards. Their continuous physical and legal presence establishes a pretty solid legal case for their claim to Jerusalem as their territory. This is, in fact, the position that successive UN resolutions have taken on the matter, and the reason why all foreign embassies to Israel are situated in West Jerusalem – which was given by the UN partition to the new state of Israel. The only political force in the world that does not share this view of the situation is the government of Israel, and great parts of its people. Since the end of the Six-Days’-War in June 1967 and the ensuing occupation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank of the River Jordan, successive Israeli governments have been labouring to change this situation, and to force international recognition for the status of East Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish state of Israel. The fact that East Jerusalem, to this day, has a largely non-Jewish population, is obviously a severe obstacle to the success of the Israeli claim to possession of East Jerusalem. Enforced settlement of Jewish people in the eastern sections of the city, and the eviction of Palestinians wherever possible, are means in the attempt to establish a Jewish ascendancy in East Jerusalem.
All this would be pretty clear, as an obvious breach of international law, and the international community would with some energy oppose Israel’s actions, were the situation not immensely complicated as the result of the last 100 years of European and world history.
Starting in effect in the middle of the 19th century there were attempts to resettle Jews from Eastern Europe – initially they were simply fleeing from oppression and mass killings in the territories of the Russian Empire, and moving to any part of the world that provided an opening. Later, the migration of Jews acquired an ideological aspect, first with largely religious overtones – the expectation of the arrival of the Messiah, who would of course be seen in ancient Israel – later, under the influence of racial and racist thinking, came the development of the movement that became Zionism, and eventually took on the form of a body of thought that saw Jerusalem as the capital of Judaism, and Palestine (which was then a Turkish province, in the time of the Ottoman Empire) as its natural territory. Theodor Herzl, who was the effective founder of modern Zionism, was not particularly keen on the notion of settling Jews in Palestine, he would have accepted Madagascar or Uganda as well, but the idea of returning to Jerusalem caught the imagination of Jews far more than the concept of settling in a part of the world with which they had no connection whatever. This was perfectly natural, but it involved an unavoidable conflict between the residents of Palestine (Palestinians, who had been there for more than 1500 years, see above), and the new settlers, who had been brought up thinking that Israel was their ancient home, promised by the Lord to Abraham and his seed, for ever, and waiting to be reoccupied.
Initially, immigration was unproblematic: outdated methods of agriculture and absentee landlords had reduced the productivity of the land in Turkish Palestine, and it had become very sparsely populated, so that immigrants, whether Jewish or otherwise, who introduced more vigorous work techniques, and procured clear titles of property from Turkish landlords, were welcomed, and considered as highly beneficial to the area. This changed when it became clear that the new arrivals intended not merely to be settlers in a foreign country, but that they were intending to construct a parallel society from which was to grow a Jewish state, in which there would be no place for non-Jewish people as citizens of equal rights. The effect was some muted trouble under Turkish rule, which ended in 1918, when the area was passed to Great Britain as a Mandate of the League of Nations. The British in 1917 had promised, as a means to gain Jewish capital support for their war effort against Germany, Austria and Turkey, to provide a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. At the same time, they had promised the Arabs of the Hedjas (modern Saudi-Arabia, with the sacred Muslim sites of Mecca and Medina) an Arab kingdom that was to include Palestine, if they helped the British war effort against the Turks through actual military effort. This was arranged by the famous Lawrence of Arabia, who in perfectly good faith made the relevant promises to the Arabs, and co-led their troops, as a consequence of which the joint English-Arab force occupied Jerusalem in 1918, and the whole of the former Turkish Palestine during the same year. The English were now faced with the situation that they had made two mutually exclusive promises. They tried to wriggle out of the situation by playing for time, trying to fob off the family of the ancient rulers of the Hedjas with a motley array of territories, which they gave the name of Iraq, and of which the Arab commander, Prince Faisal, became king – under English control. Jews were allowed to settle in Palestine in greater number than before, but they were not given a state. So both sides felt – and were – betrayed by the British. And both sides started to fight the British. The Arabs were numerically superior, but lacked unity and expertise, the Jews were highly educated (most of them were after all emigrants from Europe), well connected, and enjoyed the moral and financial support of important and powerful backers who sympathised with their cause, but were not willing to make the sacrifice of settling in the Promised Land in person. The Jewish side formed very effective underground armies that carried out bloody terrorist attacks on the British (one of the Jewish leaders, and responsible for the King David Hotel massacre of 1947, Menahem Begin, later became Israeli Prime Minister – a clear case of a former terrorist accepted as a responsible politician by the western powers).
After the end of World War II Britain was too enfeebled to carry on the struggle to preserve its colonial empire, and it gave up both India (on the way to which Palestine was an important staging-post in the supply route), and its Arabian and Mediterranean possessions. With the party in the middle gone, the Jewish and the Arab parties now attacked each other directly. In theory, numerical superiority should have helped the Arabs to win. But their habitual and traditional unwillingness to cooperate spoiled their chances. Also, there was a new factor at work that had nothing to do with them directly: the German policy of the extermination of all Jews in Europe. The great majority of the earth’s nations, in the heyday of the Third Reich, refused to help the persecuted Jews effectively – some out of ignorance, most out of indifference or outright anti-Semitism. (In the southern US states Jews suffered many of the same disabilities as blacks did. The first lynch murders carried out by the Ku Klux Klan were in fact directed at Jews. Theoretical equality Jews have enjoyed in the US since 1964 only. The unconcealed anti-semitism in e.g. Great Britain or Sweden quite shocked the present writer when he first experienced it.) German persecution of Jews was part and parcel of a far wider problem. Admittedly, no other country in the world went so far as Germany did in the fantastic and mad hatred that it nursed of Jews as the fabled authors of all things bad and dangerous. Knowledge of what Germany was doing was wide-spread during the Second World War, but effective intervention on the part of other countries was there little. The Americans knew what was going on in Auschwitz, but they refused to bomb the extermination facilities pretending it would give away military secrets if they did. Germany, thank heaven, lost the war, largely due to the Russian war effort. Russia also had a long tradition of anti-semitism, and Stalin shared this in particular. At the end of the war one thing, in view of the atrocities committed or not prevented, seemed clear: that the world owed Jews some sort of recompense. Consequently, there was general agreement that there should be a Jewish state, and that it should be established where the most effective representatives of the Jews in influential circles thought best: in Palestine, especially since most non-Jews thought this somehow fitting. That was after all where they came from, was it not? That the setting up of a Jewish state in Palestine was bound to conflict with the legitimate interests of its majority population, the Palestinians, did not bother many people. The odd thing is that no-one seems to have considered making that country give up part of its territory that was most clearly involved in the programme of genocide against the Jews: i.e. Germany. It was no problem for Germany’s neighbours to annex or otherwise acquire parts of German territory in compensation for past encroachments, real or spurious, but nobody seriously pursued the idea of setting up a Jewish state on German territory. Conceivably it had to do with the desire of most surviving Jews to escape from the neighbourhood of Germany, but that is not a sufficient reason – it would have been in the biblical tradition to set up a Jewish state where an enemy had been overcome. The Old Testament is full of reports of similar events. But it seems as if most European powers were quite happy to see Europe without Jews, especially if it could be had at little cost to any major player. And England by now was very keen on getting rid of its Palestine mandate. Setting up the Jewish state there seemed like a belated honouring of its First World War promise, at little effective cost, with the added advantage that there was a likelihood that other Jews would leave Europe, or the USA, for Israel too. That Israel would develop into a sort of US fortress in the middle east was not to be expected in 1948 – the political ideal for the new state was socialism (cf. the Kibbuz movement), and 20 years of socialist government followed the setting up of Israel as a state. And the idea of socialism was never popular with US governments. But the Kibbuz movement is dead, and the Israeli population of today finds itself faced with two unpalatable facts: there are 1 ½ million non-Jewish (i.e. Arab) Israeli citizens, with a high birth-rate, and over 1 million recent Russian immigrants, with very little knowledge of, and commitment to, Judaism – out of a population of 8 million. On top of that there are the old-established orthodox and radical religious parties. The Russians had to be accepted – under the Israeli Law of Return any Jew in the world has a right to Israeli citizenship, and for many Russians in the period of the dissolution of the Soviet Union the claim to be Jewish seemed an easy way to get out of that declining and hopeless country. Indeed, so keen were Russians, Jewish or not, to leave, that over 100,000 self-declared Jews asked for political asylum in Germany of all places.
Russian immigrants then had to be accepted, and thus to be housed somewhere, so the government- sponsored programme of settlements in the occupied territories started. Most politicians know that this was fraught with risks, but they were considered long-term, whereas the Russians are a problem now. But no-one dared to say this openly, so a modification in the published political views on the West Bank problem took place inside Israel: the ever-useful security argument (“Israel is under threat from all sides, it is only a narrow strip of land, it has a legitimate right to defend itself etc”) was used to justify the construction of the Great Wall of Palestine, which fences in the remaining Palestinian settlements in the West Bank, while Jewish settlements on West Bank territory are not fenced out. As a result, a great part of the West Bank territory has effectively been annexed by Israel. Jewish settlements there are linked by fortified roads which criss-cross the West Bank, and are out of bounds for Palestinians. The idea is gradual encroachment, hard facts – in concrete; a demoralized Palestinian population, and a long-term prospect of a referendum on whether the West Bank is Jewish or not. Hard-core Israeli imperialists of the Eretz Israel persuasion who set up settlements which even the Israeli government calls “illegal” serve a useful function in demonstrating to the world that the Israeli government is doing its best to control a radical and restive population, making even a right-wing government like the present appear moderate by contrast. If a settler outpost is evacuated by force the Israeli press makes a great fuss, and declares shock and horror at Jews fighting Jews. This is of course nonsense (cf. above) in view of the history of Biblical Israel to which right-wingers love to refer. There was only one short period ever in which what is now Israel was one state and at relative peace with itself: under Kings David and Solomon, around 1000 BC. After Solomon’s death the Jewish state broke up into Israel in the north, and Judah in the south, and they were fighting each other continuously until their independent existence ended under Babylonian, and later Greek and Roman rule. Jews were at each other’s throats as much as other people.
Incidentally, “the ancient capital of Israel, Jerusalem,” was not, in Kind David’s days, Israel’s ancient capital: it had been the capital of a Jebusite state, and David attacked and conquered the city, killing its inhabitants in the process. This and similar stories can be found in the historical books of the Old Testament, this particular story in 2 Sam. 5, vv. 6-10. If you like pictures and maps, try The Times Atlas of Biblical History, London 1987, passim. Jerusalem then was a Jewish city from ca 1000 BC to the end of Jewish residence in AD 162, i.e. for at most 1162 years, because after the middle of the 3rd century BC the Jews were certainly not masters of that country any more. Jerusalem became a Muslim city in 638 AD, which it remained until 1918, when the British and Arab armies occupied it under General Allenby. 1248 years of continuous Muslim occupation and settlement (with interruptions by Christian crusaders – but they were mere interludes, and certainly do not add to the Israeli claim to the city) – that is a lot, certainly more than the Jewish occupation (which was after all interrupted by some centuries of Babylonian and Persian and Hellenistic and at last Roman control. Also, the Muslim period came after the Israeli period. Subsequent possession tends to be a good indicator of the acquisition of a title to a property – though it does not prove it. But a thousand years of possession does establish a title beyond doubt. It would be absurd for the Irish or Welsh to claim possession of Great Britain, merely because the invading Angles and Saxons drove their ancestors off into the hills and wild marshes of the west. Or would any white Anglo-Saxon US citizen calmly concede ownership of US territory to “native American” claims because their forebears were the uncontested owners and rulers of the North American continent before the English and French and Spanish appeared?
The present Israeli establishment ignores this, without going so far as to claim possession by right of conquest. Under the law of nations that obtained in the world before the middle of the nineteenth century that would have been a fairly respectable title. But it was of course fraught with danger – a vanquished enemy may regain strength and re-conquer what he has lost. So Israel finds itself in a quandary: it cannot seriously claim that Jerusalem and the West Bank are Israeli territory by historical right . That claim is exploded by the more than a thousand years of Palestinian residence and possession. Nor can the land be claimed to be Israel’s by right of conquest – that would expose Israel to great physical danger, because it would re-introduce force into politics as a legitimate means. War would be back as an instrument of international politics, after both the League of Nations and the United Nations were set up to overcome a world order that was riddled and poisoned and torn in pieces by warfare. And Israel would saw off the bough on which it is perched, for it was set up by a decision of the United Nations, and whatever legitimacy Israeli presence in the Near East possesses is derived from the legitimacy of the United Nations.
But in effect Israel is pursuing a “might before right” policy. This is a dangerous precept, especially for a small country whose “might” is not all that impressive. It is just no match for the combined might of its neighbours. Fortunately – in the short term- for Israel, its neighbours do not combine their might. Nor is Israel alone, for over 50 years now it has been unquestioningly supported by the United States of America, and other countries, for various reasons, among which the most prominent and respectable no doubt has been their guilty conscience, the memory of what their forebears had done, or allowed to be done, to the forebears of the present people of Israel.
Still, the policy is dangerous. The Prussian prime minister, later German imperial chancellor, Otto von Bismarck declared his conviction in 1863, in a conversation with the ambassador of Austria (which in those days still was a major European power), that international law only binds small countries and weak states. In the short run his views seemed to be vindicated by his successes. But, in fact, he broke Germany’s moral backbone, and established a kind of hubris in government that led to Germany’s defeat in two world wars, and the loss of its status as a major power. It survived as a state (or rather, two) only because in the context of the Cold War it found powerful new – and very self-interested – backers.
Israel is ignoring the fact that it is losing all its backers, pretty rapidly. Russia may or may not support its own diaspora inside Israel – after all, many of them still speak mainly Russian, and that counts for a lot with Russians – but on the other hand they left Russia, which may be seen as cutting themselves loose from all allegiance to their mother country. And that sort of betrayal may be considered unforgiveable.
The US have long ago tried to diversify their bases in the Middle East, admittedly with very limited success. But at a time when the US is becoming ever more dependent on energy imports, and have ever fewer means of paying for them it is becoming less and less likely that Israel can count on America’s unconditional support for much longer. Also, demography within the US is eroding the power of the Christian (i.e. evangelical) fundamentalist lobby, who favour support for Israel because they believe that when all Jews live in Israel they will either be converted, which will cause the Second Coming of the Messiah, or He will come anyway, and then personally convert the Jews, and the world will be renewed in God’s image, i.e. like a greater and white Anglo-Saxon Protestant United States of America. But the Roman Catholic Hispanics, whose number inside the US has been growing rapidly of late, turning them into the largest ethnic group after the so-called Caucasian whites, take a dim view of such dogma. At any rate, under another Republican president the religious right will wield much less power than it did under George W. Bush. By all accounts President Obama is not keen on them, but he is in no position to challenge them, as long as he still has an agenda of his own, like health care reform. In the eyes of many Americans he is scarcely a legitimate president, because he is considered “black” (under their racist “one-drop-rule” any person who has only “one drop” of “black blood” in his veins is “black” – even the Nazis were less racist than that, regarding as Jewish only persons with more than two Jewish grandparents). And a “black” or “liberal” president only operates on sufferance. If he does anything that is likely to threaten the interests of any powerful lobby, it takes very little to run an effective campaign against him as either, well, “black” and therefore a usurper, or as a security risk (especially if he bears the middle name of Hussein, as Obama does, of which the right wing in the US are already making great play. They have also “discovered” that he was born not on Hawaii but outside the territory of the US, and is thus debarred from becoming president). Obama fears to make himself vulnerable to foreign policy criticism at a time when, to please his voters and backers, he has to concentrate on domestic policies. In order not to disappoint them he knows he must carry on supporting Israel, even though the Israeli government is doing the most provoking things, as they are doing right now. They have humiliated Vice-President Biden, Secretary of State Clinton, and the president himself, in announcing the building of those 1600 new homes while Biden was visiting, knowing perfectly well that this was making it impossible for the Palestinian side to engage in any negotiations with the Israeli government. For they have their hardliners too, called Hamas, who would have a field day portraying poor President Abbas (of the weak and insignificant Palestinian Authority) as the helpless and impotent toy of the Israeli government, and America’s promise of support for the Palestinian cause as just so much hot air. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has made matters even more humiliating for the Americans by promising that such bad timing (as the combination of an official visit from the US Vice-President and an announcement ignoring all the declared objectives of the US government) would not be allowed to occur again: but in substance he did not change one iota of Israel’s policy. Indeed, he announced that there would be more building of Jewish homes in East Jerusalem, not less.
The Israeli side knew perfectly well how furious the US would be about those new houses, but they knew also that the US are in no position just now to do anything about it. And since all politicians seem nowadays to think only in the short term, the Israeli side may find the gains in terms of domestic support much more important than the wrath of a helpless US president. And if a week is a long time in politics, as the British prime minister Harold Wilson famously discovered in the 1960s, then the 8 months till the congressional elections in November are an infinity. Israel is probably right that no serious US actions will follow now, but the objective value of Israel as a strategic and political ally of the US has again been diminished, and a president less constrained by the need to demonstrate that he does all the right things will find it even easier one day to ditch Israel, as the US under the Republican president Nixon ditched capitalist Taiwan, in favour of communist China. Nations have no friends, only interests. Israel, however, does not seem to grasp that its interest lies in international law, institutions, and the enlightened interests of its Muslim neighbours. Its expansion now is a Pyrrhic victory. A few more such successes, and the country will be done for. A financially potent US has been unable to impose its will on Iraq, Iran, or Afghanistan. If China – a country to whom the US owes more than a trillion dollars, and which is rapidly taking on an imperial role in Asia and Africa – takes the side of the oil-rich Muslim states (who in the shape of oil have a commodity that China urgently needs, as does the US, with the difference that the US will soon be unable to pay for it, and China is becoming ever more solvent) – most of whom view Israel as an enemy, what help can a financially hard-pressed US be to Israel, especially if the US, let alone China, decides that it has no interest in Israel’s continued existence?
Israel is playing with fire, and all who truly want to make amends for earlier generations’ crimes against Europe’s Jews, must do their utmost to stop Israel from turning itself into a constant provocation to the international community. The bully boy is not much loved, and when he loses his power, or the support of powerful allies, his end will swiftly be upon him. Israel must not be allowed to establish itself further in the bully-boy role. Its people have deserved better.