This is the final post (I promise!) in a series about the history of the war on Palestine. Part 1 told the history of the conflict from the beginnings of Zionism to the Nakba and the creation of Israel. Part 2 covered the formation of the PLO and its guerilla campaign. Part 3 covered the First Intifada and the Oslo Accords, and Part 4 discussed the Palestinian Authority and the rise of Hamas. In this final post I want to look at the wider context of Zionism, and the implications for where we are at right now.
One of the slogans frequently used by Zionists in the 19th and 20th centuries was ‘a land without a people for a people without a land’. The phrase was first coined by Christian Restorationists (what we now more commonly call Christian Zionists) in the mid-19th Century and was later picked up by some of the Zionist leaders, including Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi.
At one level, the first part of the statement is
simply absurd. The area we call
Palestine has been continually occupied by humans for the entirety of recorded
history, and probably before. In the 19th century it was densely populated by people who were mostly Islamic and spoke
Arabic, with smaller numbers of Orthodox Christians and Jews. There definitely were ‘people’ there.
But if you read it again, you will see that the slogan
doesn’t say ‘a land without people’ it says ‘a land without a
people’. Of course the Zionists knew
there were people living in Palestine.
What they were suggesting was that they were not ‘a people’ – a nation,
a distinct ethno-nationalist identity.
Implied in this distinction is the idea that they didn’t belong there,
and that they would be just as happy to live elsewhere. We see this rhetoric, if not these words, in
more recent Zionist propaganda, like the suggestion that Palestinians should
simply be absorbed into the populations of the surrounding nations, and that
‘there is no such thing as the Palestinian people’. The Israeli Government continues this doctrine
when it refers to the Palestinians within its territory as ‘Arabs’.
The second part of the slogan appears unproblematic to modern Western Christian ears. Our
Christian Scriptures incorporate the Hebrew writings which record the history
and traditions of the Jewish faith, written in the first millennium BCE. This means that we share with Jews a
deep-seated understanding of the ‘naturalness’ of their connection to
Palestine. Since we are mostly hazy
about the history of the region after the first century CE, we can be easily
sold on the ‘right of return’ for Jews who are scattered throughout the world.
If we are to do justice to the Palestinians, this
story requires some deconstructing. So
here we go…
***
In total, there were independent Hebrew/Jewish kingdoms for
about 500 years between roughly 1000 and 37 BCE. These included the northern kingdom of
Israel, destroyed by the Assyrians in around 720 BCE; the southern kingdom of
Judah, destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BCE; and the Hasmonean Kingdom which
ruled from 140 to 37 BCE when it was incorporated into the Roman Empire under
Herod the Great. There were none between
37 BCE and 1948 CE, when the modern state of Israel was established. This poses two questions: who lived in Palestine over this time, and
how did the Jews manage to maintain their identity?
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| Ancient Kingdoms of Israel and Judah |
The Romans recognised the distinctive nature of Jewish faith and culture and exempted them from the worship of the Roman gods and the emperor which was obligatory for other Roman subjects. In return for this exemption, they were required to pay an extra tax, and until the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 CE there were daily sacrifices on its altar for the emperor’s wellbeing. Obviously the sacrifices ceased with the temple’s destruction but the exemption (and the tax) remained in place.
This meant that throughout the empire the Jews formed
their own communities, each of them centred around a synagogue where they would
pray and hear the scriptures each Sabbath.
They tended to marry within their community, trade together and live
near each other, forming little Jewish enclaves. Yet this separation was far from total. They intermarried – Jewish women with
non-Jewish men, Jewish men with non-Jewish women. Sometimes the non-Jewish partner would
convert, sometimes not.
Jews in Roman times also sought and made converts more
generally. Compared to Christianity, conversion to Judaism was challenging because a convert was required to adopt the entirety of the Jewish purity code,
including male circumcision. Nonetheless,
there were converts to Judaism who joined the Jewish communities
throughout the Roman world and beyond, mingling and intermarrying with Palestinian Jewish emigrants to form mixed-race communities faithful to the
Jewish tradition. These were always
minorities in the cities where they lived and while they mostly lived peacefully with their
neighbours, in times of social stress they often became the scapegoats and
suffered persecution. In the late Middle
Ages several European countries expelled Jews and they were forced to take refuge
in the various Islamic nations of North Africa and the Middle East, including in Palestine.
Speaking of which, what was going in in Palestine all
this time? There was never a time when
all the Jews were expelled from Palestine.
The Babylonians took the elites and left to common people behind, and
the next generation of the elites were able to return. However, they had to share the territory with immigrants from other parts of the Empire. The Romans expelled Jews from Jerusalem in 70 CE but
not from the rest of Palestine. Their
communities continued, but adjustment was difficult. The Temple was destroyed and the daily
sacrifices were no longer possible. The
traditional structure of priests and Levites, and the local civil and religious
autonomy they provided, had been disbanded.
There was no longer a place in which Jewish customs and standards of
behaviour prevailed. Like Jews in the
rest of the empire, they were increasingly reliant on their communities and
their local synagogues for the maintenance of their faith and culture.
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| Ottoman Empire, 1683 |
Within these empires, Judaism was a licensed religion,
much as it had been in the Roman Empire.
This meant Jews could continue to practice their faith, but they had to
pay an extra tax to do so and were restricted in their participation in
governance and to some extent in commerce. While conversion was not mandatory there were many advantages to
doing so, politically, socially and financially. As time passed, the Jewish communities dwindled as more of each successive generation converted to Islam. The result was that the Jewish communities in Palestine at the end of the 19th century were almost exclusively the descendants of European refugees.
***
Where did this leave us, at the turn of the 20th
century? There were Jewish communities
in various parts of Europe, of mixed ancestry but culturally and religiously
different from their neighbours. In Palestine there were
some small Jewish communities, mainly descendants of European Jewish refugees,
alongside a majority Arabic-speaking Muslim population, also of mixed
ancestry. There was neither a 'nation of Israel' - Judaism was a multi-national religious community - nor a 'nation of Palestine' since Palestinians were part of the wider Islamic Caliphate.
But something else was going on in the late 19th and early 20th centuries – the rise of ethnic nationalism across
Europe. Ethnic nationalism has a
particular shape. The 'land' is matched by ‘a people’ – a defined ethnic
group who belong to that place. Those
people share both a common ancestry and a common culture which sets them apart
from other peoples, who belong in their own lands.
Ethnic nationalism arose out of the dislocation of the
industrial revolution. In traditional
societies it would be unnecessary because people knew where they belonged. In a society undergoing rapid change and
dislocation, people lose their sense of belonging and identity, and need to
find it again.
Like so many movements, this has a bright side and a
dark side. On the bright side, it’s good
to develop a deeper understanding of who we are, to dive into our traditions
and history. This leads to such things
as the British folk revival of the 20th century and the reclamation
of Indigenous cultures around the world.
However, ethnic nationalism has a considerable dark
side. It is easy for a dominant ethnic
group in a community to come to see itself as superior and to see the others as
interlopers or as naturally inferior. This period saw the rise of
social Darwinism and a whole system of racial pseudoscience. Australia saw the results of this in the
genocide of our continent’s First Peoples, and similar things happened around
the world - white supremacism in the US, apartheid in sub-Saharan Africa.
Jews were among the worst-affected victims of
this toxic version of ethnic nationalism.
Always vulnerable to persecution when things went wrong in their various
nations, they were indeed ‘a people without a land’ in ethnic nationalist
terms, and this had terrible consequences for them, reaching their lowest
depths in the Holocaust.
Yet in Zionism, they also adopted their own version of
ethnic nationalism. No people could be
without a land in a ethno-nationalist world.
They started to agitate for a land of their own, and Jewish/Christian
tradition suggested only one place where this could be. And of course if Palestine was ‘their land’
it could not be the land of the people who now lived there, who could only be
interlopers. Let them go back to their
own lands!
***
Ethnic nationalism is a fantasy, as I think the story
of Palestine shows. It’s not just that
all races are equal. Outside of Indigenous communities in isolated places like Australia (and even here, by now), the ethnic nationalist concept of race itself is flawed. The histories of Europe, the Middle East and
Asia are histories of mixing. There are no
‘pure races’.
Think about it like this: I am English. The country of my birth has been the site of
multiple immigrations and invasions – the Celtic Britons, the Romans and their
multi-ethnic armies, the Germanic Anglo-Saxons, the Danish Vikings, the Norman
French. They have also received multiple
immigrants for centuries, from all over Europe and further afield. As an English person born in 1961, what is my
ethnicity? It is a mix of all these
things. I am English because I was born
in England, as were both my parents and all four of my grandparents. I speak
English and mostly adhere (often unconsciously) to English cultural norms. Being English is not ‘in my blood’, it is
what I learned, what I grew up with.
The same is true of Jews and Palestinians. Both the European Jews who have migrated to
Palestine and the Palestinian Arabs have mixed heritages. They share ancient Hebrew ancestors but also
have many other ancestries from many different places. Each of them is ‘a people’ not because of who
their ancestors were but because of what they have learned from their families,
from their wider cultures, from their faiths and their politics. Not all Jews are the same – they don’t simply
reflect a Jewish culture, they also reflect the wider cultures in which they live. Eastern European Jews are different in many ways
to those from Western Europe, and different again from those who have lived in
the Middle East for generations. And
even though Palestinian Arabs have lived in Palestine for generations, there
are differences of class, education, religious outlook and so forth.
Each has their own connection with the land of
Palestine. For the Jews, the ancestral
connection is distant, and partial, their historical connection to and dwelling
in the land is very recent, but the religious connection is real and continuous. For the Palestinians their
connection comes from perhaps 50 or more generations of living in that place,
although of course there has also been immigration and emigration over that
time. Palestinian Muslims and Christians
also have their own religious connections to this place, the Christians through
it being the site of the Incarnation, the Muslims through the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site in Islam after Mecca and Medina.
***
How can we move from the dire situation Palestinians (and in a different way, Israelis) find themselves in 2024? Of course anyone can see that it will not be easy. The anger and hatreds built up over 75 years can't be erased in a day.
I suspect that when the Zionists launched their venture a little over 100 years ago they didn't realise they were getting themselves into a 'forever war'. This may be because as Europeans they shared the outlooks and prejudices of their fellows. Arabs were an 'inferior race', less intelligent and less morally upright than Europeans. They were also culturally amorphous and geographically non-specific. An 'Arab' was not tied to a particular place within the broad Ottoman domains. This meant that they were massively optimistic about the potential for European Jewish colonisation to improve their benighted lives, while at the same time being quite sanguine about the possibility of displacing them as they were seen to have a minimal attachment to place.
Neither of these assumptions was true then, and they are even less true now in the post-imperial age, with the Arab world split into a number of nations. It is abundantly clear that alongside their overall Arab Muslim culture they have strong attachments to their homes and their local cultures. They are far from an amorphous mass.
The Palestinians cannot give up their claims in the land because they have nowhere
else they can go. They are not generic
‘Arabs’ - there is no such person – and most of them do not have citizenship of
any of the surrounding nations, even if they currently live in them as refugees.
Palestine is their home, as it was the home of their ancestors. It matters not a jot whether or not there has ever been a nation called 'Palestine' - what matters is a just settlement in the here and now.
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| 1947 Partition Plan, as per Resolution 181 |
This means that there is no military solution to
this conflict. Nobody can win. The IDF’s overwhelming advantage in firepower
contributes nothing to a lasting peace.
Indeed, every Palestinian death prolongs and deepens the conflict,
making more grieving families who will struggle to ever forgive Israelis for
what they have done. Even if the extreme
Israeli nationalists succeed in driving the Palestinians from Gaza they will
simply shift the resistance into Egypt, or wherever those people end up. It would be a second Nakba, and we can see the results of the first all too clearly.
The most just solution would be to create a single nation in Palestine built on full equality of all citizens and a right of return for the descendants of those expelled in the Nakba. The idea is superficially attractive but hardly seems likely. Asking people who have so recently committed heinous crimes against one another to come together as a single nation involves a whiplash inducing turnaround. This is particularly the case for Zionist Jews, who would no longer be in a majority in this reconstituted nation.
This means that in practice, the two-state solution, as
envisaged in Resolution 181 back in 1947 and embryonically in the Oslo Accords, is the only realistic option we
have. Every year that has passed since the Oslo Accords has made the hope for a Palestinian State seem more forlorn, and many doubt if it can now be achieved. Israel has spent decades trying to
make this impossible but it has no other way of resolving the conflict, short of a genocide from which I earnestly hope the descendants of Holocaust survivors would recoil. Nor does anyone else have a proposed resolution on the table that does not involve this outcome in some form. To deny it, and hold out for 'complete victory' in a zero-sum war is to live a fantasy. The Israelis may indeed be able to force their way into the ownership of beach-front property in Gaza, but they will never be able to live there in peace and security.
The only hope for a lasting peace (and it is not a guarantee) is for the Palestinians to have the chance to build a genuine, viable nation – control over their lands, borders, infrastructure and governance. Jewish settlements either need to be removed from the West Bank or placed under Palestinian jurisdiction. Palestinian political detainees need to be released, as do Israeli hostages. Governments like mine need to stop engaging in double-speak and get actively behind supporting this solution. The killings, the invasion and the genocide need to stop.
Will anyone have the courage, the foresight, the statecraft to make this happen? Only time will tell....
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