Egypt was spectacularly uninterested in taking Gaza back when they made peace with Israel. And that was before it was full of the Muslim Brotherhood. Jordan fought off a Palestinian coup against King Hussein in the 1970s and the PLO helped destabilize Lebanon in the 1980s prompting an Israeli invasion.
The idea that 5 million Palestinians could immigrate into Israel and coexist seems fantastical given historical Palestinian attitudes and the current attitudes that see Hamas with strong support. Are there any Palestinians with any kind of power that are actually interested in coexistence? And before we start talking about the Palestinian Authority, Abbas is an old man and the PA is famous for its corruption. Is it even going to survive Abbas's death?
I do wonder how much of this conflict owes to a gerontocracy problem similar to our own. Aging elites unable to let go of old fights and paradigms, ruling over dramatically younger-skewed populations.
I think the problem is that no one speaks for Palestinians. Abbas is old, yes, but he only represents a portion of Palestinians. He is not able to make any kind of deal - Hamas and many other groups would reject it.
Fundamentally, IMO, there will never be progress on any Palestinian cause as long as they are divided and killing themselves.
It's not a great analogy, but it's a bit like the current Republican Congress. Democrats have no one to negotiate with because the GoP can't agree on leadership, much less their ultimate goals and means to achieve them. The Palestinians have the same problem, but much, much worse. Beyond vague hand-waving about a right of return, and opposition to Israel, they agree on little. There is no hope for any kind of coherent Palestinian state or polity if Palestinians remain unable to unite.
I think that points back to the statelessness problem that others have mentioned. There's nothing to really build a future for, so people's politics remain performative and extreme.
You'd need an election that included all Palestinians, not just those on the West Bank. And yes, Hamas would have a decent chance of winning. Also, it's hard to see how such an election could be legitimately accomplished.
The US opening its doors would not have really stopped anything. There were already 650,000 Jews in Palestine and hundreds of thousands more who wanted to come.
Also, if you buy into the logic of Zionism, which many world powers did at the time, it was a hugely successful undertaking. It accomplished exactly what they were trying to accomplish. There is now a country on Earth where Jews are automatically allowed to live, and the government of which will never persecute Jews because the government is Jewish.
I think that misunderstands the core of the Zionist project. Even if every last Jew had immigrated to the US, they would have remained a minority. I can’t speak entirely for people many of whom are now decades dead, but it seems like the consensus was that Jews would never be safe as a minority anywhere. America certainly wasn’t immune to pogrom-like violence in the late 40s, y’know.
Again, I’m also not saying that consensus was ultimately right or wrong - as the saying goes, it’s too soon to tell - but it explains why the victorious Allies might have agreed it was simply better to give them their own state. Call it the “least clusterfucked of all options”.
That said, I *want* to agree with you that we should have just given them New Jersey, but then again, being stuck in that hellhole might’ve made them end up worse than Hamas. 🤣🤣
After the war was too late to derail the Zionist project after most of the world wouldn't take Jewish refugees before and during the Holocaust. British attempts to stop postwar Jewish immigration into Palestine were met by Jewish violence in Palestine
Yeah I can't believe Matt glossed over that the Palestinian refugees would be a huge risk to Egypt, they have legitimate reasons for not opening the border (I believe they are barred from doing so by the last arab war treaty as well, but Israel would maybe be willing to overlook that to make their offensive easier, so I don't know how much of a role it plays in this current conflict)
I actually heard Elliott Abrams say one of the major reasons he thinks there will never be a Palestinian state in the West Bank is the Jordanians are afraid it would destabilize them.
Along these lines are there any Palestinian intellectuals or Palestinian supporting intellectuals who provide any nuanced and balanced insights on the situation? From my vantage point, most seem to be extremely radical and will only accept a one state solution whereby Jews are expelled from Israel.
Jordan and Egypt also forgot to create a Palestinian state in the 19 years they controlled the West Bank and Gaza between 1948 and 1967. In the case of the West Bank Jordan and the Palestinians completely ethnically cleansed it of the Jews who had lived there for hundreds of years, including being the majority in the old city of Jerusalem in 1948. This would have been convenient for the Palestinians- meanwhile Israel went through the process of turning all the Palestinians left in Israel into citizens - Israeli Arabs.
Palestinians only have a right of return to a Palestinian state. Any other suggestion is disingenuous bullshit from people who want to destroy Israel in slightly less violent ways than Hamas. Those same kind folks can go live in an Islamist country before preaching it to others.
Late to this, but Matt's post implies most Palestinians in Jordan lack citizenship when the opposite is true. 90% of Palestinians and UNWRA-registered refugees in Jordan have citizenship.
(Now, it's true that there are various caveats. Gazans in Jordan don't have citizenship, and those who returned to the West Bank before or after '88 (when Jordan renounced its claims to the WB) have lost citizenship. Also true that the ruling class remains dominated by native Jordanians.)
Having visited Jordan, they seem the opposite: Jordanians grab every opportunity. It's a country that really seems to have threaded a lot of difficult needles.
It is very difficult for Israelis to accept a "right to return."
One thing that seems omitted from these discussions is how Arab countries expelled or compelled their Jewish populations to leave during the 20th Century. These states offer neither a "right to return" or political protection for Jewish persons who would chose to return.
The Palestinian population is generally hostile to an Israeli state and mass in-migration of said population into Israel creates a real physical security threat for those already living there. The Jewish population rightfully fears a repeat of Pogroms and their own expulsion.
Arab states refusing to give political rights or safe harbor to Palestinians is just part of the intransigence on the part of Muslim Arabs that makes the two state solution impossible. They rejected the 1947 two state solution from the UN while Israelis accepted it. This is because they believed they could claim everything and expel 1/3 of the population by force.
There just doesn't seem to be a credible negotiating partner on the Palestinian side. They do not give up irredentism. They do not promise peace. They start with "give us everything and you get nothing" as their bargain.
The Muslim Arab intransigence you describe is exactly why the (re)establishment of a Jewish homeland in the Levant was a cursed idea from the beginning. I don’t know why the Palestinian desire to return to homes they lost seventy years ago is described pejoratively as “irredentism” while the Israeli desire to return to the site of a temple destroyed two thousand years ago goes unremarked. Obviously it would have been and still would be better for all parties if Israel’s neighbors accepted the fait accompli of 1948, but solving the problem of displaced Palestinians was always going to be impossible without the cooperation of Israel’s neighbors.
The Jews wanted self determination in their own country. They immigrated to a very sparsely inhabited land in which they bought every inch of territory with their own money and developed it almost exclusively by their own labor. Unsurprisingly they mostly had to make do with the less desirable lands Arabs were willing to sell them. They developed them into a very thriving economy. So much so that in the decades before Israel’s founding the Arab population too increased significantly via economic migrants of neighboring lands.
The important point through is that the Zionist leadership was willing to accept the partition plan leaving Jews without most of their most important historic and religious sites (including Jerusalem were the temple you mentioned was !) because their goal was secular -self determination under national sovereignty. It was also clear to them and desireable to them that the non Jews amongst them will enjoy the equality Jews never did as minorities. And in fact israel have such legal equalities to all minorities.
By stark contrast the Palestinian semand *isnt’* merely self determination in their own state like the Jews demanded (that would be simply the two state solution offered to them already in 1947 before there was a single refugee!). Their demand in 1947 was rather ethnic cleansing fo their Jewish neighbors. The demand of Palestinians is rather that “refugees” that weren’t alive in 1948 return to homes that no longer exist.
>They immigrated to a very sparsely inhabited land in which they bought every inch of territory with their own money and developed it almost exclusively by their own labor
Total myth. They had long-running terrorist organizations that engaged in the exact type of activities Hamas does now- bombings and assassinations of the existing Arabs. One such group was called Irgun (fun fact, Ari and Rahm Emmanuel's father was a member) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irgun
"Two of the operations for which the Irgun is best known are the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on 22 July 1946 and the Deir Yassin massacre that killed at least 107 Palestinian Arab villagers, including women and children, carried out together with Lehi on 9 April 1948..... Irgun's tactics appealed to many Jews who believed that any action taken in the cause of the creation of a Jewish state was justified, including terrorism.[16]..... Irgun members were absorbed into the Israel Defense Forces at the start of the 1948 Arab–Israeli war. The Irgun was a political predecessor to Israel's right-wing Herut (or "Freedom") party, which led to today's Likud party"
In the 'founding' of Israel they ethnically cleansed existing Arab population off their land, a fact well-known and celebrated in Israel. It's amazing to contrast what people in the West choose to believe about the country, as opposed to what everyone knows in Israel and discusses in the pages of Haaretz. They think the ethnic cleansing was a good thing!
I would really like to stop calling what would normally be called an “expulsion” an “ethnic cleansing.” A dear friend of mine was expelled from Uganda in 1972. His family emigrated to Canada, and then the US. Nobody calls that a “cleansing” and to my knowledge, no Indians are demanding right of return. Many progressives would now call him a colonizer.
I’m nitpicky on this point, because these overheated terms make the arguments more difficult, and have now graduated to “genocide,” which is ridiculous.
He makes the point that Benny Morris, one of the leading New Historians, "tarnish[ed] the narrative of a pure creation of Israel by uncovering the various crimes that accompanied it...[but he was] surpris[ed] that many had taken him to be an anti-Zionist based on his scholarship...his sensible response was that history is about uncovering truth, and a mature nation ought to be able to handle harsh truths about itself without going to pieces."
You're correct that it's Israel's apologists in the West who usually refuse to acknowledge any wrongdoing or even moral complexity in Israel's creation.
This is simply untrue. Much of Israel consists of land previously owned by Palestinians and adopted by Israelis after the war in 1948 without any compensation. That is part of the major sticking point to which this column refers.
And did I write anything to contradcit that? I was describing the situation up to 1947. The war that ensued was 100% a result of Arab aggression rejcting the UN resolution which would have given them a state and opting instead for an all out war with the express intention of genocide. The result of the war was 0 Jews left in areas conquered by the Arabs and by contrast a significant Arab minority left in Israel's territory, which was promptly given equal citizenship. In addition there were many Jewish and Arab refugees. The Jewish refugees who arrived in Israel after being expelled from their homes—for which they were never given any compensation— were given equal citizenship too. The Arab (Palestinian) refugees by contrast were mostly left without civil rights in the Arab states. It's absurd to demand any compensation for property left behind by Palestinians refugees (who lost it after failing to massacre their neighbors) without demanding like compensation for all the property left behind by Jewish refugees in the very same conflict. Educate yourself.
1) Yes, sort of. Palestinians owned a lot of land inside Israel in 1947.
2) Do you think you’d agree that there is no compensation owed or right to return to your families’ former land if you were the Palestinian family who lost their property?
The problem with this conflict is that things don’t actually just net out in the math for the people involved. Palestinian families who owned land in Israel didn’t take land from Jews in other Arab countries. They weren’t responsible for atrocities by others. Nor are the Jewish families killed by terrorists at a music festival the people who forced Palestinian families from their land at gunpoint. This cycle of collective blame and retribution needs to end, because the list of atrocities is too long to ever achieve justice. But simply ignoring legitimate grievances of individuals living the situation also achieves nothing.
1. They would have retained 100% of this land with equal citizenship had they accepted the partition plan. Some of them in fact did retain and did receive equal citizenship even though they rejected it and attempted genocide. Those who did not lost it as part of the conflict they instigated. More Jews lost more property in the same conflict, which was forced upon them.
2. While I very much resent the moral equivalence you're drawing from both sides — one was far worse by a wide margin— I do not dispute that Palestinians who lost property can demand monetary damages (even though many of them were very supportive of genocide and quite a few tried to participate in its enactment). All I am saying is that such compensation ought to be given as part of a collective settlement that will likewise compensate the greater number of Jews who lost property in Arab lands in the very same conflict (including some expelled from areas in the west bank and the Gaza strip).
An extremely immoral gamble. They tried to commit genocide and failed. Also, let's not describe the Palestinians as a passive pawn. They mostly enthusiastically adopted the genocidal plan. The few who did not mostly stayed in Israel and became equal citizens. Some of those who *did* nevertheless also stayed in Israel and also were given equal citizenship in the state they sought to destroy and by the people they sought to murder. The moral gap between the sides couldn't have been wider.
So you are suggesting that already existing 1/3 of the population of Palestine should have been expunged after the territory was given independence? Just like what happened to all the other Jewish populations in the Arab world during the 20th Century?
Why are you defining 1947 as the beginning? I think the argument is that Zionism was a cursed idea from the day Theodor Herzl put pen to paper precisely because it requires the displacement of the population of Palestine as it stood on the day that ink was spilled.
I think that a lot of people would dispute that it's possible to form a Jewish state in the land of Israel without expelling the non-Jewish population.
But it's certainly true that the attempt to prevent the creation of Israel in 1947-8 didn't help.
Which is not actually an unreasonable answer if you think about it. Every country in the world owes it present existence, borders, etc. to a history of conquest and slaughter. The emergence of international law in the last century or so is an attempt to control and minimize this as an ongoing phenomenon, but clearly it has not been entirely successful.
Given when my various British ancestors emigrated (1680's for the Scottish, early 1700's for the English, sometime in the mid-1800's for the Irish)... chances are they were coerced.
The intractable thing being that of course the Arabs "stole it fair and square" in the first place. What's really being advocated for is "no steal-backsies".
One could turn around Phil's statement and say the establishment of Middle Eastern national states after WW2 was cursed from the beginning, since it has inevitably lead to the slaughter and ethnic cleansing of national minorities. See Jews, Armenians, Greeks, Kurds, Christians, ...
Say what you will about empires like the Ottomans, but at least they understood their lands to be multiethnic, and engaged in slightly fewer genocides.
That's simply not correct. The Armenians (also the Greeks and Assyrians) are the most famous examples, but you can also include Serbs and Bulgarians here.
They in fact did not. The Ottomans engaged in routine ethnic cleansing in order to ensure that every area had a loyal, Muslim majority. Ask anyone from the Balkans.
Dude, that is not the preferred nomenclature, please, it is:
Say what you will about _the tenents of_ empires like the Ottomans, but at least they understood their lands to be multiethnic, and engaged in slightly fewer genocides.
I agree that at some point you lose your right to return, and whatever the time cutoff is, Judea definitely precedes it. However, I still strongly support Israel as a state. Whether or not the UN *should* have allowed Israel to become a state, they *did*, and the legitimacy that conferred cannot and should not be undone.
You seem to be a bit blinkered in your views here. Who is the credible negotiating partner on the Israeli side? Is the Israeli side not generally hostile to a Palestinian state? What about the intransigence on the part of Israelis who insist on maintaining an apartheid state?
As Matty says, this is an intractable problem. There is no question about that. But you don't solve the dilemma by ignoring the problematic positions that exist on both sides. Given that neither side, as presently constituted, are willing to empower their representatives to back down from their maximalist positions, I honestly cannot imagine that this issue is resolved by anything other than an imposed solution; with the US being the most likely party to impose the solution. Clearly this resolution is suboptimal, but we are well past the point where we (the US and the world at large) can afford to allow the status quo to obtain. The atrocities committed by both sides will (and already are) lead to further atrocities being visited upon communities well outside of Israel's borders. The sad fact is that we are, all of us, complicit in the ongoing tragedy as we have allowed our political leadership to blithely ignore the danger of Israel's shift toward increasingly hardline politics and the extreme radicalization of Palestinian youth in the occupied territories. We have reached a pass where we can no longer avert our gaze. The US needs to impose a two state solution, ideally with the assent and backing of the Arab world and the UN.
The Israelis who could make peace were in power from about the 1940s to the 1990s: but now they don't seem to get elected anymore, I wonder why that is? When were the Palestinians who were interested in making peace in power again?
Rather a stupid question, really. When have the Palestinians had either power or agency? Was it after the Balfour Declaration? Or was it when the British were given the Mandate of Palestine? The elections that the Palestinians have held to elect leadership were conducted under a state of occupation and arranged by and held at the behest of the occupying state. Their ability to campaign, educate, and persuade makes electing a truly representative leadership impossible.
Utter nonsense. When did they *not* have agency? Could they not accept the 1947 plan and celebrate the 75th birthday of their starte this year? Could they not negotiate peace with Israel in the 1990s? Can their elected leadership even now in the West Bank and all the organizations purporting to support them abroad even now not unequivocally condemn Hamas instead of justifying or celebrating its crimes against humanity? Palestinians always had agency they always have choices and they tend to make the most despicable ones.
Mate - you don’t know what you are talking about. There were two sides to these negotiations and both sides refused to give enough to reach a settlement. Rabin was assassinated for simply agreeing to the talks in Oslo and Barak lost to Sharon despite offering no concessions to the Palestinians at Camp David. If you don’t know the history, you probably shouldn’t comment on the subject.
The Oslo accords under Rabin created the PA, the most dramatic development in the region since 1967. Barak made unprecedented concessions, eg dividing Jerusalem, a taboo idea until that point. Pot kettle.
Yet somehow the South Africans managed under apartheid, with leaders who were often in jail or conducting operations outside the country, and yet they still were able to make a deal.
You are being somewhat disingenuous with that comparison. The world made the South African white leadership a pariah and forced them to negotiate with the opposition. Israel is being enabled by the western world and is thus unwilling to budge from their maximalist position. In a world where one side won’t be moved from a maximalist position it is ridiculous to expect the other side to move.
It wasn't "completely' run by peaceniks but had multiple leaders who were willing to take serious political and personal risks for peace, were willing to return to their Arab enemies vast territories in return for peace (and did!) and one of them lost his life in his earnest efforts to reach peace with the Palestinians. Of course not all Israelis wanted peace, and a fringe minority violently opposed it, but the Israeli mainstream has on multiple occasions been able to elect and support leaders who worked for peace and took risks for peace. And Israeli civil society and popular culture has seen multiple waves of peace movements, peace songs, pro peace and human rights organizations and so forth. Virtually none of this finds any significant Palestinian parallel at any point.
If the one who "lost his life" is Rabin he was killed by a Jewish fundamentalist, let's not forget. And then Netanyahu won by half a point.
Before the assassination Netanyahu led a mock funeral procession featuring a coffin and hangman's noose at an anti-Rabin rally where protesters chanted, "Death to Rabin"
Few assassinations achieve their goal, this one did.
Labor returned to power 3 years later. What killed it is Palestinian terrorism. As I said somewhere in the endless thread nihilists on both sides help each other.
I think Scott essentially gets it right here: a two state solution (that gives virtually all of the West Bank back to the Palestinians) needs to be imposed by a U.S. led coalition and enforced by a U.S. led peacekeeping force that guarantee both a demilitarized Palestine and secure borders. I describe the idea in a bit more detail here:
The additional point I try to add in that piece, which really is my response to Matt's Substack today, is the acknowledgement that this is not "justice." There will never be justice for the Palestinians who lost their homes in the Nakba.
But by that same token, however, there will never be justice for the Ashkenazi Jews who lost everything in the Holocaust or the Sephardic Jews who were expelled from the countries of their childhood. And there will never be justice for the slaves brought from Africa or born into slavery; the indigenous populations of America, Canada, or Australians; the victims of Stalin's USSR or Pol Pot's Cambodia, or the many other tragedies in human history.
[Note: As pointed out below, that should have been "Miztrahi" not "Sephardic" Jews in the paragraph above]
Sometimes you just have to accept that there will never be justice for the past and make the most of your life going forward. This is the only positive path forward for the Palestinians. Trying to get justice for the past, especially from a people that suffered far greater injustices in almost exactly that same time period (injustices admittedly committed mostly, though not exclusively: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1929_Hebron_massacre, by other people) will never succeed and will doom Palestinians to always be refugees.
Hmmm. Much as I wish it were true, I'm not sure history suggests that peaceful coexistence is a Western value. :(
Usually, when people use that phrase, I think they are talking about capitalism, pluralism, feminism, LGBTQ rights, etc. While I believe in those values, the force I'm proposing would try to enforce none of those things; their sole mission would be to enforce the promise we would make to Israelis and Palestinians that neither would be attacked by other.
This proposal has one merit... I can talk about it in terms of the merits for my home nation, the United States of America, since it's calling on the US to conquer both Israel and Palestine (at the leadership of a "coalition") and impose a peace at swordpoint.
My evaluation? I think there are absolutely no merits for the US in doing that. None.
The idea is not to "conquer" or to impose democracy by force, but simply apply enough pressure to get an agreement, and serve as an interposition force to ensure that there is no direct contact (fighting) in the future.
It has already been done on a smaller scale in Bosnia with the Dayton agreements and the permanent Implementation Force.
Simply, instead of one dysfunctional confederation, you would have two fully sovereign states.
SP: The primary benefit to the U.S. would be a much more stable Middle East with a dramatically improved standing in Arab world public opinion.
In addition, I’d argue, that there is unlikely to be any actual fighting. The threat of the end of military assistance (and of economic sanctions if necessary) will get the Israelis to agree and the Palestinians have essentially no military beyond Hamas (which will soon cease to exist).
A more stable Middle East and better Arab opinion seem like extremely weak returns on that investment, even if everything worked out exactly as you hope. Which is certainly far from guaranteed. I guess they're technically "merits" in that sure, it would be a good thing for the US if it could magically happen without us doing anything, but not at that price.
I don't mind my government doing some diplomacy and throwing some cash around for those sorts of foreign gains, but I'm going to have give a big "definitely not" to the idea of launching a military occupation of indefinite duration for "stability" and "better opinions". Risks way too large, the upsides way too low.
I want you to know that I typed and then deleted stuff about the likely reaction of Palestinians and Israelis because I am trying to, as promised, keep to a tight US-focus on "would this be good for my country" without even worrying about whether it's good for other people.
Because that's how it works with peacekeepers. They definitely aren't killed in suicide bombings while in barracks or anything, prompting withdrawal...
Because today's comments sorely lack sufficient pedantry, I'll try to fill the gap by noting that most of the Middle Eastern Jews who fled to Israel are "Mizrachi" ("Eastern") and not "Sephardic" (originating from Spain).
The right to return had salience 30 or more years ago but there are very few non-Israelí Palestinians alive who once lived within the pre-1967 borders. Their descendants may feel that they have that right in the abstract but it would be more realistically addressed in terms of compensation and reparations. Anyone who was genuinely compelled to “return” to a place where they never lived could be accommodated through a modest symbolic quota of “returnees”.
No. We don't go to war with Israel. But after Hamas has been eliminated in Gaza, we should make it clear that they need to get out of the West Bank and give the Palestinians a state in the West Bank and Gaa (with our security guarantee that we'll keep it demilitarized). And we should be willing to both cut off aid and if necessary enforce economic sanctions against Israel if they refuse to comply.
Ultimately, I think this kind of intervention (and I use the word deliberately for all its meanings) is the act of a friend. Internal Israeli politics and the craziness of the settlers is going to make it hard for Israel to withdraw from the settlements. Being economically "forced" to do so by the U.S. will make it more politically possible.
My point is that even if you were to impose a two state solution, the push for irredentism remains, and the existence of a Palestinian state would likely result in what most Israeli hardliners believe. That is a safe territory where a Hezbollah like entity would emerge.
There are many on the Palestinian side that profit off of irredentist promises that they will never be able to deliver on. (I remember Arafat's wife going shopping in Paris.)
There are of course profiteering irredentists on all sides. Neither side can credibly promise to curb their most extremist elements that want to take land that a deal would assign to the other side.
I am not saying that the solution is to be imposed only on the Israeli side. The solution would have to bind both sides and there would have to be enforcement. Clearly this would not be a simple task, but there are far more Arab nations right now that would be accepting of and would profit from more peace in the region than there were 50 years ago.
It was imposed in the former Yugoslavia fairly successfully after the 1990’s wars. I served as a member of IFOR myself during the first year after Dayton. Fighting stopped pretty much the moment IFOR peacekeepers rolled across the Bosnian border.
There would almost certainly need to be an international police force in both states empowered to impose consequences for actions meant to undermine the two state solution.
Wait, is that just going back to pre-1947 the mandate?
I joke, but you see why this is all intractable. There is a cultural and value problem that most Europeans got out of their system after two world wars. (Except the Danes who want to reforge the Kalmar Union.)
Yes, an international force led by the U.S. (who is the only country the Israelis trust) would be necessary to ensure that Palestine would be demilitarized and no threat to Israel.
Meanwhile, the borders would today's borders, with virtually all the settlements being turned over to Palestine except a few of those close to the border (for which the Palestinians would be compensated for with land swaps elsewhere).
You think? My perception is that an autonomous Palestinian state would be at war with Israel within months. Where is the capacity to marginalize Hamas and other the "to the last man" hardliners going to arise out of?
I think this is the problem here; I don't think these two statements are in conflict with each other.
I think if you had an autonomous Palestinian state, then Hamas wouldn't stay in charge for long. But I think they'd start a war before they got a chance to lose an election.
We have already seen that Hamas seems interested in only having enough elections to get them into power--not so interested in holding elections after that.
I think the time when the U.S. could do much of anything at all to help with this situation, much less impose anything about it has long past. The notion that the U.S. can be an "unwavering ally to Israel" and also anything resembling a neutral arbiter of this dispute has pretty much always been farcical but is especially impossible to square now that U.S. domestic policy basically make being tough on Israel or even showing "tough love" to them impossible, resulting in situations where U.S. Presidents nominally say they don't support settlements while doing nothing to stop them and actively vetoing UN resolutions against them. Furthermore Israel is basically self-sufficient at this point so even if the U.S. could credibly threaten to withhold foreign aid to Israel they could probably just do without us.
You may well be correct in your analysis here. My broader point is that we, as members of a representative democracy, need to start demanding that our elected representatives turn their attention to a solution. It can’t be shoved back into the bottle for 50 more years. Or, rather, it won’t be and the blowback will be harmful for us as well.
The cost of there not being a deal was low enough prior to last week that the contours (right of return is tough to compromise) prevented one happening. That’s no longer true. The West would really like there to be and so would the Arab leaders. May make room for compromise.
Not sure the US can or should "impose" anything, but I feel that ages ago we should have made aid contingent on no new settlements. And it isn't too late to start now.
There is no credible negotiating partner on either side. The last time the Israeli government participated seriously in the peace process, Yitzhak Rabin came to a deal with the Palestinians, and for this Benjamin Netanyahu denounced him as a traitor who deserved to die. Shortly therefore, Rabin was shot dead, not by an Arab but by one of his fellow Jews. Since then, Israel has continued to build illegal settlements in the West Bank, which is not something that they would be doing if they had any interest in the peace process. What they've been doing instead amounts to a slow-motion annexation. And that's not even mentioning their illegal takeover of East Jerusalem and moving their capital to Jerusalem, which according to the UN partition plan was supposed to be an international city not wholly controlled by either side, and certainly not used by either side as its capital.
I may be misunderstanding your reference here, but Cherokees and the Choctaw are allowed to live in Florida/Alabama/Georgia if they want to move there.
Good point. For separate reasons, I decided that I didn't feel like standing by the entire statement, so I deleted it.
I do want to recover the idea, though, of a "right of first refusal to return". Basically give Palestinians the right of first refusal any time their ancestral property comes up on the market.
I think it's the most reasonable version of a R2R, one which protects everyone's rights in a gradual process. It'd also be the sweetest R2R deal ever procured in human history -- usually, partitions and removals, as evil as they are, are permanent. Not even the Cherokees and Choctaw got such a sweet deal; they merely get American citizenship and freedom of movement, which any Palestinian peace deal including "RoFR2R" would presumably already include.
>I think it's the most reasonable version of a R2R<
Perhaps as one component, yes. I think that, back in the days when a two state solution looked feasible, a R2R would've looked something like: (i) Acknowledge the existence of said right. (ii) In practice administer/adjudicate that right on an individual basis so that no more than, say, 100K Palestinians return in reality. (iii) Provide financial compensation to address the disparity.
And yes, a right of first refusal to return might be a sensible add-on to such a deal.
Well, I think it's what you need to make any kind of R2R feasible in the first place, not just as an add-on. Israel will never agree to an unlimited R2R, let alone one that involves large displacements.
I think the selling point to the Palestinians here is, "Look, we know you suffered a catastrophe, and we know this isn't the full R2R, but this is the version of R2R that has the best chance of success. If you give it a chance, and if we include compensation/incentives, a lot of Israelis might even happily give away properties that right now today they're telling you 'hell no, fuck off!' over. Do you want THIS, or do you want 5 more generations of war that ultimately leads to a shitty deal where you get screwed over WAY more than this?"
My first thought was that this is a pretty cool idea -- and maybe there's a way to make it work in some form.
But on a further moment's reflection, I think the problem both morally and practically is that RoFR2R is premised on the returners' ability to meet the offering price either with cash in hand or by obtaining credit. And this is a population that has as one of its main grievances the deprivation of economic opportunities as a result of their displacement. So, not only are many Palestinians probably not especially creditworthy, but many of those will also perceive that fact as an injustice visited on them by Israel that gives them an even stronger moral claim to restitution.
One could imagine a situation where Israel in some way or another steps in to help plug the gap in financing. Aside from all the usual downsides of the government assuming a lot of bad debt, though, can you even begin to imagine the tsuris when the Palestinians discover that the right to return is being metered by... Jewish moneylenders?!?
RoFR2R would probably be FREE for the Palestinians - likely considered a form of reparation under the agreement. The Israeli government, far richer than Gaza, would pay some negotiated purchase price.
Come to think of it, if Israel has property taxes, then property taxes would be a bigger issue actually. THAT part probably WOULD result in some sort of financing scheme. But I'd propose that be handled by Gaza's putative government - perhaps they finance it out of international aid funds or something. That way, their own government is invested in their people's success in returning.
Sorry, you're right, I did misunderstand your proposal. In my defense, usually a "right of first refusal" means you get to buy at the market-clearing price without having to bid against other buyers, not that you get to initiate a forced sale (much less get the asset for free). Is what you're saying that it's Israel that would have the right of first refusal? But then I'm not sure what you mean about a negotiated price. The point of a RoFR is that there's nothing to negotiate: the seller tells Israel what the price is, and Israel can take it or leave it. If they leave it, the property goes up for sale on the open market.
But if Israel is buying the land just to give it away, it's unclear on what basis it's going to decide to accept any particular price for any particular property. That seems to lose the advantages of allocating rights through the market that made the RoFR concept appealing (to me at least) in the first place. The obvious incentive will be for owners to dump crappy unsaleable properties on the government, at a price that's inflated relative to their actual value but still lower than what Israel would have to pay for someplace people would actually want to live.
In one sense I agree this is all very complicated. In another it seems very simple. As long as the relevant Palestinian authorities persist in fighting a war they've been losing overwhelmingly for 75 years they are going to keep losing it and the Palestinian people are going to keep paying the price. The position of Hamas seems to be that the Palestinian cause merits fighting to the last Palestinian person. The only alternative to that outcome is for some authority, internal or external, to find the capacity to keep Hamas or whoever else from making war on Israel on Gaza's behalf.
In the late 40's, new borders were being drawn and redrawn all across the Middle East and Europe. Only this particular border has led to a 75-year fight, starting with the 1948 war between newly-created Israel and Egypt, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. Then again in 1967, when Egypt, Syria and Lebanon went back to war with Israel.
The difference between this situation all the others, of course, is religion. For all the talk about right-of-return, settlements, two-state solutions, ethnic cleansing and terrorism, the reason this particular situation has no current fix is that each side is fighting on behalf of their entire religion, both its history and its future. And I am very pessimistic about the possibility of a negotiated solution as a result. So I wholeheartedly agree with your last statement, for now and for the foreseeable future.
That's true as far as it goes, but the slightly older Northern Ireland issue was about religion and got solved, so it's not impossible to solve religious conflicts.
I think a big problem here is a lot of people don't actually admit their goals and have this strategy that if they keep their goals secret the status quo will work in their favor. So on the Israeli right you have people fantasizing of population transfers and Greater Israel, and on the Palestinian left you have fantasies of the demographics forcing Israel into a situation where Muslims will have a majority and take it over.
But these things, while believed, don't usually get said. Rather everyone feels that if they speak in code it will persuade the world and in any event, time is on their side.
The reality is that time is on no extremist's side. There isn't going to be a transfer and there also isn't going to be a scenario where Israel is forced into binationality. All that will happen over time is the Palestinians will get more immiserated as everyone uses them as pawns on their chessboard.
It got solved because you got a secular UK and a secular Republic of Ireland who stopped caring about religion - that is both the states and the people stopped caring. This meant that the people in Northern Ireland (who still cared) found that their alleged sponsor was working with the other side's alleged sponsor to try to calm things down.
If the problem was settlers in the West Bank (whom the Israeli state regarded as an embarrassing relic of the past) and a West Bank with a lot of religious fanatics who wanted it reattached to a majority-Palestinian East Bank, but the East Bank state was a secular democracy where the Islamic religious hierarchy had badly discredited themselves pushing people away from formal religion, then you can see how East Bank / Jordan and Israel could work together to get their respective pseudo-proxies to calm down and stop killing each other.
But none of that is true. Israel is getting more religious, not more secular; Jordan is not a Palestinian state, but one that fought off a PLO coup and defines itself against Palestinians, and is also profoundly religious, also not even slightly secular.
I think people overread the similarities of NI to I/P and underread the differences.
Northern Ireland hasn't been solved. It's frozen in amber. It will come up again if there is a change in the status quo. There are already problems (see the closure of Stormont and paramilitary activity) due to Sinn Fein's rise relative to the other parties.
Yes, the rise of Sinn Fein is intimately related to the fact of DUP intransigence and Brexit. They are all mixed together. The unionists have made it clear so far that they won't accept nationalist leadership, even soft nationalist leadership like the SDLP, of NI, so there is no downside to supporting SF.
One major factor in resolving Northern Ireland was EU membership for the UK and Ireland. Where the border was drawn mattered a lot less. Brexit has screwed this up again.
Neither Catholics nor Protestants believed their religion was founded in Belfast, or that its buildings and shrines were central to their worldwide set of followers. On the religious front, comparing Northern Ireland to Israel/Palestine is like comparing a mouse to an elephant: they are both mammals, but that's about as far as it goes.
Nor were they *really* fighting about religion as such. The conflict there was never really (to more than a tiny majority) about transubstantiation or the proper number of sacraments, or what have you. Religion was a proxy for ethnicity, or, perhaps more accurately, tribal identity.
That's true in Israel-Palestine too. When Israel supporters express worries about the demographics of a binational state or Israel losing its Jewish character, they are talking about ethnicity, not religion.
And when Palestinians talk of a right to return, that is also an ethnic claim not a religious one.
The settlements do raise religious issues and are important, but for the most part this conflict is actually a lot MORE like Ireland than people imagine- in both cases religion is a stand-in for tribal issues.
But there is a literal, physical place in Jerusalem where the conflict exists in concrete (stone?) form--the Temple Mount has a Mosque on it. The holiest site of one is literally under the second-holiest site of the other.
Yes. This is almost always the case in the modern world. Above I probably should have written "...since the 17th century." Clearly if you go back far enough in Europe (and indeed in America, especially New England), large numbers of people burned with passion about various theological controversies. This seems to be almost non-existent now.
What's that joke about a person driving up to a checkpoint during the Troubles and the armed men there demanding to know if the person was a Protestant or a Catholic. The person responded that he was an atheist, to which the guard responded, "Aye, but are you a Protestant or a Catholic atheist?"
In Ireland, religion was a proxy for support for British rule. Which might itself have been a proxy for ethnicity if we assume most Protestants in NI are the descendants of the British who moved there but I’m not sure about that. (FWIW whenever I think of Ireland on this topic I start singing “A Nation Once Again” in my head and recalling Irish friends staying with certainty that NI would eventually rejoin the rest of Ireland and I have more compassion for reflexively nationalistic attitudes on both sides of border conflicts, even if i ultimately disagree with them.)
Northern Ireland would be FAR better off joining its EU neighbor to the south. It's no longer the theocracy it used to be, and has an almost completely secular character at this point. Not would it threaten British or Irish identity.
I feel bad for the Jewish people. Two consecutive religions came around and were like "See, we made your religion better! Join us!" and the Jews were like "No, we are good thanks" and Christianity and Islam took it very, very personally.
As a non theist I very much appreciate the fact I've never had a Jewish Missionary knock on my door and ask me if I've heard about the lord and savior Yahweh.
As David R. and others have discussed though, the Israeli far right (which continues to grow in strength) seems to be a lot closer to implementing their goal, especially when they have uncritical support from the US (since the Biden administration refuses to publicly criticize Israel under any circumstances, and post H.W. Bush the GOP also competes on who can be more slavishly pro-Israel, e.g. Nikki Haley). I don't think it's either surprising or unreasonable that many Gazans believe Israel will never allow them to return to their houses in the north of the Strip.
ETA: Given how proudly Haley touts her pro-Israel credentials, it's ironic that DeSantis is criticizing her for saying that "America has always been sympathetic to the fact that you can separate civilians from terrorists."
The Northern Ireland issue is not solved, and if a majority votes for union with Ireland, there almost certainly will be violence and population movements. Don't kid yourself.
Is a NI vote a possibility? Looking at a map it seems that just calving off bits of western and southern NI to unify with RoI would move a lot of Catholics while letting a lot of Protestants remain.
"[E]ach side is fighting on behalf of their entire religion, both its history and its future."
That's not true. Each side is fighting for the entire Jewish religion. The Palestinians and their supporters want to completely erase it. Islam is not under any threat whatsoever.
"Each side is fighting for the entire Jewish religion."
Uh, no? There are lots of Jews outside Israel, and Jewish practice does not in fact require life in Israel (until the Messiah, anyways). We survived the Holocaust; if (God forbid) the Palestinians were to kill every Jew in Israel, Judaism would survive that too.
A lot of the "partitions" that happened after WWII led to lasting problems and conflicts (India/Pakison, Vietnam, Korea, China/Taiwan). Even Germany wasn't resolved until the 1990s.
This strikes me as a pretty major misreading of the situation, on a number of levels. You can't really call what is going on a "war," in any meaningful sense. There is a lot of terrorism, which is really bad, but it's not a war, and that becomes particularly clear when you roll in events in the West Bank plus the settler movement plus Israeli government policy on hardening and expansion over the last twenty years.
And one reason why you cannot call it a war is that there's not really any way to "surrender"; Palestinians in the West Bank haven't been engaged in a campaign of centrally (government) organized armed resistance, and that lack of armed resistance has not appreciably improved their situation--indeed, it has steadily worsened from both a territorial control and a security standpoint. A big part of the reason why the Israeli army was off its game at the Gaza border is that they were redeployed to deal with the rise in West Bank violence between Israeli settlers and Palestinians.
It's a hard problem not because someone is being deliberately, foolishly obtuse, but rather because it is a hard problem. The whole theory of both the settlement movement and the right of return is that people want the land but not people of the "wrong" ethnicity on the land. Surrendering or ending the "war" or whatever you want to call it doesn't solve that problem because people who surrender are still people on the land; it's a problem you can only solve by either giving up the claim to the land or giving up the ethnic cleansing project.
It was incredibly politically contentious in Israel when the government pulled back from the settlements encroaching Gaza. Hamas is an awful, evil terrorist organization. But if they held a press conference tomorrow declaring "surrender," (which I think they should do!) it would not "solve" the I/P situation or end the immiseration of Palestinians as a long-term structural matter.
There is a way for the PA to "surrender": put a peace treaty on the table that drops the demand for return into Israel. Then they would actually achieve the situation the Western Left has imagined for 20 years: Israel would be the sole obstacle to a two-state solution.
This seems like a fantasy to me. As I wrote, above, I think giving up land claims is going to have to be a big part of any deal, so I guess I agree with you, but I sort of think part of the whole "hard problems are hard" issue is that you have a genuinely difficult set of political questions, and the lack of effective actors is one of them.
The Palestinian Authority isn't at war with Israel and isn't in negotiations with the Israeli government, and elements of the current Israeli government have decried the present PA leadership as not worth negotiating with. Maybe the Israelis are wrong, and the PA is a viable leadership structure, but I'm pretty skeptical that if the PA called some kind of press conference tomorrow and declared that they were open negotiating that the Netanyahu government would be like, "Woah! Finally an answer to our prayers! We have to slow our roll here and start negotiations!"
Also, to be honest, do you really think it makes sense for the Israelis to negotiate? On some level, the ethnic cleansing project in the West Bank seems to be more or less proceeding successfully. It's really slow and somewhat politically contentious, but the settlements get bigger--and the Palestinians get steadily squeezed off of more land--every year. I think that's a morally repugnant move, sort of like I think the Chinese project against the Uighurs is morally repugnant, but from a domestic political standpoint it appears to be the reality that a majority of Israeli voters are comfortable with.
I don't much like any of those realities, but I think breaking the logjam would require genuine political courage to try and change hearts and minds on both sides at a societal level, and we know for a fact that it might get you assassinated. I kind of have a feeling that the political / social / economic / whatever conditions that finally render any particular apartheid state unsustainable are extremely contingent, so I'm not really sure what that looks like in the I/P situation, other than thinking that it probably looks different from South Africa, which itself looked different from the United States, and so on.
One thing I wonder about is to what degree the people being deliberately, foolishly obtuse are responding to the hard-problemness, in a "the only rational response is insanity" kind of way.
I don't have any particular answer for this question, but my experience from both my upbringing in (and exit from) a conservative religious setting and my work in academic public health and bioethics stuff is that sometimes people retreat into being deliberately, foolishly obtuse as a mental stance when the alternative is to admit to a position or set of realities that is incommensurate with elements of their identity or worldview.
Don't get me wrong: I think everyone should put on their grown-up pants and quit managing their cognitive dissonance by immiserating other humans. Full stop. But it's an unfortunate fact of human brains that we experience cognitive dissonance as a pretty intense form of psychic distress and will go to great lengths to avoid that feeling, especially when it also puts us at odds with our immediate community. I made a set of choices that forced me through that wringer, and even though I did believe and still do believe those were the right choices, it was pretty awful and basically still is around the holidays.
I agree but that's a heavy lift. Criticizing Hamas could get you killed so you would have to actually try to overthrow them with force of arms. "I'm killing my brothers so my enemies will stop dropping bombs on my head" isn't exactly a great slogan for recruitment. What Palestine needs right now is a Palestinian born Gandhi or MLK. But those don't exactly come around every day.
It's important to note that Israel took in similar numbers of Arab Jews. Like the Palestinians, these Jews were displaced, lost property, wealth, etc. Some would say ethnically cleansed. But Israel took them in and paid to resettle them. The Zionist position that other Arab states should do the same for Palestinians doesn't seem as draconian when viewed through that lens. Since we're talking about how Arabs view the right of return - Israeli's views on Mizrahi Jews are also cornerstone to their position. American progressives / liberals (myself included!) would be well served to better understand that viewpoint because there is an intrinsic fairness to it and these ideas don't seem to make it into in our discourse here in the U.S.
There was a lot of ethnic cleansing going around in 1948. Germans were driven out of their homes in Silesia and Pomerania, what is now the "Recovered Territories" of western Poland. Other Germans were driven from Sudetenland by Czechoslovakia. Hungarians were driven out of Transylvania, Bulgarians out of Dobruja, both by Romania.
In all of these cases, they were granted citizenship; the children and grandchildren of those driven out came to accept that, while they might visit, they were not going to be able to return. All of these people have had the right of return for approaching 20 years, as their common EU citizenship has meant they had the right to live in those countries.
There are other cases in Europe where the EU doesn't create the right to return - Poles and Lithuanians pushed out of Belarus, Poles from Ukraine, Moldovans from Ukraine.
I do think that one big failure of understanding about the Palestinian conflict is that many Israelis (and lots of outsiders) see Palestinians as just Arabs "from the River to the Sea", and don't conceive of them as being a different nationality from Syrians or Jordanians or Egyptians, which - to many Israelis - are just geographical divisions of Arabs, in the same way that, say, Texans and New Yorkers and Californians are just geographical divisions of Americans. Palestinians very much don't see themselves in those terms; they don't think that they could move to another Arab state and feel at home there; there isn't a sense of a disunited Arab people that happen to be spread across many states - unlike, say Italy or Germany in 1850. The United Arab Republic was a failed experiment in the 1970s.
Pan-Arab nationalism (in the sense of wanting to create a single state from the Atlantic to the Tigris, from the Taurus mountains to the Indian Ocean) is dead. And that means that Palestinians won't easily accept becoming citizens of another Arab country. I suspect that if there had been a Palestinian state in 1948, it might have been different - those expelled across the Green Line might well have settled within the West Bank - but that branch of the trousers of time is now closed to us.
If Palestinian leaders had accepted the 1948 UN charter, they would have legal recognition and political rights under international law. Irredentism however dominated and their leaders rejected that. It has created much human suffering.
"There was a lot of ethnic cleansing going around in 1948."
Thanks for mentioning this. I don't think a lot of people realize just how many "population transfers" were going on during and after WWII. Here's a partial list [1], but the short version is that many central and eastern European countries were actually fairly multi-ethnic pre-WWII, and the post-WWII consensus was basically that multi-ethnic countries tended to cause problems, so the victors of WW II decided that people were getting ethnostates --- like it or not.
And the few non-ethnostates that persisted --- like Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia --- fell apart later, so maybe the WW II victors were on to something.
One interesting thing here is language. These mass-relocations have historically been refereed to as "population transfers", "expulsions", etc., and I guess "ethnic cleansing" is the language that would be used today (at least on the left), but I'd prefer to reserve that term for situations that involve more killing.
I totally agree that "ethnic cleansing" has a super-high euphemism factor, and as a consequence, its meaning isn't very specific. Maybe my usage is unusual --- a consequence of trying to give it a less general meaning that others don't feel the need to give it?, but regardless of its meaning, I would use a more specific term for what happened after WW II: expulsions or population transfers (if you like euphemisms). That distinguishes it from the more deadly types of ethnic cleansing.
I understand that Palestinians may not accept that they must take another nationality, but it does not follow that we (people who are not Palestinian) should indulge them in this. I have yet to see an explanation for why the rest of the world should recognize a Palestinian nationality that persists across generations that have never lived in historic Palestine.
The simplest argument is that there are generations of Jewish people all over the world who have never lived in Eretz Yisrael and yet they have the right of return.
They have the right of return because they created a state and control who can immigrate into it and become a citizen. That's a core component of states and not unique to Israel. Other countries also recognize an ethnic right of return. If the Palestinians want to declare a state, then let them do that. They of course would have to settle for less land than they want, but they could do it. So far, they haven't been willing to do that. Again, it's not clear why we should indulge them in this position.
Sure, this is what it boils down to in the end: Israeli rights “matter” more than corresponding Palestinian rights not because of the greater justness of the cause but because the Israelis have bigger guns and stronger friends. But it’s not clear to me why those of us with out an ethnic-religious dog in this fight should “indulge” the Israeli position either, outside of sheer power politics.
I disagree. Ever since the Israeli pullout of Gaza, the government in Gaza could have declared a state and sought international recognition. Arab states probably would have recognized it right away. It is the explicit policy of the government in Gaza not to declare a state since they are unwilling to give up their claims. Similarly, the Palestinians have been unable to get recognition for a state in the West Bank. The Palestinian government does not want to exercise their "rights" to state formation and create their own right of return because they refuse to accept the limited land that the new state (or states) would control. That's a choice they are making. Just as we did and don't accept the maximalist claims of Israel on their state, it doesn't follow that we should accept the maximalist claims of the Palestinians. If the Palestinians want a state, let them declare it, raise an army and seek international recognition. The path of Somaliland is still open to them.
Yes, and Germans don't have a right of return to Kaliningrad. Pakistanis don't have a right of return to India and vice versa. Finns don't have a right of return to Vyborg. Armenians don't have a right of return to Turkey or Azerbaijan.
To extend the analogy, Russian-speakers who grew up in Kazakhstan or Turkmenistan or Ukraine have a right of return to Kaliningrad and Vyborg, but Germans and Finns don't.
Palestinians would have been much wiser to try to understand the Israeli point of view as countless Israelis tried to understand their’s. At the end of the day the two states solution , official accepted by Israel and by majority of Israelis over many years, is compatible with both Palestinian individual rights and collective self determination. Palestinians fantasies and agenda of ethnic cleansing and genocide by contrast are compatible with neither for Jews and Israelis.
A viable two-state solution isn’t feasible at this point without displacing at least some of the Jewish settlers in the West Bank, and I just don’t see Israel agreeing to that, ever.
>If the Palestinians want to declare a state, then let them do that. They of course would have to settle for less land than they want, but they could do it<
I don't see how "they could do it" while a Likud coalition governs the country. They have explicitly ruled out a Palestinian State on the West Bank. This has been a core position of Netanyahu since forever.
This is perhaps the elephant in the room in Matt's otherwise excellent piece: it's a bit beside the point to talk about a right to return to a Palestinian state (though sure, it's good to get filled on the details of this issue) when the governing power in question maintains a veto on the creation of such a state.
They've had a lot of time to declare a Palestinian state in Gaza. They explicitly refuse to do so and refuse to improve their relationship with Egypt to facilitate that. It's likely multiple Arab states would recognize such a state, e.g., Qatar. A smaller state in the West Bank is also a possibility that could have been negotiated, which they refused to accept historically, even as pressure was placed on Israel to support it. One can argue about whether a state would be viable, but I don't think you can reasonably blame this all on the most recent Likud governments.
I think a viable West Bank state was a possibility a generation ago, but not anymore. That’s entirely the result of illegal settlements and creeping annexations over the years, which would seem to me to be the responsibility of Israeli governments over that time period who looked the other way - honestly, I don’t think the settler movement can be blamed on the Palestinians.
No. Jewish right of return is to a Jewish state, not to any specific homes all over the word. Palestinians can get the exact same rights via a two state solution (assuming the Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza will accept them!)
Recent Israeli governments made it clear even before this war that a viable Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza wasn’t in the cards. Indeed, I believe Netanyahu is on the record for having actually said that at some point.
Israeli governments looking the other way while settlers insidiously implanted their roads and villages like metastatic tendrils into the remaining Palestinian territory on the West Bank would seem to have delivered the final blow to the two-state idea.
I don’t know why we even pretend to talk about it anymore, other than perhaps to make it seem to ourselves like we still care about an even-handed solution.
There is no and couldn’t be a final blow to the two states solution because it’s the only viable just solution. The fanatics of both sides always helped each other with nihilistic narratives but there is no reason why sane and decent people should play along.
Isn't that just the immigration policy of Israel, which isn't that unusual for that of a sovereign state? De Solis immigration is used in a lot of Old World states, but it's generally not imposed on other states or peoples.
Yes, but this isn't a right of return that _we_ gave them. The state of Israel gives that to them. Gaza could have declared a state after the Israeli pullout, looked for international recognition, and created a right of return.
This was of course the situation for Jewish people in the early 20th century - some thought of themselves as a nationality that persists across generations that had never lived in historic Palestine. It’s likely true for many of the indigenous American groups that have lived in Oklahoma for generations.
I don’t have a good thought about what explanations could work or fail for why one should or shouldn’t accept such nationalities.
Yes, but _we_ didn't recognize them as such and certainly don't now. We don't have a "Jewish" nationality in the US and neither do other countries. The Soviet Union did, and it created a lot of problems for them. The case of the indigenous American groups in the USA is fascinating and potentially relevant, but their indigenous statehood is not generally recognized internationally or taken particularly seriously. The Palestinian movement is deliberately asking us to recognize people, call them refugees, recognize a right of return, etc. It remains unclear to me why we (in general) should go along with that.
I will add that generally the children and grandchildren of those driven out of the German communities in Eastern Europe into the Federal Republic have had very little interest in returning even after being given the legal right to after 2004. This is largely a function I think of the fact that Federal Republic of Germany was a much more economically successful country after 1945 than of the communist Eastern European countries.
If the Arab world had been much more economically successful after 1945 then I suspect there would be far less importance and interest given to the right of return.
I think you missed a big aspect of why the Arabs states aren’t taking the Palestinians in. For the last 75 years, the Palestinian leadership has done a remarkable job of making their people unwelcome. In the 1970s, the fedayeen tried to depose the Jordanian government and made two assassination attempts on the king. After the bloodbath, they wound up in Lebanon, where they played a major role in instigating the civil war. And during the Gulf War, the PLO brilliantly decided to back Saddam, prompting Kuwait to expel 350k Palestinians.
It’s not just that Egypt doesn’t have the money or doesn’t like refugees generically (though these things are true). Hamas (an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood) is a mortal enemy of the Egyptian government. They don’t want to let in a population that’s bound to include radicalized, Islamist elements.
Egypt has 109M people. 1M voting-age Gazans (admitted over the next couple decades, realistically speaking), maybe only 40% of whom would vote for MB, wouldn't put MB anywhere close to a majority.
Egypt isn't a democracy in any real sense. They aren't worried about losing votes. They're worried about the Muslim Brotherhood (i.e., Hamas) radicalizing the population and blowing stuff up.
The tragedy for these gamblers is usually that they *do* have this concept but just fail to take it. And in this case, the bigger tragedy is that there are millions of people being involved in this gamble without agency in it.
We should recognize that the "right of return" coupled with a binational state has no real historical predecessor. The Czech Republic isn't a binational state, even though it was 30% German before WW2. The Germans were ethnically cleansed at the end of the war, and their ethnic cleansing was accepted. Germans can move to Czechia now as part of the EU, but if they became a significant minority and agitated for a binational state, I suspect the Czech Republic would not accept that. Similarly for Kaliningrad, Poland, Slovakia. We just witnessed the ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh and no one is saying anything. There is no claim for a "right of return" for India/Pakistan/Bangladesh. In fact, there are Urdu speakers in Bangladesh now who Pakistan refuses to repatriate. I'm actually struggling to find a right of return accepted that didn't involve a war and massive ethnic cleansing. So I think the position is clear here, the right of return imagines an Arab majority in a state covering historical Palestine and the Jews would be either murdered, cleansed, or a political minority with limited rights. I never have found the statements about a binational state to be at all convincing.
This (and a few related comments) makes me think about the legacy of those post-WWII ethnic cleansings. Obviously very nasty business to carry out. But having borders that match cultural/ethnic identities seems to be pretty good for stability under the current global order.
Think about how many people lost their homes in the India-Pakistan partition. And that relationship has simmered and sometimes boiled over ever since then. Yet, nonetheless, nobody's seriously going to implement a Right of Return. People have made new lives and planted new roots in their new homes.
I remember when Musharraf and Vajpayee were prime ministers of their relevant countries, and there was a thaw in the relationship, and each of them visited the other capital city, which happened to be their birthplace.
I agree that it's another relevant example. I wonder how the region would be faring on development, human rights, and ethnic conflict had the partition never occurred.
I mean that in a genuine "wonder" sense; I'm not trying to facetiously imply there is some obvious answer.
There probably would have been a civil war; in many ways, the partition WAS a civil war, but it's more accurate to say that it was done in order to head off a worse conflict.
The Germans who were ethnically cleansed at the end of world war two (1) had often supported or even fought for a monstrous regime and (2) had a few tough years but were received by what soon became a functioning state that welcomed them. If 2.5 million germans were living amid third world poverty on the polish border, were prevented from entering germany, could not navigate the baltic sea or fly airplanes, i would feel sorry for them too
Hitler never got a majority of the vote (like Hamas) and never held elections after coming to power (again like Hamas). Moreover, most Germans who fought for Hitler were conscripts, not volunteers to the Waffen-SS. Gestapo (like Hamas) violently suppressed any dissent. I believe that if we are to make a distinction between Hamas and the Gazans, we also need to make a distinction between WWII-era Germans and the Nazis.
Indians and Pakistanis have countries to return to.
Palestinians do not. They are not Jordanians or Syrians or Egyptians although there seem to be a lot of folks who clearly wish they’d just go on and accept one of those identities.
I think in the end they’ll have to accept living in one of those countries but it will have to be at the expense of their ethnic / national identity, as opposed to those other examples where the refugees were able to more or less reunite with others who shared their identity. They’ll have to live as exiles, in other words.
That's not exactly true. The population of Jordan is actually majority Palestinian. Jordan is one of the few Arab countries that grants citizenship to Palestinians.
Well then, maybe that needs to be the answer. How to convince Jordan to accept them? - maybe by offering some huge financial incentive? The “two-state solution” is a chimera, though - recent Israeli governments have made it pretty clear they ultimately want the entire West Bank.
The West justifies its support for Israel through its status as a democracy. But in a democracy you don’t get to expel part of your population to arrange the electoral outcomes you want, or to keep a certain ethnic group in power.
It’s clear why the Jewish people will never go for this, and I respect that. It’s a more tenuous argument why it should be US foreign policy to prop up a regime with these anti-democratic features.
I'm not sure I understand the relevance of this to the linked comment. Demanding "right of return" enforced by other powers is an extraordinary request with very few, if any, historical antecedents. What does that have to do with whether Israel is a democracy or not? The implicit assumption of your comment is that the US is the only thing keeping Israel from folding and accepting Palestinian demands. I don't think that is true.
Insofar as Palestinian claims to reside in Israel are illegitimate, fine. Insofar as they are legitimate but Israel rejects them because they would threaten the incumbents’ electoral math, then claims that we should support Israel to “promote democracy in the region” or whatever, ring pretty hollow.
I reserve judgement on whether Israel and the Jewish people need to be bound by democratic norms here; they’ve been through plenty. But Western leftists have a point that probably US foreign policy should be so bound.
I think we are talking past each other here. I'm speaking about the "right of return", which is a right asserted by the Palestinian national movement that any person or descendent of a person who resided in Palestine (defined by the British mandate) in 1948 should have the right to move to historic Palestine and live there, irrespective of current borders between Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank. This is a very unusual and broad claim by historical standards, particularly if we are talking about enforcing it on another country that has not been invaded and defeated. I don't understand what point you are trying to make about democracy here. I'm not sure it has anything to do with democracy. Is the argument that if Israel is not a democracy, the US govt should feel free to force another country to honor a right of return on that country? Can you give an example where the US has done that to another country before?
Again, to my previous point Germans have little interest in moving to Czechia because Germany is a much richer and economically strong state compared to Czechia post 1945. If the same was true of the Arab world perhaps this would be less of an issue.
The Arab states won't let Palestinians move there and gain citizenship because of the historical participation of Palestinian populations in their countries in assassinations, political overthrows, launch of military actions that invite reprisals, and for general anti-immigration reasons.
This is the first article in American media that I read about the conflict since the October 7 massacre (yes, I skipped Matt's article from last week as well), just because I found its title oddly specific (for an American). And ... I'm very pleasantly surprised! Thank you, Matt! Given the general insanity about the issue in American media, I'm pretty sure that this is one of the best two or three articles written on this side of the Atlantic.
Thank you for this very clear article, which definitely taught me something new. I had no idea that the descendants of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and other countries remained stateless. It reminds me of the way Northern Irish Catholics' struggles for equal treatment was often conflated with the cause of a united Ireland. I'm also struck that it would be really unusual to find this kind of clear and relatively neutral analysis anywhere in the media - is this just because I'm looking in the wrong place or because other media feels obliged to nod towards the expectations of its readers more explicitly?
It's simply because media is a profit driven business and outrage either direction draws attention and therefore business. Nuance is a niche luxury product only a few people will pay for.
1) It makes the world easier to deal with when you know who you can count on to at least try to be fair and honest. (Especially on this subject!) So thanks, Matt!
2) As late as the Nineties, Jewish kids were still being taught that old "We didn't drive out the Palestinians, the other Arabs told them to leave" tale, even after evidence from Israeli sources had started to come out that it was a crock? Does it even make any sense that invading armies would want to deprive themselves of sources of supplies and information?
3) If you listen to the rhetoric the Palestinians used at Camp David--the right of return is non-negotiable but the mechanics of implementing of it is, recognize the right in principle and we'll be willing to take your demographic concerns into account--and tell me it doesn't sound like diplomaticspeak for "We need some sort of face-saving formula that'll let us compromise while pretending that we're not."
4) The argument that "Nobody else gets to return to their ancestors' homes after 75 years! Why do the Palestinians deserve such a special privilege!" would be less, well, insulting if it wasn't coming from people who claimed that right after 2000 years.
I think 3 is a very favourable way of looking at the Palestinian behaviour at Camp David. Another way would be to say, they were basically saying to Israel "give us the biggest bargaining chip you posses, one that giving up will materially make it harder for you to run and defend your country, and we still reserve the right to agitate for full right to return, even though that would destroy your nation". I don't think you can blame the Israelis for rejecting that
4) 1/3 of Palestine was Jewish in 1947. Lots of people migrated there at the invitation of the Turks in the 19th and early 20th Century. There was a huge wave of in-migration of Jewish persons who were expelled by Muslim states after 1948. Also, I don't think we reasonably expect to expel all the descendants of persons who participated during the Age of Mass Migration in other contexts. Very few people question the legitimacy of actually living people in places like Taiwan, Argentina, New Zealand, or the US.
Jews wanted their own state, the return is only to that state. Nobody on the Jewish side was talking of specific homes when they accepted the 1947 partition plan which left them without their holiest sites including Jerusalem and Hebron from which Jews were massacred and expelled a mere 20 years earlier ! If Palestinians adopted a parallel position to the Jewish one they’d have accepted the two state solution offered them in the 90s and could exercise their return into that Palestinians state in the West Bank and Gaza! That’s not what they’re asking and the false equivalence you’re making is horribly misleading.
Never responded to a comment here, but wanted to chime in specifically on #2, as someone steeped in Jewish community my whole life, and who received a thoroughly Zionist education in the 90s and 00s. Teaching us this inaccurate history was indeed a significant mistake my parents’ generation made, but my best guess is that their historical understanding, based on their own, earlier Zionist education, just never got updated. (I grew up in a progressive community unafraid of a complicated conversation, so I think willful blindness is actually pretty unlikely here.) I am not deeply read in the historians of the 80s (Benny Morris et al) who corrected the record based on newly declassified sources that were only emerging then, 40 years on from the war, but the reason people found the original narrative plausible is because the seven Arab countries fighting the single, newborn Jewish country definitely did not expect to lose. To just throw out one simple reference, the “Military assessments” subsection of the Wiki article about the 1948 war outlines how the CIA and the Brits both expected the Arabs to prevail, that “Egyptian generals told their government that the invasion would be "A parade without any risks" and Tel Aviv would be taken "in two weeks,"” and that the Israeli forces were initially wildly out-equipped. Moreover, in the wake of incidents like the Deir Yassin massacre, it would seem to make sense that civilians would willingly flee a war zone - just as Gazans are doing today.
With regard to #4 Wayne, I think you're right that framing it as a special privilege is the wrong approach. What I would suggest instead is acknowledging that the victims of the Nakba suffered an injustice, while also making the point that not all injustices can be remedied and sometimes it is necessary to just move forward without doing so:
Exactly! That's how Truth Commissions work: if the people who fucked you over admit it to your face with the world watching, it can feel so empowering that revenge no longer feels necessary to your self-esteem. Think it would be "good for the Jews" if the Palestinians had that? Once that truth is on the table, that's the time for the pragmatic conversation about what is and isn't practical to do about it here and now. After all, they already tried it the other way around. Oslo was basically "Let's make peace now and deal with what we've been fighting about--later. Eventually." How'd that work out?
You need to understand that this is a very *charitable* view of the Palestinian position. Many of them are unflinching in advocating for one state for Palestinian only and the killing of all Jews aka genocide. The fact is Matt here in order to sound balanced has given the Palestinian side many such discounts. Eg he misleadingly uses the passive voice when saying the partition plan of of 1947 broke down. Infamously it was refuse but the Arabs even as the Jews accepted. The Arabs instead advocated for the alternative of… you guessed it- ethnic clenaisng or genocide of the Jews ! They also followed through - not a single Jew was left in the terrifies they occupied in 48. By contrast many Arabs remained in the areas Israel occupied in 48 and were given equal citizenship. Another point Matt omits.
Last week The Daily interviewed a couple of Gazans as they were actively being bombed by Israel, which was heart breaking. To hear these people being interviewed while you could literally hear missiles in the background really made the war real for me. However, when asked about Hamas and the attacks neither person had any sympathy for the Israeli victims, nor did they condemn Hamas, which I suspect to be widely held views amongst Palestinians. Once you realize this it becomes immediately obvious that a one state solution isn’t workable bc most Palestinians want Jews dead or gone.
In any short term peace deal, not everyone is going to be able to live where they want. Israeli lunatics are not going to be able to claim their preferred hilltops in Judea. Palestinians are not going to be able to reclaim their great grandma’s particular olive grove. At least not yet. It genuinely sucks for them, but it’s the reality of launching and losing a long series of wars.
In the longer term, I think the peace deal could include provisions for gradual freedom of residency and movement on both sides. But that’s going to require trust building and a psychological deescalation that could take a generation or more. You cannot pull shit like 10/7 and expect your people to saunter through the streets of Tel Aviv a year later.
I don’t believe that peace requires justice, as the saying goes. Almost nobody gets justice in geopolitics. Peace requires a settlement where your kids have a shot at a decent future.
In a peace deal, a lot of those will have to be dismantled. The Israelis have done it in Sinai in 1979, and in Gaza in 2005, and offered to do it in most of the West Bank as recently as 2008. (The immediate suburbs of Jerusalem would be traded for part of '67 Israel, given the sheer number of people who would have to be moved.)
But there is a real demographic timeline here. The more religious the Israeli population becomes, the harder this is going to be to achieve politically.
As others have kind of alluded to, the fly in the ointment is that the removals and relocations are now considered a crime against humanity as a subset of ethnic cleansing, in a way they weren't even as recently as the late 1940s.
Although its inclusion as a crime against humanity should still be lauded as a great moral victory for humanity, the result is that there basically aren't any more blunt-but-nonlethal tools left in the settling of geopolitical disputes. There are either blunt-and-lethal tools, like Hamas' terrorism or Israel's wanton destruction, precise-and-unbalancing tools like the settlements themselves, or precise-and-unpopular tools like the Camp David negotiations where neither side can offer the other any more than token concessions that are ultimately unsatisfying.
And thus it all ends up forming a catch-22. Short of a peace deal, the best we can hope for is that future generations can de-escalate and learn to coexist without the baggage of today. But the de-escalation itself seems to trigger extremists on both sides, who then periodically reignite tensions with fresh atrocities, pushing out the timeline of de-escalation.
This is a fair point. The Greek-Turkish population exchange in 1923 was brutal. But was it the best thing for everyone in the long run? I don't know, but it's very possible.
All I can say is that it seems to me that people underappreciate the fact that the horrors OF all these relocations, transfers, removals, exchanges, partitions, and worse, are precisely WHY they all got lumped under "ethnic cleansing" with events like the Holocaust and Holodomor, even when they weren't carried out with remotely the same level of murderous intent. Generations were deeply traumatized by these events, and their descendants campaigned very hard to make sure that the abuses weren't repeated again.
As I mentioned, though, the core problem seems to be that humanity has an opposite-but-roughly-equal-in-magnitude nasty habit of rebuilding our appetites for geopolitically-motivated murder.
This appetite mostly seems to be manageable in countries like America and the West, where our institutions are solid enough to keep us from erupting into violence against our neighbors -- in fact, I just finished Acemoglu and Robinson's "The Narrow Corridor" and it was downright excellent in talking about the nature of how liberal democracy sustains itself in ways that contribute to this value being upheld. Our insistence on essentially-permanent national borders doesn't seem to hurt us as much because of this.
However, in parts of the world where institutions and the public tradition of pluralistic peace aren't as strongly built up, it really hurts us that the rest of the "rules based world order" still treats those national borders as so preciously inviolable as, say, the US-Canada border. It's clear that the appetite for murder is going to keep boiling up over those borders for a bare minimum of several more generations before it can be pacified by modernism and liberal democracy - if it EVER can.
I don't think it's hopium. It happens. It's just that it only happens under the right circumstances.
And the exchanges themselves don't always solve everything either. They often involve plenty of murder and rights-abuses in the process -- it's not like countries agree to swap populations because they LIKE each other.
I think at this point this is basically the right conclusion (i.e. this is very, very intractable). The observation that people can be more bitter and incapable of overlooking expropriation than actual murder is not a new one - Macchiavelli noted back in 1509 that if you're going to take a family's stuff you might as well kill them because they *will not ever* stop hating you. For examples that are more congenial to Western readers, there are Jewish families still suing for return of stuff stolen in the 1930s, and I don't think people find that strange, and there aren't that many people saying 'let it go, it's in the past'.
The only even vaguely plausible solution to this I ever saw (and this was in the late 1990s, when things were bad but less bad than now) was some combination of a formal recognition of the Nakba, some limited rights of return for then older (now very elderly people) who were directly expropriated, a direct and substantial payment stream to the relevant families and of course full return of the Occupied Territories as a place where those people could go and live. Basically, recognition and compensation, but not full restitution or right of return (because that can't be combined with any Zionist principles). But I can't see Netanyahu's Israel doing anything like that, especially after last week.
Eh, I dunno. My family was displaced (actually, much worse) a couple times in the last hundred years, and never got a cent of reparation. We are not still grousing about the property loss because we built something new and better. We are certainly not out there conducting reprisals against innocent people to reclaim our family’s old land. The critical thing, I think, is that people have the opportunity to build a better future for their kids.
Edit: This isn't meant to criticize the Palestinians. My point is that securing them a decent future is much more important than wrangling over the past. People who can build a good life for their kids are *usually* not going to blow themselves up over past grievances.
That last bit seems to hint pretty hard that the statelessness of Palestinian refugees in (wherever) is a core part of this problem. Hard to build a better forward-looking future for your kids if they, and their kids after, will still be second-class wanderers.
That's not exactly an earthshattering revelation on my part, but it seems worth stating out loud.
It wasn't intended to be a judgment on them at all! I just meant that creating opportunities for people to have a better future for their kids mitigates a lot of the historic grievances. You don't need to achieve perfect justice, you need a reasonable life for the next generation. Hence, I think getting a state for the Palestinians - with any contours - is more important than wrangling over who did what to who.
I may have miscommunicated--I wasn't trying to ascribe a judgment call to your earlier comment. What I think I mostly meant was
> "Hey, 20-year-old Palestinian in Egypt, you were born in Egypt, your parents were born in Egypt, you've never been outside of Egypt, why won't you just work towards being a happy, productive Egyptian of Palestinian descent (to the extent the latter is important to you)?"
> "Egypt won't take me as Egyptian. They wouldn't take my parents and they won't take my kids."
This speaks to the prospect that perhaps the Abraham Accords can be part of a two-step pivot towards statefulness for Palestinians.
It's unfortunate that this renewed conflict probably means another 10-20-year delay in progress towards that end, but it's probably a shorter path towards de-escalation than hoping that the conflict will de-escalate on its own.
But in that context the way Israel (and yes, Egypt) have been treating the Gazans and WB Palestinians doesn’t seem calculated to have helped them construct much of a forward-looking future.
That's a good point of view, but in practice it is not universal.
It is not just the Palestinians. Everywhere previously oppressed and robbed groups are demanding their lands/stuff back (e.g. the previous owners of quite a lot of stuff in London's British Museum would like those things returned. Now. Even though a lot of it was stolen in the 19th century).
As for Palestinian terrorism, yes there were terrorist actions by Palestinian refugees in the 1950 to 70s, but the vast majority today is from inhabitants of the Israeli occupied terroritories, and can't be disentangled from violent revolt against that occupation. Certainly people in Gaya and the West Bank are not getting great opportunities to build a better future
Agreed. I got to visit some of the places my family got displaced from, and we traveled with a guy who was old enough to remember some of it and could recall that my great-grand uncle used to run that restaurant over there and lived in the apartment above it. When we ate at the restaurant, I didn't tell the waiter to fuck off and return my family's property; I just ate my meal and wondered about what could have been --- while also being happy that I'm not running the family restaurant.
Matthew, if you were to open access to this article: 1) it would be a huge contribution to the public discourse, 2) it would attract subscribers. If I weren't already a subscriber, I'd be signing up right now. Thank you.
It’s further important to recall that both Jews and Palestinians were displaced in 1948, in fact Jews much more thoroughly than Palestinians: no Jew was left in the areas the Arabs conquered at the end of the war whereas a sizable Arab minority remained in newly created Israel, and were given equal citizenship forthwith, as promised by Israel’s Declaration of Independence. This state of affairs isn’t surprising seeing the sides official position at the eve of the war:1. The Jewish community accepted the partition plan and vowed to give equality to all Arabs in its territory. The Palestinian/Arab leadership promised publicly to kill all the Jews. When the war was over each side basically lived up to its promises. Almost complete ethnic cleansing of Jews from all Arab states (including Jewish communities that were literally millennia old as in Iraq), equal citizenship to Arabs remaining in Israel.
In addition to all that israel that was just born out of a terrible war surviving a genocide attempt a mere 3 years after the Holocaust, *also* had to absorb all the Jewish refugees from the Arab world and the Holocaust refugees. All became citizenship so that the number of new citizens (Jewish AND Arab) far outnumbered Israel’s founding population. (Can you imagine any other country accepting more refugees than its own citizens, all within a few years? ). While tensions remains internally, descendants of these Palestinians Arabs became doctors, government ministers, Israeli Supreme Court judges etc Descendants of Jewish refugees cleansed from Arab states where even better integrated into Israel
Meanwhile as Matt alludes the Palestinians refugees in the Arab lands mostly were intentionally left without citizenship and in refugee camps, and were given a unique refugee status that is inherited intergenerationally contra to how all other refugees, including Jewish refugees of the very same conflict, are defined.
All this matters. Even as Palestinian supporters complain of “genocide” against them their population keeps growing under Israeli occupation (or within Israel as equal citizens). By contrast Palestinians *keep* calling for ethnic cleansing and genocide of Jews, never anllowed annd have no plans to allow a single Jew to live under their rule, and *practice* the genocide they preach whenever they can, as we saw demonstrated horrifically just last week. One cannot be taken seriously as an interlocutor by Israelis (of all political stripes) without acknowledging these facts.
Great article but my Israeli friend told me another problem with Palestinian right of return - which in their mind makes this impossible. A lot of the land that the jews bought before Israel was made (either in Ottoman Turkish Palestine or British Palestine) was owned by landlords in Damascus, Beirut or Cairo. As a result when it comes to actual deeds, a lot of Jews bought out those deeds ans own those deeds to land in Palestine before Israel was created. In other words, many Palestinians who lived in Ottoman Palestine didn't own the deeds to the land they live on. He would say "How could Palestinians return when they didn't own the deeds? Only a few Palestinians who owned the land after the 1947-1948 "civil war" would actually have a right to return." The problem with the negotiation would be the Palestinian leaders would probably want a right to return for Palestinians whether they owned a deed or not. While Israel could, at best, could only offer right to return for Palestinians that have their own deeds. That would restrict the number of Palestinians with a right to return by an order of magnitude.
This is related in a deep sense to the issues of displacement due to gentrification, where long-time renters (or sometimes squatters who have squatted long enough to get some sort of legal recognition under many legal systems) are displaced by landlords selling to new homeowners.
Egypt was spectacularly uninterested in taking Gaza back when they made peace with Israel. And that was before it was full of the Muslim Brotherhood. Jordan fought off a Palestinian coup against King Hussein in the 1970s and the PLO helped destabilize Lebanon in the 1980s prompting an Israeli invasion.
The idea that 5 million Palestinians could immigrate into Israel and coexist seems fantastical given historical Palestinian attitudes and the current attitudes that see Hamas with strong support. Are there any Palestinians with any kind of power that are actually interested in coexistence? And before we start talking about the Palestinian Authority, Abbas is an old man and the PA is famous for its corruption. Is it even going to survive Abbas's death?
I do wonder how much of this conflict owes to a gerontocracy problem similar to our own. Aging elites unable to let go of old fights and paradigms, ruling over dramatically younger-skewed populations.
I think the problem is that no one speaks for Palestinians. Abbas is old, yes, but he only represents a portion of Palestinians. He is not able to make any kind of deal - Hamas and many other groups would reject it.
Fundamentally, IMO, there will never be progress on any Palestinian cause as long as they are divided and killing themselves.
It's not a great analogy, but it's a bit like the current Republican Congress. Democrats have no one to negotiate with because the GoP can't agree on leadership, much less their ultimate goals and means to achieve them. The Palestinians have the same problem, but much, much worse. Beyond vague hand-waving about a right of return, and opposition to Israel, they agree on little. There is no hope for any kind of coherent Palestinian state or polity if Palestinians remain unable to unite.
I think that points back to the statelessness problem that others have mentioned. There's nothing to really build a future for, so people's politics remain performative and extreme.
It doesn’t help that Hamas was elected in 2006 - so long ago
You'd need an election that included all Palestinians, not just those on the West Bank. And yes, Hamas would have a decent chance of winning. Also, it's hard to see how such an election could be legitimately accomplished.
The US opening its doors would not have really stopped anything. There were already 650,000 Jews in Palestine and hundreds of thousands more who wanted to come.
Also, if you buy into the logic of Zionism, which many world powers did at the time, it was a hugely successful undertaking. It accomplished exactly what they were trying to accomplish. There is now a country on Earth where Jews are automatically allowed to live, and the government of which will never persecute Jews because the government is Jewish.
I think that misunderstands the core of the Zionist project. Even if every last Jew had immigrated to the US, they would have remained a minority. I can’t speak entirely for people many of whom are now decades dead, but it seems like the consensus was that Jews would never be safe as a minority anywhere. America certainly wasn’t immune to pogrom-like violence in the late 40s, y’know.
Again, I’m also not saying that consensus was ultimately right or wrong - as the saying goes, it’s too soon to tell - but it explains why the victorious Allies might have agreed it was simply better to give them their own state. Call it the “least clusterfucked of all options”.
That said, I *want* to agree with you that we should have just given them New Jersey, but then again, being stuck in that hellhole might’ve made them end up worse than Hamas. 🤣🤣
After the war was too late to derail the Zionist project after most of the world wouldn't take Jewish refugees before and during the Holocaust. British attempts to stop postwar Jewish immigration into Palestine were met by Jewish violence in Palestine
Considering Hamas' goals, it would be more war, and Israel would have no incentive to stop settlements on the West Bank - quite the opposite.
Yeah I can't believe Matt glossed over that the Palestinian refugees would be a huge risk to Egypt, they have legitimate reasons for not opening the border (I believe they are barred from doing so by the last arab war treaty as well, but Israel would maybe be willing to overlook that to make their offensive easier, so I don't know how much of a role it plays in this current conflict)
I actually heard Elliott Abrams say one of the major reasons he thinks there will never be a Palestinian state in the West Bank is the Jordanians are afraid it would destabilize them.
By “the Jordanians” does this mean the people of Jordan or the monarchy or both?
The majority of Jordanians are of Palestinian origin.
I presumed the government.
Yes, it’s a huge risk to Egypt, but given that, Egypt is hardly in a position to condemn Israel for not wanting them either.
Along these lines are there any Palestinian intellectuals or Palestinian supporting intellectuals who provide any nuanced and balanced insights on the situation? From my vantage point, most seem to be extremely radical and will only accept a one state solution whereby Jews are expelled from Israel.
I am impressed by these folks. I could be wrong, but you have to start somewhere: https://www.standing-together.org/en
Is it correct to understand this group as supporting a one-state solution of mixed Palestinian and Jewish ethnicity?
Thank you for sharing.
I think we're forgetting that Jordan did grant citizenship to all of the Palestinians in the West Bank between 1950 and 1988.
Jordan and Egypt also forgot to create a Palestinian state in the 19 years they controlled the West Bank and Gaza between 1948 and 1967. In the case of the West Bank Jordan and the Palestinians completely ethnically cleansed it of the Jews who had lived there for hundreds of years, including being the majority in the old city of Jerusalem in 1948. This would have been convenient for the Palestinians- meanwhile Israel went through the process of turning all the Palestinians left in Israel into citizens - Israeli Arabs.
Palestinians only have a right of return to a Palestinian state. Any other suggestion is disingenuous bullshit from people who want to destroy Israel in slightly less violent ways than Hamas. Those same kind folks can go live in an Islamist country before preaching it to others.
Late to this, but Matt's post implies most Palestinians in Jordan lack citizenship when the opposite is true. 90% of Palestinians and UNWRA-registered refugees in Jordan have citizenship.
(Now, it's true that there are various caveats. Gazans in Jordan don't have citizenship, and those who returned to the West Bank before or after '88 (when Jordan renounced its claims to the WB) have lost citizenship. Also true that the ruling class remains dominated by native Jordanians.)
They did. It more than doubled their population at the time.
Fascinating. And suggests that Jordan wishes to “ethnically cleanse” Palestinians when Palestine is officially recognized.
Also, super-dumb question… why doesn’t Israel just give the West Bank back?
To start with:
A. Jordan doesn't want it
B. The Palestinians don't want to be Jordanians
C. Some Israelis want the West Bank
D. The West Bank includes East Jerusalem
E. There's several hundred thousand settlers in the West Bank
And too many settlers
Having visited Jordan, they seem the opposite: Jordanians grab every opportunity. It's a country that really seems to have threaded a lot of difficult needles.
Just throwing out my comment on Jordanians-- I have almost no experience with Palestinians.
It is very difficult for Israelis to accept a "right to return."
One thing that seems omitted from these discussions is how Arab countries expelled or compelled their Jewish populations to leave during the 20th Century. These states offer neither a "right to return" or political protection for Jewish persons who would chose to return.
The Palestinian population is generally hostile to an Israeli state and mass in-migration of said population into Israel creates a real physical security threat for those already living there. The Jewish population rightfully fears a repeat of Pogroms and their own expulsion.
Arab states refusing to give political rights or safe harbor to Palestinians is just part of the intransigence on the part of Muslim Arabs that makes the two state solution impossible. They rejected the 1947 two state solution from the UN while Israelis accepted it. This is because they believed they could claim everything and expel 1/3 of the population by force.
There just doesn't seem to be a credible negotiating partner on the Palestinian side. They do not give up irredentism. They do not promise peace. They start with "give us everything and you get nothing" as their bargain.
The Muslim Arab intransigence you describe is exactly why the (re)establishment of a Jewish homeland in the Levant was a cursed idea from the beginning. I don’t know why the Palestinian desire to return to homes they lost seventy years ago is described pejoratively as “irredentism” while the Israeli desire to return to the site of a temple destroyed two thousand years ago goes unremarked. Obviously it would have been and still would be better for all parties if Israel’s neighbors accepted the fait accompli of 1948, but solving the problem of displaced Palestinians was always going to be impossible without the cooperation of Israel’s neighbors.
The Jews wanted self determination in their own country. They immigrated to a very sparsely inhabited land in which they bought every inch of territory with their own money and developed it almost exclusively by their own labor. Unsurprisingly they mostly had to make do with the less desirable lands Arabs were willing to sell them. They developed them into a very thriving economy. So much so that in the decades before Israel’s founding the Arab population too increased significantly via economic migrants of neighboring lands.
The important point through is that the Zionist leadership was willing to accept the partition plan leaving Jews without most of their most important historic and religious sites (including Jerusalem were the temple you mentioned was !) because their goal was secular -self determination under national sovereignty. It was also clear to them and desireable to them that the non Jews amongst them will enjoy the equality Jews never did as minorities. And in fact israel have such legal equalities to all minorities.
By stark contrast the Palestinian semand *isnt’* merely self determination in their own state like the Jews demanded (that would be simply the two state solution offered to them already in 1947 before there was a single refugee!). Their demand in 1947 was rather ethnic cleansing fo their Jewish neighbors. The demand of Palestinians is rather that “refugees” that weren’t alive in 1948 return to homes that no longer exist.
>They immigrated to a very sparsely inhabited land in which they bought every inch of territory with their own money and developed it almost exclusively by their own labor
Total myth. They had long-running terrorist organizations that engaged in the exact type of activities Hamas does now- bombings and assassinations of the existing Arabs. One such group was called Irgun (fun fact, Ari and Rahm Emmanuel's father was a member) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irgun
"Two of the operations for which the Irgun is best known are the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on 22 July 1946 and the Deir Yassin massacre that killed at least 107 Palestinian Arab villagers, including women and children, carried out together with Lehi on 9 April 1948..... Irgun's tactics appealed to many Jews who believed that any action taken in the cause of the creation of a Jewish state was justified, including terrorism.[16]..... Irgun members were absorbed into the Israel Defense Forces at the start of the 1948 Arab–Israeli war. The Irgun was a political predecessor to Israel's right-wing Herut (or "Freedom") party, which led to today's Likud party"
In the 'founding' of Israel they ethnically cleansed existing Arab population off their land, a fact well-known and celebrated in Israel. It's amazing to contrast what people in the West choose to believe about the country, as opposed to what everyone knows in Israel and discusses in the pages of Haaretz. They think the ethnic cleansing was a good thing!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Palestine_war
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depopulated_Palestinian_locations_in_Israel
I would really like to stop calling what would normally be called an “expulsion” an “ethnic cleansing.” A dear friend of mine was expelled from Uganda in 1972. His family emigrated to Canada, and then the US. Nobody calls that a “cleansing” and to my knowledge, no Indians are demanding right of return. Many progressives would now call him a colonizer.
I’m nitpicky on this point, because these overheated terms make the arguments more difficult, and have now graduated to “genocide,” which is ridiculous.
Since there's been a lot of back and forth on this issue in the last 10 days, I wanted to again share this recent (13OCT2023) essay by David Polansky: https://www.strangefrequencies.co/whither-palestine/
He makes the point that Benny Morris, one of the leading New Historians, "tarnish[ed] the narrative of a pure creation of Israel by uncovering the various crimes that accompanied it...[but he was] surpris[ed] that many had taken him to be an anti-Zionist based on his scholarship...his sensible response was that history is about uncovering truth, and a mature nation ought to be able to handle harsh truths about itself without going to pieces."
You're correct that it's Israel's apologists in the West who usually refuse to acknowledge any wrongdoing or even moral complexity in Israel's creation.
“Which they bought every inch of territory”
This is simply untrue. Much of Israel consists of land previously owned by Palestinians and adopted by Israelis after the war in 1948 without any compensation. That is part of the major sticking point to which this column refers.
https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-208638/
And did I write anything to contradcit that? I was describing the situation up to 1947. The war that ensued was 100% a result of Arab aggression rejcting the UN resolution which would have given them a state and opting instead for an all out war with the express intention of genocide. The result of the war was 0 Jews left in areas conquered by the Arabs and by contrast a significant Arab minority left in Israel's territory, which was promptly given equal citizenship. In addition there were many Jewish and Arab refugees. The Jewish refugees who arrived in Israel after being expelled from their homes—for which they were never given any compensation— were given equal citizenship too. The Arab (Palestinian) refugees by contrast were mostly left without civil rights in the Arab states. It's absurd to demand any compensation for property left behind by Palestinians refugees (who lost it after failing to massacre their neighbors) without demanding like compensation for all the property left behind by Jewish refugees in the very same conflict. Educate yourself.
1) Yes, sort of. Palestinians owned a lot of land inside Israel in 1947.
2) Do you think you’d agree that there is no compensation owed or right to return to your families’ former land if you were the Palestinian family who lost their property?
The problem with this conflict is that things don’t actually just net out in the math for the people involved. Palestinian families who owned land in Israel didn’t take land from Jews in other Arab countries. They weren’t responsible for atrocities by others. Nor are the Jewish families killed by terrorists at a music festival the people who forced Palestinian families from their land at gunpoint. This cycle of collective blame and retribution needs to end, because the list of atrocities is too long to ever achieve justice. But simply ignoring legitimate grievances of individuals living the situation also achieves nothing.
1. They would have retained 100% of this land with equal citizenship had they accepted the partition plan. Some of them in fact did retain and did receive equal citizenship even though they rejected it and attempted genocide. Those who did not lost it as part of the conflict they instigated. More Jews lost more property in the same conflict, which was forced upon them.
2. While I very much resent the moral equivalence you're drawing from both sides — one was far worse by a wide margin— I do not dispute that Palestinians who lost property can demand monetary damages (even though many of them were very supportive of genocide and quite a few tried to participate in its enactment). All I am saying is that such compensation ought to be given as part of a collective settlement that will likewise compensate the greater number of Jews who lost property in Arab lands in the very same conflict (including some expelled from areas in the west bank and the Gaza strip).
"This cycle of collective blame and retribution needs to end" <- This right here
An extremely immoral gamble. They tried to commit genocide and failed. Also, let's not describe the Palestinians as a passive pawn. They mostly enthusiastically adopted the genocidal plan. The few who did not mostly stayed in Israel and became equal citizens. Some of those who *did* nevertheless also stayed in Israel and also were given equal citizenship in the state they sought to destroy and by the people they sought to murder. The moral gap between the sides couldn't have been wider.
You have a point, except a lot of people who were expelled had no agency in the gamble.
Well that's the tragedy of it. It takes two parties to build a sustainable peace but only one to drag them both into hell.
If I were asked which party is more morally culpable, I would blame the Palestinians. That doesn't change that the status quo is monstrous.
This is a literal myth.
You’re gonna have to be a little more specific
So you are suggesting that already existing 1/3 of the population of Palestine should have been expunged after the territory was given independence? Just like what happened to all the other Jewish populations in the Arab world during the 20th Century?
Why are you defining 1947 as the beginning? I think the argument is that Zionism was a cursed idea from the day Theodor Herzl put pen to paper precisely because it requires the displacement of the population of Palestine as it stood on the day that ink was spilled.
It didn’t require any such displacement and none occurred before Palestianisn and Arab attempt at Jewish genocide in 1947-9.
I think that a lot of people would dispute that it's possible to form a Jewish state in the land of Israel without expelling the non-Jewish population.
But it's certainly true that the attempt to prevent the creation of Israel in 1947-8 didn't help.
Me among them. Converting Muslim Palestine country to a secular state might have been (just) doable.
Well, all nations are built on theft.
Oops, I forgot my land acknowledgment. "I am writing this comment in west Los Angeles, on land settled for generations by the Tongva people."
Yes. This is the proper response to the right of return. "We stole it fair and square, it's ours now".
Which is not actually an unreasonable answer if you think about it. Every country in the world owes it present existence, borders, etc. to a history of conquest and slaughter. The emergence of international law in the last century or so is an attempt to control and minimize this as an ongoing phenomenon, but clearly it has not been entirely successful.
Given when my various British ancestors emigrated (1680's for the Scottish, early 1700's for the English, sometime in the mid-1800's for the Irish)... chances are they were coerced.
Give me your house, dammit.
The intractable thing being that of course the Arabs "stole it fair and square" in the first place. What's really being advocated for is "no steal-backsies".
Every nation has a checkered past and none can claim to be without any blame but few have greater justification for their creation than Israel.
OK, so Palestinian people pay for German sins? I guess that sounds OK if you aren't Palestinian.
Funny!
This amounts to blaming the abstraction of "Zionism" in Theodor Herzl's pen for the Arab countries' expulsion of their preexisting Jewish populations.
One could turn around Phil's statement and say the establishment of Middle Eastern national states after WW2 was cursed from the beginning, since it has inevitably lead to the slaughter and ethnic cleansing of national minorities. See Jews, Armenians, Greeks, Kurds, Christians, ...
Say what you will about empires like the Ottomans, but at least they understood their lands to be multiethnic, and engaged in slightly fewer genocides.
That's simply not correct. The Armenians (also the Greeks and Assyrians) are the most famous examples, but you can also include Serbs and Bulgarians here.
They in fact did not. The Ottomans engaged in routine ethnic cleansing in order to ensure that every area had a loyal, Muslim majority. Ask anyone from the Balkans.
Dude, that is not the preferred nomenclature, please, it is:
Say what you will about _the tenents of_ empires like the Ottomans, but at least they understood their lands to be multiethnic, and engaged in slightly fewer genocides.
I can understand the genocides. The Devshirme system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devshirme) is pretty weird though!
I agree that at some point you lose your right to return, and whatever the time cutoff is, Judea definitely precedes it. However, I still strongly support Israel as a state. Whether or not the UN *should* have allowed Israel to become a state, they *did*, and the legitimacy that conferred cannot and should not be undone.
You seem to be a bit blinkered in your views here. Who is the credible negotiating partner on the Israeli side? Is the Israeli side not generally hostile to a Palestinian state? What about the intransigence on the part of Israelis who insist on maintaining an apartheid state?
As Matty says, this is an intractable problem. There is no question about that. But you don't solve the dilemma by ignoring the problematic positions that exist on both sides. Given that neither side, as presently constituted, are willing to empower their representatives to back down from their maximalist positions, I honestly cannot imagine that this issue is resolved by anything other than an imposed solution; with the US being the most likely party to impose the solution. Clearly this resolution is suboptimal, but we are well past the point where we (the US and the world at large) can afford to allow the status quo to obtain. The atrocities committed by both sides will (and already are) lead to further atrocities being visited upon communities well outside of Israel's borders. The sad fact is that we are, all of us, complicit in the ongoing tragedy as we have allowed our political leadership to blithely ignore the danger of Israel's shift toward increasingly hardline politics and the extreme radicalization of Palestinian youth in the occupied territories. We have reached a pass where we can no longer avert our gaze. The US needs to impose a two state solution, ideally with the assent and backing of the Arab world and the UN.
The Israelis who could make peace were in power from about the 1940s to the 1990s: but now they don't seem to get elected anymore, I wonder why that is? When were the Palestinians who were interested in making peace in power again?
Rather a stupid question, really. When have the Palestinians had either power or agency? Was it after the Balfour Declaration? Or was it when the British were given the Mandate of Palestine? The elections that the Palestinians have held to elect leadership were conducted under a state of occupation and arranged by and held at the behest of the occupying state. Their ability to campaign, educate, and persuade makes electing a truly representative leadership impossible.
Utter nonsense. When did they *not* have agency? Could they not accept the 1947 plan and celebrate the 75th birthday of their starte this year? Could they not negotiate peace with Israel in the 1990s? Can their elected leadership even now in the West Bank and all the organizations purporting to support them abroad even now not unequivocally condemn Hamas instead of justifying or celebrating its crimes against humanity? Palestinians always had agency they always have choices and they tend to make the most despicable ones.
Mate - you don’t know what you are talking about. There were two sides to these negotiations and both sides refused to give enough to reach a settlement. Rabin was assassinated for simply agreeing to the talks in Oslo and Barak lost to Sharon despite offering no concessions to the Palestinians at Camp David. If you don’t know the history, you probably shouldn’t comment on the subject.
The Oslo accords under Rabin created the PA, the most dramatic development in the region since 1967. Barak made unprecedented concessions, eg dividing Jerusalem, a taboo idea until that point. Pot kettle.
Yet somehow the South Africans managed under apartheid, with leaders who were often in jail or conducting operations outside the country, and yet they still were able to make a deal.
You are being somewhat disingenuous with that comparison. The world made the South African white leadership a pariah and forced them to negotiate with the opposition. Israel is being enabled by the western world and is thus unwilling to budge from their maximalist position. In a world where one side won’t be moved from a maximalist position it is ridiculous to expect the other side to move.
Characterizing Israel's current posture as maximalist renders the whole comment unserious.
The international community was isolating S. Africa. The squeeze just got tighter and tighter.
Israel is the #1 recipient of US aid.
Israel isn't compromising because they don't have to.
>When have the Palestinians had either power or agency?
The 1400 years from the Islamic Conquests through to the British Mandate.
Ok - yes.
I think its more complicated than that.
Between '48 and '66 Israeli-Arabs lived under literal martial law. And then after '67 settlers started moving into the West Bank.
I don't think Israel was completely run by peacniks from 48-99
It wasn't "completely' run by peaceniks but had multiple leaders who were willing to take serious political and personal risks for peace, were willing to return to their Arab enemies vast territories in return for peace (and did!) and one of them lost his life in his earnest efforts to reach peace with the Palestinians. Of course not all Israelis wanted peace, and a fringe minority violently opposed it, but the Israeli mainstream has on multiple occasions been able to elect and support leaders who worked for peace and took risks for peace. And Israeli civil society and popular culture has seen multiple waves of peace movements, peace songs, pro peace and human rights organizations and so forth. Virtually none of this finds any significant Palestinian parallel at any point.
If the one who "lost his life" is Rabin he was killed by a Jewish fundamentalist, let's not forget. And then Netanyahu won by half a point.
Before the assassination Netanyahu led a mock funeral procession featuring a coffin and hangman's noose at an anti-Rabin rally where protesters chanted, "Death to Rabin"
Few assassinations achieve their goal, this one did.
Labor returned to power 3 years later. What killed it is Palestinian terrorism. As I said somewhere in the endless thread nihilists on both sides help each other.
I think Scott essentially gets it right here: a two state solution (that gives virtually all of the West Bank back to the Palestinians) needs to be imposed by a U.S. led coalition and enforced by a U.S. led peacekeeping force that guarantee both a demilitarized Palestine and secure borders. I describe the idea in a bit more detail here:
https://gordonstrause.substack.com/p/israel-and-the-palestinians
The additional point I try to add in that piece, which really is my response to Matt's Substack today, is the acknowledgement that this is not "justice." There will never be justice for the Palestinians who lost their homes in the Nakba.
But by that same token, however, there will never be justice for the Ashkenazi Jews who lost everything in the Holocaust or the Sephardic Jews who were expelled from the countries of their childhood. And there will never be justice for the slaves brought from Africa or born into slavery; the indigenous populations of America, Canada, or Australians; the victims of Stalin's USSR or Pol Pot's Cambodia, or the many other tragedies in human history.
[Note: As pointed out below, that should have been "Miztrahi" not "Sephardic" Jews in the paragraph above]
Sometimes you just have to accept that there will never be justice for the past and make the most of your life going forward. This is the only positive path forward for the Palestinians. Trying to get justice for the past, especially from a people that suffered far greater injustices in almost exactly that same time period (injustices admittedly committed mostly, though not exclusively: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1929_Hebron_massacre, by other people) will never succeed and will doom Palestinians to always be refugees.
A US-led peacekeeping force trying to impose modern Western values in the Middle East? What could POSSIBLY go wrong?
Not imposing Western values; just ensuring Israelis that a Palestinian state on the West Bank will not be militarized.
Preventing people from militarizing = imposing the Western value that peaceful coexistence >>> fighting to the death to reclaim a piece of land.
Hmmm. Much as I wish it were true, I'm not sure history suggests that peaceful coexistence is a Western value. :(
Usually, when people use that phrase, I think they are talking about capitalism, pluralism, feminism, LGBTQ rights, etc. While I believe in those values, the force I'm proposing would try to enforce none of those things; their sole mission would be to enforce the promise we would make to Israelis and Palestinians that neither would be attacked by other.
If that's a Western value, then I have to reject the idea that "imposing Western values" is a bad thing.
This proposal has one merit... I can talk about it in terms of the merits for my home nation, the United States of America, since it's calling on the US to conquer both Israel and Palestine (at the leadership of a "coalition") and impose a peace at swordpoint.
My evaluation? I think there are absolutely no merits for the US in doing that. None.
The idea is not to "conquer" or to impose democracy by force, but simply apply enough pressure to get an agreement, and serve as an interposition force to ensure that there is no direct contact (fighting) in the future.
It has already been done on a smaller scale in Bosnia with the Dayton agreements and the permanent Implementation Force.
Simply, instead of one dysfunctional confederation, you would have two fully sovereign states.
SP: The primary benefit to the U.S. would be a much more stable Middle East with a dramatically improved standing in Arab world public opinion.
In addition, I’d argue, that there is unlikely to be any actual fighting. The threat of the end of military assistance (and of economic sanctions if necessary) will get the Israelis to agree and the Palestinians have essentially no military beyond Hamas (which will soon cease to exist).
A more stable Middle East and better Arab opinion seem like extremely weak returns on that investment, even if everything worked out exactly as you hope. Which is certainly far from guaranteed. I guess they're technically "merits" in that sure, it would be a good thing for the US if it could magically happen without us doing anything, but not at that price.
I don't mind my government doing some diplomacy and throwing some cash around for those sorts of foreign gains, but I'm going to have give a big "definitely not" to the idea of launching a military occupation of indefinite duration for "stability" and "better opinions". Risks way too large, the upsides way too low.
I want you to know that I typed and then deleted stuff about the likely reaction of Palestinians and Israelis because I am trying to, as promised, keep to a tight US-focus on "would this be good for my country" without even worrying about whether it's good for other people.
Because that's how it works with peacekeepers. They definitely aren't killed in suicide bombings while in barracks or anything, prompting withdrawal...
That is a risk. But there are lots of peackeeping operations that don't suffer casualties.
https://peacekeeping.un.org/en/list-of-past-peacekeeping-operations
It's not inevitable.
Because today's comments sorely lack sufficient pedantry, I'll try to fill the gap by noting that most of the Middle Eastern Jews who fled to Israel are "Mizrachi" ("Eastern") and not "Sephardic" (originating from Spain).
A Slow Boring comment thread with no pedantry is like Japanese cuisine with no soy sauce.
Heh. Good point. I always forget that.
The right to return had salience 30 or more years ago but there are very few non-Israelí Palestinians alive who once lived within the pre-1967 borders. Their descendants may feel that they have that right in the abstract but it would be more realistically addressed in terms of compensation and reparations. Anyone who was genuinely compelled to “return” to a place where they never lived could be accommodated through a modest symbolic quota of “returnees”.
We go to war with Israel? Really? Peacekeeping force? Israel just stands down and lets us take over?
And just who joins this U.S. led coalition?
No. We don't go to war with Israel. But after Hamas has been eliminated in Gaza, we should make it clear that they need to get out of the West Bank and give the Palestinians a state in the West Bank and Gaa (with our security guarantee that we'll keep it demilitarized). And we should be willing to both cut off aid and if necessary enforce economic sanctions against Israel if they refuse to comply.
Ultimately, I think this kind of intervention (and I use the word deliberately for all its meanings) is the act of a friend. Internal Israeli politics and the craziness of the settlers is going to make it hard for Israel to withdraw from the settlements. Being economically "forced" to do so by the U.S. will make it more politically possible.
Well said.
My point is that even if you were to impose a two state solution, the push for irredentism remains, and the existence of a Palestinian state would likely result in what most Israeli hardliners believe. That is a safe territory where a Hezbollah like entity would emerge.
There are many on the Palestinian side that profit off of irredentist promises that they will never be able to deliver on. (I remember Arafat's wife going shopping in Paris.)
There are of course profiteering irredentists on all sides. Neither side can credibly promise to curb their most extremist elements that want to take land that a deal would assign to the other side.
I am not saying that the solution is to be imposed only on the Israeli side. The solution would have to bind both sides and there would have to be enforcement. Clearly this would not be a simple task, but there are far more Arab nations right now that would be accepting of and would profit from more peace in the region than there were 50 years ago.
I just don't know how you impose such a solution without irredentists using violence to make the idea of peace without military occupation feasible.
It was imposed in the former Yugoslavia fairly successfully after the 1990’s wars. I served as a member of IFOR myself during the first year after Dayton. Fighting stopped pretty much the moment IFOR peacekeepers rolled across the Bosnian border.
There would almost certainly need to be an international police force in both states empowered to impose consequences for actions meant to undermine the two state solution.
Wait, is that just going back to pre-1947 the mandate?
I joke, but you see why this is all intractable. There is a cultural and value problem that most Europeans got out of their system after two world wars. (Except the Danes who want to reforge the Kalmar Union.)
Yes, an international force led by the U.S. (who is the only country the Israelis trust) would be necessary to ensure that Palestine would be demilitarized and no threat to Israel.
Meanwhile, the borders would today's borders, with virtually all the settlements being turned over to Palestine except a few of those close to the border (for which the Palestinians would be compensated for with land swaps elsewhere).
You think? My perception is that an autonomous Palestinian state would be at war with Israel within months. Where is the capacity to marginalize Hamas and other the "to the last man" hardliners going to arise out of?
I think this is the problem here; I don't think these two statements are in conflict with each other.
I think if you had an autonomous Palestinian state, then Hamas wouldn't stay in charge for long. But I think they'd start a war before they got a chance to lose an election.
We have already seen that Hamas seems interested in only having enough elections to get them into power--not so interested in holding elections after that.
To some folks, HAMAS, Hezbollah, Munich, the Second Intifada, and that slaughter two weeks ago never happened.
I think the time when the U.S. could do much of anything at all to help with this situation, much less impose anything about it has long past. The notion that the U.S. can be an "unwavering ally to Israel" and also anything resembling a neutral arbiter of this dispute has pretty much always been farcical but is especially impossible to square now that U.S. domestic policy basically make being tough on Israel or even showing "tough love" to them impossible, resulting in situations where U.S. Presidents nominally say they don't support settlements while doing nothing to stop them and actively vetoing UN resolutions against them. Furthermore Israel is basically self-sufficient at this point so even if the U.S. could credibly threaten to withhold foreign aid to Israel they could probably just do without us.
You may well be correct in your analysis here. My broader point is that we, as members of a representative democracy, need to start demanding that our elected representatives turn their attention to a solution. It can’t be shoved back into the bottle for 50 more years. Or, rather, it won’t be and the blowback will be harmful for us as well.
The cost of there not being a deal was low enough prior to last week that the contours (right of return is tough to compromise) prevented one happening. That’s no longer true. The West would really like there to be and so would the Arab leaders. May make room for compromise.
"Matty"? Have you seen our host's no holds barred Twitter blocking policy? Tread carefully; he means business.
Hah! No Twitter for me. I try to stay on boards like this where there are generally thoughtful discussions.
Not sure the US can or should "impose" anything, but I feel that ages ago we should have made aid contingent on no new settlements. And it isn't too late to start now.
Settlements make the problem so much worse.
There is no credible negotiating partner on either side. The last time the Israeli government participated seriously in the peace process, Yitzhak Rabin came to a deal with the Palestinians, and for this Benjamin Netanyahu denounced him as a traitor who deserved to die. Shortly therefore, Rabin was shot dead, not by an Arab but by one of his fellow Jews. Since then, Israel has continued to build illegal settlements in the West Bank, which is not something that they would be doing if they had any interest in the peace process. What they've been doing instead amounts to a slow-motion annexation. And that's not even mentioning their illegal takeover of East Jerusalem and moving their capital to Jerusalem, which according to the UN partition plan was supposed to be an international city not wholly controlled by either side, and certainly not used by either side as its capital.
Not omitted from this post though--Matt explicitly discusses the expulsion of Jews from Arab countries.
Matt isn’t proposing it as a solution. He is describing the major Palestinian position that is incompatible with Israeli’s interests.
Right - impossible to maintain a Jewish state with this proposal
Matt isn’t proposing any solution--he’s explaining why all proposed solutions are impossible as things stand.
You’re being charitable. It would be a total bloodbath.
I may be misunderstanding your reference here, but Cherokees and the Choctaw are allowed to live in Florida/Alabama/Georgia if they want to move there.
Good point. For separate reasons, I decided that I didn't feel like standing by the entire statement, so I deleted it.
I do want to recover the idea, though, of a "right of first refusal to return". Basically give Palestinians the right of first refusal any time their ancestral property comes up on the market.
I think it's the most reasonable version of a R2R, one which protects everyone's rights in a gradual process. It'd also be the sweetest R2R deal ever procured in human history -- usually, partitions and removals, as evil as they are, are permanent. Not even the Cherokees and Choctaw got such a sweet deal; they merely get American citizenship and freedom of movement, which any Palestinian peace deal including "RoFR2R" would presumably already include.
>I think it's the most reasonable version of a R2R<
Perhaps as one component, yes. I think that, back in the days when a two state solution looked feasible, a R2R would've looked something like: (i) Acknowledge the existence of said right. (ii) In practice administer/adjudicate that right on an individual basis so that no more than, say, 100K Palestinians return in reality. (iii) Provide financial compensation to address the disparity.
And yes, a right of first refusal to return might be a sensible add-on to such a deal.
Well, I think it's what you need to make any kind of R2R feasible in the first place, not just as an add-on. Israel will never agree to an unlimited R2R, let alone one that involves large displacements.
I think the selling point to the Palestinians here is, "Look, we know you suffered a catastrophe, and we know this isn't the full R2R, but this is the version of R2R that has the best chance of success. If you give it a chance, and if we include compensation/incentives, a lot of Israelis might even happily give away properties that right now today they're telling you 'hell no, fuck off!' over. Do you want THIS, or do you want 5 more generations of war that ultimately leads to a shitty deal where you get screwed over WAY more than this?"
My first thought was that this is a pretty cool idea -- and maybe there's a way to make it work in some form.
But on a further moment's reflection, I think the problem both morally and practically is that RoFR2R is premised on the returners' ability to meet the offering price either with cash in hand or by obtaining credit. And this is a population that has as one of its main grievances the deprivation of economic opportunities as a result of their displacement. So, not only are many Palestinians probably not especially creditworthy, but many of those will also perceive that fact as an injustice visited on them by Israel that gives them an even stronger moral claim to restitution.
One could imagine a situation where Israel in some way or another steps in to help plug the gap in financing. Aside from all the usual downsides of the government assuming a lot of bad debt, though, can you even begin to imagine the tsuris when the Palestinians discover that the right to return is being metered by... Jewish moneylenders?!?
I think you're misreading what I was saying.
RoFR2R would probably be FREE for the Palestinians - likely considered a form of reparation under the agreement. The Israeli government, far richer than Gaza, would pay some negotiated purchase price.
Come to think of it, if Israel has property taxes, then property taxes would be a bigger issue actually. THAT part probably WOULD result in some sort of financing scheme. But I'd propose that be handled by Gaza's putative government - perhaps they finance it out of international aid funds or something. That way, their own government is invested in their people's success in returning.
Sorry, you're right, I did misunderstand your proposal. In my defense, usually a "right of first refusal" means you get to buy at the market-clearing price without having to bid against other buyers, not that you get to initiate a forced sale (much less get the asset for free). Is what you're saying that it's Israel that would have the right of first refusal? But then I'm not sure what you mean about a negotiated price. The point of a RoFR is that there's nothing to negotiate: the seller tells Israel what the price is, and Israel can take it or leave it. If they leave it, the property goes up for sale on the open market.
But if Israel is buying the land just to give it away, it's unclear on what basis it's going to decide to accept any particular price for any particular property. That seems to lose the advantages of allocating rights through the market that made the RoFR concept appealing (to me at least) in the first place. The obvious incentive will be for owners to dump crappy unsaleable properties on the government, at a price that's inflated relative to their actual value but still lower than what Israel would have to pay for someplace people would actually want to live.
In one sense I agree this is all very complicated. In another it seems very simple. As long as the relevant Palestinian authorities persist in fighting a war they've been losing overwhelmingly for 75 years they are going to keep losing it and the Palestinian people are going to keep paying the price. The position of Hamas seems to be that the Palestinian cause merits fighting to the last Palestinian person. The only alternative to that outcome is for some authority, internal or external, to find the capacity to keep Hamas or whoever else from making war on Israel on Gaza's behalf.
In the late 40's, new borders were being drawn and redrawn all across the Middle East and Europe. Only this particular border has led to a 75-year fight, starting with the 1948 war between newly-created Israel and Egypt, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. Then again in 1967, when Egypt, Syria and Lebanon went back to war with Israel.
The difference between this situation all the others, of course, is religion. For all the talk about right-of-return, settlements, two-state solutions, ethnic cleansing and terrorism, the reason this particular situation has no current fix is that each side is fighting on behalf of their entire religion, both its history and its future. And I am very pessimistic about the possibility of a negotiated solution as a result. So I wholeheartedly agree with your last statement, for now and for the foreseeable future.
That's true as far as it goes, but the slightly older Northern Ireland issue was about religion and got solved, so it's not impossible to solve religious conflicts.
I think a big problem here is a lot of people don't actually admit their goals and have this strategy that if they keep their goals secret the status quo will work in their favor. So on the Israeli right you have people fantasizing of population transfers and Greater Israel, and on the Palestinian left you have fantasies of the demographics forcing Israel into a situation where Muslims will have a majority and take it over.
But these things, while believed, don't usually get said. Rather everyone feels that if they speak in code it will persuade the world and in any event, time is on their side.
The reality is that time is on no extremist's side. There isn't going to be a transfer and there also isn't going to be a scenario where Israel is forced into binationality. All that will happen over time is the Palestinians will get more immiserated as everyone uses them as pawns on their chessboard.
It got solved because you got a secular UK and a secular Republic of Ireland who stopped caring about religion - that is both the states and the people stopped caring. This meant that the people in Northern Ireland (who still cared) found that their alleged sponsor was working with the other side's alleged sponsor to try to calm things down.
If the problem was settlers in the West Bank (whom the Israeli state regarded as an embarrassing relic of the past) and a West Bank with a lot of religious fanatics who wanted it reattached to a majority-Palestinian East Bank, but the East Bank state was a secular democracy where the Islamic religious hierarchy had badly discredited themselves pushing people away from formal religion, then you can see how East Bank / Jordan and Israel could work together to get their respective pseudo-proxies to calm down and stop killing each other.
But none of that is true. Israel is getting more religious, not more secular; Jordan is not a Palestinian state, but one that fought off a PLO coup and defines itself against Palestinians, and is also profoundly religious, also not even slightly secular.
I think people overread the similarities of NI to I/P and underread the differences.
Northern Ireland hasn't been solved. It's frozen in amber. It will come up again if there is a change in the status quo. There are already problems (see the closure of Stormont and paramilitary activity) due to Sinn Fein's rise relative to the other parties.
*due to DUP's intransigence and Brexit?
Yes, the rise of Sinn Fein is intimately related to the fact of DUP intransigence and Brexit. They are all mixed together. The unionists have made it clear so far that they won't accept nationalist leadership, even soft nationalist leadership like the SDLP, of NI, so there is no downside to supporting SF.
One major factor in resolving Northern Ireland was EU membership for the UK and Ireland. Where the border was drawn mattered a lot less. Brexit has screwed this up again.
Neither Catholics nor Protestants believed their religion was founded in Belfast, or that its buildings and shrines were central to their worldwide set of followers. On the religious front, comparing Northern Ireland to Israel/Palestine is like comparing a mouse to an elephant: they are both mammals, but that's about as far as it goes.
Nor were they *really* fighting about religion as such. The conflict there was never really (to more than a tiny majority) about transubstantiation or the proper number of sacraments, or what have you. Religion was a proxy for ethnicity, or, perhaps more accurately, tribal identity.
That's true in Israel-Palestine too. When Israel supporters express worries about the demographics of a binational state or Israel losing its Jewish character, they are talking about ethnicity, not religion.
And when Palestinians talk of a right to return, that is also an ethnic claim not a religious one.
The settlements do raise religious issues and are important, but for the most part this conflict is actually a lot MORE like Ireland than people imagine- in both cases religion is a stand-in for tribal issues.
But there is a literal, physical place in Jerusalem where the conflict exists in concrete (stone?) form--the Temple Mount has a Mosque on it. The holiest site of one is literally under the second-holiest site of the other.
Yes. This is almost always the case in the modern world. Above I probably should have written "...since the 17th century." Clearly if you go back far enough in Europe (and indeed in America, especially New England), large numbers of people burned with passion about various theological controversies. This seems to be almost non-existent now.
What's that joke about a person driving up to a checkpoint during the Troubles and the armed men there demanding to know if the person was a Protestant or a Catholic. The person responded that he was an atheist, to which the guard responded, "Aye, but are you a Protestant or a Catholic atheist?"
A classic.
In Ireland, religion was a proxy for support for British rule. Which might itself have been a proxy for ethnicity if we assume most Protestants in NI are the descendants of the British who moved there but I’m not sure about that. (FWIW whenever I think of Ireland on this topic I start singing “A Nation Once Again” in my head and recalling Irish friends staying with certainty that NI would eventually rejoin the rest of Ireland and I have more compassion for reflexively nationalistic attitudes on both sides of border conflicts, even if i ultimately disagree with them.)
Northern Ireland would be FAR better off joining its EU neighbor to the south. It's no longer the theocracy it used to be, and has an almost completely secular character at this point. Not would it threaten British or Irish identity.
The religious dynamic is so central as you said.
I feel bad for the Jewish people. Two consecutive religions came around and were like "See, we made your religion better! Join us!" and the Jews were like "No, we are good thanks" and Christianity and Islam took it very, very personally.
As a non theist I very much appreciate the fact I've never had a Jewish Missionary knock on my door and ask me if I've heard about the lord and savior Yahweh.
As David R. and others have discussed though, the Israeli far right (which continues to grow in strength) seems to be a lot closer to implementing their goal, especially when they have uncritical support from the US (since the Biden administration refuses to publicly criticize Israel under any circumstances, and post H.W. Bush the GOP also competes on who can be more slavishly pro-Israel, e.g. Nikki Haley). I don't think it's either surprising or unreasonable that many Gazans believe Israel will never allow them to return to their houses in the north of the Strip.
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2023/10/israel-gaza-hamas-evacuation/675665/
ETA: Given how proudly Haley touts her pro-Israel credentials, it's ironic that DeSantis is criticizing her for saying that "America has always been sympathetic to the fact that you can separate civilians from terrorists."
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/16/desantis-haley-gaza-israel-hamas-war-00121869
Completely agree that the hardliners on both sides are disingenuous. I find both the settlers and the BDS movement to not behave honestly.
The Northern Ireland issue is not solved, and if a majority votes for union with Ireland, there almost certainly will be violence and population movements. Don't kid yourself.
Is a NI vote a possibility? Looking at a map it seems that just calving off bits of western and southern NI to unify with RoI would move a lot of Catholics while letting a lot of Protestants remain.
Belfast is majority nationalist/Catholic now. A repartition is a no-go politically and would directly lead to violence relative to the status quo.
"[E]ach side is fighting on behalf of their entire religion, both its history and its future."
That's not true. Each side is fighting for the entire Jewish religion. The Palestinians and their supporters want to completely erase it. Islam is not under any threat whatsoever.
"Each side is fighting for the entire Jewish religion."
Uh, no? There are lots of Jews outside Israel, and Jewish practice does not in fact require life in Israel (until the Messiah, anyways). We survived the Holocaust; if (God forbid) the Palestinians were to kill every Jew in Israel, Judaism would survive that too.
Fair point--I should have said each side is fighting about the existence of a Jewish-majority state.
A lot of the "partitions" that happened after WWII led to lasting problems and conflicts (India/Pakison, Vietnam, Korea, China/Taiwan). Even Germany wasn't resolved until the 1990s.
Israel invaded Egypt in 1967. Common misconception
This strikes me as a pretty major misreading of the situation, on a number of levels. You can't really call what is going on a "war," in any meaningful sense. There is a lot of terrorism, which is really bad, but it's not a war, and that becomes particularly clear when you roll in events in the West Bank plus the settler movement plus Israeli government policy on hardening and expansion over the last twenty years.
And one reason why you cannot call it a war is that there's not really any way to "surrender"; Palestinians in the West Bank haven't been engaged in a campaign of centrally (government) organized armed resistance, and that lack of armed resistance has not appreciably improved their situation--indeed, it has steadily worsened from both a territorial control and a security standpoint. A big part of the reason why the Israeli army was off its game at the Gaza border is that they were redeployed to deal with the rise in West Bank violence between Israeli settlers and Palestinians.
It's a hard problem not because someone is being deliberately, foolishly obtuse, but rather because it is a hard problem. The whole theory of both the settlement movement and the right of return is that people want the land but not people of the "wrong" ethnicity on the land. Surrendering or ending the "war" or whatever you want to call it doesn't solve that problem because people who surrender are still people on the land; it's a problem you can only solve by either giving up the claim to the land or giving up the ethnic cleansing project.
It was incredibly politically contentious in Israel when the government pulled back from the settlements encroaching Gaza. Hamas is an awful, evil terrorist organization. But if they held a press conference tomorrow declaring "surrender," (which I think they should do!) it would not "solve" the I/P situation or end the immiseration of Palestinians as a long-term structural matter.
There is a way for the PA to "surrender": put a peace treaty on the table that drops the demand for return into Israel. Then they would actually achieve the situation the Western Left has imagined for 20 years: Israel would be the sole obstacle to a two-state solution.
This seems like a fantasy to me. As I wrote, above, I think giving up land claims is going to have to be a big part of any deal, so I guess I agree with you, but I sort of think part of the whole "hard problems are hard" issue is that you have a genuinely difficult set of political questions, and the lack of effective actors is one of them.
The Palestinian Authority isn't at war with Israel and isn't in negotiations with the Israeli government, and elements of the current Israeli government have decried the present PA leadership as not worth negotiating with. Maybe the Israelis are wrong, and the PA is a viable leadership structure, but I'm pretty skeptical that if the PA called some kind of press conference tomorrow and declared that they were open negotiating that the Netanyahu government would be like, "Woah! Finally an answer to our prayers! We have to slow our roll here and start negotiations!"
Also, to be honest, do you really think it makes sense for the Israelis to negotiate? On some level, the ethnic cleansing project in the West Bank seems to be more or less proceeding successfully. It's really slow and somewhat politically contentious, but the settlements get bigger--and the Palestinians get steadily squeezed off of more land--every year. I think that's a morally repugnant move, sort of like I think the Chinese project against the Uighurs is morally repugnant, but from a domestic political standpoint it appears to be the reality that a majority of Israeli voters are comfortable with.
I don't much like any of those realities, but I think breaking the logjam would require genuine political courage to try and change hearts and minds on both sides at a societal level, and we know for a fact that it might get you assassinated. I kind of have a feeling that the political / social / economic / whatever conditions that finally render any particular apartheid state unsustainable are extremely contingent, so I'm not really sure what that looks like in the I/P situation, other than thinking that it probably looks different from South Africa, which itself looked different from the United States, and so on.
Hard problems are hard.
I mean, all this is true, but there are *also* many people on all sides being deliberately, foolishly obtuse.
One thing I wonder about is to what degree the people being deliberately, foolishly obtuse are responding to the hard-problemness, in a "the only rational response is insanity" kind of way.
I don't have any particular answer for this question, but my experience from both my upbringing in (and exit from) a conservative religious setting and my work in academic public health and bioethics stuff is that sometimes people retreat into being deliberately, foolishly obtuse as a mental stance when the alternative is to admit to a position or set of realities that is incommensurate with elements of their identity or worldview.
Don't get me wrong: I think everyone should put on their grown-up pants and quit managing their cognitive dissonance by immiserating other humans. Full stop. But it's an unfortunate fact of human brains that we experience cognitive dissonance as a pretty intense form of psychic distress and will go to great lengths to avoid that feeling, especially when it also puts us at odds with our immediate community. I made a set of choices that forced me through that wringer, and even though I did believe and still do believe those were the right choices, it was pretty awful and basically still is around the holidays.
I agree but that's a heavy lift. Criticizing Hamas could get you killed so you would have to actually try to overthrow them with force of arms. "I'm killing my brothers so my enemies will stop dropping bombs on my head" isn't exactly a great slogan for recruitment. What Palestine needs right now is a Palestinian born Gandhi or MLK. But those don't exactly come around every day.
It's important to note that Israel took in similar numbers of Arab Jews. Like the Palestinians, these Jews were displaced, lost property, wealth, etc. Some would say ethnically cleansed. But Israel took them in and paid to resettle them. The Zionist position that other Arab states should do the same for Palestinians doesn't seem as draconian when viewed through that lens. Since we're talking about how Arabs view the right of return - Israeli's views on Mizrahi Jews are also cornerstone to their position. American progressives / liberals (myself included!) would be well served to better understand that viewpoint because there is an intrinsic fairness to it and these ideas don't seem to make it into in our discourse here in the U.S.
One example (of many): “The trial and execution of Shafiq Adas 75 years ago are fairly well documented. The purpose of this report is to shed light on the political atmosphere that prevailed in the Iraq that led to his tragic death, which ultimately triggered the mass emigration of Iraqi Jews.” https://www.memri.org/reports/75th-anniversary-execution-iraqi-jewish-merchant-shafiq-adas-and-expulsion-iraqs-jewish
There was a lot of ethnic cleansing going around in 1948. Germans were driven out of their homes in Silesia and Pomerania, what is now the "Recovered Territories" of western Poland. Other Germans were driven from Sudetenland by Czechoslovakia. Hungarians were driven out of Transylvania, Bulgarians out of Dobruja, both by Romania.
In all of these cases, they were granted citizenship; the children and grandchildren of those driven out came to accept that, while they might visit, they were not going to be able to return. All of these people have had the right of return for approaching 20 years, as their common EU citizenship has meant they had the right to live in those countries.
There are other cases in Europe where the EU doesn't create the right to return - Poles and Lithuanians pushed out of Belarus, Poles from Ukraine, Moldovans from Ukraine.
I do think that one big failure of understanding about the Palestinian conflict is that many Israelis (and lots of outsiders) see Palestinians as just Arabs "from the River to the Sea", and don't conceive of them as being a different nationality from Syrians or Jordanians or Egyptians, which - to many Israelis - are just geographical divisions of Arabs, in the same way that, say, Texans and New Yorkers and Californians are just geographical divisions of Americans. Palestinians very much don't see themselves in those terms; they don't think that they could move to another Arab state and feel at home there; there isn't a sense of a disunited Arab people that happen to be spread across many states - unlike, say Italy or Germany in 1850. The United Arab Republic was a failed experiment in the 1970s.
Pan-Arab nationalism (in the sense of wanting to create a single state from the Atlantic to the Tigris, from the Taurus mountains to the Indian Ocean) is dead. And that means that Palestinians won't easily accept becoming citizens of another Arab country. I suspect that if there had been a Palestinian state in 1948, it might have been different - those expelled across the Green Line might well have settled within the West Bank - but that branch of the trousers of time is now closed to us.
If Palestinian leaders had accepted the 1948 UN charter, they would have legal recognition and political rights under international law. Irredentism however dominated and their leaders rejected that. It has created much human suffering.
See Plan Dalet
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"There was a lot of ethnic cleansing going around in 1948."
Thanks for mentioning this. I don't think a lot of people realize just how many "population transfers" were going on during and after WWII. Here's a partial list [1], but the short version is that many central and eastern European countries were actually fairly multi-ethnic pre-WWII, and the post-WWII consensus was basically that multi-ethnic countries tended to cause problems, so the victors of WW II decided that people were getting ethnostates --- like it or not.
And the few non-ethnostates that persisted --- like Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia --- fell apart later, so maybe the WW II victors were on to something.
One interesting thing here is language. These mass-relocations have historically been refereed to as "population transfers", "expulsions", etc., and I guess "ethnic cleansing" is the language that would be used today (at least on the left), but I'd prefer to reserve that term for situations that involve more killing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_evacuation_and_expulsion
This is funny to me in a vacuum, because even "ethnic cleansing" seems several steps down the euphemism treadmill from "genocide".
I totally agree that "ethnic cleansing" has a super-high euphemism factor, and as a consequence, its meaning isn't very specific. Maybe my usage is unusual --- a consequence of trying to give it a less general meaning that others don't feel the need to give it?, but regardless of its meaning, I would use a more specific term for what happened after WW II: expulsions or population transfers (if you like euphemisms). That distinguishes it from the more deadly types of ethnic cleansing.
I understand that Palestinians may not accept that they must take another nationality, but it does not follow that we (people who are not Palestinian) should indulge them in this. I have yet to see an explanation for why the rest of the world should recognize a Palestinian nationality that persists across generations that have never lived in historic Palestine.
The simplest argument is that there are generations of Jewish people all over the world who have never lived in Eretz Yisrael and yet they have the right of return.
They have the right of return because they created a state and control who can immigrate into it and become a citizen. That's a core component of states and not unique to Israel. Other countries also recognize an ethnic right of return. If the Palestinians want to declare a state, then let them do that. They of course would have to settle for less land than they want, but they could do it. So far, they haven't been willing to do that. Again, it's not clear why we should indulge them in this position.
Sure, this is what it boils down to in the end: Israeli rights “matter” more than corresponding Palestinian rights not because of the greater justness of the cause but because the Israelis have bigger guns and stronger friends. But it’s not clear to me why those of us with out an ethnic-religious dog in this fight should “indulge” the Israeli position either, outside of sheer power politics.
I disagree. Ever since the Israeli pullout of Gaza, the government in Gaza could have declared a state and sought international recognition. Arab states probably would have recognized it right away. It is the explicit policy of the government in Gaza not to declare a state since they are unwilling to give up their claims. Similarly, the Palestinians have been unable to get recognition for a state in the West Bank. The Palestinian government does not want to exercise their "rights" to state formation and create their own right of return because they refuse to accept the limited land that the new state (or states) would control. That's a choice they are making. Just as we did and don't accept the maximalist claims of Israel on their state, it doesn't follow that we should accept the maximalist claims of the Palestinians. If the Palestinians want a state, let them declare it, raise an army and seek international recognition. The path of Somaliland is still open to them.
From the Palestinian point of view: Israel has a right of return for people who never lived there, but doesn't have one for people who did.
Yes, and Germans don't have a right of return to Kaliningrad. Pakistanis don't have a right of return to India and vice versa. Finns don't have a right of return to Vyborg. Armenians don't have a right of return to Turkey or Azerbaijan.
To extend the analogy, Russian-speakers who grew up in Kazakhstan or Turkmenistan or Ukraine have a right of return to Kaliningrad and Vyborg, but Germans and Finns don't.
Palestinians would have been much wiser to try to understand the Israeli point of view as countless Israelis tried to understand their’s. At the end of the day the two states solution , official accepted by Israel and by majority of Israelis over many years, is compatible with both Palestinian individual rights and collective self determination. Palestinians fantasies and agenda of ethnic cleansing and genocide by contrast are compatible with neither for Jews and Israelis.
A viable two-state solution isn’t feasible at this point without displacing at least some of the Jewish settlers in the West Bank, and I just don’t see Israel agreeing to that, ever.
That's a reason why the Palestinians hold the views they hold, not for why everyone else ought to hold those views too.
I was trying to explain, not to defend.
>If the Palestinians want to declare a state, then let them do that. They of course would have to settle for less land than they want, but they could do it<
I don't see how "they could do it" while a Likud coalition governs the country. They have explicitly ruled out a Palestinian State on the West Bank. This has been a core position of Netanyahu since forever.
This is perhaps the elephant in the room in Matt's otherwise excellent piece: it's a bit beside the point to talk about a right to return to a Palestinian state (though sure, it's good to get filled on the details of this issue) when the governing power in question maintains a veto on the creation of such a state.
They've had a lot of time to declare a Palestinian state in Gaza. They explicitly refuse to do so and refuse to improve their relationship with Egypt to facilitate that. It's likely multiple Arab states would recognize such a state, e.g., Qatar. A smaller state in the West Bank is also a possibility that could have been negotiated, which they refused to accept historically, even as pressure was placed on Israel to support it. One can argue about whether a state would be viable, but I don't think you can reasonably blame this all on the most recent Likud governments.
I think a viable West Bank state was a possibility a generation ago, but not anymore. That’s entirely the result of illegal settlements and creeping annexations over the years, which would seem to me to be the responsibility of Israeli governments over that time period who looked the other way - honestly, I don’t think the settler movement can be blamed on the Palestinians.
Technically the PA actually does proclaim itself to be the State of Palestine, with a Declaration of Independence in 1988.
No. Jewish right of return is to a Jewish state, not to any specific homes all over the word. Palestinians can get the exact same rights via a two state solution (assuming the Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza will accept them!)
Recent Israeli governments made it clear even before this war that a viable Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza wasn’t in the cards. Indeed, I believe Netanyahu is on the record for having actually said that at some point.
Israeli governments looking the other way while settlers insidiously implanted their roads and villages like metastatic tendrils into the remaining Palestinian territory on the West Bank would seem to have delivered the final blow to the two-state idea.
I don’t know why we even pretend to talk about it anymore, other than perhaps to make it seem to ourselves like we still care about an even-handed solution.
There is no and couldn’t be a final blow to the two states solution because it’s the only viable just solution. The fanatics of both sides always helped each other with nihilistic narratives but there is no reason why sane and decent people should play along.
I look at the maps and cannot see a viable Palestinian state constructed out of what remains even by people of good will.
Isn't that just the immigration policy of Israel, which isn't that unusual for that of a sovereign state? De Solis immigration is used in a lot of Old World states, but it's generally not imposed on other states or peoples.
Yes, but this isn't a right of return that _we_ gave them. The state of Israel gives that to them. Gaza could have declared a state after the Israeli pullout, looked for international recognition, and created a right of return.
This was of course the situation for Jewish people in the early 20th century - some thought of themselves as a nationality that persists across generations that had never lived in historic Palestine. It’s likely true for many of the indigenous American groups that have lived in Oklahoma for generations.
I don’t have a good thought about what explanations could work or fail for why one should or shouldn’t accept such nationalities.
Yes, but _we_ didn't recognize them as such and certainly don't now. We don't have a "Jewish" nationality in the US and neither do other countries. The Soviet Union did, and it created a lot of problems for them. The case of the indigenous American groups in the USA is fascinating and potentially relevant, but their indigenous statehood is not generally recognized internationally or taken particularly seriously. The Palestinian movement is deliberately asking us to recognize people, call them refugees, recognize a right of return, etc. It remains unclear to me why we (in general) should go along with that.
I will add that generally the children and grandchildren of those driven out of the German communities in Eastern Europe into the Federal Republic have had very little interest in returning even after being given the legal right to after 2004. This is largely a function I think of the fact that Federal Republic of Germany was a much more economically successful country after 1945 than of the communist Eastern European countries.
If the Arab world had been much more economically successful after 1945 then I suspect there would be far less importance and interest given to the right of return.
Question: Are Scots, Welsh and English geographical divisions of British or different nationalities?
Answer: Yes.
They are clearly different *peoples*, but since they are part of a United Kingdom, they are not separate nations.
I think you missed a big aspect of why the Arabs states aren’t taking the Palestinians in. For the last 75 years, the Palestinian leadership has done a remarkable job of making their people unwelcome. In the 1970s, the fedayeen tried to depose the Jordanian government and made two assassination attempts on the king. After the bloodbath, they wound up in Lebanon, where they played a major role in instigating the civil war. And during the Gulf War, the PLO brilliantly decided to back Saddam, prompting Kuwait to expel 350k Palestinians.
It’s not just that Egypt doesn’t have the money or doesn’t like refugees generically (though these things are true). Hamas (an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood) is a mortal enemy of the Egyptian government. They don’t want to let in a population that’s bound to include radicalized, Islamist elements.
Egypt has 109M people. 1M voting-age Gazans (admitted over the next couple decades, realistically speaking), maybe only 40% of whom would vote for MB, wouldn't put MB anywhere close to a majority.
Egypt isn't a democracy in any real sense. They aren't worried about losing votes. They're worried about the Muslim Brotherhood (i.e., Hamas) radicalizing the population and blowing stuff up.
It makes me wonder whether the brief Muslim Brotherhood-run state between Mubarak and Sisi might have done something different here.
The tragedy for these gamblers is usually that they *do* have this concept but just fail to take it. And in this case, the bigger tragedy is that there are millions of people being involved in this gamble without agency in it.
We should recognize that the "right of return" coupled with a binational state has no real historical predecessor. The Czech Republic isn't a binational state, even though it was 30% German before WW2. The Germans were ethnically cleansed at the end of the war, and their ethnic cleansing was accepted. Germans can move to Czechia now as part of the EU, but if they became a significant minority and agitated for a binational state, I suspect the Czech Republic would not accept that. Similarly for Kaliningrad, Poland, Slovakia. We just witnessed the ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh and no one is saying anything. There is no claim for a "right of return" for India/Pakistan/Bangladesh. In fact, there are Urdu speakers in Bangladesh now who Pakistan refuses to repatriate. I'm actually struggling to find a right of return accepted that didn't involve a war and massive ethnic cleansing. So I think the position is clear here, the right of return imagines an Arab majority in a state covering historical Palestine and the Jews would be either murdered, cleansed, or a political minority with limited rights. I never have found the statements about a binational state to be at all convincing.
This (and a few related comments) makes me think about the legacy of those post-WWII ethnic cleansings. Obviously very nasty business to carry out. But having borders that match cultural/ethnic identities seems to be pretty good for stability under the current global order.
Think about how many people lost their homes in the India-Pakistan partition. And that relationship has simmered and sometimes boiled over ever since then. Yet, nonetheless, nobody's seriously going to implement a Right of Return. People have made new lives and planted new roots in their new homes.
I remember when Musharraf and Vajpayee were prime ministers of their relevant countries, and there was a thaw in the relationship, and each of them visited the other capital city, which happened to be their birthplace.
I agree that it's another relevant example. I wonder how the region would be faring on development, human rights, and ethnic conflict had the partition never occurred.
I mean that in a genuine "wonder" sense; I'm not trying to facetiously imply there is some obvious answer.
There probably would have been a civil war; in many ways, the partition WAS a civil war, but it's more accurate to say that it was done in order to head off a worse conflict.
It's more accurate to say that it was done because the British drew a sloppy border.
I'll take that. Teleology allows for many simultaneous causes.
The Germans who were ethnically cleansed at the end of world war two (1) had often supported or even fought for a monstrous regime and (2) had a few tough years but were received by what soon became a functioning state that welcomed them. If 2.5 million germans were living amid third world poverty on the polish border, were prevented from entering germany, could not navigate the baltic sea or fly airplanes, i would feel sorry for them too
Hitler never got a majority of the vote (like Hamas) and never held elections after coming to power (again like Hamas). Moreover, most Germans who fought for Hitler were conscripts, not volunteers to the Waffen-SS. Gestapo (like Hamas) violently suppressed any dissent. I believe that if we are to make a distinction between Hamas and the Gazans, we also need to make a distinction between WWII-era Germans and the Nazis.
Germans have a country they can return to.
Armenians have a country they can return to.
Indians and Pakistanis have countries to return to.
Palestinians do not. They are not Jordanians or Syrians or Egyptians although there seem to be a lot of folks who clearly wish they’d just go on and accept one of those identities.
I think in the end they’ll have to accept living in one of those countries but it will have to be at the expense of their ethnic / national identity, as opposed to those other examples where the refugees were able to more or less reunite with others who shared their identity. They’ll have to live as exiles, in other words.
That's not exactly true. The population of Jordan is actually majority Palestinian. Jordan is one of the few Arab countries that grants citizenship to Palestinians.
Well then, maybe that needs to be the answer. How to convince Jordan to accept them? - maybe by offering some huge financial incentive? The “two-state solution” is a chimera, though - recent Israeli governments have made it pretty clear they ultimately want the entire West Bank.
The West justifies its support for Israel through its status as a democracy. But in a democracy you don’t get to expel part of your population to arrange the electoral outcomes you want, or to keep a certain ethnic group in power.
It’s clear why the Jewish people will never go for this, and I respect that. It’s a more tenuous argument why it should be US foreign policy to prop up a regime with these anti-democratic features.
I'm not sure I understand the relevance of this to the linked comment. Demanding "right of return" enforced by other powers is an extraordinary request with very few, if any, historical antecedents. What does that have to do with whether Israel is a democracy or not? The implicit assumption of your comment is that the US is the only thing keeping Israel from folding and accepting Palestinian demands. I don't think that is true.
Insofar as Palestinian claims to reside in Israel are illegitimate, fine. Insofar as they are legitimate but Israel rejects them because they would threaten the incumbents’ electoral math, then claims that we should support Israel to “promote democracy in the region” or whatever, ring pretty hollow.
I reserve judgement on whether Israel and the Jewish people need to be bound by democratic norms here; they’ve been through plenty. But Western leftists have a point that probably US foreign policy should be so bound.
I think we are talking past each other here. I'm speaking about the "right of return", which is a right asserted by the Palestinian national movement that any person or descendent of a person who resided in Palestine (defined by the British mandate) in 1948 should have the right to move to historic Palestine and live there, irrespective of current borders between Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank. This is a very unusual and broad claim by historical standards, particularly if we are talking about enforcing it on another country that has not been invaded and defeated. I don't understand what point you are trying to make about democracy here. I'm not sure it has anything to do with democracy. Is the argument that if Israel is not a democracy, the US govt should feel free to force another country to honor a right of return on that country? Can you give an example where the US has done that to another country before?
Again, to my previous point Germans have little interest in moving to Czechia because Germany is a much richer and economically strong state compared to Czechia post 1945. If the same was true of the Arab world perhaps this would be less of an issue.
The Arab states won't let Palestinians move there and gain citizenship because of the historical participation of Palestinian populations in their countries in assassinations, political overthrows, launch of military actions that invite reprisals, and for general anti-immigration reasons.
This is the first article in American media that I read about the conflict since the October 7 massacre (yes, I skipped Matt's article from last week as well), just because I found its title oddly specific (for an American). And ... I'm very pleasantly surprised! Thank you, Matt! Given the general insanity about the issue in American media, I'm pretty sure that this is one of the best two or three articles written on this side of the Atlantic.
+1
Great article. Thoughtful, adds something useful. This is why I subscribed.
Thank you for this very clear article, which definitely taught me something new. I had no idea that the descendants of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and other countries remained stateless. It reminds me of the way Northern Irish Catholics' struggles for equal treatment was often conflated with the cause of a united Ireland. I'm also struck that it would be really unusual to find this kind of clear and relatively neutral analysis anywhere in the media - is this just because I'm looking in the wrong place or because other media feels obliged to nod towards the expectations of its readers more explicitly?
The US is special in how we grant birthright citizenship. It is one of the best aspects about being American.
I will just add that true birthright citizenship is a Western Hemisphere/New World thing more broadly.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_soli#/media/File%3AJus_soli_world.svg
As a Brit I was still shocked - most 2nd and 3rd gen immigrants in the UK have citizenship even if their parents arrived irregularly
It's simply because media is a profit driven business and outrage either direction draws attention and therefore business. Nuance is a niche luxury product only a few people will pay for.
1) It makes the world easier to deal with when you know who you can count on to at least try to be fair and honest. (Especially on this subject!) So thanks, Matt!
2) As late as the Nineties, Jewish kids were still being taught that old "We didn't drive out the Palestinians, the other Arabs told them to leave" tale, even after evidence from Israeli sources had started to come out that it was a crock? Does it even make any sense that invading armies would want to deprive themselves of sources of supplies and information?
3) If you listen to the rhetoric the Palestinians used at Camp David--the right of return is non-negotiable but the mechanics of implementing of it is, recognize the right in principle and we'll be willing to take your demographic concerns into account--and tell me it doesn't sound like diplomaticspeak for "We need some sort of face-saving formula that'll let us compromise while pretending that we're not."
4) The argument that "Nobody else gets to return to their ancestors' homes after 75 years! Why do the Palestinians deserve such a special privilege!" would be less, well, insulting if it wasn't coming from people who claimed that right after 2000 years.
I think 3 is a very favourable way of looking at the Palestinian behaviour at Camp David. Another way would be to say, they were basically saying to Israel "give us the biggest bargaining chip you posses, one that giving up will materially make it harder for you to run and defend your country, and we still reserve the right to agitate for full right to return, even though that would destroy your nation". I don't think you can blame the Israelis for rejecting that
4) 1/3 of Palestine was Jewish in 1947. Lots of people migrated there at the invitation of the Turks in the 19th and early 20th Century. There was a huge wave of in-migration of Jewish persons who were expelled by Muslim states after 1948. Also, I don't think we reasonably expect to expel all the descendants of persons who participated during the Age of Mass Migration in other contexts. Very few people question the legitimacy of actually living people in places like Taiwan, Argentina, New Zealand, or the US.
Jews wanted their own state, the return is only to that state. Nobody on the Jewish side was talking of specific homes when they accepted the 1947 partition plan which left them without their holiest sites including Jerusalem and Hebron from which Jews were massacred and expelled a mere 20 years earlier ! If Palestinians adopted a parallel position to the Jewish one they’d have accepted the two state solution offered them in the 90s and could exercise their return into that Palestinians state in the West Bank and Gaza! That’s not what they’re asking and the false equivalence you’re making is horribly misleading.
Never responded to a comment here, but wanted to chime in specifically on #2, as someone steeped in Jewish community my whole life, and who received a thoroughly Zionist education in the 90s and 00s. Teaching us this inaccurate history was indeed a significant mistake my parents’ generation made, but my best guess is that their historical understanding, based on their own, earlier Zionist education, just never got updated. (I grew up in a progressive community unafraid of a complicated conversation, so I think willful blindness is actually pretty unlikely here.) I am not deeply read in the historians of the 80s (Benny Morris et al) who corrected the record based on newly declassified sources that were only emerging then, 40 years on from the war, but the reason people found the original narrative plausible is because the seven Arab countries fighting the single, newborn Jewish country definitely did not expect to lose. To just throw out one simple reference, the “Military assessments” subsection of the Wiki article about the 1948 war outlines how the CIA and the Brits both expected the Arabs to prevail, that “Egyptian generals told their government that the invasion would be "A parade without any risks" and Tel Aviv would be taken "in two weeks,"” and that the Israeli forces were initially wildly out-equipped. Moreover, in the wake of incidents like the Deir Yassin massacre, it would seem to make sense that civilians would willingly flee a war zone - just as Gazans are doing today.
For a different take on the military balance, check out Simha Flapan's The Birth of Israel.
With regard to #4 Wayne, I think you're right that framing it as a special privilege is the wrong approach. What I would suggest instead is acknowledging that the victims of the Nakba suffered an injustice, while also making the point that not all injustices can be remedied and sometimes it is necessary to just move forward without doing so:
https://gordonstrause.substack.com/p/israel-and-the-palestinians
Exactly! That's how Truth Commissions work: if the people who fucked you over admit it to your face with the world watching, it can feel so empowering that revenge no longer feels necessary to your self-esteem. Think it would be "good for the Jews" if the Palestinians had that? Once that truth is on the table, that's the time for the pragmatic conversation about what is and isn't practical to do about it here and now. After all, they already tried it the other way around. Oslo was basically "Let's make peace now and deal with what we've been fighting about--later. Eventually." How'd that work out?
"but the Palestinians see themselves as proposing one state for Palestinians and a second binational state."
I don't know if this was your intention but, when you put it that way, the Palestinian position sounds *completely* unreasonable.
You need to understand that this is a very *charitable* view of the Palestinian position. Many of them are unflinching in advocating for one state for Palestinian only and the killing of all Jews aka genocide. The fact is Matt here in order to sound balanced has given the Palestinian side many such discounts. Eg he misleadingly uses the passive voice when saying the partition plan of of 1947 broke down. Infamously it was refuse but the Arabs even as the Jews accepted. The Arabs instead advocated for the alternative of… you guessed it- ethnic clenaisng or genocide of the Jews ! They also followed through - not a single Jew was left in the terrifies they occupied in 48. By contrast many Arabs remained in the areas Israel occupied in 48 and were given equal citizenship. Another point Matt omits.
Last week The Daily interviewed a couple of Gazans as they were actively being bombed by Israel, which was heart breaking. To hear these people being interviewed while you could literally hear missiles in the background really made the war real for me. However, when asked about Hamas and the attacks neither person had any sympathy for the Israeli victims, nor did they condemn Hamas, which I suspect to be widely held views amongst Palestinians. Once you realize this it becomes immediately obvious that a one state solution isn’t workable bc most Palestinians want Jews dead or gone.
Irredentism tends to be unreasonable.
It's only unreasonable if you think Israelis are people.
In any short term peace deal, not everyone is going to be able to live where they want. Israeli lunatics are not going to be able to claim their preferred hilltops in Judea. Palestinians are not going to be able to reclaim their great grandma’s particular olive grove. At least not yet. It genuinely sucks for them, but it’s the reality of launching and losing a long series of wars.
In the longer term, I think the peace deal could include provisions for gradual freedom of residency and movement on both sides. But that’s going to require trust building and a psychological deescalation that could take a generation or more. You cannot pull shit like 10/7 and expect your people to saunter through the streets of Tel Aviv a year later.
I don’t believe that peace requires justice, as the saying goes. Almost nobody gets justice in geopolitics. Peace requires a settlement where your kids have a shot at a decent future.
I think part of the problem here is that with the settlements and such Israelis do in fact get to claim their preferred hilltops in Judea.
In a peace deal, a lot of those will have to be dismantled. The Israelis have done it in Sinai in 1979, and in Gaza in 2005, and offered to do it in most of the West Bank as recently as 2008. (The immediate suburbs of Jerusalem would be traded for part of '67 Israel, given the sheer number of people who would have to be moved.)
But there is a real demographic timeline here. The more religious the Israeli population becomes, the harder this is going to be to achieve politically.
As others have kind of alluded to, the fly in the ointment is that the removals and relocations are now considered a crime against humanity as a subset of ethnic cleansing, in a way they weren't even as recently as the late 1940s.
Although its inclusion as a crime against humanity should still be lauded as a great moral victory for humanity, the result is that there basically aren't any more blunt-but-nonlethal tools left in the settling of geopolitical disputes. There are either blunt-and-lethal tools, like Hamas' terrorism or Israel's wanton destruction, precise-and-unbalancing tools like the settlements themselves, or precise-and-unpopular tools like the Camp David negotiations where neither side can offer the other any more than token concessions that are ultimately unsatisfying.
And thus it all ends up forming a catch-22. Short of a peace deal, the best we can hope for is that future generations can de-escalate and learn to coexist without the baggage of today. But the de-escalation itself seems to trigger extremists on both sides, who then periodically reignite tensions with fresh atrocities, pushing out the timeline of de-escalation.
This is a fair point. The Greek-Turkish population exchange in 1923 was brutal. But was it the best thing for everyone in the long run? I don't know, but it's very possible.
All I can say is that it seems to me that people underappreciate the fact that the horrors OF all these relocations, transfers, removals, exchanges, partitions, and worse, are precisely WHY they all got lumped under "ethnic cleansing" with events like the Holocaust and Holodomor, even when they weren't carried out with remotely the same level of murderous intent. Generations were deeply traumatized by these events, and their descendants campaigned very hard to make sure that the abuses weren't repeated again.
As I mentioned, though, the core problem seems to be that humanity has an opposite-but-roughly-equal-in-magnitude nasty habit of rebuilding our appetites for geopolitically-motivated murder.
This appetite mostly seems to be manageable in countries like America and the West, where our institutions are solid enough to keep us from erupting into violence against our neighbors -- in fact, I just finished Acemoglu and Robinson's "The Narrow Corridor" and it was downright excellent in talking about the nature of how liberal democracy sustains itself in ways that contribute to this value being upheld. Our insistence on essentially-permanent national borders doesn't seem to hurt us as much because of this.
However, in parts of the world where institutions and the public tradition of pluralistic peace aren't as strongly built up, it really hurts us that the rest of the "rules based world order" still treats those national borders as so preciously inviolable as, say, the US-Canada border. It's clear that the appetite for murder is going to keep boiling up over those borders for a bare minimum of several more generations before it can be pacified by modernism and liberal democracy - if it EVER can.
I don't think it's hopium. It happens. It's just that it only happens under the right circumstances.
And the exchanges themselves don't always solve everything either. They often involve plenty of murder and rights-abuses in the process -- it's not like countries agree to swap populations because they LIKE each other.
I think at this point this is basically the right conclusion (i.e. this is very, very intractable). The observation that people can be more bitter and incapable of overlooking expropriation than actual murder is not a new one - Macchiavelli noted back in 1509 that if you're going to take a family's stuff you might as well kill them because they *will not ever* stop hating you. For examples that are more congenial to Western readers, there are Jewish families still suing for return of stuff stolen in the 1930s, and I don't think people find that strange, and there aren't that many people saying 'let it go, it's in the past'.
The only even vaguely plausible solution to this I ever saw (and this was in the late 1990s, when things were bad but less bad than now) was some combination of a formal recognition of the Nakba, some limited rights of return for then older (now very elderly people) who were directly expropriated, a direct and substantial payment stream to the relevant families and of course full return of the Occupied Territories as a place where those people could go and live. Basically, recognition and compensation, but not full restitution or right of return (because that can't be combined with any Zionist principles). But I can't see Netanyahu's Israel doing anything like that, especially after last week.
Eh, I dunno. My family was displaced (actually, much worse) a couple times in the last hundred years, and never got a cent of reparation. We are not still grousing about the property loss because we built something new and better. We are certainly not out there conducting reprisals against innocent people to reclaim our family’s old land. The critical thing, I think, is that people have the opportunity to build a better future for their kids.
Edit: This isn't meant to criticize the Palestinians. My point is that securing them a decent future is much more important than wrangling over the past. People who can build a good life for their kids are *usually* not going to blow themselves up over past grievances.
That last bit seems to hint pretty hard that the statelessness of Palestinian refugees in (wherever) is a core part of this problem. Hard to build a better forward-looking future for your kids if they, and their kids after, will still be second-class wanderers.
That's not exactly an earthshattering revelation on my part, but it seems worth stating out loud.
It wasn't intended to be a judgment on them at all! I just meant that creating opportunities for people to have a better future for their kids mitigates a lot of the historic grievances. You don't need to achieve perfect justice, you need a reasonable life for the next generation. Hence, I think getting a state for the Palestinians - with any contours - is more important than wrangling over who did what to who.
I may have miscommunicated--I wasn't trying to ascribe a judgment call to your earlier comment. What I think I mostly meant was
> "Hey, 20-year-old Palestinian in Egypt, you were born in Egypt, your parents were born in Egypt, you've never been outside of Egypt, why won't you just work towards being a happy, productive Egyptian of Palestinian descent (to the extent the latter is important to you)?"
> "Egypt won't take me as Egyptian. They wouldn't take my parents and they won't take my kids."
> "oh."
> "oh."
This speaks to the prospect that perhaps the Abraham Accords can be part of a two-step pivot towards statefulness for Palestinians.
It's unfortunate that this renewed conflict probably means another 10-20-year delay in progress towards that end, but it's probably a shorter path towards de-escalation than hoping that the conflict will de-escalate on its own.
Yes, absolutely!
Agree.
But in that context the way Israel (and yes, Egypt) have been treating the Gazans and WB Palestinians doesn’t seem calculated to have helped them construct much of a forward-looking future.
That's a good point of view, but in practice it is not universal.
It is not just the Palestinians. Everywhere previously oppressed and robbed groups are demanding their lands/stuff back (e.g. the previous owners of quite a lot of stuff in London's British Museum would like those things returned. Now. Even though a lot of it was stolen in the 19th century).
As for Palestinian terrorism, yes there were terrorist actions by Palestinian refugees in the 1950 to 70s, but the vast majority today is from inhabitants of the Israeli occupied terroritories, and can't be disentangled from violent revolt against that occupation. Certainly people in Gaya and the West Bank are not getting great opportunities to build a better future
Agreed. I got to visit some of the places my family got displaced from, and we traveled with a guy who was old enough to remember some of it and could recall that my great-grand uncle used to run that restaurant over there and lived in the apartment above it. When we ate at the restaurant, I didn't tell the waiter to fuck off and return my family's property; I just ate my meal and wondered about what could have been --- while also being happy that I'm not running the family restaurant.
Matthew, if you were to open access to this article: 1) it would be a huge contribution to the public discourse, 2) it would attract subscribers. If I weren't already a subscriber, I'd be signing up right now. Thank you.
This post is open, but please let us know if anyone is having trouble reading it!
Thanks. I'm sending it to everyone I know.
Don't open the comments though. That would get nutty.
Bold of you to think it won't already be nutty by maybe 9am Eastern.
It's almost 11 AM Eastern now and still seems to be pretty civil?
Oh wow. Yes.
Agreed, it's a great article to share with people to fight some of the misinformation floating around
This piece needs to be viral-enabled.
It’s further important to recall that both Jews and Palestinians were displaced in 1948, in fact Jews much more thoroughly than Palestinians: no Jew was left in the areas the Arabs conquered at the end of the war whereas a sizable Arab minority remained in newly created Israel, and were given equal citizenship forthwith, as promised by Israel’s Declaration of Independence. This state of affairs isn’t surprising seeing the sides official position at the eve of the war:1. The Jewish community accepted the partition plan and vowed to give equality to all Arabs in its territory. The Palestinian/Arab leadership promised publicly to kill all the Jews. When the war was over each side basically lived up to its promises. Almost complete ethnic cleansing of Jews from all Arab states (including Jewish communities that were literally millennia old as in Iraq), equal citizenship to Arabs remaining in Israel.
In addition to all that israel that was just born out of a terrible war surviving a genocide attempt a mere 3 years after the Holocaust, *also* had to absorb all the Jewish refugees from the Arab world and the Holocaust refugees. All became citizenship so that the number of new citizens (Jewish AND Arab) far outnumbered Israel’s founding population. (Can you imagine any other country accepting more refugees than its own citizens, all within a few years? ). While tensions remains internally, descendants of these Palestinians Arabs became doctors, government ministers, Israeli Supreme Court judges etc Descendants of Jewish refugees cleansed from Arab states where even better integrated into Israel
Meanwhile as Matt alludes the Palestinians refugees in the Arab lands mostly were intentionally left without citizenship and in refugee camps, and were given a unique refugee status that is inherited intergenerationally contra to how all other refugees, including Jewish refugees of the very same conflict, are defined.
All this matters. Even as Palestinian supporters complain of “genocide” against them their population keeps growing under Israeli occupation (or within Israel as equal citizens). By contrast Palestinians *keep* calling for ethnic cleansing and genocide of Jews, never anllowed annd have no plans to allow a single Jew to live under their rule, and *practice* the genocide they preach whenever they can, as we saw demonstrated horrifically just last week. One cannot be taken seriously as an interlocutor by Israelis (of all political stripes) without acknowledging these facts.
Great article but my Israeli friend told me another problem with Palestinian right of return - which in their mind makes this impossible. A lot of the land that the jews bought before Israel was made (either in Ottoman Turkish Palestine or British Palestine) was owned by landlords in Damascus, Beirut or Cairo. As a result when it comes to actual deeds, a lot of Jews bought out those deeds ans own those deeds to land in Palestine before Israel was created. In other words, many Palestinians who lived in Ottoman Palestine didn't own the deeds to the land they live on. He would say "How could Palestinians return when they didn't own the deeds? Only a few Palestinians who owned the land after the 1947-1948 "civil war" would actually have a right to return." The problem with the negotiation would be the Palestinian leaders would probably want a right to return for Palestinians whether they owned a deed or not. While Israel could, at best, could only offer right to return for Palestinians that have their own deeds. That would restrict the number of Palestinians with a right to return by an order of magnitude.
This is related in a deep sense to the issues of displacement due to gentrification, where long-time renters (or sometimes squatters who have squatted long enough to get some sort of legal recognition under many legal systems) are displaced by landlords selling to new homeowners.