I wish Matt had spent a bit more time discussing the partition of India in 1947. It’s so similar to the Israel situation but where no one is calling for a return to status quo ante and the dissolution of Pakistan and Bangladesh. My ancestors came over to Calcutta from the Pabna district in B’desh, albeit to escape constant flooding and for professional reasons, but a few years later and it could very well have been due to Partition. I don’t hold a key on a chain around my neck. There are movies and TV series about families (especially on the western front) who wax nostalgic about their old homes and neighborhoods in Lahore and Karachi. Best friends reunited after decades. But no one is clamoring for the Hindus who have now been in India for generations to go back to their old land in Pakistan. The two countries find each other highly irritating but fundamentally, we recognize the existence of the other.
Truly, I wish the Palestinians just saw a future in the land they do have (whatever, negotiate to ‘67 borders) and got on with the business of building a nation.
That's the saddest part of all this. If 40 years ago or so after repeated defeats on the battlefield, the mainstream of Palestinian society had stopped "kicking against the pricks" so to speak, and just gotten on with the business of building a nation, instead of doing things like digging tunnels and terrorism, the two states of Israel and Palestine would likely be close allies and the undisputed commercial and cultural center of the Middle East.
If on any given day between 1948 and now the Palestinians had simply said we'll accept what we have today, they would be decisively better off than they are --- any single day. And the curve is a steep one, because every day their plight has gotten worse.
I think it was Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban who described the Palestinians as "never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity." Sadly, much truth to that, and in the end they got Bibi and the right wingers and there are no more opportunities left on the table, to the detriment of all actors in this drama.
In fairness to the Palestinians, as with any polity they have extremists and they have moderates, and for the last 70 years various outside groups have been supporting and encouraging the extremists.
The other Arab nations have found supporting the maximalist version of the Palestinian cause convenient for their own domestic politics, the Iranians need terrorist proxies, Israeli right-wingers want to undermine anything that looks like a viable Palestinian government so they can claim to have no negotiating partner, and Westerners exploit the Palestinian cause for status jockeying and expressive activism. It might be the case that there's no group on Earth that has been more poorly served by their "supporters" than the Palestinians.
Alarmingly, it seems like a similar dynamic is now taking place among the Israelis. Far-right Israelis increasingly take the support of the United States for granted, which is encouraging them to pursue maximalist goals.
"The other Arab nations have found supporting the maximalist version of the Palestinian cause convenient for their own domestic politics"
This is often said, but there is little evidence for it. The Arab regimes that supported maximalist positions toward Israel were genuinely ideologically committed (Nasser's Egypt, Ba'athist Syria/Iraq), whereas other Arab regimes were willing to find a permanent accomodation with Israel (Sadat's Egypt, Hashemite Jordan, the Gulf monarchies).
An opportunity to end the conflict presented itself in the early 1970s, when Israel could have fully normalized both with Egypt and Jordan (and probably even Syria) in exchange for the territories occupied in 1967, including the Palestinian territories.
Israel, however, didn't miss the opportunity to miss the opportunity, to use an overworn expression.
You can go back even further to the Peel Commission in 1936, which proposed a partition with a much larger Arab state and a much smaller Jewish state in Palestine than was enacted in 1948, which the Palestinians also rejected out of hand (Zionist representative were divided on the specific boundaries of the partition but were open to negotiation of final borders with roughly the proportions proposed). Palestinian leadership has forever seemed unable to accept that Jews in Palestine / Israel are anything other than a "conquered people" that may only live in Arab lands on that basis. This takes on insane dimensions in the modern era, with Palestinian leaders denying that Jews as a people have any pre-Zionist history or connection with the land.
The PLO accepted the 1967 borders. Had Israel simply pulled back to the Green Line, clean, in 1993, the conflict would be over.
The same is true of King Hussein's "federation plan" in 1972: had Israel returned the occupied territories in exchange for peace and full normalization, the conflict would also be over.
The problem with Matt's analysis is that it misses that a large subset of Israelis have had, and still have today, irredentist aspirations that go beyond the establishment of a Jewish state in some part of Eretz Yisrael. Too much consideration has been given to the Israeli argument about security, when a careful analysis of their behavior throughout the past decades shows that irredentism is as much, and probably even more, of a factor in the continuing occupation of the OPTs.
Matt has no illusions about Israeli maximalists. The fact remains that the Israeli left collapsed in the wake of the second antifada. And "we should get all the land" is the most popular opinion for both sides.
The left did collapse after the 2nd Intifada, but then the 2nd Intifada was the product of the failures of the Oslo process: an unending negotiation largely focused on minutiae that failed to rollback, much less stop, the settlement enterprise, and that missed its own deadline (May 4, 1999) to bring forth a permanent settlement.
That Ehud Barak attempted to salvage the process ten minutes past midnight should not blind us to the chronic feet dragging and bad faith on the Israeli side over the preceding 5 years.
We seem to have entered the territory where both sides vociferously declare their own peaceful intentions and insist on the perfidy of the other.
I don't think this nitpicking is useful. My own reading is that Israel was somewhat more credibly interested in peace, but it was never a strong desire for either side. Neither I nor P has been interested at all for at least the past fifteen years.
"the two states of Israel and Palestine would likely be close allies"
I…doubt this. India and Pakistan are in no way close allies to this day.
(India and Bangladesh are close allies, though. One wonders whether, in your counterfactual, the West Bank and Gaza would have eventually separated in a civil war. If so, Israel might end up close to whichever side they ended up backing in that civil war.)
And this unreasonable dream of taking back all of Israel has been aided and abetted by the surrounding Arab Nations and Western Leftists who have used the Palestinian plight for politica and cynical reasons. Arguably, Israel has done more for plight of Palestinians than any of their supposed "friends."
I highly doubt that there would have been an alliance, as the same wars of the 1960s and 1970s that led to Palestinian occupation, led to the rise of the Gush Emunim and their goal to occupy and ethnically cleanse all of Greater Israel. Those folks are in Netanyahu's government now.
You guys (including Matt) underestimate the extent to which a) Palestinian national identity only emerged around 67 and b) it’s defined largely in terms of opposition to Israel.
The problem is that right wingers and various psychos try to leverage this fact to argue that Palestinian nationalism is “fake” (???) and otherwise illegitimate. Which is of course nonsense but then this history gets obscured.
Anyway that’s why you don’t see Palestinian national aspirations take what we regard as the reasonable direction.
Seldom is it mentioned that, between 1967 and 1987, there was so little anti-Israeli violence originating from the occupied Palestinian territories that said occupied Palestinians could freely move between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and even visit Israel!
And yet, in the face of relative calm, Israel's behavior was to initiate the settlement enterprise, which took on a large-scale, determined character with Likud's election in 1977. It took the violence of the First Intifada, itself a reaction to the growing alienation and dispossession of the Palestinians under the settlement enterprise, for Israel to consent to an indeterminate "peace process" aiming at a modicum of Palestinian self-determination.
"but where no one is calling for a return to status quo ante and the dissolution of Pakistan and Bangladesh"
I think that's generally true on the Indian side,* but there are certainly plenty of people in Pakistan who think substantial parts of what is today India should be part of Pakistan (e.g., Jammu, Kashmir, and the other Indian states with substantial Muslim minority populations along the Indo-Pakistani border).
*: Qualified, because I could swear there were some of the more extreme members of the RSS who think India should claim everything west up to the Indus River and expel the Muslim population, which would effectively eliminate Pakistan as a functioning state.
J&K has been a tinderbox since Day 1. Modi revoking their autonomy under Art. 370 didn't help the Indian case for sure. As for RSS/VHP nutcasery, I'd wait till that irredentist thinking moves out of the fringe before worrying.
Don't know much about it but I believe you. Frankly, they should stay there and try and make a life in a country whose per capita GDP was higher than India's recently! And given that Bihar is truly the pits and the Alabama of India, only worse, they'd probably have better luck in B'desh! Also, compared to Pakistan, they have a higher percent of Hindu minority population which is maybe saying something.
I did not know this, but found this on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Biharis_in_Bangladesh. Turns out they are not Biharis, as in from Bihar, the state. In Bangladesh they were called Beharis, as the word Behar in Bengali means "outsider". They are indeed Urdu speaking muslims who supported Pakistan in the 1971 war.
And importantly, nobody thinks that if they had tried to keep it together as one state in the Raj it would have worked. There would have just been violence war and a partition down the line. (Indeed that eventually happened to split Pakistan later on.) Jinnah is one of history's great unsung heroes for convincing everyone of that.
Interestingly, I know someone whose family is Pakistani but almost all of them were always opposed to its creation, believing that a secular, multi-ethnic India was the right course, morally and pragmatically. But, although they largely despise what Pakistan's government and political culture have become, the rise of Modi and his blatant support for Hindutva (including widespread, legal discrimination and support for ethnic violence) has made them reconsider the necessity of Pakistan (and maybe Bangladesh?) for Muslims in South Asia.
That's the thing. I am not a cheerleader for ethnostates but it is actually difficult and threatening to live somewhere as an ethnic minority, and an ethnostate is a safety valve. No matter how bad things get for a Hindu in Pakistan or a Muslim in India, there is always at least the possibility of migrating.
I’m not a Modi person, but I find these comments don’t capture the legal Indian system and how it’s currently set up.
India is not a liberal democracy, but a communitarian one. It inherited the British system of treating people from different religions as divided. What I mean is, Muslims, Christians have different civil law as opposed to Hindus, Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists.
This extends far beyond marriage and divorce laws. In India, if there’s conflict between Muslims, it is legally justifiable for them to be tried in a Sharia court as opposed to the regular justice system.
Religious monuments are maintained by the government. Muslims have a Waqf, and I would encourage you to read about some of the encroachment undertaken by Waqfs in India. This are real problems, unrelated to a hate towards Islam, and more towards the dual national legal system in India.
My point here is that for all the talk of legal discrimination, Muslims have special protections carved out from the time before partition, and the INC promised to maintain them in order to project India as a secular homeland for all.
In the meantime, Bangladeshi Hindus suffered a genocide in 1971. Pakistani Hindus went from 18% of the population in the 60s to 0.01% in the 21st century. I make this point to illustrate that Muslims in India have the Law and the System on their side.
People want change though. It’s a remnant of Colonial rule, people want common civil law. They want equality in education.
There are some hindu facists out there who want nothing more than the extermination of muslims in India, but many of Modi’s voters just want to see removal of a colonial system that still divides two religions.
Read on Two Nation Theory (the idea that led to the creation of Pakistan), and understand that the existence of Pakistan in some effect justifies India’s want to remove these protections and unify the legal system.
The existence of Pakistan definitely makes India more Hindu nationalist. There's no way you can deny that.
The problem is without the partition there would have been a bloodbath. It's not as though India had the state capacity to prevent violence between Hindus and Muslims. It barely has that state capacity now, and it is a lot richer now than it was then. And indeed, what happened in Bangladesh shows exactly what happens when you don't have that capacity. You end up with a partition anyway, but a ton of people have to die.
Also, I think even if we take the idealized notion of India's laws (which do in theory protect Muslims) and not the realities on the ground, that sort of thinking still runs into the reality that people want their own states. It's not as though Slovaks were going to be treated terribly in unified Czechoslovakia, but they still demanded an exit. And even in places that stay together, like Belgium, we see pretty significant ethnic tensions from time to time. (And Belgium, of course, does have the state capacity to tamp some of them down.)
In other words, Jinnah was right and Gandhi was wrong, because Indian Muslims at the end of the day needed the protection AND self-determination that only their own state could offer.
I think if we had implemented the 1946 cabinet mission plan of a unified federal government with three units that determined civil and criminal in those lands India could have stayed united.
Nehru’s borderline insane commitment to Fabian socialism led to him backstabbing Jinnah and causing the union to rupture.
Also Indian Muslims to this day get specific protections, exceptions and benefits prescribed in the law. Name one other country that provides those many exceptions for it’s minority communities.
Don’t buy the neocolonial dogwash being fed to you. Give me evidence of one other country that has more exceptions carved out than India for it’s Muslims.
Most Indians are proud and happy that we have diversity, it’s how we were raised and educated.
Hindu nationalism enjoyed only a sliver of support for most part of the 20th century. It is Pakistan's ISI supported terrorist activity in India that turned many Hindus towards the BJP, and against the Congress party.
India should fall then, Dravidians have a different culture than the Northern Indians, Far Eastern Indians have a different race than the Mainland Indians, Western Indians have different languages Eastern Indians.
It sticks together because of it’s multicultural foundation not inspite it.
I think you are probably right, but currently there are 200 million Indian Muslims out of a population of 1.4 billion, so about 14% of the population (about the same as Blacks in the US).
If India had not been partitioned, then Pakistan (235 million), Bangledesh (170 million) would be added to that population and it would be 600+ million out of 1.8 billion so more than a third of the population.
In that environment, I think you get what there is today. Either there is much more widespread ethnic violence, or it really does become a more multicultural society.
So you are obviously wrong. Think about the violence we have now, within India, between Hindus and Muslims. And then multiply it out. As I intimated, what would eventually happened was a partition anyway, as we've seen in innumerable places (e.g., former Yugoslavia, East Timor, Bangladesh, etc.). You'd just get a ton of violence and mass death first.
It's not as though India is incapable of maintaining a multicultural state. India has many non-Hindu minorities in its northeast that it does not culturally persecute, even though many of them have been and currently continue to engage in guerilla war against the government. Likewise with the Sikhs in the northwest.
Jinnah's project directly caused non-Muslim India to polarize against specifically its Muslim minority. Without that movement, I don't think a conjoined India-Pakistan would turn on them the way you suppose.
In fact, I'd go further and say that Gandhi was right, and any deviation from complete multiculturalism endangers the Indian project because it sets up a "first they came for the Communists" dynamic. Non-Indians really underestimate the religious diversity inside Hinduism; many "Hindus" really follow a local spiritual tradition that has only recently incorporated into the Hindu pantheon within the past generation or two. There are still major disputes over whether such fundamental concepts as vegetarianism are mandatory for non-Brahmins. And syncretic religions (e.g. Jainism) abound.
Exactly. India is already Multicultural. Three states with Christian Majorities, One with Muslim Majority, One territory with Indegnious Majority and one with Muslim Majority.
The problems in India are overblown. There is violence but I do not remember one article from the NYT discussing the decimation of minority populations in Pakistan, Bangladesh or Afghanistan. Understanding Pakistan being a staunch cold war ally of the West will help understand the narrative that’s currently being spread today.
Look at how progressives reacted in California when Hindus wanted to expand more on their religion and remove some caste issues from the cirriculum. Progressive white professors went apeshit on the poor parents who wanted to prevent bullying based on religion.
Or look ath Audrey Thrusker. Her vitriol towards hindus is crazy (Ive read her books), and when I tried to trace her sources I found nothing.
Neocolonial Garbage.
If India was a full blown facist state, why do I still see advertisements for INC on my youtube feed, or on the television? There’s an election going on right now, where is the blood and the violence?
I never said India was a fascist state. I simply said that had it been held together in 1947 rather than partitioned, it would have lacked the state capacity to stop inter-ethic violence, ultimately resulting in a violent Muslim rebellion that it would not have been able to put down and an ultimate partition, just with a lot more dead bodies in between.
I admire India, quite a lot. But I think the notion of platonic India (the multi-ethnic democracy) gets in the way of understanding the actual situation of 1947 and why Jinnah (and Nehru, by the way) figured out that this had to be the way to do things.
I think you’ve never been to India or understand the nuances of how the country is set up. For all the talks of riots, it’s not like there’s continual violence or bloodshed. There are incidents of violence yes, but that’s on par with any third world developing country. Tribal violence in the interior of Africaesque.
The cities violence is very rare (kind of like hate crimes in America? Happens for sure but not systematic or large scale).
I’ve got plenty of Muslim friends who live in peace in the big cities. I mean Modi won 20% of the Muslim vote in the last election!
(Again I do not care for the rhetoric but I am sick of Western commentators reading neocolonial garbage and spouting their opinions based on that).
So now take us back 75 years, when India had far less wealth and state capacity than it has now.
And now, multiply the number of incidents between Hindus and Muslims in 1948 by, lets say, a factor of 100 because of all the additional Muslims who are still in the country.
How was India going to control that? Answer: they couldn't. It would have been a bloodbath, and the Muslims would have eventually formed a revolutionary army and gained their independence, just like the Bangladeshis eventually did. It's just that a ton more people would have died.
That's the reality. I know it's painful to the self-image of India to contemplate that, because it thinks of itself as a multi-ethnic secular democracy that is fair to Muslims. But that's what would have happened. Jinnah was a hero who saved a lot of Hindu lives as well as Muslim lives.
I wouldn't blame Jinnah (I think I agree with you that he saw the reality unfolding and adapted) and I don't think you could turn back 75 years and have things go better in a unified state but I do think if you went back 125 years you could have a unified state. I do think there is failure to imagine how multiethnic states can build stable institutions.
Is that really the viewpoint, that no one thinks the pluralistic unified state would have worked? I had always assumed it would have gone better, but a lot depends on what the INC of that world would have been like, and whether they would have triggered a stronger Hindutva backlash, or have been able to navigate communitarian Muslim and Hindu parties pushing from opposite sides of the right.
As I say above, I don't think immediate post-revolutionary India had anywhere near the state capacity to prevent Hindu-Muslim violence. It would have blown up, a ton of people would have died, and you would have ended up with a partition anyway. Jinnah saved a ton of lives.
There are many Pakistani intellectuals who bemoan the creation of Pakistan today. Indian subcontinent, even under the Mughals and earlier muslim rulers, was always multi-cultural, and Islam thrived culturally because of interaction with other faiths. Sikhism was founded by Guru Nanak whose closest associate was muslim-born (Bhai Mardana). It was heavily influenced by the Sufi movement, which is of course part of Islam. Poet Kabir was also born muslim but studied under a Hindu guru in Varanasi and became one of the leading saints of the Bhakti movement (Hindu). It can be argued other faiths' influence kept Islam in check.
I seem to remember a time when Pervez Musharraf and Manmohan Singh had a thaw in relations and jointly visited their birthplaces, which are in the opposite countries.
Well, the partition of India created decades of wars and continuous animosity between Pakistan and India, so it's not like it was a peaceful unproblematic split.
Ha! I stayed up till 3:30 am my time working, so I get to be one of the first commenters for a change!
So, I have a lot of Feelings about this post, also I'm super sleep-deprived so I probably won't be very coherent or logical about any of this, here goes.
This sentence right here really, REALLY gets at the difference between the American liberal and the Polish (or really, any Old World country) traditional mindset:
"This version of Poland [the one that existed in between WWI and WWII] was not a particularly practical or workable idea."
And you know what, the American in me looks at that wonky map and nods sagely and says, yes, it certainly is not a very good map, look at those big populations of Ukrainians and Belorussians, do we really need Vilnius, shouldn't that go to Lithuania?"
And the Polish person in me, the one raised on stories of a century-plus of oppression and subjugation by foreign powers, looks at that sentence and says, "Hey doofus, WE GOT OUR COUNTRY BACK! Our independent homeland! Do you know what it meant to us, how Polish people under Russian and Prussian and Austro-Hungarian occupation used to pray, Grant us our free homeland back, O Lord? You have the temerity to criticize the Second Polish Republic for being impractical or something? You have no idea, you who were born in America and could always take it for granted that a bunch of German or Russian troops wouldn't just walk over and take your country from you!"
Ahem. The cognitive dissonance is strong.
Anyway! When I think that way, the Polish way I mean, I can sort of kind of understand the Palestinians. They lost their country! They want it back!
And yet, on the whole, with lots of "it's complicated", I support Israel and not Palestine, how can this be? Three reasons!
1. Poland was an actual, existing country before Russia and Prussia and Austria-Hungary took it away. We had a king and a royal castle and stuff! And the FIRST constitution in Europe, how about that! In contrast, there was never a country called Palestine. OK, but that's kind of a weak sauce excuse, so what if there was no official country "Palestine," there's still Palestinian national identity. So, on to...
2. The goal was Polish independence, not the annihilation of the occupying nations. Mostly we just wanted them to f*** off and go back where they came from, to their own sovereign nations of Russia and Germany and wherever. In contrast, there is no sovereign nation that Jews can "go back to" that is THEIRS, no secret Jewish nation in Antarctica or Atlantis. Israel is it. Furthermore...
3. I was a child when I learned Polish history, and maybe it was somewhat sanitized for a child's consumption. However, while the stories I heard certainly emphasized manly heroism and glorious death in battle, I do not recall anyone EVER promoting things like "let's rape a bunch of Russian women and slaughter a bunch of Russian children, that'll learn 'em for occupying us!" Acts of savagery and butchery against civilians were strongly frowned upon. We wanted to see ourselves as the good guys, the beleaguered scrappy heroes who fight against overwhelming odds, not murderers and rapists of unarmed civilians.
Anyhow, I have to get a bit of sleep now, also the only reason I'm up so late is that I procrastinated catastrophically earlier this week, so to anyone reading this: learn from me and please don't do what I did.
Really insightful response. One thing Matt hasn't touched on when covering this issue, and I get why he hasn't because it's a third rail, is the role radical Islam has played in Palestinian culture. It's an inconvenient truth that Israel is both substantially more to the right than the US but also in no way comparable to the Conservative Muslim culture of Palestine and the surrounding Arab states.
Since 10/7 Sam Harris has produced a number of podcasts covering this issue - I haven't really seen any other public intellectual do so. As Sam has said, in the immediate aftermath of 10/7, Gazans were celebrating the deaths of innocent Israeli children and parading their bodies through the streets. It's inconceivable that the same would happen in Tel Aviv.
I definitely agree that this the third rail here, and an undeniable part of the political reality in creating a Palestinian state. But the dehumanization of the widespread death and suffering in from the Israel side is still something that needs to be reckoned with as well.
Talked about this with my grandparents last night (both self-described Zionists, and one of which fled Germany during the holocaust). They were absolutely outraged and shocked at the college protestors. But said that, in their opinion, what Bibi has done is a "shanda for the goyim". Which translates to "shame in front of non-jews."
Yeah, none of what I said is meant to absolve Bibi, the ultranationalist settlers or lunatics in his coalition from many of the abhorrent things they've done. The rhetoric coming from Smoltrich and Ben-Gvir is sickening.
That being said, if you're to believe Urban Warfare experts like John Spencer (who was recently on the Making Sense Podcast with Sam Harris) it's not entirely clear that Israel isn't carrying out the war in Gaza as ethically as possible. I'm paraphrasing here but according to Spencer, if you take the Gaza Ministry of Health's death toll of around 35k at face value and the IDF's claim of killing around 12k combatants at face value, then you get a historically low ratio of combatants to civilian deaths. These are all estimations since it's impossible to accurately count deaths in the middle of an urban war but I think it's the fairest way to do it by taking both side's estimates into consideration.
Now all of that being said, I personally find it really hard to reconcile the disgusting rhetoric of Bibi and his associates, Israel's actions in the west bank over the last few decades and the country's steady drift rightwards with, what I believe to be an ethical war in Gaza. It's a confounding time to be a center left Jew!
I think it’s underrated the extent to which Bibi does not actually control the army or how the war gets fought on the ground. In the US the president is the commander in chief; this is not how it works in Israel, where the army is more of an autonomous public institution like the Federal Reserve in the US.
There’s the movement on the far right to push for more “civilian oversight” of the army because they don’t like how they fight wars ethically (in their minds, at the expense of Israeli soldiers) and more importantly that most of the defense establishment supports a two state solution. And obviously all of this is nuts.
But the point is, if you want to understand how Ben Gvir and Smotrich can have an effective veto over government decisions while the army goes about fighting the war in accordance with international law, well that that movement exists tells you everything you need to know.
The fact that I, a pretty well informed center left Jew, didn't know all of this tells you how badly Israel is losing the PR War. Ben-Gvir and Smotrich should be barred from talking in public.
Not likely in Tel Aviv. But that’s because Israel has enough land that a cosmopolitan beach town on the Mediterranean is not the only place to live, and the kind of people that would celebrate ethnic strife have chosen to live together in other places. The interesting question is whether there has been dancing in the streets in any of the settlements during various phases of the current Gaza operation.
Islamism actually post dates the Palestinians Israeli conflict, the secular Marxist leninists PFLP, Popular front for the liberation of Palestine is older than Hamas and the PFLP also carried out terrorist attacks on Israel. This also ignores the role of religious Zionism among the Jewish side for the continued war.
I agree with most of the article. Wanted to flag one thing:
> anyway! When I think that way, the Polish way I mean, I can sort of kind of understand the Palestinians. They lost their country! They want it back!
This is also the way that some Jews view Israel, what with the whole "next year in Jerusalem" thing. Not all Jews, and this wasn't the main motivation around Zionism I believe, but worth pointing out the similarities explicitly.
Human history is an immense, tottering tower of conquest. That's what makes this whole current progressive obsession with things like land acknowledgements in the US or anti-Zionism in the middle east so infuriating -- it's this pretense that there is a "legitimate" owner to land, like we can take this multi-thousand-year history of violent seizure of land, war, genocide, displacement, draw a line somewhere and say, "Oh, well these guys are legitimate, not before or after."
True egalitarian progressivism would indeed acknowledge that no one actually "owns" land, and that the entire concept of the nation-state is just a temporary kludge, one which we might hope will eventually be replaced by a united world government or some other appropriately humanist peaceful evolution of government.
Righting the wrongs of the past is easy to confuse for the true progressive project of preventing future wrongs. [Ed: Because studying the past is so important for charting the path forward.]
Yes, it was very sanitised—do you really think that the themes emphasised in modern romantic stories are a reliable guide to the character of nationalists from a hundred years ago? If somehow the maximalist Palestinian nationalist cause succeeds their discussion of October 7 a century from now is going to sound something like “the fighters broke out of the walls! then [mumbling], anyway, Gaza”.
Moreover, Modern Poland doesn’t exist without the atrocities that made the underlying populations more or less match the country’s borders (many committed by others, but with plenty of blood on the hands of Polish nationalists). This is true of all the nationalist projects, which is why we shouldn’t do any more of them, but also why we shouldn’t be trying to roll any of the old ones back.
Re: (1) it is underrated the extent to which there was no Palestinian nationalism pre-1967. What there was was pan-Arab nationalism. Post 67 is around when Palestinian nationalism started coalescing. Moreover most of the Arabs that lived in Israel in 1948 had migrated from elsewhere themselves.
This history is obscured because it’s usually cited by right wingers and other psychos to argue that Palestinian nationalism is somehow illegitimate or not “real” or whatever. But this is why I get upset when people make claims like “the Palestinians got jobbed” - this is only true if you regard Jewish immigration to the British mandate as illegitimate but Arabs who wandered over from Jordan or Egypt as legitimate.
Non of this is true, there were institutions declaring a distinct Palestinian nationalism since before the British Mandate. The famous newspaper Falastin was created by Christian Palestinians and talked about opposition to the Zionist project and talked about a Palestinian national identity.
Matt also mentioned him but the historian Rashid Khalidi has a book on the history of the development of Palestinian nationalism and he shows it developed around the late 19th early 20th century.
1. As much as this article talks about how counterproductive anti-Zionism is, I think it undersells the fundamental weirdness of it. Over the course of the past 100 years, the Arab world has unified behind an *anti-nationalist* project that has taken precedence at every turn over the Palestinian national project.
Hence the invasion of Israel by four Arab armies who wanted nothing whatsoever to do with the expelled Palestinians -- I don't think this is something that's easily understandable in the context of European national projects. Also, there's the idea that Palestinians must have the right of return before creating a state. Has anyone ever heard a demand like "we want to create a country, but a precondition is that we must be allowed to send any of our citizens to *your* country, which we incidentally hate with a burning passion."
Is there another example of an anti-nationalist project like this?
2. This article criticizes Herzl's Zionism as being (1) too pessimistic about anti-Semitism (pre-Hitler), and (2) ultimately unsuccessful in "solving" anti-Semitism. Perhaps nothing like Hitler happened in the 19th century, but taking the long view of history, Herzl certainly wasn't crazy to think there would be mass expulsions or killings of Jews in Europe.
As for the "failure" of Zionism, it's true that it hasn't solved anti-Semitism. I view it more as an insurance policy. It's well understood that *on average*, Israelis will actually face many more difficulties than diaspora Jews in functioning liberal democracies -- here in America, we don't have to fight jihadists. However, if something were to go wrong, Israel gives Jews a place to go (not that this is likely!). The Jews of Germany would've been very grateful for a Jewish state in 1939.
This may have been true before nuclear bombs. But as the leaders of Iran have observed, a few nuclear explosions would utterly wipe Israel off the map, while only causing temporary harm to the surrounding Arab communities.
All your eggs in one basket and watch that basket, vs the security of spreading them around.
If there is in fact more existential risk to Jews living in Israel today, than in various diaspora communities, then what is the continued purpose of Israel, other than as a regular nation state that, like any other, needs continually justify its legitimacy by the way it treats those under its sovereignty?
I think this is a valid point. The existence of a Jewish state helps against Hitler-type threats, but it exposes Israelis to large attacks. Whether you think Herzl had a good idea depends on which of these threats you think is more likely or severe.
Also keep in mind that Zionism doesn't require all the eggs to be in one basket -- I think you can be a Zionist while still thinking that it's a good idea to have a large diaspora community.
Exactly - one thing I found odd about Matt’s definition of Zionism is the view that it entails that all Jews migrate to Israel. There are more than a few self-described Zionist organizations in the US that are not remotely committed to every American Jew moving to Israel. Jewish schools almost universally describe themselves as strongly Zionist and yet the message “you should move to Israel” is hardly present.
Modern day Zionism mostly does consist of the, in Matt’s words, “deflated” proposition that Israel should exist, and beyond that, that American Jews should create cultural ties and support its existence to the extent we can. But basically every diaspora Jewish community is a Zionist one despite being, well, a diaspora Jewish community.
I think Israel's nuclear (presumably) second strike capability make that calculation not quite so simple. But it's also why I find Israel's constant claim to be under existential threat so unconvincing. Even if they were destroyed too they can nuke any regional enemy out of existence, which in turn makes it highly unlikely anyone would actually do it.
Even without nukes, constant low-tech rocket fire from Gaza and Lebanon has put Israel under existential threat. The north and southwestern parts of the country have been evacuated for months. With even a slight improvement in rocket technology the entire country could be in the same situation. Second strike nuclear capability doesn't solve that.
No but the Iron Dome, Patriot missiles, and similar missile defense systems does greatly mitigate it. So it's a security threat but it is not existential, any more than a bunch of poorly trained marauders with small arms are. The unwillingness to ever make these distinctions is not doing the Israelis any favors.
I guess it depends on your definition of existential. Those parts of the country evacuated because they are under constant rocket fire cannot function normally as a country. That's why they evacuated. What would happen if that state of affairs spread to the rest of the country? People would try and carry on as best they could but you would see a lot of people who could move away moving away.
Yes, today they have the Iron Dome and for the last few years that has been more or less sufficient to keep things manageable. But that is actually a relatively recent state of affairs and not a stable equilibrium, as we have seen. There's no an inexhaustible amount of munitions for it, and it depends on Hezbollah and Hamas not making a significant advance in their rocket technology to work.
Sure but that just leads us to the question of whether the Israeli approach to the conflict, and really, the settlements, is conducive to eventually securing peace. It's also not like there's some huge backlash when Israel conducts an incursion against external non state actors like Hezbollah, operating from territory Israel doesn't de jure or de facto control. They're the motte to the bailey of a bunch of far less defensible policies and actions, which again, hurt Israel in far more lasting and profound ways than Hamas ever could.
I’m gonna say, once your nation has faced uncompromising existential threat, and then in the aftermath your country faces 30 years of the regional power trying to destroy you, you’re gonna be a bit paranoid about existential threats.
Part of the rationale for Israel was that, whether or not it guaranteed the survival of the Jewish people it at least gave them a basis for fighting for that survival. That's something they've never had in the Diaspora.
I would phrase this a little differently: in the Diaspora, Jews had to hope that they could convince a majority of gentiles to allow their existence qua Jews. In Israel, they do not. The fact that (for the moment) it is arguably easier to convince Americans to allow their existence than it is to maintain that existence in Israel, is maybe interesting but not as compelling as Matt thinks it is.
I'm not any kind of expert on Iran, but it seems fairly obvious that they are also worried about deterring Saudi Arabia or being invaded by the US or (some day down the road) Russia, as happened may times historically. They spent 8 years fighting off the smaller country of Iraq not too long ago, for instance.
Sure, but I'm not the one who needs convinced of that, and the lazy but mostly true rejoinder is that that didn't save Saddam.
In any case, a nuclear weapons program is something you set up for 50 years, not 10 years, and who knows how global politics will be configured then, other than to say Iran will probably have a few powerful, nuclear armed neighbors and enemies.
To not lose the plot, I think I'm trying to point out that they may have other reasons to acquire weapons apart from Israel, whatever you think of the legitimacy of those reasons.
Israel and Iran have conflicting interests in Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank and Gaza. Israel has escalation dominance. No serious regional power would concede escalation dominance to an enemy.
But France had reason to fear Soviet invasion because the Soviets expressed an interest in spreading their ideology and control over other countries. Israel has never expressed a desire to spread beyond what it sees as its historic homeland, which certainly never included Persia.
Why, though? Israel has no designs on Iran. If Iran recognized Israel's existence and stopped using proxies to attack Israel, there would be no conflict between them at all. The risk and threat is entirely from the Iranian side. They don't need nukes for self-defense against Israel unless they insist on war.
If Iran decides not to seek Israel's destruction (as several Arab states have done), it cedes foreign policy autonomy to America? How so? Do Iranian interests inherently demand seeking Israel's destruction? Do the Iranian people benefit somehow from attacking international shipping and arming terrorists with missiles?
Most countries refrain from such behavior. Have they also ceded their foreign policy autonomy to America? Or are they just acting rationally and constructively for their own interests?
To the extent that their foreign policy autonomy consists of the ability to pursue Israel’s destruction, or the proliferation of non-state militias that parasitically extort concessions from the countries unwillingly hosting them, yes they’d have to give that up. I don’t see why any of that is desirable (much less necessary) in the first place.
This is a strange way to say “let’s take Iranian theocratic psychopathy as a given, in which case, they’ll come to blows with non-theocratic psychopaths.”
Not just Israel too. Also Pakistan, a neighbor, and several other “near” neighbors, Russia, India and China, if you drastically stretch a geographic point.
Why? Israel wants literally nothing from Iran, nothing to do with Iran - Iran could have peace with Israel tomorrow if it just said “ok fine we’ll stop shooting at you”.
This is dumb because (a) they’re not going to nuke some of the holiest sites in their own religion, (b) it would make Palestine also totally uninhabitable, and due to both it would (c) also ensure the swift destruction of Iran.
They would have done it already if none of the above mattered
Nukes aren’t the same as the 1940s. The fallout would extend, depending on weather, through Greece or halfway down Saudi Arabia who hates Iran. It would also level all of Israel and most of Palestine. It would lead to Irans total destruction.
Yes, and one of the biggest differences between today and the 40s is that there are dozens of designs. You can make them very big, or you can make them pretty small. You can also dial up or down the fallout by changing the detonation height and fraction of fission vs fusion.
Famously, Herzl was inspired to start the Zionist movement while being a correspondent during the Dreyfuss trial. It's a big leap to go from that experience to imagining the Holocaust, but it's not *that* big of a leap.
This was a glaring hole in the story Matt tells. Jewish nationalism had less to do with mimicking the broader trend, and more to do with “hey if everyone else is nationalizing, that doesn’t leave much room for us.” The lack of any mention of Dreyfus in the context of Herzl was frankly bewildering.
To be honest I’m not sure sure concentrating all the Jews in a single place of tiny geographical extent (and surrounded by hostile neighbors) in a world in which nuclear weapons exist is without its drawbacks as far as genocide risk goes.
But the same can be said of any distinct national or ethnic group, most of which are "concentrated" by virtue of living together in a relatively compact area with defined borders and a commitment to self-defense.
The temptation of anti-zionism is that Israelis are surrounded by Arabs, so expelling them shouldn’t be so much different than driving the Dutch from East Timor. However, four wars have proved this position dubious.
I think the subtlety that is elided here is that it is debatable whether Palestine and Palestinians ever represented a national grouping prior to the creation of Israel. And, even if they were, the creation of a nation of Palestine would have been just as Romantic-Nationalistic as any of the other nation-births discussed here.
The large majority of the Levant was carved up into ethnically Arab countries with cultures and historic nationalities that were/are not clearly markedly distinct from Palestinian culture/nationhood. Saying Palestine was separate from Jordan or Syria and deserved its own country was not that different from saying Galicia should not have been part of Spain because it had its own unique identity. Galicia perhaps had a better argument, I think, and I believe the last independent country in Palestine was the crusader-run Kingdom of Jerusalem
When the Israeli partition plan was drawn up, a small portion of the British Middle East was allocated to Jews, who were *a majority* in the land they were allocated. And it is disingenuous to repeat the factoid that Jews only owned 5% of the land of Palestine when Israel was created, without specifying how much of the land in the *Jewish* partition was Jewish-owned (a number that I have difficulty finding) and without specifying how much was Arab-owned rather than simply not privately owned (was the Negev desert owned by individual Arabs?). When sovereignty changes, communally owned lands naturally and justifiably pass to the new sovereign.
I think this is a deeply underrated point. The Ottoman Empire fell apart and the modern nations we have today are absolutely not the ways that the Arabs of the time saw themselves. There are dozens more examples like the Galicians who got absorbed into a nation state.
We can see this easily because between 1948 and 1967 it was Transjordan, and there was no attempt to create a unique Palestinian state. It wasn’t until the land was totally lost in 1967 and the Israeli retreating from their conquered territory that Palestinians saw a unique chance at all. And to Matt’s point they decided to squander it in attempts to genocide their neighbor.
The problem is that the only people who ever bring this stuff up are right wing psychos who try to leverage it to claim that “Palestinians are fake they should live in Jordan”. So no one likes to talk about it.
The Arabs did not see the British rule over Palestine as legitimate and therefore were mad about illegal Jewish immigration. This is not a very liberal attitude but it's also not an unexpected attitude. This was Jabotinsky's point. They were obviously going to be mad
I was definitely thinking about that when I saw the sign at the protest encampment on campus that said something like “there is no such thing as a birthright”. I see what they meant, that being born of certain ancestors shouldn’t give you a better right than anyone else to immigrate to a country your family has no immediate connection to, but this word enters into a lot of political discussions with many different valences and I would want to be careful about denying all of them.
For one thing, "there is no such thing as a birthright", if taken beyond an "own the libs" on a tourism program, just means there's no such thing as a positive right, period. It's a Libertarian Party view of society.
Best comment of the day. I think it's fair to say that any organized movement for Palestinian national identity emerged long after the Zionist movement had begun purchasing land from the Ottoman empire and establishing settlements.
Zionist actually didn't believe Arabs were part of any distinct national group, Weitzman the first Israeli president asked the UK to economically develop the Euphrates river delta so that the Arabs of parts of Syria, Palestine, Jordan could be moved to Iraq and make room for Jewish immigration.
It's true that the Muslims eventually kicked the Crusaders out of the Holy Land. It's not so clear that it was the *Arabs* that did so. The most decisive victories came under the leadership of Saladin, a Kurd, heading a force in which Arabs were probably a minority, with the bulk made up of Turks, Berbers, Nubians, Kurds, etc.
OK, then I'm just not clear on what was supposed to happen. The Ottomans (do you consider them European?) lost WWI. The victors (France, UK) took over their land. Were the Ottomans just supposed to leave, and were France and the UK just supposed to throw up their hands at the power vacuum? People can say "Europeans shouldn't create states in the Middle East," but what alternative was there given geopolitical facts as they stood?
One of the victors of WWI was Hussein bin Ali, the King of the Arabs, the Sharifian Caliph and the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, whose armies participated, with their allies from Britain and its Empire, in the liberation of the Arabs from Ottoman rule. He was the rightful ruler of all of the formerly Ottoman-occupied Arabian lands after WWI: the mutasarrifates of Jerusalem and Beirut, the vilayets of Damascus, Beirut, Aleppo, Baghdad and Basra and the sanjak of Deir Es-Zor. All the British and the French had to do was to stand aside and let the Hashemites take over.
Such were the terms of the agreement he (believed he) had with the British when he led the Great Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire. Britain's insistence on the Balfour Declaration and on the French control of Beirut and Damascus resulted in him ending the alliance with Britain (which resulted in him losing the war with the Emir of Najd, which is why there is now a country called Saudi Arabia).
(Hussein in Ali was the father of Abdullah I of Jordan and Faisal I of Iraq; Abdullah's great-grandson is Abdullah II, the present King of Jordan)
Fair enough. But what I think is missing (from both this Arab perspective you describe and much contemporary anti-Zionist perspective) is that modern Israelis do not consider themselves European (and most modern Israelis are not of European descent). Even historic Jewish Palestinians at the time of Partition were hardly European either, in that they owned land in Palestine, had worked to develop their parts of Palestine, might have been born in Palestine, or had fled persecution in Europe. I know this last group is the one that is emphasized ("maybe they were fleeing persecution, but they were still European interlopers"), but the other groups were by no means insubstantial.
As I understand it the demographic center of gravity in Israel is the descendants of Jews expelled from other parts of the ME. That's part of the 'get real' conversation that needs to take place on the Arab side. It isn't any more inherently illegitimate than the numerous other polities carved out of broken empires over the last 100-150 years. The part where the Israelis need to get real is the belief that in the 21st century they can have huge numbers of completely disenfranchised people under their de facto control in perpetuity and still be treated like any other liberal democracy.
The Europeans did not "have those Jews move" to the Middle East and create a state for them. The Jews were moving there already since the Ottomans were in charge. The Europeans in question spent the bulk of their time trying to prevent the Jews from moving there. For example, the British imposed strict immigration quotas on Jews and for many years barred them from buying property. The Germans and their allies tried to murder as many European Jews as possible, especially in the heartland of the Zionist movement, Poland, Belarus and Ukraine.
I wish people would be more specific when they criticize the "Europeans" for "moving" the Jews to Palestine and "creating a state" for them. Which Europeans? How did they "create a state" for the Jews? When did they do this?
But the Balfour Declaration did not create a state and the British resisted any attempts to do so, going so far as to restrict Jewish immigration during the Holocaust and bar Jews from buying land. At best, and I am unclear even on this, the Balfour Declaration created a more favorable attitude towards additional Jewish immigration than existed under the Turks (the founding generation of Israel had already by and large immigrated to Palestine before the Balfour Declaration). But what motivated Jews to move to Palestine was antisemitism in Europe, the greater proximity of Palestine to Europe (as opposed to say, South America or Australia), and the closing of America to Jewish immigration. To say that the British "created" the Jewish state means they didn't do enough to stop it.
The 1947 Partition was supported by 2/3 of the entire United Nations at the time, i.e. not just Europe. Moreover, it did not "create" Israel - the Jews had to fight off a civil war and an invasion to make it actually happen. The Europeans did not fight the war for them, and in fact (aside from Czechoslovakia) refused to let them buy any arms.
And now here's the antisemitism! Why do Arabs and Europeans get to decide which Jews belong to "Arab lands" and which Jews belong to "European lands"? Not only against the will and voice of those Jews but against where those Jews actually live, as with "Eastern" Jews living in Los Angeles and "Western" Jews having lived in pre-Zionist Palestine!
Europeans created all the "states" in the modern Middle East by virtue of the fall of the Ottoman Empire, and of course Europeans (Romans) also created the administrative units and some of the nomenclature (including "Palestine") used to this day. I don't think people are "missing" the Arab perspective on Israel, I think people are pointing out that the Arab perspective is unhelpfully narrow and ahistorical in its rejection of any argument that does not begin and end with the Islamic conquest of the 7th century, while ignoring the thousands of years of history that preceded it as well as everything that came after the fall of the Ottomans.
Your definition of Zionism to Peretz is the correct one and not “deflationary.” If you support the existence of a Jewish state, you are a Zionist. It doesn’t mean you have any particular positions on the borders, defense policy, etc.
If you love and support America, you are an American patriot. That doesn’t mean you support whatever boneheaded thing the government is currently up to.
One of the most irritating leftist tendencies is to twist the meanings of words to suit their political agenda. Don’t let them.
This. I am a Zionist in that I very much believe a Jewish state, that currently exists, should continue to exist. If you define Zionism the way ultra-right wing Jewish nationalists and some of the Haredi do as including the West Bank and “greater Israel”, then I oppose that and believe a compact Jewish Democratic state should exist. But that is not what “anti-Zionists” are preaching.
Anti-zionists (as opposed to pro-Palestinians) are seeking the destruction of Israel and that Jews living there either be eliminated or “go back” to places that never accepted them and would not now. The movement itself is very much anti-Semitic. It frankly is scary how much of this has come out of the woodwork since 10/7. Nor does describing anti-zionism as an anti-colonial project make sense. Jews have lived in the Levant for thousands of years. The return of Jews, many of whom were not accepted in their states, should be considered an anti-colonialist triumph. The spinning of the facts the other way is just bad faith.
I think this is a gross mischaracterization of the vast majority of anti-zionist activists, in America at least. The majority of them want a singular state where everyone has equal rights in a democratic system. I think you could reasonably call that naive and say that there is a good chance that there would in practice ultimately be expulsion of Jews, but they're kids, they're supposed to be naive.
It’s more than naive - why is this an acceptable goal at all? 9.5 million Israelis want nothing to do with their non-Israeli Palestinian neighbors - how is forcing them into political union with them humane?
Or to take it from another angle: why start with Israel at all? Let’s demand one state with equal rights between the US and Canada. No? Why not?
The issue is your version of Zionism is basically limited to the small number of Meretz and Labor politicians left. Even 'moderates' like Gantz are in favor of the current West Bank settlements and will make deals for more in the future if needed to keep a government stable.
Part of the reason for the rise of anti-Zionism, is the Labor/moderate/etc. Zionism you're supporting is dead in Israel.
There's a difference between the ideological position of wanting to settle the West Bank because of wanting that land, vs. wanting settlements to continue because you worry about the security of Israel.
The majority of Israelis don't want a Palestinian state to arise because they're afraid it will weaken Israel's security (with good reason), and they believe that settlements help protect "mainland" Israel.
It's true that the left in Israel has dwindled a lot and is very small, but it can certainly rise again, especially with good leadership on both sides making the case that this will bring peace (think the peace treaty with Egypt following the Yom Kippur war).
But I think this is part of the point too. The mainstream Israeli position seems to be that the existence of a separate Palestinian state is an existential security threat that cannot be allowed, AND that extending equal rights to the Palestinian inhabitants of the land is an existential threat to Israel’s Jewish identity that also cannot be allowed. So if the 2-state solution and the 1-state solution are both off the table, then the only outcomes left are either a continued state of increasing military rule/apartheid, or the Ben Gvir/Smotrich vision of ethnic cleansing and elimination.
And maybe those really are the only ways Israel can continue to exist. I don’t believe they are but many Israelis clearly do think so. But if they’re right true, then as someone in the diaspora, that’s where I get off the bus. While there seemed to be a possibility of a road towards a 2-state solution, I could call myself a Zionist in the minimal sense Matt’s describing. But if that’s off the table - and I’ve become convinced it is - then “I support Israel’s right to exist” becomes “I support Israel’s right to exist as a nation that must eternally rule an ethnic underclass in it’s occupied Bantustan”. And no, I don’t.
That doesn’t mean I dream of seeing Israel wiped off the map. But it’s just a nation like any other, and I feel no more committed to defending its inherent legitimacy than I do to Saudi Arabia.
"Nor does describing anti-zionism as an anti-colonial project make sense. Jews have lived in the Levant for thousands of years."
If Native Americans and Alaskan Natives from Montana, the Dakotas, etc... moved en masse to New Jersey and setup an ethno-religious state their would that be a colonialist or not? "They" have been living in NJ for thousands of years and a few even live their today
It wasn't colonial because there was no real metropole.
I will concede, however, that it LOOKED colonial to folks living in Palestine in say the 1920's, a point Matt makes. But calling Israel "settler colonialist" is wrong except as to what is now happening on the West Bank (which is terrible).
"It wasn't colonial because there was no real metropole."
Yeah, I think the lack of a metropole is a key distinction. It's what separate immigration as refugees versus colonialism. The "Jewish settler colonialists" were refugees fleeing the countries of their birth. The vast majority of them were from Czarist Russia. Nobody thinks the Czar was trying to colonize Palestine. And nobody thinks Honduras is trying to colonize Texas.
Slight correction, there are a lot of people who think some version of Honduras is trying to colonize Texas. They're all nuts, and they all wear red baseball caps.
Immigration with forceful setting up of a new government with jurisdiction over the original inhabitants is what makes it settler colonialism. The new government doesn't have to be reporting back to some city 1000 miles away for this to be pretty trash.
The ethnic groups in mandatory Palestine in the 1920's and 1930's set up their own armed ethnic militias with the express purpose of imposing governance upon and resisting governance from their neighbors who they saw as different.
If a poor immigrant from Honduras arrives and within 2 years joined some Spanish speaking armed Militia called "the Defense" dedicated to resisting the laws of the state of Texas and demanding land grants... we need a word for that.
But the Jews did not set up such a government until 1948, which happened after all the so-called colonialism had already occurred.
What happened was Jewish refugees began emigrating from Eastern Europe to Palestine for mostly non-ideological reasons in the 1890s. The vast majority of Jews did not immigrate to Palestine out of adherence to Zionist beliefs. They just wanted a place to live and couldn't afford or get into a better country. So fundamentally I don't see how this can be meaningfully described as colonialism as opposed to immigration.
But even if all of those refugees were Zionists and harbored a desire to set up an autonomous homeland for themselves in the country to which they immigrated that would not also be colonialism and I don't see why it would be described that way. If all of the Ultra-Orthodox Jews in the greater New York area expressed a desire to create an autonomous homeland in Rockland County and moved there en masse that would be a bad idea but it wouldn't be colonialism.
Just because something is bad and you want a word for it, doesn't mean it's colonialism. I also don't really get the need to fit it within that label. Israeli treatment of Palestinians can be bad on its own terms - it doesn't need to be forced into colonialist discourse. If you think that ethnic groups should be able to bar people from other ethnic groups from living in a place you can make that argument without colonialism.
The distinction is not silly because the solutions are different. In the case of settler colonialism you can make appeals to the metropole and expect the settlers to leave depending on the situation. Obviously there is some overlap in cases of settler colonialism where overtime the colony secedes from the metropole but again once that happens you can discuss the historical injustice but it doesn't make sense to ask most Americans to go back to their country of origin (assuming they are in the United States, complaining about American tourists expats is perfectly ok).
That would not be considered colonialist by the anti-settler colonialism set. Matt’s persuasive point is that once these things get resolved, usually with force, the displaced adjust their aspirations to reflect reality. Native Americans don’t expect Manhattan to be returned to them or advocate that everyone I. Manhattan return to their place of origin or be eliminated.
So the concept of a Native American Identity that connects the Inuit to the Lakota Sioux is interesting, because until the Europeans arrived, not only did those to indigenous groups not have a common identity, they probably didn't even know that the others existed. Therefore, any common identity and therefore connection to the land of New Jersey is a construct in relation to Europeans. This would only be analogous to Israeli Jews if Ashkenazi Jews had no cultural identification with Safardic Jews before zionism
I think it might be more analogous than it at first sounds, because an identity that was common enough to form a nation state probably did not exist between Ashkenazi and Safardic Jews for most of their history. Ethno-states didn't really start consolidating anywhere in Europe, the Mediterranean or the Middle East until at least the 15th century partly because pan-X feelings, where XX is German, Jewish, Arab, etc...weren't strong anywhere.
*I* would find such a project highly dubious both morally and legally, but I don't think it would be "colonialist," because, as I understand that term, it implies the settlers owe allegiance to another political entity. I.e., that's why the American "colonies" became "states" after declaring independence from Britain.
I think where the word has the most meaning, America was still regarded as colonialist long past it's founding. The part where you're still connected to a distant state is less important than the part where you are usurping political power from the locals. So if the Native Americans took all political power in NJ to me it's relevant as colonialism.
Why not? In my example it's explicitly not only natives who have some historical record of living in NJ, but many others as well.
But even if it's Lenapes, it sure seems colonialist, or something like it, because they'd be pushing out long-settled peoples who have more of a right to be there.
Lenapes are an almost unique example, though, because for most other Native groups, Iroquois included, there is some record of them displacing a previous native group to occupy the most recent territory they had prior to being ousted later.
White Americans absolutely do not have more of a right to be in New Jersey than the Lenape. The Lenape are the indigenous people and New Jerseyans (I say this having been raised in NJ and taught about its native peoples in school, lmao) are colonizers.
Ok tell me more - who belongs where...what if you're 1/2 Lenape or 1/4 Lenape or 1/8th Lenape or 1/64th? What if you're a Black American whose grandparents were born in NJ? Should Asian immigrants be allowed to come to NJ? Do the Iroquois belong on any of the land they pushed other tribes off of?
As a quick addendum - I sincerely doubt the Lenape are truly indigenous. They surely migrated from some other region and / or developed some sort of conscientious of being a separate people a few hundred years before sustained European contact. The peoples of that region (and every region of the globe) have always migrated, mixed and pushed each other out. That much is always evident in pre-contact language maps, which suggest the ancestors of the Lenape and all Algonquins perhaps originated somewhere in NE or NY before spreading out across much of the continent.
He isn’t claiming to love and support Israel, or that it should be a Jewish state. He is supporting its continued existence as a state. I expect Matt would actually have some substantive disagreements with many people on whether and how that requires Jewishness of the state. It seems to me that part of Zionism is in fact an insistence on the Jewishness of the state (though there are many questions about what that might mean, and whether it is compatible with an end to apartheid on the occupied territories).
At this point, now that Israel is established, it doesn’t even require insisting on that. Arguing that Israel needs to be compelled to accept millions of immigrants who are committed to its destruction and the expulsion of 80% of its citizens isn’t objectionable just because “well then Israel won’t be majority Jewish”.
I think it is very easy to claim to be a Zionist while arguing that Israel should dispense with most of the things that make it Jewish de jure. (For example, I am one such person - no one benefits from the state rabbinate, for example, except for the rabbis employed by it.)
Totally agree. I am a non-Jewish Zionist because I know enough history to understand that the world at large has a deep-seated (arguably psychotic) penchant for violent anti-Judaism. So I subscribe to the proposition that there "must be" a Jewish state to provide protection and an opportunity for Jews to flourish (as they have in Israel), without in the least derogating from the rights of Jews to establish thriving communities elsewhere in the world (as they have in the US and elsewhere). This is not different than my attitude would be about any other people that had been persecuted and reviled without reason throughout recorded history. This is NOT the same as supporting any particular Israeli policy or government, and it comes with deep revulsion at the arguments of religious zealots in Israel about the absolute primacy of Jewish interests in that land above those of any other people.
I think you have to understand this in terms of weirdness, bad faith and conspiracy theories.
I don't believe Belgium should exist, but if i spent my life screaming at strangers on the internet about how much I hated Belgium and defined myself as an anti-Belgiumist it would be really odd and would reflect a deeper issue.
I would not think you a weirdo if Belgium were still occupying the Congo and chopping off the hands of natives who opposed King Leopold. Belgium stopped but Israeli settler colonialism is ascendant.
I think the crimes in the Congo are neither here nor there as to whether Belgium should exist. The questions that are relevant are about how the Walloons and Flemish people feel about sharing a country with each other, and/or with the Dutch or French.
I might cheer on Congolese freedom fighters when they massacred their colonial overlords. I might sing songs and write essays and watch movies about their heroic deeds. I wouldn’t want the bourgeois women of Brussels raped, and I’d be conflicted about what should happen to white women and children in Congo, but frankly I’d think they had it coming if they were wiped out.
When you roll the iron dice and they come up against you, the penalty is death.
They were responding to the second paragraph in the top comment. They were saying it would be less weird to hate Belgium if they were currently chopping off hands.
But consider the historical erasure in that sentence. Jews, as a historical matter, are from Israel. Belgians are not from the Congo. Also settlers may be odious, but they do not do what Belgium did in the Congo.
"Jews, as a historical matter, are from Israel.": that is not as clear truth as you write it to be. The jewish religion spread beyond people from the region (e.g., the jewish population in Ethiopia).
Not all catholics are desendants of people from Italy.
One of the jet differences between Christianity and Judaism is that Christianity is a proselytizing religion. Judaism is not. The conventional Jewish belief presumes a genetic link to ancient Israelites, and there is evidence to support this.
That was not always true. Again, see as examples the jewish communities in Ethiopia or India.
And that's beyond the fact that genetics or ancestry should not dictate your rights. Can you imagine if only Americans with Native American ancentry had political rights in the US?
The fact that genetics/ancestry should not dictate your rights is a very good reason why Palestinians need to throw away the keys and create a peaceful society that renounces claims for the destruction of Jewish Israel.
1) any time an anti Israel protestor makes some reference to "turtle Island", they are literally saying only native Americans should have political rights in the US.
2) I do not understand your reference to Jews in Ethiopia and India. Jews have always intermarried where they moved, and that's how different Jewish communities look different. It also has to do with rape and pogroms.
"Can you imagine if only Americans with Native American ancentry had political rights in the US?"
Actually, under US federal law, whether one can be tried in federal court as an "Indian" does often depend on whether one has a "blood quantum" of descent from Native Americans.
(The Druze would be a better example, as they completely forbid conversion and even bar non-Druze from observing or studying the specifics of their religious practices.)
*key differences [I get not letting us edit, but why doesn't substack at least let you copy and paste your comment so you can easily repost it with your typos edited out?]
But ancestry is complicated. A good number of non-Jewish people have as much ancestry from the territory of modern Israel as significant fractions of the Jewish diaspora. There may be important reasons why one sort of ancestry conveys Jewish identity while the other does not, but none of it obviously conveys more of a historical tie to the land.
Of course Creek Indians have a historical claim to Georgia! But then of course the people who were before the Creek Indians also have a historical claim, and the people before them (presuming they exist). This is why I generally find the 'historical claim' line of thinking to be unproductive and an unwise basis for modern policymaking. As they say, toast can never be bread again.
From what I can find, the total population of Palestine in 1890 was about 500k, of which about 50k were Jews, 60k were Christians, and the rest, about 430K Muslim.
If that 50k of Jews had ancestors there longer than the 400k Muslims, would you consider them to have a stronger or weaker historical claim to Israel?
The question isn’t about those 50,000 and 400,000 - it’s about the millions of people who are descended from neither groups but claim some sort of group-related (and possibly ancestry-related) tie to the land despite not having ancestors of that generation (or the preceding dozen) who lived there.
The idea that I, a British person with a Russian Ashkenazi grandfather, have a deep inalienable right to move to my historic homeland Israel, while a Palestinian whose parents and grandparents were all born in Haifa has no such right, strikes me as another kind of historical erasure.
“… uniting most of the world’s Italian speakers (but not Rome and its environs or the area around Venice, or the Italian-speaking people of the Dalmatian coast, or the city of Trieste, or the Italian-speaking minority in Nice) into a single state.”
You are hereby declared persona non grata in the Most Serene Republic of San Marino.
San Marino erasure is all too real! For Mother's Day, my family went to an Italian restaurant and they had placemats for the kids with facts about Italy, which included (1) a map of the country and (2) a list of countries that border Italy, and San Marino (as well as the Papal States/Vatican City) was missing from both.
This is a great article. Ethno-nationalism broadly is a highly dubious project under the best of circumstances. That the Israeli state is as constrained as it has been is it's most impressive feature. Maybe the most remarkable thing about all of this is that the intransigent displaced population has been allowed to persist in the manner it has. The typical trajectory of these situations is much more like the "genocide" the anti-zionists pretend has happened. I see very little reason to believe that it has ever been the case that the displacement of the Israeli ethno-state by some hypothetical or counterfactual anti-zionist effort would have produced a Palestinian state that would be so accommodating.
Israel has been the premier military power in the region for like 50+ years. They're constrained by ideology not capacity. In fact, if they were less overwhelmingly strong, they would be compelled to be more ruthless than they have been. This gets to why complaints about US policy are so misguided. US support of Israel protects their neighbors from them even more so than the other way around. When Israel actually has to enforce it's own borders it's extremely bad for the people in the regions that force the issue.
Israel is only the premier military power because of their neighbors' incompetence and US support. The combined abilities of its neighbors, especially once you throw in Iran which never actually took up arms against Israel until after the Shah, should have been and should be militarily superior to Israel. By all rights the Arabs should have won at least one of the the 20th century Arab-Israeli wars.
Exactly, Israel accepts mostly indefensible borders on the back of US support. The alternative is they create defensible ones, which would be extremely bad for their Arab neighbors.
You can easily lookup the differences in military hardware between Israel and literally the entire Muslim world (who, it should be said, are not unilaterally anti Israel).
What you’re failing to see here is that if the US stopped supplying Israel and bombs started falling on Tel Aviv and people really started dying, Israel wouldn’t hold back either. And in that scenario I cannot begin to describe how lopsided the conflict would be. It would make the 1967 war look like a schoolyard tussle
It’s this ideology that leads to so much death. People just cannot grasp that Israel is an extremely strong military for some reason.
There are three tiers of militaries today — US/China, modern powers (Israel to UK to Australian with all the modern tech), and everyone else. If you’re in the everyone else bucket, you’re using Soviet trash or US dustbin technology that we surpassed in the 80s. It’s hard to describe how lopsided these conflicts are.
I really liked parts of this article and disagreed with others pretty strongly.
To start with what I liked, I think there's actually been revisionism in the Israeli account of their own history. Zionism was always a weird idea, and there were very few ideologically-driven zionist migrants. The vast majority of those pushed to move there did so because they had nowhere else to go, especially after the American immigration crackdown of 1924 (which my great grandparents migrated here before). The early leaders of the movement were ideological, though, and they often get quoted to speak for everyone.
On the question of Herzl's weirdness, he'd almost certainly have agreed the idea was insane too. Chaim Weizmann, then-leader of the world zionist congress, used to say "you don't need to be crazy to be a zionist, but it certainly helps". I do disagree, though, that Herzl was somehow misguided because he could not have predicted the specifics of a catastrophe for jews in the context of European nationalist movements.
Herzl's contention was that, after observing events like the Dreyfus affair, European nationalism never included the Jews. He had strong historical precedent for believing no one would save them if that lack of inclusion turned violent, and nationalism was in the air, so a nation-state was the solution he went to. Maybe he could have advocated for mass migration to America, but a lot of people viewed further migration in minority status as just another step in fleeing as the Christian world went through it's repetitive cycles of tolerating then expulsion of Jews.
It's pretty difficult, though, to say that Herzl predicted European nationalism would exclude Jews and it could result in a catastrophe, but he was misguided because he couldn't have predicted exactly how it happened. No one could have predicted the horror of the Holocaust, since that kind of industrialized genocide had never been seen before, but Herzl got most of the ingredients correct: ultra-nationalism, lack of any safe refuge, and Jews as an "other" being viewed as corrupting true European nationalist identities.
The correctness of Herzl and early Zionists does not make their cause any less crazy, but it makes them more understandable. There's an old adage about the conflict being a "collision of right and right" which I basically agree with. Palestinians bear no responsibility for European anti-semitism, but Zionism is a story of what happens when refugees refuse to take no for an answer. Is it morally legitimate to say "we should have been allowed to shut our doors to fleeing Holocaust survivors just like the rest of the world did"? I'm not sure, but no one is asking that question of the people who did so successfully. It also raises very real questions about our own culpability as a world community in ignoring the plight of modern refugees.
Anyways, I largely agree about the weirdness of both Zionism and anti-Zionism as ideas. The history is interesting and I like to argue about whether Herzl was right as much as the next guy. At the end of the day, though, real people are suffering immensely, and their well-being does not actually rely on the dissolution of Israel. Anti-zionism is a movement about finding what they perceive as justice, but it keeps coming at massive cost to everyone, most of all those for whom the justice is sought.
Wonderful point. It made me rethink my views on immigration/refuge dynamics in America. Israel became necessary through the unique combination of a) a culture and identity that persisted over millennia regardless of where its people found themselves, b) a pervasive, virulent hate of that culture escalating to unspeakable evil, c) a people who had no natural homeland to defend, and d) nobody opening their doors to help.
We’re ~200 years into the American experiment of creating a society organized around ideas, not national identify. Who else is better positioned to be generous with those who struggle to find a home or cannot live in their own. If the US had permitted significant Jewish immigration during WWII, Israel may not have been necessary.
There are clear limits to a country’s cultural willingness to adsorb new immigrants, but we should push for at least a bit more than is comfortable.
Also, judging Zionism by only what facts Herzl had access to in 1898 or whatever isn't really fair. Zionism continued to evolve over the next few decades under other leaders, who had access to later historical developments such as World War I and the resulting antisemitism the new nationalist movements enacted in their new countries. Jabotinsky in particular, whatever his other faults, foresaw great purges and massacres of Jews on the horizon even before World War II.
I strongly agree with this point. People like to take the Zionism of Herzl and act like it got sealed in a vacuum, unable to evolve at all after he died in 1904. It makes a lot more sense that Ben-Gurion and Weizmann fought so hard for Jewish immigration when they basically knew in the 1930s that every immigrant is a Jewish life saved. You really can't separate that environment from early Zionism
I do think that it’s relevant that Levantine leaders who came back to take over the Arab partition, esp in the Arab Liberation Army, came directly from serving in the Nazi army. The ideology that Jews ran from that spread like a cancer across Europe got consolidated in white hot persistent rage in the form of the Palestinians leadership and has never stopped.
Very few soldiers in any of the Arab liberation armies came from Nazi armies. You're talking about a literal handful of people. Certainly not their leadership. It's entirely logical why the Arabs would have opposed the creation of a Jewish state - not everything is Nazism.
Please google Fawzi al-Qawuqji and his cadre. It was precisely the leadership that came directly like Qawuqji or directly worked with nazis like then mufti or Rashid Ali Al-Gaylani. Arbs in the levant were led by these people. If they had better leaders at the beginning the whole issue could have been greatly avoided and resolved decades ago.
Fawzi al-Qawuqji is much better classified as a serial Arab nationalist revolutionary than anti-semite. He was heavily involved in Syrian and Saudi guerilla fights, which were much more how he was trained. I'm of two minds on this. Palestinians genuinely lost en enormous amount at the hands of jews, and they don't need any anti-semitism to feel resentful. Hajj Amin al-Huseini, though, had deep nazi ties and really served as a key connection and recruiter for nazis in the Arab world. That's bad! Characterizing him as representative of the entire Palestinian cause is disingenous and wrong, though
I’ve never characterized the average Palestinian as Nazis. The leadership was obviously either directly nazis or their allies, which makes sense as the ottomans joined the Germans war of conquest in WW1 so they were natural allies. I don’t even understand how this is controversial, Qawuqji and his cadre wore the Nazi uniform. They were nazis. They brought that genocidal ideology with them
I’m trying to figure out the terminology. Armenian people I know always refer to it as “Artsakh”, while the New York Times always calls it “Nagorno-Karabakh”. I’ve browsed the Wikipedia pages but had trouble figuring out why these terms are used so differently.
I try not to comment on Israel-Palestine conflicts for a number of reasons (inter alia becuase it’s usually comically unproductive, no one’s mind will be changed, and such disucssions generally create far more heat than light) but Matt has provided an opening for a tangential complaint that I have about the entirety of the discourse. To wit:
“I’d successfully prevailed on someone I knew who worked for him to communicate that it was really quite offensive to me, as a Jewish person with lots of Jewish relatives who I love and who themselves have a range of views about Israel, tobe called antisemitic.”
I ask Matt and other readers to consider the counterfactual world in which he held and expressed these very same opinions but was one of the 97.4% or so of Americans who are not Jewish, and thus lacked the capacity to immunize himself from accusations of anti-semitism (which, I hope one can stipulate, is a bad thing to be accused of personally and professionally in America).
I understand the rationale behind the heuristic that Jewish commentators are less likely to be closet antisemites and thus less likely to express any critiques of Israeli policy as a reflection of underlying antisemitism, but the chilling effect that anecdotes like the above have whereby it feels like only Jewish commentators have the freedom to publicly opine across the opinion spectrum on a dispute that is constantly plastered over the front pages of the New York Times without great personal and professional risk of censure — again, in a country that is supermajoritarian non-Jewish — seems to me like it is *also a problem.*
The only solution I can propose is rigorous application of the principle of charity.
1. Plenty of people are unfairly called anti-semitic who aren't.
2. Plenty of people espouse views about the future of historic Palestine that if implemented would lead to mass murder and mass exile of Jews and either want that outcome or don't care that it happens because they see Palestine as Arab/Muslim land.
For American progressives at least I think extremely few of them think that their desired one state would lead to any mass murder/ exile. You could very reasonably call this uninformed and/or naive, but I don't think you could reasonably call it apathetic or hateful. Of course the people you reference exist, but I do think it's a small percentage, at least among Western progressives
To call that willful ignorance is probably being too charitable. You only have to look at how jews are treated in the rest of the Arab world to predict how one state would work out.
While this is true, a lot of these people are people who basically want to just transplant American values on top of the area. It's the same naivety that caused George W Bush to want to do all that nation-building in the Middle East. You'd think the fallout from Iraq and Afghanistan would make it clear that a project that says "It'll be fine for these people to integrate into a modern, secular democracy even though they've never done that before and have wildly different values" is doomed, but people tend to forget.
Google told me “As of May 2024, the estimated population of Israel is 9,311,652, the West Bank is 3,243,369, and the Gaza Strip is 2.1 million”. Unless there’s a lot more than 2 million non Jewish people in Israel I think it really would be hard to predict what democratic politics in a unitary state would be like.
That said, if I'm not mistaken, your number for the West Bank includes not just Palestinians but also the 670k Israeli settlers there. (I believe that the CBS total for Israel also includes those settlers.)
So I believe the current total Arab population of Israel + West Bank + Gaza is only 6.75m (2.08m + (3.24m - 670k) + 2.1m), which is about 460k less than the current total Jewish population of the same area.
(N.B. This is not considering potential impacts from any right of return.)
Strongly agree with rigorous application of charity. But I think the charitable interpretation of Matt’s point is that those who have a personal stake in anti-semitism are more justified in being offended by having having anything less than the maximalist Zionist position begin called anti-Semitic, but not that Jews have a monopoly on being offended by the charge.
I take your point that our current world in which only those with a particular identify are “allowed” to comment on related issues is absurd. But it’s still more the exception than the rule that people comment on issues impacting other groups with curiosity and understanding.
The strongest justification for zionism is the extent of violent antisemitism that prevailed in central Europe *after* the holocaust. In 1946, a majority of Germans told Gallup they supported the final solution. Hundreds of Jews survived Nazi death camps only to be killed by their Polish neighbors in pogroms. Central Europe was not a safe place to be Jewish in the late 1940s, and folks like Ben Gurion who helped holocaust survivors find safe homes in the only plausible location that existed were heroes.
None of this justifies the push over the last 35 years to colonize the West Bank.
IMO, there's no justification for the claim that Israel is colonizing the West Bank.
To my mind, the goal of a colonization effort is to extract resources and exploit the population to gain something of value from them. Aside from peace, what exactly is Israel trying to extract from the West Bank?
Cheaper housing than one can find in, say, Tel Aviv.
Now that I think of it (you probably knew this was coming), the ultimate solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict is deregulating zoning in the built-up areas of Israel.
More to the point, a large chunk of the "settlers" commute into Israeli cities proper for their jobs.
Mind you, most of these developments would almost certainly stay under Israeli control in a final agreement. (they're close to the likely border). But it would be good if future potential residents could find good, affordable housing inside the Green Line.
It’s not as if Virginians in the 1640s we’re enslaving Indians or even turning them into debt peons. It’s not as if Indians were aggrieved by their inability to elect representatives to the House of Burgesses. Yet 1640s Virginia clearly was colonial because Englishmen were taking land formerly controlled by Indians to build plantations.
I'm inclined to agree with Magellan in that the distinction between Virginia as a colony of Great Britain and American westward expansion is less than entirely pedantic. Like, the settlement of Tennessee by Europeans wasn't a colonialist project of North Carolina or wherever.
IMO, it was colonial because the motivation behind the settlement was to extract wealth from the land and send it back to England.
It's not an accident that the initial settlements were funded by for-profit trading companies with shareholders expecting a return on their investment.
I mean, they're Israeli citizens who, with government approval, have gone into territory outside of Israel, where Israeli law does not apply, and created settlements of Israelis, within which Israeli law does apply, to themselves, and refused to grant Israeli citizenship status to the people already living there. (If you insist on a definition of colonialism that requires resource extraction it's there too - there are farms and factories there producing goods that contribute to Israel's GDP.)
To me that qualifies as colonialism, but regardless of whether or not you want to call it colonialism, it's certainly oppressive and violates international law.
Of course if you look closely a lot of “settlement” of “virgin frontiers” was in fact more in the way of displacing the locals who actually were using the land in question.
Seems like a needlessly narrow view of what a colony is. By your lights literal Roman coloniae don’t count! Dropping a bunch of loyal citizens to help pacify unruly natives improve the security situation and better secure land for long term annexation is a pretty paradigmatic colonial practice IMO.
Ezra Klein had an International Law scholar on earlier this week, and I found her views somewhat illuminating and more than a little maddening. They were discussing the relationship between Israel and the UN.
Klein has this week, and previously, summarized Israel's origin similarly to Matt's: there was the immigration and the British and UN plan, but then there was the war. And it's the war that really birthed Israel. Klein's question was, an origin story of winning a war and then setting boundaries based at least in part on the success of that war is a hugely common story across history and today's nations, and we accept that as the status quo. Why don't we do the same with Israel?
The answer was fascinating. The guest said that the difference was that all those other times happened before the creation of the UN and the end of colonialism. And, she said the majority of the states in the UN being from the global south and/or otherwise being formerly colonized, see Israel as the remaining example of colonization, and they cannot abide that. In fact they see the UN's mission as mostly having been about the end of colonization.
Viewed through this paradigm, that Israel is the remaining colony, and that all colonies must be ended, then there is simply no acceptance possible based on practicality or parallels with other accepted unfortunate historical events. It left me a little shaken, because it really says that if you accept this one label, one characterization, one definition of a historic event, and brook no dissent from that characterization, then everything else flows from there.
Wow, interesting - that's a lot of straining rationalization by the guest.
First, the UN was specifically structured to empower those who had prevailed by force of arms - it was a validation of might makes right, not a repudiation. Look who's on the Security Council, for crying out loud. Not exactly a collection of anti-colonial powers doing anti-colonial things.
Second, colonialism did not end. Western colonialism ended (mostly - even the western powers hung on to plenty of far-flung territories). The Soviet Union was plenty colonial and Russia is carrying on the old tradition today.
Third, the UN approved the creation of Israel, just as it did the newly established (and completely arbitrary) states of Africa and the Middle East. Apparently, the UN's central purpose was to dismantle colonialism, and it also approved the colony of Israel. Okay.
Finally, who exactly is Israel supposed to be the colony OF? Nobody. It was not established to extract resources for a foreign power. It was refugees seeking self-determination. The paradigm is just nonsense unless you completely redefine the words.
It’s a ridiculous position. As others have said, the UN approved the creation of Israel. By her logic, why don’t we censure Arab states for waging direct and indirect warfare on Israel for nearly 100 years. It’s okay to say that this believe has explanatory power for Arab and other public opinion is anti-Israel, but only if it’s paired by showing how so many middle eastern and other leaders have stoked antisemitism and this specific rationalization for it.
It also ignores the very complex dynamics of the post-WWII years when everything was driven by the transition from the WWII alignment of the Allies to the West vs. USSR Cold War dynamic, with middle eastern leaders mostly focused on trying to leverage various WWII victors to advance their own agendas.
She had an amazingly calm, well-modulated voice. I couldn't possibly have had that conversation without shrieking or getting shrill. But she stayed calm and poised throughout the whole thing. I suppose that's an odd thing to remember but I was so impressed, more impressed than I was with her arguments.
yeah i forgot the guest's name but it was pretty interesting. I thought the primary issue was the guest kind of mixed up the direction of legitimacy by saying starting in 1945 with the founding of the UN, use of force needs to be legitimated by international law.
But the reality is the UN/international law draw their legitimacy from the overwhelming dominance of the US at that time and in general in the ~80 years since. The UN broadly provides predictability in how the US and associated countries will use force, because the US essentially wrote most of the international laws. So in the case where you have Israel (which has a preponderance of force and has won all the wars) that does not want to listen to the UN and the US is not willing to stop them, in reality what are we doing with a bunch of analysis of the rules?
It assumes a lot of democratic legitimacy to decisions by the UN despite a deficit of democratic legitimacy of many of the countries voting there. It also sees no precedential value in all the times the UN is OK with being ignored by the more powerful of its members.
I really wish there was some better term for what is referred to as international law, because it's not really law in the way we generally think about, but it is wielded, for some specific subjects, such as Israel, as if it was the same as what we commonly understand as law.
EK's guest kind of waved away the inconsistencies as unfortunate, being necessary for maintaining peace, not really relevant, etc.
There's also the matter that no liberal-democratic legal system actually functions by allowing a simple majority (or even supermajority!) of otherwise unelected parliamentarians to abrogate individual rights in the name of social peace. "You, Bob over there, we've decided to vote you off the island of Life for the crime of existing in any peace of real-estate at all, drop dead" is simply not a thing that actually happens in real legal systems.
There’s something notable in the fact that basically no borders have shifted since 1945 other than a few examples with Russia and with Israel. As far as I know, all other changed borders since 1945 involve countries gaining or losing independence, but not gaining or losing territory while being independent both before and after.
She was a very enlightening guest, in my opinion. Do I agree with that paradigm? No, but I absolutely believe that most countries in the UN do. I mean, look at the skin colors involved. The Palestinians look brown and the Israelis in leadership look white. In many countries, the brown people used to be ruled by the white people, but they gained independence and self-determination.
I also thought it was very true when she mentioned that Americans don't think much of international law because we're one of the countries that can disobey it with impunity. It's like saying the law is meaningless in the US just because cops are rarely prosecuted. The less privileged people in America certainly think the law exists and means something even if it's not equally enforced.
Which then becomes fractally wrong and deeply troubling, since Israel is not, in fact, a colony or colonialist at all, and the case that it is basically amounts to "we can't be colonizers because we are in the Global South and have a lot of votes at the UN".
Wow, this is exactly an example of antisemitism. Such a ridiculous argument specifically targeted against Jews. The establishment of Israel itself was based on a decision by the UN.
Even Samuel Alito has better arguments when he tries to justify one whim or another of the Republican Party.
To be fair to her, she would concede the existence of the State of Israel within the original UN mandated Israel borders. She would also say that the right of return for the descendants of those from within those borders was sacrosanct. Both the displacement from within and any expansion outward is the post UN disapproved colonialism that needs to be rolled back.
I think this is a more common view among international legal scholars that people realize because it isn't really a commonly expressed view of most activists. I think that most scholars would add though is that Palestinians should have both a legal right to return and a right to legal asylum with a path to citizenship in the countries where they are current refugees. If the neighboring countries were to grant that so that Palestinians could either (1) move into Israel (2) remain in free and independent Palestine in Gaza and the West Bank or (3) remain in any of the Arab countries in which there families have resided for more one generation with citizenship, I think it is less clear that a right of return would necessarily result in an Israeli population that doesn't remain majority Jewish, especially if options (2) and (3) came with some sort of financial compensation.
One thing I find frustrating is the trend of activists and politicians on both sides of this big fight to demand you either be a "Zionist" or "Anti-Zionist", personally I like to be a"A-Zionist" that is someone who thinks that states aren't created because of God's will or "justice" of "what history wanted" or "what is right", but rather, well as a Targaryen might say: Fire and Blood. Wars, revolutions, historical contingency is what makes modern states.
Whether or not Israel should have been created, the reality is it has been, and it has a powerful military and vast arsenal of thermonuclear weapons, so it's not going anywhere anytime soon. Likewise, the Palestinians aren't going to go away either and the Israeli policy of total domination of them isn't great to say the least. Personally I think we should all try talk more about moving forward, rather than being drawn back into fighting about the endless tragedies and pain of the past, but I get in that part of the world people tend to favor the latter rather than the former.
The thing I do find very close to anti-Semitic is the use of Zionist as an epithet, as if thinking a 75 year old country should exist is an outrageous and unacceptable belief.
I actually have a lot of respect for anti-zionist activists who put both "Israel" and "the United States" in quotation marks and refer to the United States as Occupied Turtle Island. It sounds ridiculous, but it is at least logically consistent. Saying that Israel doesn't have the right to exist but that the United States does is at best logically inconsistent and at worst anti-semetic.
Does “ Zionism” mean thinking that Israel should exist, or thinking that Israel should exist as a Jewish state? I believe Germany should exist, but I don’t believe it should exist as an ethnic state with formal ethnic preferences for that ethnicity, and I think similar things about most actually existing countries. That is a major difference I have from the 19th century nationalists.
Do I think there might be some special cases, where there really should be an ethnic or religious state? I’m less sure about that either way, and I don’t know what policies such states should have tied to that ethnicity or religion.
I agree and have been calling this anti-Zionistism, defining it as (a) using Zionist as an epithet or (b) believing that Zionism (i.e., that the Jewish people should have a country) is so noxious that Zionists should be banished from unrelated movements. I think this strain of anti-Zionism is *per se* antisemitic.
(While hardly important I would like to point out The Yiddish Policemen's Union will probably never get out of development hell now. Too bad, John Turturro could have been a great Landsman.)
It's quite good. My only two significant criticisms of it are both spoilers, so I won't lay them out here, but I will say that they are not enough to deter me from recommending it.
I consider myself "post-Zionist". Israel is there and many of its citizens were born there as were their parents. At some point descendants of immigrants have the right to remain. But, as an American with American values, I believe in religious freedom and that there should not be any sort of second class citizenship.
I suppose the better way to say it is that there shouldn’t be whatever status Palestinians have in the West Bank and Gaza, where they have no real ability to participate in a representative government that engages in governance of their territory. Maybe they are second class citizens of Israel, maybe they are victims of an occupying force, maybe their local government needs to step up, but whatever their status is, it should be raised to first class citizenship of some self governing territory.
"The UN Partition plan presented in 1948 assigned half the land to the proposed Jewish state, even though Jews were easily less than half the population"
This is one of the more tiresome things I see. A significant majority of the land allocated for a Jewish state in the UN partition plan was the Negev desert. Not much basis for settling a large population there. Even today, after decades of development, the Negev comprises half of Israel's territory while housing about 13% of the population. The UN plan of 1947 actually allocated much more arable land to the proposed Palestinian state.
The description of Herzl here is very problematic, as if he was just another European nationalist, without mentioning the Dreyfus Affair. Herzl understood the problem of anti-Semitism because of the Dreyfus Affair and predicted the Holocaust with chilling accuracy. He grasped what Matt Yglesias cannot comprehend, even after the Holocaust and the recent outbreak of extreme and surprising anti-Semitism in America. Anti-Semitism is one of the mysterious forces in human society, and an independent state is a strategy to deal with it.
We do not know the future and cannot
guarantee that this state will ensure the security of the Jews, but there is no security in the diaspora either. After the state was established, the fact that it is the only one marked as deserving of destruction, even though it is a liberal democracy with enormous contributions to science and culture, is indeed compelling proof of the mystical power of anti-Semitism. Ultimately, there is something somewhat beyond nature in the phenomenon of anti-Semitism, which is why rationalist atheist Jews find it difficult to recognize it until it strikes them forcefully.
Recently, I've been reading discussion groups of secular liberal American Jews and feel how everything that was once said about German Jewry is coming true word for word. They simply do not understand how it suddenly happened to them, that they and their non Jewish friends who always believed in the same things and felt a complete connection, suddenly find their paths diverging.
Jews were extremely assimilated and successful in Germany. That’s the point of comparison OP is making, not the levels of danger and hostility. It’s a cautionary tale that all Jews know - we were safe and prosperous in humanist Germany until we weren’t.
Assimilated and successful yes (though many Jews in Germany in the 1930s, like my grandmother's family, were immigrants from poverty and persecution in Eastern Europe, and less assimilated). But one should not overstate how "humanist" Germany was: antisemitic romantic German ethnonationalism was powerful in Germany long before Hitler, liberal democracy was new to Weimar and it did not take. The US is no stranger to populist antisemitism and we're seeing a bit of a resurgence (though still much less than *America* in the 1930s, let alone other countries) but it's also probably the friendliest non-Israel country to Jews in the world, and has been for much (most?) of its history. Ethnic and religious pluralism is deeply rooted in the US, liberalism is not new, even in 2024 the primary role of antisemitism in partisan electoral politics is that politicians find it useful to accuse the other party of harboring it. There are problems and they are getting worse, but I don't think the specific historical analogies people are making are sound.
The similarity isn't that the United States is like Germany, but in the sense of betrayal and shock that Jews, integrated into general society, feel when they encounter surprising acts of antisemitism from those they considered friends.
OK so you just mean pretty normal minority stress. It's not great but it doesn't seem very compelling to me as an example of the "mystical power" of antisemitism or as a sign that American Jews will have to flee anytime soon.
Can they be in the same place as German Jews in the 1900’s? What about Spanish Jews in the 1450’s? Or to take a more obscure example, Lebanese Jews in the 1950’s?
I mean, not really, liberalism is good for Jews and liberalism was nonexistent in two of your cases and pretty weak in the third. I am pretty worried about rising antisemitism but there is a truly giant gulf between those realities and the idea that mass expulsion is lurking behind the corner.
Liberalism stopped being good for Jews when its main interpretation became that mass immigration from the most antisemitic places on earth should be allowed, and when liberals believe that the average Jew has skin that is too light to be considered a victim if harmed.
He may have meant Muslims or Arabs but he most certainly didn't mean "brown people". "Brown people" is a term I've pretty much only heard here and I'm usually confused by what you mean by it.
You seem to have missed the point - if you define “right around the corner” as 5 years away then sure - but Tamritz did not say that. If you define it as 40 years away, is it really so inconceivable that liberalism declines in America over the course of 40 years such that Jews are in a much more precarious position? Are you really going to claim in 2024 that American liberalism is invulnerable and not at risk of rapid deterioration? I think the answer is very obviously no but maybe it’s only somewhat obviously no.
It is hard to say anything for certain about what happens in 40 years, including to Israel.
I am pretty concerned about the status of American liberalism. I am not concerned to the point that I think mass expulsion of Jews is realistic (with all the caveats about predicting the distant future). The places where liberalism is most vulnerable are the places where Trumpy Republicans can get either popular support or partisan support and severely undermining the status of Jews is in neither category.
The view that the security of American Jews is maintained by Israel is bad and also wrong when Joe Biden says it, and the same when you do. And the view that my situation and my grandfather's in pre-war Vienna are the same is without any merit at all.
>Anti-Semitism is one of the mysterious forces in human society, and an independent state is a strategy to deal with it.<
I agree with this sentence of yours. But how is any of your comment relevant to Yglesias's piece? What's your point? Matt is clearly not calling for an end to the "independent state" of Israel. (Yes, some extremists want this, and they're wrong.)
I guess what I want to know is: what do you wish to see happen? Endless Israeli occupation of post-1967 conquests (AKA a permanent state of low intensity war that occasionally erupts into the high intensity variety)? It seems to be not working out ideally. Also, while I'd personally love to see Israel be in a position to once again be viewed as a liberal democracy, it's really—and tragically in my view—hard to make such a categorization when something like a third of the population under the authority of Israel's government lacks voting rights. It all seems so misguided from the perspective of Israel's long term stability, security and success.
There is immense security in the diaspora as long as Jews live in safe places. American Jews are murdered at lower rates (and have longer life expectancies) than white protestants or Catholics. Sure there are weirdos who spout off antisemitic conspiracy theories, but there are also strange theories about capitalists, hippies, environmentalists, Democrats, masturbators, Taylor Swift and a litany of other people and groups.
That “as long as Jews live in safe places “ is doing a hell of a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. There were multiple cases of a place being safe for Jews, until suddenly, it wasn’t.
The murder rates you cite are almost entirely explicable by economics or geography (which is driven by economics), meaning the security of the Jews in America is dependent on an economic system that favors particular strengths of the Jewish community. That, even in the presence of liberalism, is not a fait accompli. The point here is very much that it is a historical accident that many Jews ended up in a very safe country, considering the times that Jews had to relocate due to antisemitism and ended up in countries that were not so safe. We can't count on being that lucky next time, or even on being allowed in *anywhere* next time, as borders have solidified in an ahistorical way.
When is “next time?” Most Jews who live in America will die here quite peacefully. Ditto western Europe. Diaspora Jews in western countries are physically secure and would be at greater risk of violence in Israel.
I don't know about this. If the forces arrayed against Jewish people are "mystical" and "mysterious", what does that say about Jewish people? I concede that the appeal of romantic enthno-nationalism, as opposed to inclusive republican nationalism is mysterious to me, in the sense that it's never held any appeal to me. But I don't think it's beyond understanding.
"inconvenient to tolerate and convenient to scapegoat"
That kind of sidesteps the question. The same could be said about any minority ethnicity, but the claim seems to be that the Jewish ethnicity is for some reason extra-special in this regard, not just historically, but now and going forward.
The difference is the ubiquity of Jews as local minority. Every area has its idiosyncratic minorities, but the prevalence of Jews as a local minority supports the development of fictions that are ready to take off the shelf for quickly understandable scapegoating.
I heard someone recently point out that, while Israel isn't exactly a client state of the US, it's existence is largely dependent on US support. As a result, if the US takes a hard anti-semetic turn, Israel isn't going to serve as that much of a bulwark.
It kinda depends on what "hard anti-semitic" turn means. Just because a nation is antisemitic doesn't mean that it's policy is to destroy Israel. If the United States decided that all the Jews should be expelled that would be very antisemitic but wouldn't directly threaten Israel and could actually help. (This is why Early Zionism tried to recruit anti-semitic leaders to its cause - you get rid of your Jews and it strengthens our country.) The idea that an antisemitic state needs to destroy all of the Jews anywhere in the world is one of the unique elements of Nazi ideology. Most antisemites were content with removing Jews from their country.
I dont think that the US would have to decide to destroy Israel for Israel to have an existential problem. In addition to concrete military aid from the US, Israel's defense depends largely on the presumption that that the US would back it if it were invaded. There's a reason why the US sent a couple carriers to the area after 10/7 - it was basically a message to Iran that, if they decided to attack Israel it would have big problems.
It's likely that this implicit US backing would go long before the US started expelling Jews or even before the US became a bad place for a Jewish person to live.
Israel is not dependent on the US for defense. It doesn't even strictly need the military aid it gets. Don't get me wrong, it would be a huge headache if the US suddenly turned evil, but the US is not propping Israel up.
But that's not how Matt presents the difference between himself and Herzl to the reader. He portrays Herzl simply as a European nationalist without explaining that Herzl was deeply concerned about antisemitism and that Herzl predicted the future much more accurately than Matt's counterparts did in those days.
I think the point is to resist recasting Herzl’s views through the lens of the Holocaust. The idea of building a nationalist state formed around identify in response to ethnic persecution was widespread. Where his Zionism differed from other forms of nationalism is that he correctly saw that antisemitism was intractable. But that doesn’t mean he predicted the holocaust. And his plan was built as much on positive nationalist impulses — foster Jewish culture and identity — as fear of persecution.
It was inevitable that the political structures of the 1700s-1800s — small city-states, feudal states with highly autonomous localities, and sprawling empires with mostly autonomous regions — would crumble and transform into mid-sized nations. In retrospect, nationalism was a terrible organizing principle for a new order. But Zionism may be the exception, not because Herzl was prescient, but because of the persistence of Jewish identity and ineradicability of antisemitism
> Anti-Semitism is one of the mysterious forces in human society
> compelling proof of the mystical power of anti-Semitism
I can understand why you might believe this about Christian-majority societies, but I don't think this really holds up when you try to say it about humanity as a whole. Especially populations that historically haven't had much contact with Jews, and thus don't have any reason to have a burning, incorrigible hatred of them.
I mean, do you really believe that, for example, Nepalese people are just inevitably, irredeemably antisemitic? How about Cambodians? Inuit? Thai people? Aboriginal Australians? North Sentinelese?
I'm not particularly familiar with the Uganda scheme - would that have necessarily required ethnic displacement of indigenous peoples or was there a very large open space with no-one living there?
Uganda was viewed as underpopulated at the time, although I'm sure there would have been some displacement of the native population too. The pattern of British colonization of places like Botswana and Rhodesia was the intended model, AFAIUI.
Herzl died decades before the Jewish Autonomous Oblast was created and I don't think the Soviets ever even pretended that it was open to immigration by non-Soviet Jews.
I wish Matt had spent a bit more time discussing the partition of India in 1947. It’s so similar to the Israel situation but where no one is calling for a return to status quo ante and the dissolution of Pakistan and Bangladesh. My ancestors came over to Calcutta from the Pabna district in B’desh, albeit to escape constant flooding and for professional reasons, but a few years later and it could very well have been due to Partition. I don’t hold a key on a chain around my neck. There are movies and TV series about families (especially on the western front) who wax nostalgic about their old homes and neighborhoods in Lahore and Karachi. Best friends reunited after decades. But no one is clamoring for the Hindus who have now been in India for generations to go back to their old land in Pakistan. The two countries find each other highly irritating but fundamentally, we recognize the existence of the other.
Truly, I wish the Palestinians just saw a future in the land they do have (whatever, negotiate to ‘67 borders) and got on with the business of building a nation.
That's the saddest part of all this. If 40 years ago or so after repeated defeats on the battlefield, the mainstream of Palestinian society had stopped "kicking against the pricks" so to speak, and just gotten on with the business of building a nation, instead of doing things like digging tunnels and terrorism, the two states of Israel and Palestine would likely be close allies and the undisputed commercial and cultural center of the Middle East.
If on any given day between 1948 and now the Palestinians had simply said we'll accept what we have today, they would be decisively better off than they are --- any single day. And the curve is a steep one, because every day their plight has gotten worse.
I think it was Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban who described the Palestinians as "never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity." Sadly, much truth to that, and in the end they got Bibi and the right wingers and there are no more opportunities left on the table, to the detriment of all actors in this drama.
In fairness to the Palestinians, as with any polity they have extremists and they have moderates, and for the last 70 years various outside groups have been supporting and encouraging the extremists.
The other Arab nations have found supporting the maximalist version of the Palestinian cause convenient for their own domestic politics, the Iranians need terrorist proxies, Israeli right-wingers want to undermine anything that looks like a viable Palestinian government so they can claim to have no negotiating partner, and Westerners exploit the Palestinian cause for status jockeying and expressive activism. It might be the case that there's no group on Earth that has been more poorly served by their "supporters" than the Palestinians.
Alarmingly, it seems like a similar dynamic is now taking place among the Israelis. Far-right Israelis increasingly take the support of the United States for granted, which is encouraging them to pursue maximalist goals.
"The other Arab nations have found supporting the maximalist version of the Palestinian cause convenient for their own domestic politics"
This is often said, but there is little evidence for it. The Arab regimes that supported maximalist positions toward Israel were genuinely ideologically committed (Nasser's Egypt, Ba'athist Syria/Iraq), whereas other Arab regimes were willing to find a permanent accomodation with Israel (Sadat's Egypt, Hashemite Jordan, the Gulf monarchies).
An opportunity to end the conflict presented itself in the early 1970s, when Israel could have fully normalized both with Egypt and Jordan (and probably even Syria) in exchange for the territories occupied in 1967, including the Palestinian territories.
Israel, however, didn't miss the opportunity to miss the opportunity, to use an overworn expression.
Evidence?
You can go back even further to the Peel Commission in 1936, which proposed a partition with a much larger Arab state and a much smaller Jewish state in Palestine than was enacted in 1948, which the Palestinians also rejected out of hand (Zionist representative were divided on the specific boundaries of the partition but were open to negotiation of final borders with roughly the proportions proposed). Palestinian leadership has forever seemed unable to accept that Jews in Palestine / Israel are anything other than a "conquered people" that may only live in Arab lands on that basis. This takes on insane dimensions in the modern era, with Palestinian leaders denying that Jews as a people have any pre-Zionist history or connection with the land.
The PLO accepted the 1967 borders. Had Israel simply pulled back to the Green Line, clean, in 1993, the conflict would be over.
The same is true of King Hussein's "federation plan" in 1972: had Israel returned the occupied territories in exchange for peace and full normalization, the conflict would also be over.
The problem with Matt's analysis is that it misses that a large subset of Israelis have had, and still have today, irredentist aspirations that go beyond the establishment of a Jewish state in some part of Eretz Yisrael. Too much consideration has been given to the Israeli argument about security, when a careful analysis of their behavior throughout the past decades shows that irredentism is as much, and probably even more, of a factor in the continuing occupation of the OPTs.
Matt has no illusions about Israeli maximalists. The fact remains that the Israeli left collapsed in the wake of the second antifada. And "we should get all the land" is the most popular opinion for both sides.
The left did collapse after the 2nd Intifada, but then the 2nd Intifada was the product of the failures of the Oslo process: an unending negotiation largely focused on minutiae that failed to rollback, much less stop, the settlement enterprise, and that missed its own deadline (May 4, 1999) to bring forth a permanent settlement.
That Ehud Barak attempted to salvage the process ten minutes past midnight should not blind us to the chronic feet dragging and bad faith on the Israeli side over the preceding 5 years.
We seem to have entered the territory where both sides vociferously declare their own peaceful intentions and insist on the perfidy of the other.
I don't think this nitpicking is useful. My own reading is that Israel was somewhat more credibly interested in peace, but it was never a strong desire for either side. Neither I nor P has been interested at all for at least the past fifteen years.
This belief is only sustainable if you ignore basically the entirety of the history since 1967.
"the two states of Israel and Palestine would likely be close allies"
I…doubt this. India and Pakistan are in no way close allies to this day.
(India and Bangladesh are close allies, though. One wonders whether, in your counterfactual, the West Bank and Gaza would have eventually separated in a civil war. If so, Israel might end up close to whichever side they ended up backing in that civil war.)
Yes, "close alliance" seems unlikely. But peaceful coexistence with robust commercial interactions would be good enough.
And this unreasonable dream of taking back all of Israel has been aided and abetted by the surrounding Arab Nations and Western Leftists who have used the Palestinian plight for politica and cynical reasons. Arguably, Israel has done more for plight of Palestinians than any of their supposed "friends."
Don't forget the appalling role of the UN via the UNRWA.
I highly doubt that there would have been an alliance, as the same wars of the 1960s and 1970s that led to Palestinian occupation, led to the rise of the Gush Emunim and their goal to occupy and ethnically cleanse all of Greater Israel. Those folks are in Netanyahu's government now.
Ethnically cleansing the Palestinians has been goal from the very beginning of Zionism.
You guys (including Matt) underestimate the extent to which a) Palestinian national identity only emerged around 67 and b) it’s defined largely in terms of opposition to Israel.
The problem is that right wingers and various psychos try to leverage this fact to argue that Palestinian nationalism is “fake” (???) and otherwise illegitimate. Which is of course nonsense but then this history gets obscured.
Anyway that’s why you don’t see Palestinian national aspirations take what we regard as the reasonable direction.
In 1984 the Israeli government was adamantly opposed to even a nominal Palestinian state.
Indeed.
Seldom is it mentioned that, between 1967 and 1987, there was so little anti-Israeli violence originating from the occupied Palestinian territories that said occupied Palestinians could freely move between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and even visit Israel!
And yet, in the face of relative calm, Israel's behavior was to initiate the settlement enterprise, which took on a large-scale, determined character with Likud's election in 1977. It took the violence of the First Intifada, itself a reaction to the growing alienation and dispossession of the Palestinians under the settlement enterprise, for Israel to consent to an indeterminate "peace process" aiming at a modicum of Palestinian self-determination.
"but where no one is calling for a return to status quo ante and the dissolution of Pakistan and Bangladesh"
I think that's generally true on the Indian side,* but there are certainly plenty of people in Pakistan who think substantial parts of what is today India should be part of Pakistan (e.g., Jammu, Kashmir, and the other Indian states with substantial Muslim minority populations along the Indo-Pakistani border).
*: Qualified, because I could swear there were some of the more extreme members of the RSS who think India should claim everything west up to the Indus River and expel the Muslim population, which would effectively eliminate Pakistan as a functioning state.
J&K has been a tinderbox since Day 1. Modi revoking their autonomy under Art. 370 didn't help the Indian case for sure. As for RSS/VHP nutcasery, I'd wait till that irredentist thinking moves out of the fringe before worrying.
There are 100,000s of Bihari refugees in Bangladesh from their 1971 war of independence still living in refugee camps and it gets no attention.
Don't know much about it but I believe you. Frankly, they should stay there and try and make a life in a country whose per capita GDP was higher than India's recently! And given that Bihar is truly the pits and the Alabama of India, only worse, they'd probably have better luck in B'desh! Also, compared to Pakistan, they have a higher percent of Hindu minority population which is maybe saying something.
They left Bihar in 1948 and lost their Pakistani citizenship in 1971, they have no real connection to Bihar.
Pakistani should just accept them they are Urdu speaking Pakistanis.
Are you saying the people are in Bangladesh or in Pakistan or in Bihar right now?
They live in refugee camps in Bangladesh but they are Urdu speakers whose ancestors were from North India.
I did not know this, but found this on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Biharis_in_Bangladesh. Turns out they are not Biharis, as in from Bihar, the state. In Bangladesh they were called Beharis, as the word Behar in Bengali means "outsider". They are indeed Urdu speaking muslims who supported Pakistan in the 1971 war.
And importantly, nobody thinks that if they had tried to keep it together as one state in the Raj it would have worked. There would have just been violence war and a partition down the line. (Indeed that eventually happened to split Pakistan later on.) Jinnah is one of history's great unsung heroes for convincing everyone of that.
Interestingly, I know someone whose family is Pakistani but almost all of them were always opposed to its creation, believing that a secular, multi-ethnic India was the right course, morally and pragmatically. But, although they largely despise what Pakistan's government and political culture have become, the rise of Modi and his blatant support for Hindutva (including widespread, legal discrimination and support for ethnic violence) has made them reconsider the necessity of Pakistan (and maybe Bangladesh?) for Muslims in South Asia.
That's the thing. I am not a cheerleader for ethnostates but it is actually difficult and threatening to live somewhere as an ethnic minority, and an ethnostate is a safety valve. No matter how bad things get for a Hindu in Pakistan or a Muslim in India, there is always at least the possibility of migrating.
I’m not a Modi person, but I find these comments don’t capture the legal Indian system and how it’s currently set up.
India is not a liberal democracy, but a communitarian one. It inherited the British system of treating people from different religions as divided. What I mean is, Muslims, Christians have different civil law as opposed to Hindus, Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists.
This extends far beyond marriage and divorce laws. In India, if there’s conflict between Muslims, it is legally justifiable for them to be tried in a Sharia court as opposed to the regular justice system.
Religious monuments are maintained by the government. Muslims have a Waqf, and I would encourage you to read about some of the encroachment undertaken by Waqfs in India. This are real problems, unrelated to a hate towards Islam, and more towards the dual national legal system in India.
My point here is that for all the talk of legal discrimination, Muslims have special protections carved out from the time before partition, and the INC promised to maintain them in order to project India as a secular homeland for all.
In the meantime, Bangladeshi Hindus suffered a genocide in 1971. Pakistani Hindus went from 18% of the population in the 60s to 0.01% in the 21st century. I make this point to illustrate that Muslims in India have the Law and the System on their side.
People want change though. It’s a remnant of Colonial rule, people want common civil law. They want equality in education.
There are some hindu facists out there who want nothing more than the extermination of muslims in India, but many of Modi’s voters just want to see removal of a colonial system that still divides two religions.
Read on Two Nation Theory (the idea that led to the creation of Pakistan), and understand that the existence of Pakistan in some effect justifies India’s want to remove these protections and unify the legal system.
The existence of Pakistan definitely makes India more Hindu nationalist. There's no way you can deny that.
The problem is without the partition there would have been a bloodbath. It's not as though India had the state capacity to prevent violence between Hindus and Muslims. It barely has that state capacity now, and it is a lot richer now than it was then. And indeed, what happened in Bangladesh shows exactly what happens when you don't have that capacity. You end up with a partition anyway, but a ton of people have to die.
Also, I think even if we take the idealized notion of India's laws (which do in theory protect Muslims) and not the realities on the ground, that sort of thinking still runs into the reality that people want their own states. It's not as though Slovaks were going to be treated terribly in unified Czechoslovakia, but they still demanded an exit. And even in places that stay together, like Belgium, we see pretty significant ethnic tensions from time to time. (And Belgium, of course, does have the state capacity to tamp some of them down.)
In other words, Jinnah was right and Gandhi was wrong, because Indian Muslims at the end of the day needed the protection AND self-determination that only their own state could offer.
I think if we had implemented the 1946 cabinet mission plan of a unified federal government with three units that determined civil and criminal in those lands India could have stayed united.
Nehru’s borderline insane commitment to Fabian socialism led to him backstabbing Jinnah and causing the union to rupture.
Also Indian Muslims to this day get specific protections, exceptions and benefits prescribed in the law. Name one other country that provides those many exceptions for it’s minority communities.
Don’t buy the neocolonial dogwash being fed to you. Give me evidence of one other country that has more exceptions carved out than India for it’s Muslims.
Most Indians are proud and happy that we have diversity, it’s how we were raised and educated.
You are severely mistaken.
Hindu nationalism enjoyed only a sliver of support for most part of the 20th century. It is Pakistan's ISI supported terrorist activity in India that turned many Hindus towards the BJP, and against the Congress party.
India should fall then, Dravidians have a different culture than the Northern Indians, Far Eastern Indians have a different race than the Mainland Indians, Western Indians have different languages Eastern Indians.
It sticks together because of it’s multicultural foundation not inspite it.
I think you are probably right, but currently there are 200 million Indian Muslims out of a population of 1.4 billion, so about 14% of the population (about the same as Blacks in the US).
If India had not been partitioned, then Pakistan (235 million), Bangledesh (170 million) would be added to that population and it would be 600+ million out of 1.8 billion so more than a third of the population.
In that environment, I think you get what there is today. Either there is much more widespread ethnic violence, or it really does become a more multicultural society.
I lean towards the latter as that is what I experienced growing up in a tier-1 city in India, and having a Pakistani girlfriend.
"And importantly, nobody thinks that if they had tried to keep it together as one state in the Raj it would have worked."
Ackshually, I do think it could have worked. So that's at least one person.
So you are obviously wrong. Think about the violence we have now, within India, between Hindus and Muslims. And then multiply it out. As I intimated, what would eventually happened was a partition anyway, as we've seen in innumerable places (e.g., former Yugoslavia, East Timor, Bangladesh, etc.). You'd just get a ton of violence and mass death first.
(EDIT: my post here may be out of date. Per https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2024/01/06/hindu-extremists-ruthlessly-hunt-down-christians-in-india_6406265_4.html, Hindutva persecution may extend beyond Islam now.)
It's not as though India is incapable of maintaining a multicultural state. India has many non-Hindu minorities in its northeast that it does not culturally persecute, even though many of them have been and currently continue to engage in guerilla war against the government. Likewise with the Sikhs in the northwest.
Jinnah's project directly caused non-Muslim India to polarize against specifically its Muslim minority. Without that movement, I don't think a conjoined India-Pakistan would turn on them the way you suppose.
In fact, I'd go further and say that Gandhi was right, and any deviation from complete multiculturalism endangers the Indian project because it sets up a "first they came for the Communists" dynamic. Non-Indians really underestimate the religious diversity inside Hinduism; many "Hindus" really follow a local spiritual tradition that has only recently incorporated into the Hindu pantheon within the past generation or two. There are still major disputes over whether such fundamental concepts as vegetarianism are mandatory for non-Brahmins. And syncretic religions (e.g. Jainism) abound.
Exactly. India is already Multicultural. Three states with Christian Majorities, One with Muslim Majority, One territory with Indegnious Majority and one with Muslim Majority.
The problems in India are overblown. There is violence but I do not remember one article from the NYT discussing the decimation of minority populations in Pakistan, Bangladesh or Afghanistan. Understanding Pakistan being a staunch cold war ally of the West will help understand the narrative that’s currently being spread today.
Look at how progressives reacted in California when Hindus wanted to expand more on their religion and remove some caste issues from the cirriculum. Progressive white professors went apeshit on the poor parents who wanted to prevent bullying based on religion.
Or look ath Audrey Thrusker. Her vitriol towards hindus is crazy (Ive read her books), and when I tried to trace her sources I found nothing.
Neocolonial Garbage.
If India was a full blown facist state, why do I still see advertisements for INC on my youtube feed, or on the television? There’s an election going on right now, where is the blood and the violence?
I never said India was a fascist state. I simply said that had it been held together in 1947 rather than partitioned, it would have lacked the state capacity to stop inter-ethic violence, ultimately resulting in a violent Muslim rebellion that it would not have been able to put down and an ultimate partition, just with a lot more dead bodies in between.
I admire India, quite a lot. But I think the notion of platonic India (the multi-ethnic democracy) gets in the way of understanding the actual situation of 1947 and why Jinnah (and Nehru, by the way) figured out that this had to be the way to do things.
I think you’ve never been to India or understand the nuances of how the country is set up. For all the talks of riots, it’s not like there’s continual violence or bloodshed. There are incidents of violence yes, but that’s on par with any third world developing country. Tribal violence in the interior of Africaesque.
The cities violence is very rare (kind of like hate crimes in America? Happens for sure but not systematic or large scale).
I’ve got plenty of Muslim friends who live in peace in the big cities. I mean Modi won 20% of the Muslim vote in the last election!
(Again I do not care for the rhetoric but I am sick of Western commentators reading neocolonial garbage and spouting their opinions based on that).
" third world developing country"
So now take us back 75 years, when India had far less wealth and state capacity than it has now.
And now, multiply the number of incidents between Hindus and Muslims in 1948 by, lets say, a factor of 100 because of all the additional Muslims who are still in the country.
How was India going to control that? Answer: they couldn't. It would have been a bloodbath, and the Muslims would have eventually formed a revolutionary army and gained their independence, just like the Bangladeshis eventually did. It's just that a ton more people would have died.
That's the reality. I know it's painful to the self-image of India to contemplate that, because it thinks of itself as a multi-ethnic secular democracy that is fair to Muslims. But that's what would have happened. Jinnah was a hero who saved a lot of Hindu lives as well as Muslim lives.
I like Jinnah. He agreed to the 1946 cabinet mission and I think that was the best outcome for South Asia to begin with.
I wouldn't blame Jinnah (I think I agree with you that he saw the reality unfolding and adapted) and I don't think you could turn back 75 years and have things go better in a unified state but I do think if you went back 125 years you could have a unified state. I do think there is failure to imagine how multiethnic states can build stable institutions.
Is that really the viewpoint, that no one thinks the pluralistic unified state would have worked? I had always assumed it would have gone better, but a lot depends on what the INC of that world would have been like, and whether they would have triggered a stronger Hindutva backlash, or have been able to navigate communitarian Muslim and Hindu parties pushing from opposite sides of the right.
As I say above, I don't think immediate post-revolutionary India had anywhere near the state capacity to prevent Hindu-Muslim violence. It would have blown up, a ton of people would have died, and you would have ended up with a partition anyway. Jinnah saved a ton of lives.
There are many Pakistani intellectuals who bemoan the creation of Pakistan today. Indian subcontinent, even under the Mughals and earlier muslim rulers, was always multi-cultural, and Islam thrived culturally because of interaction with other faiths. Sikhism was founded by Guru Nanak whose closest associate was muslim-born (Bhai Mardana). It was heavily influenced by the Sufi movement, which is of course part of Islam. Poet Kabir was also born muslim but studied under a Hindu guru in Varanasi and became one of the leading saints of the Bhakti movement (Hindu). It can be argued other faiths' influence kept Islam in check.
I seem to remember a time when Pervez Musharraf and Manmohan Singh had a thaw in relations and jointly visited their birthplaces, which are in the opposite countries.
Since the topic came up I'll put in a plug for an absolutely beautiful historical novel about the Partition: House of Caravans
https://milkweed.org/book/house-of-caravans
Thanks. Never heard of this book, and I see it has great reviews. Adding it to my list now.
Yeah, it's an indie book that's never gonna sell many copies.
Well, the partition of India created decades of wars and continuous animosity between Pakistan and India, so it's not like it was a peaceful unproblematic split.
Get back to me when the Palestinians have not only their own country and army but also their own nukes, and this might be a relevant analogy.
isn't Pakistan based on an acronym the British came up with (Punjabi, Afghan, Kashmir or something)
Depends on who you ask - it's also 'Land of the Pure' in Urdu.
The implications of calling South Asian Muslims “pure” and implying that non-Muslims are impure are … unfortunate.
The British didn't invent the acronym, the Pakistan movement of the Muslim League created it.
Ha! I stayed up till 3:30 am my time working, so I get to be one of the first commenters for a change!
So, I have a lot of Feelings about this post, also I'm super sleep-deprived so I probably won't be very coherent or logical about any of this, here goes.
This sentence right here really, REALLY gets at the difference between the American liberal and the Polish (or really, any Old World country) traditional mindset:
"This version of Poland [the one that existed in between WWI and WWII] was not a particularly practical or workable idea."
And you know what, the American in me looks at that wonky map and nods sagely and says, yes, it certainly is not a very good map, look at those big populations of Ukrainians and Belorussians, do we really need Vilnius, shouldn't that go to Lithuania?"
And the Polish person in me, the one raised on stories of a century-plus of oppression and subjugation by foreign powers, looks at that sentence and says, "Hey doofus, WE GOT OUR COUNTRY BACK! Our independent homeland! Do you know what it meant to us, how Polish people under Russian and Prussian and Austro-Hungarian occupation used to pray, Grant us our free homeland back, O Lord? You have the temerity to criticize the Second Polish Republic for being impractical or something? You have no idea, you who were born in America and could always take it for granted that a bunch of German or Russian troops wouldn't just walk over and take your country from you!"
Ahem. The cognitive dissonance is strong.
Anyway! When I think that way, the Polish way I mean, I can sort of kind of understand the Palestinians. They lost their country! They want it back!
And yet, on the whole, with lots of "it's complicated", I support Israel and not Palestine, how can this be? Three reasons!
1. Poland was an actual, existing country before Russia and Prussia and Austria-Hungary took it away. We had a king and a royal castle and stuff! And the FIRST constitution in Europe, how about that! In contrast, there was never a country called Palestine. OK, but that's kind of a weak sauce excuse, so what if there was no official country "Palestine," there's still Palestinian national identity. So, on to...
2. The goal was Polish independence, not the annihilation of the occupying nations. Mostly we just wanted them to f*** off and go back where they came from, to their own sovereign nations of Russia and Germany and wherever. In contrast, there is no sovereign nation that Jews can "go back to" that is THEIRS, no secret Jewish nation in Antarctica or Atlantis. Israel is it. Furthermore...
3. I was a child when I learned Polish history, and maybe it was somewhat sanitized for a child's consumption. However, while the stories I heard certainly emphasized manly heroism and glorious death in battle, I do not recall anyone EVER promoting things like "let's rape a bunch of Russian women and slaughter a bunch of Russian children, that'll learn 'em for occupying us!" Acts of savagery and butchery against civilians were strongly frowned upon. We wanted to see ourselves as the good guys, the beleaguered scrappy heroes who fight against overwhelming odds, not murderers and rapists of unarmed civilians.
Anyhow, I have to get a bit of sleep now, also the only reason I'm up so late is that I procrastinated catastrophically earlier this week, so to anyone reading this: learn from me and please don't do what I did.
Really insightful response. One thing Matt hasn't touched on when covering this issue, and I get why he hasn't because it's a third rail, is the role radical Islam has played in Palestinian culture. It's an inconvenient truth that Israel is both substantially more to the right than the US but also in no way comparable to the Conservative Muslim culture of Palestine and the surrounding Arab states.
Since 10/7 Sam Harris has produced a number of podcasts covering this issue - I haven't really seen any other public intellectual do so. As Sam has said, in the immediate aftermath of 10/7, Gazans were celebrating the deaths of innocent Israeli children and parading their bodies through the streets. It's inconceivable that the same would happen in Tel Aviv.
I definitely agree that this the third rail here, and an undeniable part of the political reality in creating a Palestinian state. But the dehumanization of the widespread death and suffering in from the Israel side is still something that needs to be reckoned with as well.
Talked about this with my grandparents last night (both self-described Zionists, and one of which fled Germany during the holocaust). They were absolutely outraged and shocked at the college protestors. But said that, in their opinion, what Bibi has done is a "shanda for the goyim". Which translates to "shame in front of non-jews."
Yeah, none of what I said is meant to absolve Bibi, the ultranationalist settlers or lunatics in his coalition from many of the abhorrent things they've done. The rhetoric coming from Smoltrich and Ben-Gvir is sickening.
That being said, if you're to believe Urban Warfare experts like John Spencer (who was recently on the Making Sense Podcast with Sam Harris) it's not entirely clear that Israel isn't carrying out the war in Gaza as ethically as possible. I'm paraphrasing here but according to Spencer, if you take the Gaza Ministry of Health's death toll of around 35k at face value and the IDF's claim of killing around 12k combatants at face value, then you get a historically low ratio of combatants to civilian deaths. These are all estimations since it's impossible to accurately count deaths in the middle of an urban war but I think it's the fairest way to do it by taking both side's estimates into consideration.
Now all of that being said, I personally find it really hard to reconcile the disgusting rhetoric of Bibi and his associates, Israel's actions in the west bank over the last few decades and the country's steady drift rightwards with, what I believe to be an ethical war in Gaza. It's a confounding time to be a center left Jew!
Btw, here is a really great expose on how the Israeli government, pretty much from the top down has been complicit in west bank settlement expansion over the years: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/16/magazine/israel-west-bank-settler-violence-impunity.html?utm_source=instagram&utm_medium=instagram&utm_campaign=likeshopme&utm_content=ig-nytmag.
A lot of this is well known but it's still alarming to read the details.
I think it’s underrated the extent to which Bibi does not actually control the army or how the war gets fought on the ground. In the US the president is the commander in chief; this is not how it works in Israel, where the army is more of an autonomous public institution like the Federal Reserve in the US.
There’s the movement on the far right to push for more “civilian oversight” of the army because they don’t like how they fight wars ethically (in their minds, at the expense of Israeli soldiers) and more importantly that most of the defense establishment supports a two state solution. And obviously all of this is nuts.
But the point is, if you want to understand how Ben Gvir and Smotrich can have an effective veto over government decisions while the army goes about fighting the war in accordance with international law, well that that movement exists tells you everything you need to know.
The fact that I, a pretty well informed center left Jew, didn't know all of this tells you how badly Israel is losing the PR War. Ben-Gvir and Smotrich should be barred from talking in public.
Here is Spencer's article in Newsweek for those who don't subscribe to the Making Sense Podcast: https://www.newsweek.com/israel-has-created-new-standard-urban-warfare-why-will-no-one-admit-it-opinion-1883286.
Not likely in Tel Aviv. But that’s because Israel has enough land that a cosmopolitan beach town on the Mediterranean is not the only place to live, and the kind of people that would celebrate ethnic strife have chosen to live together in other places. The interesting question is whether there has been dancing in the streets in any of the settlements during various phases of the current Gaza operation.
Islamism actually post dates the Palestinians Israeli conflict, the secular Marxist leninists PFLP, Popular front for the liberation of Palestine is older than Hamas and the PFLP also carried out terrorist attacks on Israel. This also ignores the role of religious Zionism among the Jewish side for the continued war.
I agree with most of the article. Wanted to flag one thing:
> anyway! When I think that way, the Polish way I mean, I can sort of kind of understand the Palestinians. They lost their country! They want it back!
This is also the way that some Jews view Israel, what with the whole "next year in Jerusalem" thing. Not all Jews, and this wasn't the main motivation around Zionism I believe, but worth pointing out the similarities explicitly.
Human history is an immense, tottering tower of conquest. That's what makes this whole current progressive obsession with things like land acknowledgements in the US or anti-Zionism in the middle east so infuriating -- it's this pretense that there is a "legitimate" owner to land, like we can take this multi-thousand-year history of violent seizure of land, war, genocide, displacement, draw a line somewhere and say, "Oh, well these guys are legitimate, not before or after."
They're misguided, though, not evil.
True egalitarian progressivism would indeed acknowledge that no one actually "owns" land, and that the entire concept of the nation-state is just a temporary kludge, one which we might hope will eventually be replaced by a united world government or some other appropriately humanist peaceful evolution of government.
Righting the wrongs of the past is easy to confuse for the true progressive project of preventing future wrongs. [Ed: Because studying the past is so important for charting the path forward.]
Amen
100% agree
Well said
Yes, it was very sanitised—do you really think that the themes emphasised in modern romantic stories are a reliable guide to the character of nationalists from a hundred years ago? If somehow the maximalist Palestinian nationalist cause succeeds their discussion of October 7 a century from now is going to sound something like “the fighters broke out of the walls! then [mumbling], anyway, Gaza”.
Moreover, Modern Poland doesn’t exist without the atrocities that made the underlying populations more or less match the country’s borders (many committed by others, but with plenty of blood on the hands of Polish nationalists). This is true of all the nationalist projects, which is why we shouldn’t do any more of them, but also why we shouldn’t be trying to roll any of the old ones back.
Re: (1) it is underrated the extent to which there was no Palestinian nationalism pre-1967. What there was was pan-Arab nationalism. Post 67 is around when Palestinian nationalism started coalescing. Moreover most of the Arabs that lived in Israel in 1948 had migrated from elsewhere themselves.
This history is obscured because it’s usually cited by right wingers and other psychos to argue that Palestinian nationalism is somehow illegitimate or not “real” or whatever. But this is why I get upset when people make claims like “the Palestinians got jobbed” - this is only true if you regard Jewish immigration to the British mandate as illegitimate but Arabs who wandered over from Jordan or Egypt as legitimate.
Non of this is true, there were institutions declaring a distinct Palestinian nationalism since before the British Mandate. The famous newspaper Falastin was created by Christian Palestinians and talked about opposition to the Zionist project and talked about a Palestinian national identity.
Matt also mentioned him but the historian Rashid Khalidi has a book on the history of the development of Palestinian nationalism and he shows it developed around the late 19th early 20th century.
https://books.google.com/books?id=YDPKFyZ38qsC
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falastin
Romantic nationalism is the pretense that to build a better future, one must (impossibly) undo the past.
Overall good article, but a few comments.
1. As much as this article talks about how counterproductive anti-Zionism is, I think it undersells the fundamental weirdness of it. Over the course of the past 100 years, the Arab world has unified behind an *anti-nationalist* project that has taken precedence at every turn over the Palestinian national project.
Hence the invasion of Israel by four Arab armies who wanted nothing whatsoever to do with the expelled Palestinians -- I don't think this is something that's easily understandable in the context of European national projects. Also, there's the idea that Palestinians must have the right of return before creating a state. Has anyone ever heard a demand like "we want to create a country, but a precondition is that we must be allowed to send any of our citizens to *your* country, which we incidentally hate with a burning passion."
Is there another example of an anti-nationalist project like this?
2. This article criticizes Herzl's Zionism as being (1) too pessimistic about anti-Semitism (pre-Hitler), and (2) ultimately unsuccessful in "solving" anti-Semitism. Perhaps nothing like Hitler happened in the 19th century, but taking the long view of history, Herzl certainly wasn't crazy to think there would be mass expulsions or killings of Jews in Europe.
As for the "failure" of Zionism, it's true that it hasn't solved anti-Semitism. I view it more as an insurance policy. It's well understood that *on average*, Israelis will actually face many more difficulties than diaspora Jews in functioning liberal democracies -- here in America, we don't have to fight jihadists. However, if something were to go wrong, Israel gives Jews a place to go (not that this is likely!). The Jews of Germany would've been very grateful for a Jewish state in 1939.
This may have been true before nuclear bombs. But as the leaders of Iran have observed, a few nuclear explosions would utterly wipe Israel off the map, while only causing temporary harm to the surrounding Arab communities.
All your eggs in one basket and watch that basket, vs the security of spreading them around.
If there is in fact more existential risk to Jews living in Israel today, than in various diaspora communities, then what is the continued purpose of Israel, other than as a regular nation state that, like any other, needs continually justify its legitimacy by the way it treats those under its sovereignty?
I think this is a valid point. The existence of a Jewish state helps against Hitler-type threats, but it exposes Israelis to large attacks. Whether you think Herzl had a good idea depends on which of these threats you think is more likely or severe.
Also keep in mind that Zionism doesn't require all the eggs to be in one basket -- I think you can be a Zionist while still thinking that it's a good idea to have a large diaspora community.
Exactly - one thing I found odd about Matt’s definition of Zionism is the view that it entails that all Jews migrate to Israel. There are more than a few self-described Zionist organizations in the US that are not remotely committed to every American Jew moving to Israel. Jewish schools almost universally describe themselves as strongly Zionist and yet the message “you should move to Israel” is hardly present.
Modern day Zionism mostly does consist of the, in Matt’s words, “deflated” proposition that Israel should exist, and beyond that, that American Jews should create cultural ties and support its existence to the extent we can. But basically every diaspora Jewish community is a Zionist one despite being, well, a diaspora Jewish community.
I think Israel's nuclear (presumably) second strike capability make that calculation not quite so simple. But it's also why I find Israel's constant claim to be under existential threat so unconvincing. Even if they were destroyed too they can nuke any regional enemy out of existence, which in turn makes it highly unlikely anyone would actually do it.
There’s been enough suicide bombings in this conflict to leave that not entirely reassuring.
Even without nukes, constant low-tech rocket fire from Gaza and Lebanon has put Israel under existential threat. The north and southwestern parts of the country have been evacuated for months. With even a slight improvement in rocket technology the entire country could be in the same situation. Second strike nuclear capability doesn't solve that.
This is not what "existential" means.
What does existential mean?
"Relating to existence."
Those threats aren't going to lead to Israel ceasing to exist.
No but the Iron Dome, Patriot missiles, and similar missile defense systems does greatly mitigate it. So it's a security threat but it is not existential, any more than a bunch of poorly trained marauders with small arms are. The unwillingness to ever make these distinctions is not doing the Israelis any favors.
I guess it depends on your definition of existential. Those parts of the country evacuated because they are under constant rocket fire cannot function normally as a country. That's why they evacuated. What would happen if that state of affairs spread to the rest of the country? People would try and carry on as best they could but you would see a lot of people who could move away moving away.
Yes, today they have the Iron Dome and for the last few years that has been more or less sufficient to keep things manageable. But that is actually a relatively recent state of affairs and not a stable equilibrium, as we have seen. There's no an inexhaustible amount of munitions for it, and it depends on Hezbollah and Hamas not making a significant advance in their rocket technology to work.
Sure but that just leads us to the question of whether the Israeli approach to the conflict, and really, the settlements, is conducive to eventually securing peace. It's also not like there's some huge backlash when Israel conducts an incursion against external non state actors like Hezbollah, operating from territory Israel doesn't de jure or de facto control. They're the motte to the bailey of a bunch of far less defensible policies and actions, which again, hurt Israel in far more lasting and profound ways than Hamas ever could.
Do you have a reference for these evacuations? I'd like to understand the situation better, but it's hard to search for.
Idk man Iran is pretty nuts and the second intifada featured a lot of suicide bombings.
I’m gonna say, once your nation has faced uncompromising existential threat, and then in the aftermath your country faces 30 years of the regional power trying to destroy you, you’re gonna be a bit paranoid about existential threats.
Part of the rationale for Israel was that, whether or not it guaranteed the survival of the Jewish people it at least gave them a basis for fighting for that survival. That's something they've never had in the Diaspora.
I would phrase this a little differently: in the Diaspora, Jews had to hope that they could convince a majority of gentiles to allow their existence qua Jews. In Israel, they do not. The fact that (for the moment) it is arguably easier to convince Americans to allow their existence than it is to maintain that existence in Israel, is maybe interesting but not as compelling as Matt thinks it is.
Iran would be stupid not to have nuclear weapons when Israel does.
They would only be stupid not to have them if they desire to destroy Israel. If they wanted peace then Israel would sign that treaty tomorrow.
I'm not any kind of expert on Iran, but it seems fairly obvious that they are also worried about deterring Saudi Arabia or being invaded by the US or (some day down the road) Russia, as happened may times historically. They spent 8 years fighting off the smaller country of Iraq not too long ago, for instance.
If you don't want to be attacked by the US, then maybe stop attacking the US and sponsoring terrorism that attacks the US
Sure, but I'm not the one who needs convinced of that, and the lazy but mostly true rejoinder is that that didn't save Saddam.
In any case, a nuclear weapons program is something you set up for 50 years, not 10 years, and who knows how global politics will be configured then, other than to say Iran will probably have a few powerful, nuclear armed neighbors and enemies.
To not lose the plot, I think I'm trying to point out that they may have other reasons to acquire weapons apart from Israel, whatever you think of the legitimacy of those reasons.
Did France develop an independent deterrent to destroy the Soviet Union? Nope, they just wanted to deter invasion.
Israel doesn’t want to invade Iran. Israel doesn’t have a religion they are trying to spread through radical terrorist groups throughout the region.
Israel and Iran have conflicting interests in Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank and Gaza. Israel has escalation dominance. No serious regional power would concede escalation dominance to an enemy.
But France had reason to fear Soviet invasion because the Soviets expressed an interest in spreading their ideology and control over other countries. Israel has never expressed a desire to spread beyond what it sees as its historic homeland, which certainly never included Persia.
Why, though? Israel has no designs on Iran. If Iran recognized Israel's existence and stopped using proxies to attack Israel, there would be no conflict between them at all. The risk and threat is entirely from the Iranian side. They don't need nukes for self-defense against Israel unless they insist on war.
If Iran decides not to seek Israel's destruction (as several Arab states have done), it cedes foreign policy autonomy to America? How so? Do Iranian interests inherently demand seeking Israel's destruction? Do the Iranian people benefit somehow from attacking international shipping and arming terrorists with missiles?
Most countries refrain from such behavior. Have they also ceded their foreign policy autonomy to America? Or are they just acting rationally and constructively for their own interests?
To the extent that their foreign policy autonomy consists of the ability to pursue Israel’s destruction, or the proliferation of non-state militias that parasitically extort concessions from the countries unwillingly hosting them, yes they’d have to give that up. I don’t see why any of that is desirable (much less necessary) in the first place.
This is a strange way to say “let’s take Iranian theocratic psychopathy as a given, in which case, they’ll come to blows with non-theocratic psychopaths.”
Not just Israel too. Also Pakistan, a neighbor, and several other “near” neighbors, Russia, India and China, if you drastically stretch a geographic point.
Why? Israel wants literally nothing from Iran, nothing to do with Iran - Iran could have peace with Israel tomorrow if it just said “ok fine we’ll stop shooting at you”.
This is dumb because (a) they’re not going to nuke some of the holiest sites in their own religion, (b) it would make Palestine also totally uninhabitable, and due to both it would (c) also ensure the swift destruction of Iran.
They would have done it already if none of the above mattered
Are all of Israel's military bases or economic targets located on Muslim Holy Sites? I agree they wouldn't try to blow up the Dome of the Rock.
"it would make Palestine also totally uninhabitable" - people live in Hiroshima today.
Nukes aren’t the same as the 1940s. The fallout would extend, depending on weather, through Greece or halfway down Saudi Arabia who hates Iran. It would also level all of Israel and most of Palestine. It would lead to Irans total destruction.
"Nukes aren’t the same as the 1940s."
Yes, and one of the biggest differences between today and the 40s is that there are dozens of designs. You can make them very big, or you can make them pretty small. You can also dial up or down the fallout by changing the detonation height and fraction of fission vs fusion.
The Iranians are not that sophisticated. Nukes are not the same as other weapons.
The Iranian Regime sponsored a mass shooting a Mecca decades ago.
I'd say there's a fairly major qualitative difference between mass killings at a holy site and literally vaporizing the holy site.
Famously, Herzl was inspired to start the Zionist movement while being a correspondent during the Dreyfuss trial. It's a big leap to go from that experience to imagining the Holocaust, but it's not *that* big of a leap.
This was a glaring hole in the story Matt tells. Jewish nationalism had less to do with mimicking the broader trend, and more to do with “hey if everyone else is nationalizing, that doesn’t leave much room for us.” The lack of any mention of Dreyfus in the context of Herzl was frankly bewildering.
(Ed.: Ninja’d by Allan Thoen)
To be honest I’m not sure sure concentrating all the Jews in a single place of tiny geographical extent (and surrounded by hostile neighbors) in a world in which nuclear weapons exist is without its drawbacks as far as genocide risk goes.
But the same can be said of any distinct national or ethnic group, most of which are "concentrated" by virtue of living together in a relatively compact area with defined borders and a commitment to self-defense.
The temptation of anti-zionism is that Israelis are surrounded by Arabs, so expelling them shouldn’t be so much different than driving the Dutch from East Timor. However, four wars have proved this position dubious.
I think the subtlety that is elided here is that it is debatable whether Palestine and Palestinians ever represented a national grouping prior to the creation of Israel. And, even if they were, the creation of a nation of Palestine would have been just as Romantic-Nationalistic as any of the other nation-births discussed here.
The large majority of the Levant was carved up into ethnically Arab countries with cultures and historic nationalities that were/are not clearly markedly distinct from Palestinian culture/nationhood. Saying Palestine was separate from Jordan or Syria and deserved its own country was not that different from saying Galicia should not have been part of Spain because it had its own unique identity. Galicia perhaps had a better argument, I think, and I believe the last independent country in Palestine was the crusader-run Kingdom of Jerusalem
When the Israeli partition plan was drawn up, a small portion of the British Middle East was allocated to Jews, who were *a majority* in the land they were allocated. And it is disingenuous to repeat the factoid that Jews only owned 5% of the land of Palestine when Israel was created, without specifying how much of the land in the *Jewish* partition was Jewish-owned (a number that I have difficulty finding) and without specifying how much was Arab-owned rather than simply not privately owned (was the Negev desert owned by individual Arabs?). When sovereignty changes, communally owned lands naturally and justifiably pass to the new sovereign.
I think this is a deeply underrated point. The Ottoman Empire fell apart and the modern nations we have today are absolutely not the ways that the Arabs of the time saw themselves. There are dozens more examples like the Galicians who got absorbed into a nation state.
We can see this easily because between 1948 and 1967 it was Transjordan, and there was no attempt to create a unique Palestinian state. It wasn’t until the land was totally lost in 1967 and the Israeli retreating from their conquered territory that Palestinians saw a unique chance at all. And to Matt’s point they decided to squander it in attempts to genocide their neighbor.
Nitpick - it was Transjordan until it officially annexed the West Bank in 1950 and became Jordan.
This is 100% correct.
The problem is that the only people who ever bring this stuff up are right wing psychos who try to leverage it to claim that “Palestinians are fake they should live in Jordan”. So no one likes to talk about it.
The Arabs did not see the British rule over Palestine as legitimate and therefore were mad about illegal Jewish immigration. This is not a very liberal attitude but it's also not an unexpected attitude. This was Jabotinsky's point. They were obviously going to be mad
…and this is why birthright citizenship is one of America's key social innovations.
I was definitely thinking about that when I saw the sign at the protest encampment on campus that said something like “there is no such thing as a birthright”. I see what they meant, that being born of certain ancestors shouldn’t give you a better right than anyone else to immigrate to a country your family has no immediate connection to, but this word enters into a lot of political discussions with many different valences and I would want to be careful about denying all of them.
For one thing, "there is no such thing as a birthright", if taken beyond an "own the libs" on a tourism program, just means there's no such thing as a positive right, period. It's a Libertarian Party view of society.
Best comment of the day. I think it's fair to say that any organized movement for Palestinian national identity emerged long after the Zionist movement had begun purchasing land from the Ottoman empire and establishing settlements.
Zionist actually didn't believe Arabs were part of any distinct national group, Weitzman the first Israeli president asked the UK to economically develop the Euphrates river delta so that the Arabs of parts of Syria, Palestine, Jordan could be moved to Iraq and make room for Jewish immigration.
It's true that the Muslims eventually kicked the Crusaders out of the Holy Land. It's not so clear that it was the *Arabs* that did so. The most decisive victories came under the leadership of Saladin, a Kurd, heading a force in which Arabs were probably a minority, with the bulk made up of Turks, Berbers, Nubians, Kurds, etc.
OK, then I'm just not clear on what was supposed to happen. The Ottomans (do you consider them European?) lost WWI. The victors (France, UK) took over their land. Were the Ottomans just supposed to leave, and were France and the UK just supposed to throw up their hands at the power vacuum? People can say "Europeans shouldn't create states in the Middle East," but what alternative was there given geopolitical facts as they stood?
You could write this from an Arab perspective:
One of the victors of WWI was Hussein bin Ali, the King of the Arabs, the Sharifian Caliph and the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, whose armies participated, with their allies from Britain and its Empire, in the liberation of the Arabs from Ottoman rule. He was the rightful ruler of all of the formerly Ottoman-occupied Arabian lands after WWI: the mutasarrifates of Jerusalem and Beirut, the vilayets of Damascus, Beirut, Aleppo, Baghdad and Basra and the sanjak of Deir Es-Zor. All the British and the French had to do was to stand aside and let the Hashemites take over.
Such were the terms of the agreement he (believed he) had with the British when he led the Great Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire. Britain's insistence on the Balfour Declaration and on the French control of Beirut and Damascus resulted in him ending the alliance with Britain (which resulted in him losing the war with the Emir of Najd, which is why there is now a country called Saudi Arabia).
(Hussein in Ali was the father of Abdullah I of Jordan and Faisal I of Iraq; Abdullah's great-grandson is Abdullah II, the present King of Jordan)
Fair enough. But what I think is missing (from both this Arab perspective you describe and much contemporary anti-Zionist perspective) is that modern Israelis do not consider themselves European (and most modern Israelis are not of European descent). Even historic Jewish Palestinians at the time of Partition were hardly European either, in that they owned land in Palestine, had worked to develop their parts of Palestine, might have been born in Palestine, or had fled persecution in Europe. I know this last group is the one that is emphasized ("maybe they were fleeing persecution, but they were still European interlopers"), but the other groups were by no means insubstantial.
As I understand it the demographic center of gravity in Israel is the descendants of Jews expelled from other parts of the ME. That's part of the 'get real' conversation that needs to take place on the Arab side. It isn't any more inherently illegitimate than the numerous other polities carved out of broken empires over the last 100-150 years. The part where the Israelis need to get real is the belief that in the 21st century they can have huge numbers of completely disenfranchised people under their de facto control in perpetuity and still be treated like any other liberal democracy.
The anti Zionist crowd is wrong about genocide but they're right about apartheid. Should have stuck with that one.
The Europeans did not "have those Jews move" to the Middle East and create a state for them. The Jews were moving there already since the Ottomans were in charge. The Europeans in question spent the bulk of their time trying to prevent the Jews from moving there. For example, the British imposed strict immigration quotas on Jews and for many years barred them from buying property. The Germans and their allies tried to murder as many European Jews as possible, especially in the heartland of the Zionist movement, Poland, Belarus and Ukraine.
I wish people would be more specific when they criticize the "Europeans" for "moving" the Jews to Palestine and "creating a state" for them. Which Europeans? How did they "create a state" for the Jews? When did they do this?
But the Balfour Declaration did not create a state and the British resisted any attempts to do so, going so far as to restrict Jewish immigration during the Holocaust and bar Jews from buying land. At best, and I am unclear even on this, the Balfour Declaration created a more favorable attitude towards additional Jewish immigration than existed under the Turks (the founding generation of Israel had already by and large immigrated to Palestine before the Balfour Declaration). But what motivated Jews to move to Palestine was antisemitism in Europe, the greater proximity of Palestine to Europe (as opposed to say, South America or Australia), and the closing of America to Jewish immigration. To say that the British "created" the Jewish state means they didn't do enough to stop it.
The 1947 Partition was supported by 2/3 of the entire United Nations at the time, i.e. not just Europe. Moreover, it did not "create" Israel - the Jews had to fight off a civil war and an invasion to make it actually happen. The Europeans did not fight the war for them, and in fact (aside from Czechoslovakia) refused to let them buy any arms.
And now here's the antisemitism! Why do Arabs and Europeans get to decide which Jews belong to "Arab lands" and which Jews belong to "European lands"? Not only against the will and voice of those Jews but against where those Jews actually live, as with "Eastern" Jews living in Los Angeles and "Western" Jews having lived in pre-Zionist Palestine!
Europeans created all the "states" in the modern Middle East by virtue of the fall of the Ottoman Empire, and of course Europeans (Romans) also created the administrative units and some of the nomenclature (including "Palestine") used to this day. I don't think people are "missing" the Arab perspective on Israel, I think people are pointing out that the Arab perspective is unhelpfully narrow and ahistorical in its rejection of any argument that does not begin and end with the Islamic conquest of the 7th century, while ignoring the thousands of years of history that preceded it as well as everything that came after the fall of the Ottomans.
Sure, but that Arab perspective is bullshit. They are not the only people in the Middle East and never have been.
Your definition of Zionism to Peretz is the correct one and not “deflationary.” If you support the existence of a Jewish state, you are a Zionist. It doesn’t mean you have any particular positions on the borders, defense policy, etc.
If you love and support America, you are an American patriot. That doesn’t mean you support whatever boneheaded thing the government is currently up to.
One of the most irritating leftist tendencies is to twist the meanings of words to suit their political agenda. Don’t let them.
This. I am a Zionist in that I very much believe a Jewish state, that currently exists, should continue to exist. If you define Zionism the way ultra-right wing Jewish nationalists and some of the Haredi do as including the West Bank and “greater Israel”, then I oppose that and believe a compact Jewish Democratic state should exist. But that is not what “anti-Zionists” are preaching.
Anti-zionists (as opposed to pro-Palestinians) are seeking the destruction of Israel and that Jews living there either be eliminated or “go back” to places that never accepted them and would not now. The movement itself is very much anti-Semitic. It frankly is scary how much of this has come out of the woodwork since 10/7. Nor does describing anti-zionism as an anti-colonial project make sense. Jews have lived in the Levant for thousands of years. The return of Jews, many of whom were not accepted in their states, should be considered an anti-colonialist triumph. The spinning of the facts the other way is just bad faith.
I think this is a gross mischaracterization of the vast majority of anti-zionist activists, in America at least. The majority of them want a singular state where everyone has equal rights in a democratic system. I think you could reasonably call that naive and say that there is a good chance that there would in practice ultimately be expulsion of Jews, but they're kids, they're supposed to be naive.
It’s more than naive - why is this an acceptable goal at all? 9.5 million Israelis want nothing to do with their non-Israeli Palestinian neighbors - how is forcing them into political union with them humane?
Or to take it from another angle: why start with Israel at all? Let’s demand one state with equal rights between the US and Canada. No? Why not?
The issue is your version of Zionism is basically limited to the small number of Meretz and Labor politicians left. Even 'moderates' like Gantz are in favor of the current West Bank settlements and will make deals for more in the future if needed to keep a government stable.
Part of the reason for the rise of anti-Zionism, is the Labor/moderate/etc. Zionism you're supporting is dead in Israel.
I don't think this is completely true.
There's a difference between the ideological position of wanting to settle the West Bank because of wanting that land, vs. wanting settlements to continue because you worry about the security of Israel.
The majority of Israelis don't want a Palestinian state to arise because they're afraid it will weaken Israel's security (with good reason), and they believe that settlements help protect "mainland" Israel.
It's true that the left in Israel has dwindled a lot and is very small, but it can certainly rise again, especially with good leadership on both sides making the case that this will bring peace (think the peace treaty with Egypt following the Yom Kippur war).
But I think this is part of the point too. The mainstream Israeli position seems to be that the existence of a separate Palestinian state is an existential security threat that cannot be allowed, AND that extending equal rights to the Palestinian inhabitants of the land is an existential threat to Israel’s Jewish identity that also cannot be allowed. So if the 2-state solution and the 1-state solution are both off the table, then the only outcomes left are either a continued state of increasing military rule/apartheid, or the Ben Gvir/Smotrich vision of ethnic cleansing and elimination.
And maybe those really are the only ways Israel can continue to exist. I don’t believe they are but many Israelis clearly do think so. But if they’re right true, then as someone in the diaspora, that’s where I get off the bus. While there seemed to be a possibility of a road towards a 2-state solution, I could call myself a Zionist in the minimal sense Matt’s describing. But if that’s off the table - and I’ve become convinced it is - then “I support Israel’s right to exist” becomes “I support Israel’s right to exist as a nation that must eternally rule an ethnic underclass in it’s occupied Bantustan”. And no, I don’t.
That doesn’t mean I dream of seeing Israel wiped off the map. But it’s just a nation like any other, and I feel no more committed to defending its inherent legitimacy than I do to Saudi Arabia.
"Nor does describing anti-zionism as an anti-colonial project make sense. Jews have lived in the Levant for thousands of years."
If Native Americans and Alaskan Natives from Montana, the Dakotas, etc... moved en masse to New Jersey and setup an ethno-religious state their would that be a colonialist or not? "They" have been living in NJ for thousands of years and a few even live their today
It wasn't colonial because there was no real metropole.
I will concede, however, that it LOOKED colonial to folks living in Palestine in say the 1920's, a point Matt makes. But calling Israel "settler colonialist" is wrong except as to what is now happening on the West Bank (which is terrible).
"It wasn't colonial because there was no real metropole."
Yeah, I think the lack of a metropole is a key distinction. It's what separate immigration as refugees versus colonialism. The "Jewish settler colonialists" were refugees fleeing the countries of their birth. The vast majority of them were from Czarist Russia. Nobody thinks the Czar was trying to colonize Palestine. And nobody thinks Honduras is trying to colonize Texas.
Slight correction, there are a lot of people who think some version of Honduras is trying to colonize Texas. They're all nuts, and they all wear red baseball caps.
This is a silly distinction.
Immigration with forceful setting up of a new government with jurisdiction over the original inhabitants is what makes it settler colonialism. The new government doesn't have to be reporting back to some city 1000 miles away for this to be pretty trash.
The ethnic groups in mandatory Palestine in the 1920's and 1930's set up their own armed ethnic militias with the express purpose of imposing governance upon and resisting governance from their neighbors who they saw as different.
If a poor immigrant from Honduras arrives and within 2 years joined some Spanish speaking armed Militia called "the Defense" dedicated to resisting the laws of the state of Texas and demanding land grants... we need a word for that.
You think it a silly distinction, but words have meanings, and a "colony" does in fact require a metropole.
But the Jews did not set up such a government until 1948, which happened after all the so-called colonialism had already occurred.
What happened was Jewish refugees began emigrating from Eastern Europe to Palestine for mostly non-ideological reasons in the 1890s. The vast majority of Jews did not immigrate to Palestine out of adherence to Zionist beliefs. They just wanted a place to live and couldn't afford or get into a better country. So fundamentally I don't see how this can be meaningfully described as colonialism as opposed to immigration.
But even if all of those refugees were Zionists and harbored a desire to set up an autonomous homeland for themselves in the country to which they immigrated that would not also be colonialism and I don't see why it would be described that way. If all of the Ultra-Orthodox Jews in the greater New York area expressed a desire to create an autonomous homeland in Rockland County and moved there en masse that would be a bad idea but it wouldn't be colonialism.
Just because something is bad and you want a word for it, doesn't mean it's colonialism. I also don't really get the need to fit it within that label. Israeli treatment of Palestinians can be bad on its own terms - it doesn't need to be forced into colonialist discourse. If you think that ethnic groups should be able to bar people from other ethnic groups from living in a place you can make that argument without colonialism.
The distinction is not silly because the solutions are different. In the case of settler colonialism you can make appeals to the metropole and expect the settlers to leave depending on the situation. Obviously there is some overlap in cases of settler colonialism where overtime the colony secedes from the metropole but again once that happens you can discuss the historical injustice but it doesn't make sense to ask most Americans to go back to their country of origin (assuming they are in the United States, complaining about American tourists expats is perfectly ok).
Palestinians started massacring Jews in 1920. I’d guess the Jewish militias had something to do with that https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_and_massacres_in_Mandatory_Palestine
That would not be considered colonialist by the anti-settler colonialism set. Matt’s persuasive point is that once these things get resolved, usually with force, the displaced adjust their aspirations to reflect reality. Native Americans don’t expect Manhattan to be returned to them or advocate that everyone I. Manhattan return to their place of origin or be eliminated.
So the concept of a Native American Identity that connects the Inuit to the Lakota Sioux is interesting, because until the Europeans arrived, not only did those to indigenous groups not have a common identity, they probably didn't even know that the others existed. Therefore, any common identity and therefore connection to the land of New Jersey is a construct in relation to Europeans. This would only be analogous to Israeli Jews if Ashkenazi Jews had no cultural identification with Safardic Jews before zionism
I think it might be more analogous than it at first sounds, because an identity that was common enough to form a nation state probably did not exist between Ashkenazi and Safardic Jews for most of their history. Ethno-states didn't really start consolidating anywhere in Europe, the Mediterranean or the Middle East until at least the 15th century partly because pan-X feelings, where XX is German, Jewish, Arab, etc...weren't strong anywhere.
*I* would find such a project highly dubious both morally and legally, but I don't think it would be "colonialist," because, as I understand that term, it implies the settlers owe allegiance to another political entity. I.e., that's why the American "colonies" became "states" after declaring independence from Britain.
I think where the word has the most meaning, America was still regarded as colonialist long past it's founding. The part where you're still connected to a distant state is less important than the part where you are usurping political power from the locals. So if the Native Americans took all political power in NJ to me it's relevant as colonialism.
That would not be colonialist, especially if you were talking about Iroquois and Lenape Natives setting up an Iroquois or Lenape state.
Why not? In my example it's explicitly not only natives who have some historical record of living in NJ, but many others as well.
But even if it's Lenapes, it sure seems colonialist, or something like it, because they'd be pushing out long-settled peoples who have more of a right to be there.
Lenapes are an almost unique example, though, because for most other Native groups, Iroquois included, there is some record of them displacing a previous native group to occupy the most recent territory they had prior to being ousted later.
White Americans absolutely do not have more of a right to be in New Jersey than the Lenape. The Lenape are the indigenous people and New Jerseyans (I say this having been raised in NJ and taught about its native peoples in school, lmao) are colonizers.
Ok tell me more - who belongs where...what if you're 1/2 Lenape or 1/4 Lenape or 1/8th Lenape or 1/64th? What if you're a Black American whose grandparents were born in NJ? Should Asian immigrants be allowed to come to NJ? Do the Iroquois belong on any of the land they pushed other tribes off of?
As a quick addendum - I sincerely doubt the Lenape are truly indigenous. They surely migrated from some other region and / or developed some sort of conscientious of being a separate people a few hundred years before sustained European contact. The peoples of that region (and every region of the globe) have always migrated, mixed and pushed each other out. That much is always evident in pre-contact language maps, which suggest the ancestors of the Lenape and all Algonquins perhaps originated somewhere in NE or NY before spreading out across much of the continent.
He isn’t claiming to love and support Israel, or that it should be a Jewish state. He is supporting its continued existence as a state. I expect Matt would actually have some substantive disagreements with many people on whether and how that requires Jewishness of the state. It seems to me that part of Zionism is in fact an insistence on the Jewishness of the state (though there are many questions about what that might mean, and whether it is compatible with an end to apartheid on the occupied territories).
At this point, now that Israel is established, it doesn’t even require insisting on that. Arguing that Israel needs to be compelled to accept millions of immigrants who are committed to its destruction and the expulsion of 80% of its citizens isn’t objectionable just because “well then Israel won’t be majority Jewish”.
I think it is very easy to claim to be a Zionist while arguing that Israel should dispense with most of the things that make it Jewish de jure. (For example, I am one such person - no one benefits from the state rabbinate, for example, except for the rabbis employed by it.)
Totally agree. I am a non-Jewish Zionist because I know enough history to understand that the world at large has a deep-seated (arguably psychotic) penchant for violent anti-Judaism. So I subscribe to the proposition that there "must be" a Jewish state to provide protection and an opportunity for Jews to flourish (as they have in Israel), without in the least derogating from the rights of Jews to establish thriving communities elsewhere in the world (as they have in the US and elsewhere). This is not different than my attitude would be about any other people that had been persecuted and reviled without reason throughout recorded history. This is NOT the same as supporting any particular Israeli policy or government, and it comes with deep revulsion at the arguments of religious zealots in Israel about the absolute primacy of Jewish interests in that land above those of any other people.
"One of the most irritating leftist tendencies is to twist the meanings of words to suit their political agenda. Don’t let them."
There's also the (rightist) anti-semitic version of Zionism, which is that Jews should only live in Israel.
This doesn't accurately reflect the beliefs of most right-wing Israelis, I believe.
I think you have to understand this in terms of weirdness, bad faith and conspiracy theories.
I don't believe Belgium should exist, but if i spent my life screaming at strangers on the internet about how much I hated Belgium and defined myself as an anti-Belgiumist it would be really odd and would reflect a deeper issue.
Sounds like just the kind of thing a Flemish absolutist would say. We Walloonian independence fighters won’t fall for your tricks.
I would not think you a weirdo if Belgium were still occupying the Congo and chopping off the hands of natives who opposed King Leopold. Belgium stopped but Israeli settler colonialism is ascendant.
You think the crimes in the Congo would be a reason for Belgium not to EXIST?
I think the crimes in the Congo are neither here nor there as to whether Belgium should exist. The questions that are relevant are about how the Walloons and Flemish people feel about sharing a country with each other, and/or with the Dutch or French.
I might cheer on Congolese freedom fighters when they massacred their colonial overlords. I might sing songs and write essays and watch movies about their heroic deeds. I wouldn’t want the bourgeois women of Brussels raped, and I’d be conflicted about what should happen to white women and children in Congo, but frankly I’d think they had it coming if they were wiped out.
When you roll the iron dice and they come up against you, the penalty is death.
Wow. This is a disturbing moral compass.
They were responding to the second paragraph in the top comment. They were saying it would be less weird to hate Belgium if they were currently chopping off hands.
But consider the historical erasure in that sentence. Jews, as a historical matter, are from Israel. Belgians are not from the Congo. Also settlers may be odious, but they do not do what Belgium did in the Congo.
"Jews, as a historical matter, are from Israel.": that is not as clear truth as you write it to be. The jewish religion spread beyond people from the region (e.g., the jewish population in Ethiopia).
Not all catholics are desendants of people from Italy.
One of the jet differences between Christianity and Judaism is that Christianity is a proselytizing religion. Judaism is not. The conventional Jewish belief presumes a genetic link to ancient Israelites, and there is evidence to support this.
That was not always true. Again, see as examples the jewish communities in Ethiopia or India.
And that's beyond the fact that genetics or ancestry should not dictate your rights. Can you imagine if only Americans with Native American ancentry had political rights in the US?
The fact that genetics/ancestry should not dictate your rights is a very good reason why Palestinians need to throw away the keys and create a peaceful society that renounces claims for the destruction of Jewish Israel.
1) any time an anti Israel protestor makes some reference to "turtle Island", they are literally saying only native Americans should have political rights in the US.
2) I do not understand your reference to Jews in Ethiopia and India. Jews have always intermarried where they moved, and that's how different Jewish communities look different. It also has to do with rape and pogroms.
26% of Israelis aren’t Jewish and have equal rights.
Not only can I imagine that, it's the entire substance of the American decolonization movement!
"Can you imagine if only Americans with Native American ancentry had political rights in the US?"
Actually, under US federal law, whether one can be tried in federal court as an "Indian" does often depend on whether one has a "blood quantum" of descent from Native Americans.
"One of the jet differences between Christianity and Judaism is that Christianity is a proselytizing religion."
But, unlike with Zoroastrianism, it is still possible to convert to Judaism and people have done so.
Whether it's possible to convert to Zoroastrianism is disputed and depends in large part on specific local community practices: https://iranicaonline.org/articles/conversion-vii
(The Druze would be a better example, as they completely forbid conversion and even bar non-Druze from observing or studying the specifics of their religious practices.)
*key differences [I get not letting us edit, but why doesn't substack at least let you copy and paste your comment so you can easily repost it with your typos edited out?]
You can do both things on the website. Stop using the app.
But ancestry is complicated. A good number of non-Jewish people have as much ancestry from the territory of modern Israel as significant fractions of the Jewish diaspora. There may be important reasons why one sort of ancestry conveys Jewish identity while the other does not, but none of it obviously conveys more of a historical tie to the land.
There were roughly 20k Jews in Israel in 1890. Creek Indians have a stronger historical claim to Georgia than early modern zionists had to Israel.
Of course Creek Indians have a historical claim to Georgia! But then of course the people who were before the Creek Indians also have a historical claim, and the people before them (presuming they exist). This is why I generally find the 'historical claim' line of thinking to be unproductive and an unwise basis for modern policymaking. As they say, toast can never be bread again.
"As they say, toast can never be bread again."
*Mmm*, French Toast.
Where are you getting that number?
From what I can find, the total population of Palestine in 1890 was about 500k, of which about 50k were Jews, 60k were Christians, and the rest, about 430K Muslim.
If that 50k of Jews had ancestors there longer than the 400k Muslims, would you consider them to have a stronger or weaker historical claim to Israel?
The question isn’t about those 50,000 and 400,000 - it’s about the millions of people who are descended from neither groups but claim some sort of group-related (and possibly ancestry-related) tie to the land despite not having ancestors of that generation (or the preceding dozen) who lived there.
Why do minorities not have "historical claims"?
The idea that I, a British person with a Russian Ashkenazi grandfather, have a deep inalienable right to move to my historic homeland Israel, while a Palestinian whose parents and grandparents were all born in Haifa has no such right, strikes me as another kind of historical erasure.
Even more so if you weren’t, had no family in Belgium, had never been to Belgium, spoke none of the languages of Belgium…
Belgium, like Idaho, does not exist.
You’re just trolling City of Trees 😆
“… uniting most of the world’s Italian speakers (but not Rome and its environs or the area around Venice, or the Italian-speaking people of the Dalmatian coast, or the city of Trieste, or the Italian-speaking minority in Nice) into a single state.”
You are hereby declared persona non grata in the Most Serene Republic of San Marino.
[In Yglesias voice] I've been kicked out of better countries than this!
"I've been kicked out of better countries than this!"
Yes, Signore, and we have expelled better opinionated persons than you, also.
Michael Fey was an "opinionated person"?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpI3EaLfkVQ
Your standards aren't that high.
San Marino erasure is all too real! For Mother's Day, my family went to an Italian restaurant and they had placemats for the kids with facts about Italy, which included (1) a map of the country and (2) a list of countries that border Italy, and San Marino (as well as the Papal States/Vatican City) was missing from both.
Thank you for editing to add the comma!
You're welcome; I originally wrote it on my phone, then spotted the error when I got an e-mail notification about the comment being liked.
Not to mention all the "Little Italys" in the US.
This is a great article. Ethno-nationalism broadly is a highly dubious project under the best of circumstances. That the Israeli state is as constrained as it has been is it's most impressive feature. Maybe the most remarkable thing about all of this is that the intransigent displaced population has been allowed to persist in the manner it has. The typical trajectory of these situations is much more like the "genocide" the anti-zionists pretend has happened. I see very little reason to believe that it has ever been the case that the displacement of the Israeli ethno-state by some hypothetical or counterfactual anti-zionist effort would have produced a Palestinian state that would be so accommodating.
Israel has been the premier military power in the region for like 50+ years. They're constrained by ideology not capacity. In fact, if they were less overwhelmingly strong, they would be compelled to be more ruthless than they have been. This gets to why complaints about US policy are so misguided. US support of Israel protects their neighbors from them even more so than the other way around. When Israel actually has to enforce it's own borders it's extremely bad for the people in the regions that force the issue.
Israel is only the premier military power because of their neighbors' incompetence and US support. The combined abilities of its neighbors, especially once you throw in Iran which never actually took up arms against Israel until after the Shah, should have been and should be militarily superior to Israel. By all rights the Arabs should have won at least one of the the 20th century Arab-Israeli wars.
Exactly, Israel accepts mostly indefensible borders on the back of US support. The alternative is they create defensible ones, which would be extremely bad for their Arab neighbors.
The Arab/Muslim world made that bet several times and got their asses kicked by Israel every time.
This is a very dangerous belief that has killed a lot of Muslims and will kill more.
You can easily lookup the differences in military hardware between Israel and literally the entire Muslim world (who, it should be said, are not unilaterally anti Israel).
What you’re failing to see here is that if the US stopped supplying Israel and bombs started falling on Tel Aviv and people really started dying, Israel wouldn’t hold back either. And in that scenario I cannot begin to describe how lopsided the conflict would be. It would make the 1967 war look like a schoolyard tussle
The "Fortress Israel" hypothetical would be an incredibly bad state of affairs. I agree. The Israeli accelerationists are off the deep end.
It’s this ideology that leads to so much death. People just cannot grasp that Israel is an extremely strong military for some reason.
There are three tiers of militaries today — US/China, modern powers (Israel to UK to Australian with all the modern tech), and everyone else. If you’re in the everyone else bucket, you’re using Soviet trash or US dustbin technology that we surpassed in the 80s. It’s hard to describe how lopsided these conflicts are.
What you’re seeing is Israel’s RESTRAINT.
I really liked parts of this article and disagreed with others pretty strongly.
To start with what I liked, I think there's actually been revisionism in the Israeli account of their own history. Zionism was always a weird idea, and there were very few ideologically-driven zionist migrants. The vast majority of those pushed to move there did so because they had nowhere else to go, especially after the American immigration crackdown of 1924 (which my great grandparents migrated here before). The early leaders of the movement were ideological, though, and they often get quoted to speak for everyone.
On the question of Herzl's weirdness, he'd almost certainly have agreed the idea was insane too. Chaim Weizmann, then-leader of the world zionist congress, used to say "you don't need to be crazy to be a zionist, but it certainly helps". I do disagree, though, that Herzl was somehow misguided because he could not have predicted the specifics of a catastrophe for jews in the context of European nationalist movements.
Herzl's contention was that, after observing events like the Dreyfus affair, European nationalism never included the Jews. He had strong historical precedent for believing no one would save them if that lack of inclusion turned violent, and nationalism was in the air, so a nation-state was the solution he went to. Maybe he could have advocated for mass migration to America, but a lot of people viewed further migration in minority status as just another step in fleeing as the Christian world went through it's repetitive cycles of tolerating then expulsion of Jews.
It's pretty difficult, though, to say that Herzl predicted European nationalism would exclude Jews and it could result in a catastrophe, but he was misguided because he couldn't have predicted exactly how it happened. No one could have predicted the horror of the Holocaust, since that kind of industrialized genocide had never been seen before, but Herzl got most of the ingredients correct: ultra-nationalism, lack of any safe refuge, and Jews as an "other" being viewed as corrupting true European nationalist identities.
The correctness of Herzl and early Zionists does not make their cause any less crazy, but it makes them more understandable. There's an old adage about the conflict being a "collision of right and right" which I basically agree with. Palestinians bear no responsibility for European anti-semitism, but Zionism is a story of what happens when refugees refuse to take no for an answer. Is it morally legitimate to say "we should have been allowed to shut our doors to fleeing Holocaust survivors just like the rest of the world did"? I'm not sure, but no one is asking that question of the people who did so successfully. It also raises very real questions about our own culpability as a world community in ignoring the plight of modern refugees.
Anyways, I largely agree about the weirdness of both Zionism and anti-Zionism as ideas. The history is interesting and I like to argue about whether Herzl was right as much as the next guy. At the end of the day, though, real people are suffering immensely, and their well-being does not actually rely on the dissolution of Israel. Anti-zionism is a movement about finding what they perceive as justice, but it keeps coming at massive cost to everyone, most of all those for whom the justice is sought.
Wonderful point. It made me rethink my views on immigration/refuge dynamics in America. Israel became necessary through the unique combination of a) a culture and identity that persisted over millennia regardless of where its people found themselves, b) a pervasive, virulent hate of that culture escalating to unspeakable evil, c) a people who had no natural homeland to defend, and d) nobody opening their doors to help.
We’re ~200 years into the American experiment of creating a society organized around ideas, not national identify. Who else is better positioned to be generous with those who struggle to find a home or cannot live in their own. If the US had permitted significant Jewish immigration during WWII, Israel may not have been necessary.
There are clear limits to a country’s cultural willingness to adsorb new immigrants, but we should push for at least a bit more than is comfortable.
Also, judging Zionism by only what facts Herzl had access to in 1898 or whatever isn't really fair. Zionism continued to evolve over the next few decades under other leaders, who had access to later historical developments such as World War I and the resulting antisemitism the new nationalist movements enacted in their new countries. Jabotinsky in particular, whatever his other faults, foresaw great purges and massacres of Jews on the horizon even before World War II.
I strongly agree with this point. People like to take the Zionism of Herzl and act like it got sealed in a vacuum, unable to evolve at all after he died in 1904. It makes a lot more sense that Ben-Gurion and Weizmann fought so hard for Jewish immigration when they basically knew in the 1930s that every immigrant is a Jewish life saved. You really can't separate that environment from early Zionism
I do think that it’s relevant that Levantine leaders who came back to take over the Arab partition, esp in the Arab Liberation Army, came directly from serving in the Nazi army. The ideology that Jews ran from that spread like a cancer across Europe got consolidated in white hot persistent rage in the form of the Palestinians leadership and has never stopped.
Very few soldiers in any of the Arab liberation armies came from Nazi armies. You're talking about a literal handful of people. Certainly not their leadership. It's entirely logical why the Arabs would have opposed the creation of a Jewish state - not everything is Nazism.
Please google Fawzi al-Qawuqji and his cadre. It was precisely the leadership that came directly like Qawuqji or directly worked with nazis like then mufti or Rashid Ali Al-Gaylani. Arbs in the levant were led by these people. If they had better leaders at the beginning the whole issue could have been greatly avoided and resolved decades ago.
Fawzi al-Qawuqji is much better classified as a serial Arab nationalist revolutionary than anti-semite. He was heavily involved in Syrian and Saudi guerilla fights, which were much more how he was trained. I'm of two minds on this. Palestinians genuinely lost en enormous amount at the hands of jews, and they don't need any anti-semitism to feel resentful. Hajj Amin al-Huseini, though, had deep nazi ties and really served as a key connection and recruiter for nazis in the Arab world. That's bad! Characterizing him as representative of the entire Palestinian cause is disingenous and wrong, though
I’ve never characterized the average Palestinian as Nazis. The leadership was obviously either directly nazis or their allies, which makes sense as the ottomans joined the Germans war of conquest in WW1 so they were natural allies. I don’t even understand how this is controversial, Qawuqji and his cadre wore the Nazi uniform. They were nazis. They brought that genocidal ideology with them
Husseini represented the entire Palestinian cause as president of the Arab Higher Committee
By the way, thanks for mentioning Nagorno-Karabakh. This massive ethnic cleansing just happened, and surprisingly few people seem to care.
I’m trying to figure out the terminology. Armenian people I know always refer to it as “Artsakh”, while the New York Times always calls it “Nagorno-Karabakh”. I’ve browsed the Wikipedia pages but had trouble figuring out why these terms are used so differently.
Israel is a major ally of Azerbaijan and sell them loads of weapons. Funny how that works, huh?
I try not to comment on Israel-Palestine conflicts for a number of reasons (inter alia becuase it’s usually comically unproductive, no one’s mind will be changed, and such disucssions generally create far more heat than light) but Matt has provided an opening for a tangential complaint that I have about the entirety of the discourse. To wit:
“I’d successfully prevailed on someone I knew who worked for him to communicate that it was really quite offensive to me, as a Jewish person with lots of Jewish relatives who I love and who themselves have a range of views about Israel, tobe called antisemitic.”
I ask Matt and other readers to consider the counterfactual world in which he held and expressed these very same opinions but was one of the 97.4% or so of Americans who are not Jewish, and thus lacked the capacity to immunize himself from accusations of anti-semitism (which, I hope one can stipulate, is a bad thing to be accused of personally and professionally in America).
I understand the rationale behind the heuristic that Jewish commentators are less likely to be closet antisemites and thus less likely to express any critiques of Israeli policy as a reflection of underlying antisemitism, but the chilling effect that anecdotes like the above have whereby it feels like only Jewish commentators have the freedom to publicly opine across the opinion spectrum on a dispute that is constantly plastered over the front pages of the New York Times without great personal and professional risk of censure — again, in a country that is supermajoritarian non-Jewish — seems to me like it is *also a problem.*
The only solution I can propose is rigorous application of the principle of charity.
Two things are true:
1. Plenty of people are unfairly called anti-semitic who aren't.
2. Plenty of people espouse views about the future of historic Palestine that if implemented would lead to mass murder and mass exile of Jews and either want that outcome or don't care that it happens because they see Palestine as Arab/Muslim land.
For American progressives at least I think extremely few of them think that their desired one state would lead to any mass murder/ exile. You could very reasonably call this uninformed and/or naive, but I don't think you could reasonably call it apathetic or hateful. Of course the people you reference exist, but I do think it's a small percentage, at least among Western progressives
To call that willful ignorance is probably being too charitable. You only have to look at how jews are treated in the rest of the Arab world to predict how one state would work out.
While this is true, a lot of these people are people who basically want to just transplant American values on top of the area. It's the same naivety that caused George W Bush to want to do all that nation-building in the Middle East. You'd think the fallout from Iraq and Afghanistan would make it clear that a project that says "It'll be fine for these people to integrate into a modern, secular democracy even though they've never done that before and have wildly different values" is doomed, but people tend to forget.
Google told me “As of May 2024, the estimated population of Israel is 9,311,652, the West Bank is 3,243,369, and the Gaza Strip is 2.1 million”. Unless there’s a lot more than 2 million non Jewish people in Israel I think it really would be hard to predict what democratic politics in a unitary state would be like.
Fair enough - but the claim is (nearly) always combined with right of return which is another 5-7MM people.
> Unless there’s a lot more than 2 million non Jewish people in Israel [...]
There are!
As of the most recent information I can find from Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics (https://www.cbs.gov.il/he/mediarelease/DocLib/2023/424/11_23_424b.pdf, dated 2023-12-28), Israel has 9.84m people, of whom 7.21m are Jews, 2.08m are Arabs, and 554k are neither.
That said, if I'm not mistaken, your number for the West Bank includes not just Palestinians but also the 670k Israeli settlers there. (I believe that the CBS total for Israel also includes those settlers.)
So I believe the current total Arab population of Israel + West Bank + Gaza is only 6.75m (2.08m + (3.24m - 670k) + 2.1m), which is about 460k less than the current total Jewish population of the same area.
(N.B. This is not considering potential impacts from any right of return.)
Then Western progressives should stop marching with those other people, cheering their slogans, etc.
Strongly agree with rigorous application of charity. But I think the charitable interpretation of Matt’s point is that those who have a personal stake in anti-semitism are more justified in being offended by having having anything less than the maximalist Zionist position begin called anti-Semitic, but not that Jews have a monopoly on being offended by the charge.
I take your point that our current world in which only those with a particular identify are “allowed” to comment on related issues is absurd. But it’s still more the exception than the rule that people comment on issues impacting other groups with curiosity and understanding.
For the record, I do not mean to suggest that Matt personally did anything wrong here.
I agree and didn’t take it as such
The strongest justification for zionism is the extent of violent antisemitism that prevailed in central Europe *after* the holocaust. In 1946, a majority of Germans told Gallup they supported the final solution. Hundreds of Jews survived Nazi death camps only to be killed by their Polish neighbors in pogroms. Central Europe was not a safe place to be Jewish in the late 1940s, and folks like Ben Gurion who helped holocaust survivors find safe homes in the only plausible location that existed were heroes.
None of this justifies the push over the last 35 years to colonize the West Bank.
https://open.substack.com/pub/davidabbott/p/the-birth-of-a-nation-a-short-history?r=87ovl&utm_medium=ios
IMO, there's no justification for the claim that Israel is colonizing the West Bank.
To my mind, the goal of a colonization effort is to extract resources and exploit the population to gain something of value from them. Aside from peace, what exactly is Israel trying to extract from the West Bank?
Land for settlements.
That's fine for calling them settlers, but how is that colonization, which requires exploitation for economic gain?
Cheaper housing than one can find in, say, Tel Aviv.
Now that I think of it (you probably knew this was coming), the ultimate solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict is deregulating zoning in the built-up areas of Israel.
I was shocked when I understood that many of the settlements were basically 1990s style cookie cutter suburbs.
More to the point, a large chunk of the "settlers" commute into Israeli cities proper for their jobs.
Mind you, most of these developments would almost certainly stay under Israeli control in a final agreement. (they're close to the likely border). But it would be good if future potential residents could find good, affordable housing inside the Green Line.
It’s not as if Virginians in the 1640s we’re enslaving Indians or even turning them into debt peons. It’s not as if Indians were aggrieved by their inability to elect representatives to the House of Burgesses. Yet 1640s Virginia clearly was colonial because Englishmen were taking land formerly controlled by Indians to build plantations.
I'm inclined to agree with Magellan in that the distinction between Virginia as a colony of Great Britain and American westward expansion is less than entirely pedantic. Like, the settlement of Tennessee by Europeans wasn't a colonialist project of North Carolina or wherever.
IMO, it was colonial because the motivation behind the settlement was to extract wealth from the land and send it back to England.
It's not an accident that the initial settlements were funded by for-profit trading companies with shareholders expecting a return on their investment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Company
In my view, establishing colonies on “native” land makes one a colonialist.
Is there any distinction between a settler and a colonist or do they mean the same thing to you?
I mean, they're Israeli citizens who, with government approval, have gone into territory outside of Israel, where Israeli law does not apply, and created settlements of Israelis, within which Israeli law does apply, to themselves, and refused to grant Israeli citizenship status to the people already living there. (If you insist on a definition of colonialism that requires resource extraction it's there too - there are farms and factories there producing goods that contribute to Israel's GDP.)
To me that qualifies as colonialism, but regardless of whether or not you want to call it colonialism, it's certainly oppressive and violates international law.
You could settle temporarily for some reason. Or settle but not serve a metropole (which is what Jewish Israel itself is).
Establishing a permanent presence tied back to a metropole is settler colonialism. The West Bank arguably qualifies.
This is the root of the term 'settler colonialism'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settler_colonialism
Settlers move to uninhabited land.
Of course if you look closely a lot of “settlement” of “virgin frontiers” was in fact more in the way of displacing the locals who actually were using the land in question.
Seems like a needlessly narrow view of what a colony is. By your lights literal Roman coloniae don’t count! Dropping a bunch of loyal citizens to help pacify unruly natives improve the security situation and better secure land for long term annexation is a pretty paradigmatic colonial practice IMO.
Ezra Klein had an International Law scholar on earlier this week, and I found her views somewhat illuminating and more than a little maddening. They were discussing the relationship between Israel and the UN.
Klein has this week, and previously, summarized Israel's origin similarly to Matt's: there was the immigration and the British and UN plan, but then there was the war. And it's the war that really birthed Israel. Klein's question was, an origin story of winning a war and then setting boundaries based at least in part on the success of that war is a hugely common story across history and today's nations, and we accept that as the status quo. Why don't we do the same with Israel?
The answer was fascinating. The guest said that the difference was that all those other times happened before the creation of the UN and the end of colonialism. And, she said the majority of the states in the UN being from the global south and/or otherwise being formerly colonized, see Israel as the remaining example of colonization, and they cannot abide that. In fact they see the UN's mission as mostly having been about the end of colonization.
Viewed through this paradigm, that Israel is the remaining colony, and that all colonies must be ended, then there is simply no acceptance possible based on practicality or parallels with other accepted unfortunate historical events. It left me a little shaken, because it really says that if you accept this one label, one characterization, one definition of a historic event, and brook no dissent from that characterization, then everything else flows from there.
Wow, interesting - that's a lot of straining rationalization by the guest.
First, the UN was specifically structured to empower those who had prevailed by force of arms - it was a validation of might makes right, not a repudiation. Look who's on the Security Council, for crying out loud. Not exactly a collection of anti-colonial powers doing anti-colonial things.
Second, colonialism did not end. Western colonialism ended (mostly - even the western powers hung on to plenty of far-flung territories). The Soviet Union was plenty colonial and Russia is carrying on the old tradition today.
Third, the UN approved the creation of Israel, just as it did the newly established (and completely arbitrary) states of Africa and the Middle East. Apparently, the UN's central purpose was to dismantle colonialism, and it also approved the colony of Israel. Okay.
Finally, who exactly is Israel supposed to be the colony OF? Nobody. It was not established to extract resources for a foreign power. It was refugees seeking self-determination. The paradigm is just nonsense unless you completely redefine the words.
TBF, it sounds like the scholar was not sharing her own beliefs, she was explaining the beliefs of a bunch of countries in the global south.
It’s a ridiculous position. As others have said, the UN approved the creation of Israel. By her logic, why don’t we censure Arab states for waging direct and indirect warfare on Israel for nearly 100 years. It’s okay to say that this believe has explanatory power for Arab and other public opinion is anti-Israel, but only if it’s paired by showing how so many middle eastern and other leaders have stoked antisemitism and this specific rationalization for it.
It also ignores the very complex dynamics of the post-WWII years when everything was driven by the transition from the WWII alignment of the Allies to the West vs. USSR Cold War dynamic, with middle eastern leaders mostly focused on trying to leverage various WWII victors to advance their own agendas.
She had an amazingly calm, well-modulated voice. I couldn't possibly have had that conversation without shrieking or getting shrill. But she stayed calm and poised throughout the whole thing. I suppose that's an odd thing to remember but I was so impressed, more impressed than I was with her arguments.
yeah i forgot the guest's name but it was pretty interesting. I thought the primary issue was the guest kind of mixed up the direction of legitimacy by saying starting in 1945 with the founding of the UN, use of force needs to be legitimated by international law.
But the reality is the UN/international law draw their legitimacy from the overwhelming dominance of the US at that time and in general in the ~80 years since. The UN broadly provides predictability in how the US and associated countries will use force, because the US essentially wrote most of the international laws. So in the case where you have Israel (which has a preponderance of force and has won all the wars) that does not want to listen to the UN and the US is not willing to stop them, in reality what are we doing with a bunch of analysis of the rules?
This is a point I've heard before and don't fully agree with, but which I find has merit from a legalistic standpoint, if not a moral/historical one.
It assumes a lot of democratic legitimacy to decisions by the UN despite a deficit of democratic legitimacy of many of the countries voting there. It also sees no precedential value in all the times the UN is OK with being ignored by the more powerful of its members.
I really wish there was some better term for what is referred to as international law, because it's not really law in the way we generally think about, but it is wielded, for some specific subjects, such as Israel, as if it was the same as what we commonly understand as law.
EK's guest kind of waved away the inconsistencies as unfortunate, being necessary for maintaining peace, not really relevant, etc.
There's also the matter that no liberal-democratic legal system actually functions by allowing a simple majority (or even supermajority!) of otherwise unelected parliamentarians to abrogate individual rights in the name of social peace. "You, Bob over there, we've decided to vote you off the island of Life for the crime of existing in any peace of real-estate at all, drop dead" is simply not a thing that actually happens in real legal systems.
There’s something notable in the fact that basically no borders have shifted since 1945 other than a few examples with Russia and with Israel. As far as I know, all other changed borders since 1945 involve countries gaining or losing independence, but not gaining or losing territory while being independent both before and after.
She was a very enlightening guest, in my opinion. Do I agree with that paradigm? No, but I absolutely believe that most countries in the UN do. I mean, look at the skin colors involved. The Palestinians look brown and the Israelis in leadership look white. In many countries, the brown people used to be ruled by the white people, but they gained independence and self-determination.
I also thought it was very true when she mentioned that Americans don't think much of international law because we're one of the countries that can disobey it with impunity. It's like saying the law is meaningless in the US just because cops are rarely prosecuted. The less privileged people in America certainly think the law exists and means something even if it's not equally enforced.
Which then becomes fractally wrong and deeply troubling, since Israel is not, in fact, a colony or colonialist at all, and the case that it is basically amounts to "we can't be colonizers because we are in the Global South and have a lot of votes at the UN".
Wow, this is exactly an example of antisemitism. Such a ridiculous argument specifically targeted against Jews. The establishment of Israel itself was based on a decision by the UN.
Even Samuel Alito has better arguments when he tries to justify one whim or another of the Republican Party.
To be fair to her, she would concede the existence of the State of Israel within the original UN mandated Israel borders. She would also say that the right of return for the descendants of those from within those borders was sacrosanct. Both the displacement from within and any expansion outward is the post UN disapproved colonialism that needs to be rolled back.
I think this is a more common view among international legal scholars that people realize because it isn't really a commonly expressed view of most activists. I think that most scholars would add though is that Palestinians should have both a legal right to return and a right to legal asylum with a path to citizenship in the countries where they are current refugees. If the neighboring countries were to grant that so that Palestinians could either (1) move into Israel (2) remain in free and independent Palestine in Gaza and the West Bank or (3) remain in any of the Arab countries in which there families have resided for more one generation with citizenship, I think it is less clear that a right of return would necessarily result in an Israeli population that doesn't remain majority Jewish, especially if options (2) and (3) came with some sort of financial compensation.
One thing I find frustrating is the trend of activists and politicians on both sides of this big fight to demand you either be a "Zionist" or "Anti-Zionist", personally I like to be a"A-Zionist" that is someone who thinks that states aren't created because of God's will or "justice" of "what history wanted" or "what is right", but rather, well as a Targaryen might say: Fire and Blood. Wars, revolutions, historical contingency is what makes modern states.
Whether or not Israel should have been created, the reality is it has been, and it has a powerful military and vast arsenal of thermonuclear weapons, so it's not going anywhere anytime soon. Likewise, the Palestinians aren't going to go away either and the Israeli policy of total domination of them isn't great to say the least. Personally I think we should all try talk more about moving forward, rather than being drawn back into fighting about the endless tragedies and pain of the past, but I get in that part of the world people tend to favor the latter rather than the former.
The thing I do find very close to anti-Semitic is the use of Zionist as an epithet, as if thinking a 75 year old country should exist is an outrageous and unacceptable belief.
I actually have a lot of respect for anti-zionist activists who put both "Israel" and "the United States" in quotation marks and refer to the United States as Occupied Turtle Island. It sounds ridiculous, but it is at least logically consistent. Saying that Israel doesn't have the right to exist but that the United States does is at best logically inconsistent and at worst anti-semetic.
But that's completely backwards. If you're calling the United States "Occupied Turtle Island", then Palestine is Arab-occupied Israel!
Does “ Zionism” mean thinking that Israel should exist, or thinking that Israel should exist as a Jewish state? I believe Germany should exist, but I don’t believe it should exist as an ethnic state with formal ethnic preferences for that ethnicity, and I think similar things about most actually existing countries. That is a major difference I have from the 19th century nationalists.
Do I think there might be some special cases, where there really should be an ethnic or religious state? I’m less sure about that either way, and I don’t know what policies such states should have tied to that ethnicity or religion.
I agree and have been calling this anti-Zionistism, defining it as (a) using Zionist as an epithet or (b) believing that Zionism (i.e., that the Jewish people should have a country) is so noxious that Zionists should be banished from unrelated movements. I think this strain of anti-Zionism is *per se* antisemitic.
Agree, it's a reasonable position to have I guess, like "Scotland should be an independent country" or whatever, or Sitka should be a state: https://www.amazon.com/Yiddish-Policemens-Union-Novel-P-S/dp/0007149832
(While hardly important I would like to point out The Yiddish Policemen's Union will probably never get out of development hell now. Too bad, John Turturro could have been a great Landsman.)
How can that be? Anti-semites keep telling me the Jews control Hollywood!
It's quite good. My only two significant criticisms of it are both spoilers, so I won't lay them out here, but I will say that they are not enough to deter me from recommending it.
Great! If you'd like a Yiddish/Scandi style neo-noir/alt history.
In Sitka you call a gun a sholem, a play on the use of piece/peace in English.
Also those Filipino doughnuts sound good...
I consider myself "post-Zionist". Israel is there and many of its citizens were born there as were their parents. At some point descendants of immigrants have the right to remain. But, as an American with American values, I believe in religious freedom and that there should not be any sort of second class citizenship.
There isn’t second class citizenship in israel.
I suppose the better way to say it is that there shouldn’t be whatever status Palestinians have in the West Bank and Gaza, where they have no real ability to participate in a representative government that engages in governance of their territory. Maybe they are second class citizens of Israel, maybe they are victims of an occupying force, maybe their local government needs to step up, but whatever their status is, it should be raised to first class citizenship of some self governing territory.
They might!
"The UN Partition plan presented in 1948 assigned half the land to the proposed Jewish state, even though Jews were easily less than half the population"
This is one of the more tiresome things I see. A significant majority of the land allocated for a Jewish state in the UN partition plan was the Negev desert. Not much basis for settling a large population there. Even today, after decades of development, the Negev comprises half of Israel's territory while housing about 13% of the population. The UN plan of 1947 actually allocated much more arable land to the proposed Palestinian state.
The description of Herzl here is very problematic, as if he was just another European nationalist, without mentioning the Dreyfus Affair. Herzl understood the problem of anti-Semitism because of the Dreyfus Affair and predicted the Holocaust with chilling accuracy. He grasped what Matt Yglesias cannot comprehend, even after the Holocaust and the recent outbreak of extreme and surprising anti-Semitism in America. Anti-Semitism is one of the mysterious forces in human society, and an independent state is a strategy to deal with it.
We do not know the future and cannot
guarantee that this state will ensure the security of the Jews, but there is no security in the diaspora either. After the state was established, the fact that it is the only one marked as deserving of destruction, even though it is a liberal democracy with enormous contributions to science and culture, is indeed compelling proof of the mystical power of anti-Semitism. Ultimately, there is something somewhat beyond nature in the phenomenon of anti-Semitism, which is why rationalist atheist Jews find it difficult to recognize it until it strikes them forcefully.
Recently, I've been reading discussion groups of secular liberal American Jews and feel how everything that was once said about German Jewry is coming true word for word. They simply do not understand how it suddenly happened to them, that they and their non Jewish friends who always believed in the same things and felt a complete connection, suddenly find their paths diverging.
The idea that American Jews are remotely in the same place as German Jews in the 1930s is not serious and should not be taken seriously.
Jews were extremely assimilated and successful in Germany. That’s the point of comparison OP is making, not the levels of danger and hostility. It’s a cautionary tale that all Jews know - we were safe and prosperous in humanist Germany until we weren’t.
Assimilated and successful yes (though many Jews in Germany in the 1930s, like my grandmother's family, were immigrants from poverty and persecution in Eastern Europe, and less assimilated). But one should not overstate how "humanist" Germany was: antisemitic romantic German ethnonationalism was powerful in Germany long before Hitler, liberal democracy was new to Weimar and it did not take. The US is no stranger to populist antisemitism and we're seeing a bit of a resurgence (though still much less than *America* in the 1930s, let alone other countries) but it's also probably the friendliest non-Israel country to Jews in the world, and has been for much (most?) of its history. Ethnic and religious pluralism is deeply rooted in the US, liberalism is not new, even in 2024 the primary role of antisemitism in partisan electoral politics is that politicians find it useful to accuse the other party of harboring it. There are problems and they are getting worse, but I don't think the specific historical analogies people are making are sound.
The similarity isn't that the United States is like Germany, but in the sense of betrayal and shock that Jews, integrated into general society, feel when they encounter surprising acts of antisemitism from those they considered friends.
OK so you just mean pretty normal minority stress. It's not great but it doesn't seem very compelling to me as an example of the "mystical power" of antisemitism or as a sign that American Jews will have to flee anytime soon.
Can they be in the same place as German Jews in the 1900’s? What about Spanish Jews in the 1450’s? Or to take a more obscure example, Lebanese Jews in the 1950’s?
I mean, not really, liberalism is good for Jews and liberalism was nonexistent in two of your cases and pretty weak in the third. I am pretty worried about rising antisemitism but there is a truly giant gulf between those realities and the idea that mass expulsion is lurking behind the corner.
Liberalism stopped being good for Jews when its main interpretation became that mass immigration from the most antisemitic places on earth should be allowed, and when liberals believe that the average Jew has skin that is too light to be considered a victim if harmed.
You can spell out the words "Muslim" or "brown people", you don't need to pussyfoot around it
He may have meant Muslims or Arabs but he most certainly didn't mean "brown people". "Brown people" is a term I've pretty much only heard here and I'm usually confused by what you mean by it.
You seem to have missed the point - if you define “right around the corner” as 5 years away then sure - but Tamritz did not say that. If you define it as 40 years away, is it really so inconceivable that liberalism declines in America over the course of 40 years such that Jews are in a much more precarious position? Are you really going to claim in 2024 that American liberalism is invulnerable and not at risk of rapid deterioration? I think the answer is very obviously no but maybe it’s only somewhat obviously no.
It is hard to say anything for certain about what happens in 40 years, including to Israel.
I am pretty concerned about the status of American liberalism. I am not concerned to the point that I think mass expulsion of Jews is realistic (with all the caveats about predicting the distant future). The places where liberalism is most vulnerable are the places where Trumpy Republicans can get either popular support or partisan support and severely undermining the status of Jews is in neither category.
"The places where liberalism is most vulnerable are the places where Trumpy Republicans can get either popular support or partisan support..."
I guess you haven't heard about what's been going on at Ivy League campuses. Classic liberalism is all but dead in such places.
Perhaps the minimal and least far-fetched example is France 20-30 years ago.
The view that the security of American Jews is maintained by Israel is bad and also wrong when Joe Biden says it, and the same when you do. And the view that my situation and my grandfather's in pre-war Vienna are the same is without any merit at all.
>Anti-Semitism is one of the mysterious forces in human society, and an independent state is a strategy to deal with it.<
I agree with this sentence of yours. But how is any of your comment relevant to Yglesias's piece? What's your point? Matt is clearly not calling for an end to the "independent state" of Israel. (Yes, some extremists want this, and they're wrong.)
I guess what I want to know is: what do you wish to see happen? Endless Israeli occupation of post-1967 conquests (AKA a permanent state of low intensity war that occasionally erupts into the high intensity variety)? It seems to be not working out ideally. Also, while I'd personally love to see Israel be in a position to once again be viewed as a liberal democracy, it's really—and tragically in my view—hard to make such a categorization when something like a third of the population under the authority of Israel's government lacks voting rights. It all seems so misguided from the perspective of Israel's long term stability, security and success.
I actually answered it.
https://tamritz.substack.com/p/israelpalestine-after-the-end-of
There is immense security in the diaspora as long as Jews live in safe places. American Jews are murdered at lower rates (and have longer life expectancies) than white protestants or Catholics. Sure there are weirdos who spout off antisemitic conspiracy theories, but there are also strange theories about capitalists, hippies, environmentalists, Democrats, masturbators, Taylor Swift and a litany of other people and groups.
That “as long as Jews live in safe places “ is doing a hell of a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. There were multiple cases of a place being safe for Jews, until suddenly, it wasn’t.
The murder rates you cite are almost entirely explicable by economics or geography (which is driven by economics), meaning the security of the Jews in America is dependent on an economic system that favors particular strengths of the Jewish community. That, even in the presence of liberalism, is not a fait accompli. The point here is very much that it is a historical accident that many Jews ended up in a very safe country, considering the times that Jews had to relocate due to antisemitism and ended up in countries that were not so safe. We can't count on being that lucky next time, or even on being allowed in *anywhere* next time, as borders have solidified in an ahistorical way.
When is “next time?” Most Jews who live in America will die here quite peacefully. Ditto western Europe. Diaspora Jews in western countries are physically secure and would be at greater risk of violence in Israel.
The Jews do not persist in existence as a result of our neglect of a historical perspective.
I don't know about this. If the forces arrayed against Jewish people are "mystical" and "mysterious", what does that say about Jewish people? I concede that the appeal of romantic enthno-nationalism, as opposed to inclusive republican nationalism is mysterious to me, in the sense that it's never held any appeal to me. But I don't think it's beyond understanding.
It says that Jewish people are inconvenient to tolerate and convenient to scapegoat, not that Jewish people are mystically and mysteriously bad.
"inconvenient to tolerate and convenient to scapegoat"
That kind of sidesteps the question. The same could be said about any minority ethnicity, but the claim seems to be that the Jewish ethnicity is for some reason extra-special in this regard, not just historically, but now and going forward.
The difference is the ubiquity of Jews as local minority. Every area has its idiosyncratic minorities, but the prevalence of Jews as a local minority supports the development of fictions that are ready to take off the shelf for quickly understandable scapegoating.
I heard someone recently point out that, while Israel isn't exactly a client state of the US, it's existence is largely dependent on US support. As a result, if the US takes a hard anti-semetic turn, Israel isn't going to serve as that much of a bulwark.
It kinda depends on what "hard anti-semitic" turn means. Just because a nation is antisemitic doesn't mean that it's policy is to destroy Israel. If the United States decided that all the Jews should be expelled that would be very antisemitic but wouldn't directly threaten Israel and could actually help. (This is why Early Zionism tried to recruit anti-semitic leaders to its cause - you get rid of your Jews and it strengthens our country.) The idea that an antisemitic state needs to destroy all of the Jews anywhere in the world is one of the unique elements of Nazi ideology. Most antisemites were content with removing Jews from their country.
I dont think that the US would have to decide to destroy Israel for Israel to have an existential problem. In addition to concrete military aid from the US, Israel's defense depends largely on the presumption that that the US would back it if it were invaded. There's a reason why the US sent a couple carriers to the area after 10/7 - it was basically a message to Iran that, if they decided to attack Israel it would have big problems.
It's likely that this implicit US backing would go long before the US started expelling Jews or even before the US became a bad place for a Jewish person to live.
Israel is not dependent on the US for defense. It doesn't even strictly need the military aid it gets. Don't get me wrong, it would be a huge headache if the US suddenly turned evil, but the US is not propping Israel up.
Herzl thought that the liberalism/humanism wouldn't protect Jews and Matt Does.
Problematic is such a weird way to describe that view.
But that's not how Matt presents the difference between himself and Herzl to the reader. He portrays Herzl simply as a European nationalist without explaining that Herzl was deeply concerned about antisemitism and that Herzl predicted the future much more accurately than Matt's counterparts did in those days.
I think the point is to resist recasting Herzl’s views through the lens of the Holocaust. The idea of building a nationalist state formed around identify in response to ethnic persecution was widespread. Where his Zionism differed from other forms of nationalism is that he correctly saw that antisemitism was intractable. But that doesn’t mean he predicted the holocaust. And his plan was built as much on positive nationalist impulses — foster Jewish culture and identity — as fear of persecution.
It was inevitable that the political structures of the 1700s-1800s — small city-states, feudal states with highly autonomous localities, and sprawling empires with mostly autonomous regions — would crumble and transform into mid-sized nations. In retrospect, nationalism was a terrible organizing principle for a new order. But Zionism may be the exception, not because Herzl was prescient, but because of the persistence of Jewish identity and ineradicability of antisemitism
> Anti-Semitism is one of the mysterious forces in human society
> compelling proof of the mystical power of anti-Semitism
I can understand why you might believe this about Christian-majority societies, but I don't think this really holds up when you try to say it about humanity as a whole. Especially populations that historically haven't had much contact with Jews, and thus don't have any reason to have a burning, incorrigible hatred of them.
I mean, do you really believe that, for example, Nepalese people are just inevitably, irredeemably antisemitic? How about Cambodians? Inuit? Thai people? Aboriginal Australians? North Sentinelese?
The Uganda scheme was a good idea, but jewish settlement in the Holy Land wasn't Ben Gurion's idea it has always been a very widely held view.
I'm not particularly familiar with the Uganda scheme - would that have necessarily required ethnic displacement of indigenous peoples or was there a very large open space with no-one living there?
Uganda was viewed as underpopulated at the time, although I'm sure there would have been some displacement of the native population too. The pattern of British colonization of places like Botswana and Rhodesia was the intended model, AFAIUI.
Yeah I doubt anti-zionist think a Rhodesia-based model would have been fine
This is Jewish Autonomous Oblast erasure.
Herzl died decades before the Jewish Autonomous Oblast was created and I don't think the Soviets ever even pretended that it was open to immigration by non-Soviet Jews.
This would have been news to Herzl and Ben Gurion.