Two nations, one land

The Israel-Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War by James L. Gelvin

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Gelvin is a great writer who excels writing about complicated history in a very readable way. I’ve read the second edition of The Modern Middle East: A History as well as The Arab Uprisings, and he has a similar style in each of these books: explaining the events in the context of world-historical developments, with a touch of humor.

This is mostly good, but sometimes the blow-by-blow of the story is sacrificed for the thematic focus. In this book, his major theme is nationalism, and how both Israeli and Palestinian nationalisms developed. Like all nationalisms, he believes that both are invented in the context of the conditions of the modern world rather than natural. He also ties in the rise and fall of the Cold War order.

It’s a good book overall. Gelvin tilts toward the Palestinians, which is good for readers who have a difficult time seeing that perspective but would best supplemented with another point of view for those already tilting that way. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is definitely an issue where it’s good to hear the story from a number of different points of view.

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Postmodern military theory

Last month, Peter Leithart linked to a May 2006 article from Frieze magazine, which showed how the Israeli military used postmodern theories to fight against Palestinian guerrillas in Nablus in 2002. Check out Leithart’s post or the whole article (if you can deal with some postmodern jargon) for more.

Here’s one excerpt:

To understand the IDF’s tactics for moving through Palestinian urban spaces, it is necessary to understand how they interpret the by now familiar principle of ‘swarming’ – a term that has been a buzzword in military theory since the start of the US post cold War doctrine known as the Revolution in Military Affairs. The swarm manoeuvre was in fact adapted, from the Artificial Intelligence principle of swarm intelligence, which assumes that problem-solving capacities are found in the interaction and communication of relatively unsophisticated agents (ants, birds, bees, soldiers) with little or no centralized control. The swarm exemplifies the principle of non-linearity apparent in spatial, organizational and temporal terms. The traditional manoeuvre paradigm, characterized by the simplified geometry of Euclidean order, is transformed, according to the military, into a complex fractal-like geometry. The narrative of the battle plan is replaced by what the military, using a Foucaultian term, calls the ‘toolbox approach’, according to which units receive the tools they need to deal with several given situations and scenarios but cannot predict the order in which these events would actually occur.7 Naveh: ‘Operative and tactical commanders depend on one another and learn the problems through constructing the battle narrative; […] action becomes knowledge, and knowledge becomes action. […] Without a decisive result possible, the main benefit of operation is the very improvement of the system as a system.’

This may explain the fascination of the military with the spatial and organizational models and modes of operation advanced by theorists such as Deleuze and Guattari. Indeed, as far as the military is concerned, urban warfare is the ultimate Postmodern form of conflict. Belief in a logically structured and single-track battle-plan is lost in the face of the complexity and ambiguity of the urban reality. Civilians become combatants, and combatants become civilians. Identity can be changed as quickly as gender can be feigned: the transformation of women into fighting men can occur at the speed that it takes an undercover ‘Arabized’ Israeli soldier or a camouflaged Palestinian fighter to pull a machine-gun out from under a dress. For a Palestinian fighter caught up in this battle, Israelis seem ‘to be everywhere: behind, on the sides, on the right and on the left. How can you fight that way?’

From Ottoman Palestine to Israel

A History of Palestine: From the Ottoman Conquest to the Founding of the State of Israel by Gudrun Krämer

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

While I have a lot to learn on this topic, this is one of the most helpful books I have read on the topic. Krämer looks more in-depth at the patterns of the Palestinian economy, Jewish settlement, and Jewish purchases of land than other sources that I have read, and the book seems to be fair to both sides.

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Ben Birnbaum on the two-state solution

This (long) article in The New Republic surveyed attitudes toward the peace process in the Israeli and Palestinian scenes, focusing particularly on contemporary leaders but also with observations about the past few decades and the wider populations. Like others that I have read, Birnbaum believes that the window for a two-state solution is closing, but of course predicting the future is a dicey business.

Birnbaum thinks that the two-state solution is the best option:

If the two-state solution dies, Israel will only be left with ugly options. It could ride out the status quo as the world continues to turn against it. It could unilaterally create a Palestinian state by withdrawing to the line of the barrier, incurring most of the costs of a two-state solution with few of the benefits. It could annex the West Bank and give all Palestinians citizenship, making Israel a binational state. Or it could annex the entire West Bank without giving Palestinians citizenship, embracing apartheid.

Netanyahu is putting the finishing touches on a wide governing coalition, likely to include Bennett on the right and Livni on the left, and what he will do remains a mystery. Based on his historical aversion to the peace process, many believe he’ll opt for the status quo. Erekat, the Palestinian negotiator, predicted that Netanyahu would embark on unilateral withdrawal before the end of his term. (“He’s not stupid,” Erekat said.) Others think he may do more. “I’m convinced that, if the circumstances are right, he will go much farther than people think,” Dennis Ross told me. “Abu Mazen told me he thought there was no way Bibi could do a deal. I said, ‘How do you know? You haven’t tested him.’”

But one thing is clear: No Israeli would be better positioned to sell and implement a deal than Bibi. Ami Ayalon, a former chief of Shin Bet and a leading peace activist, told me Netanyahu needs to envision his grandson 40 years from now reading a newspaper about the three great Zionist leaders: Theodor Herzl, who dreamt the state; David Ben Gurion, who built it; and Benjamin Netanyahu, who secured its future as a Jewish democracy.

Which do you think is most likely and/or best?

American support for Israel’s Gaza operation

Walter Russell Mead has a thought-provoking interpretation of American support for Israel in its military response in Gaza: Americans don’t really believe in just war theory or proportionality in the conduct of war because of the circumstances of our national development. He links this to the prevalent “Jacksonian” attitude toward foreign policy in the US:

The European just war tradition springs in part from the reality that historically in Europe war was an affair of kings and rulers that hurt the little people without doing anything for them. Peasants really didn’t care whether the Duke of Burgundy or the Count of Anjou was recognized as the rightful overlord of their village, and moralists and theologians worked to limit the violence that the dukes and the counts and their henchmen wreaked on the poor peasants caught up in a quarrel that wasn’t theirs.

With no feudal past in this country, Americans have tended to see wars as wars of peoples rather than wars of elites and in a war of peoples the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate targets tends to collapse. The German civilian (male or female) making weapons for Hitler’s Wehrmacht was as much a part of the enemy’s warmaking potential as the soldier at the front. Furthermore, in a war of peoples in which civilians are implicated in the conflict, the health and morale of the civilian population is a legitimate target of war. This justified the blockades against the Confederacy and against Germany and German occupied Europe during the world wars, and it also justified the mass terror bombing raids of World War Two in which the destruction of enemy morale was one of the stated aims.

This is the same logic by which someone like Osama bin Laden could justify his attacks on civilians at the World Trade Center, and it is the fundamental logic behind Hamas’ indiscriminate attacks on Israeli civilian targets. Americans don’t like it when their enemies use this kind of logic, but it is a type of warfare they understand and they have fought and won enough of these wars in the past to be ready if necessary to do it again.

From this perspective, in which war is an elemental struggle between peoples rather than a kind of knightly duel between courtly elites, the concept of proportionality seems much less compelling. Certainly if some kind of terrorist organization were to set up missile factories across the frontier in Canada and Mexico and start attacking targets in the United States, the American people would demand that their President use all necessary force without stint or limit until the resistance had been completely, utterly and pitilessly crushed. Those Americans who share this view of war might feel sorrow at the loss of innocent life, of the children and non-combatants killed when overwhelming American power was used to take the terrorists out, but they would feel no moral guilt. The guilt would be on the shoulders of those who started the whole thing by launching the missiles.

In his review of Mead’s Special Providence, Peter Leithart summarizes Mead’s category of “Jacksonian” attitudes: “that government exists for the protection of the governed. Both domestically and in foreign policy, American should use its power to provide physical security and ensure prosperity for American citizens. Honor is a central value for Jacksonian cowboys, and when American honor is assaulted, Jacksonians make war with the fullest fury they can muster.”

Some time ago, Mead also wrote about why Americans support Israel in general, which I blogged about here.

The possibility of a binational Israel

Jeff Goldberg posted today about an Israeli study that encouraged treating the West Bank like the rest of Israel and opening it all up to Israeli settlement. Goldberg assumes that this will lead to the extension of citizenship to the Palestinians and the end of Israel as a Jewish democracy. He believes, as I have noted before, that the West Bank and Gaza should form a Palestinian state in order to preserve Israel’s Jewish and democratic character. He likes to say that the settlers are the vanguard of a binational Israel. He concludes:

This would spell the end of Israel as a Jewish-majority democracy, but the right-wing in Israel seems more enamored of land-ownership than it does of such antiquated notions as, you know, Zionism.

Of course, you don’t hear too many voices on the right in Israel clamoring to extend full Israeli citizenship to the Palestinians. The right-wing wants the land, but not the people. What the right doesn’t understand is that this arrangement would be a non-starter, for political and moral reasons. Then again, the right doesn’t understand very much, so why would it understand this?

In his next post, in response to a reminder from another journalist, he linked to this two-year -old interview with the Speaker of the Israeli Parliament, Reuven Rivlin, who said that a Jewish-Palestinian state could work with real Palestinian participation. Perhaps The article quotes Rivlin’s striking words: “‘I would prefer for the Palestinians to be citizens of this country,’ he said, ‘rather than divide the land.’” He goes on to talk about how it might work.

The contrast between Goldberg’s pessimism and Rivlin’s optimism about this kind of arrangement is remarkable. In part, it’s about what’s more important: a nationalist (and mainly secular) concept of Zionism or access to the land. Goldberg is observant himself, in the tradition of Reform Judaism I believe, but I think it is fair to characterize his Zionism as more nationalist (connecting the Jewish people with their historic home) rather than religious.

A defense of Israeli democracy

Israeli ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren recently wrote an article defending Israel’s democratic credentials. It was an in-depth reply to criticisms that Israel is becoming less democratic (here is one example).

Here was Oren’s description of the history of democracy in Israel:

In the United States, as in most Western countries, democracy evolved over the course of centuries. First nobles and then commoners wrested rights from monarchs, established representative institutions, and expanded the parameters of freedom. Democracy in Israel, however, emerged without the benefits of this gradual process. Taking root in hostile conditions, nurtured by a citizenry largely unfamiliar with Western liberal thought, democratic Israel appeared to sprout from nothing.

When Zionism emerged at the end of the 19th century, the Jews of Palestine and the thousands who joined them from tsarist Russia and around the Middle East had no exposure to democracy. Ottoman rule offered few models for democratic development and, in its final stages, brutally suppressed human rights. In fact, communism — imported from Eastern Europe in the form of collective farms and labor unions — influenced the political culture of the pre-state Jewish community, or Yishuv, far more than republican or free-market ideas.

Yet nearly from its inception, the Yishuv gravitated toward democracy. Intensely ideological and diverse, the Zionist parties — socialist, religious, nationalist — were forced to work together in the quest for Jewish statehood. The British Mandate, implemented in 1923, further fostered self-governing institutions such as the Jewish Agency. Still, in the words of Britain’s first High Commissioner Lord Herbert Samuel, the Zionists remained “entwined in an inimical embrace like fighting serpents.”

Ultimately, democracy in the Yishuv emerged not only from the requisites of state-building, but also from the legacy of tradition. The Hebrew Bible questions absolutism and the divine right of kings, and endows each individual with civic rights and responsibilities. For centuries, Jewish communities had organized themselves along democratic lines, with elected officials and public administrations. “We did not adopt the approach of the German Social Democrats … the British Labor Party … [or] Soviet communism,” Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion averred. “We paved our own path.” Innately, the Zionists understood that their future state would be both Jewish and democratic, regarding the two as synonymous.

The Yishuv accordingly developed embryonic democratic institutions such as the Elected Assembly and the Zionist Executive. It mustered a citizens’ army — the Haganah — a free press, and unprecedented opportunities for women. In spite of repeated attempts by the Palestinian Arabs to combat the Yishuv, Zionist parties and labor unions sought common ground with the Arabs. The elements of a democracy, in other words, were in place well before Israel’s establishment on May 14, 1948.

Under its declaration of independence, Israel ensured all of its citizens “complete equality of social and political rights … irrespective of religion, race, or sex.” It guaranteed “freedom of religion, conscience, language, education, and culture.” In addition to a popularly elected government, Israelis would be represented by the 120-seat Knesset and protected by an independent judiciary. Suffrage was universal and assembly safeguarded.

I also enjoyed this paragraph near the end:

Israeli culture allows for a broad spectrum of political beliefs, all of them fervently held and expounded. The heckling of the president by congressmen makes headlines in America, but the jeering of Israeli prime ministers by Knesset members is too commonplace to report. The peace process, religion, and social and economic justice are just some of the contentious issues that Israelis debate constantly.

Oren is an ambassador who must make the case for his country, obviously, and he does so very competently here.

The basis of Israeli government of the Palestinian territories

At the New York Review of Books website, Eyal Press wrote about how the foundations of Israel’s administration of the occupied/disputed territories:

But the frustration of the settlers did not last very long. As revealed in The Law in These Parts, an engrossing new Israeli documentary making its American debut at the Sundance Film Festival, just hours after the ruling was handed down, Ariel Sharon, a keen supporter of the settlement project who was then Israel’s Minister of Agriculture, organized a meeting to discuss how to circumvent it. Alexander Ramati, then a legal advisor to the West Bank military command, raised his hand to tell Sharon about an Ottoman concept known as “Mawat land.” The Ottomans, who had controlled Palestine until World War I, had used the term to designate land far enough from any neighboring village that a crowing rooster perched on its edge could not be heard. Under Ottoman law, if such land was not cultivated for three years it was “mawat”—dead —and reverted to the empire. “With or without your rooster, be at my office at 8:00 in the morning,” Sharon told Ramati, who was soon crisscrossing the West Bank in the cockpit of a helicopter, identifying tens of thousands of uninhabited acres that could be labeled “state land” and made available to settlers, notwithstanding the Geneva Convention’s prohibition on moving civilians into occupied territory. In the years that followed, a string of new settlements was built on this territory, eventually prompting another challenge before the Israeli High Court. This time, the Court denied the challenge, ruling that settlement construction was permissible while Israel served as the temporary custodian of the territory. This provided a legal basis for land expropriation that has since enabled hundreds of thousands of Israelis to relocate to the West Bank.

Surprisingly little is known about the legal apparatus that has enabled and structured the occupation. Filmed in nine days but based on years of archival research, The Law in These Parts aims to expose it. Even before the 1967 Six-Day War, the film reveals, officers in the army’s legal corps drew up guidelines for a separate system of laws that could be applied to territory under IDF control, rules they were convinced could strike a balance between order and justice. But by the time the first Palestinian Intifada erupted in 1987, detention without trial and convictions based on secret evidence had become standard operating procedure in the military courts entrusted with this task. One reason Israel did not simply extend its own laws to the West Bank and Gaza Strip was that doing so would “imply certain things you may not want,” an official in the film explains – in particular, that Palestinians living in the occupied territories were citizens with the same rights as Israelis. (In contrast, Jewish settlers in places like Hebron were spared the military justice system and granted access to civilian courts in Israel.) Director Ra’anan Alexandrowicz, an Israeli known for his meticulously researched documentaries, initially planned to make these Palestinians the film’s protagonists. Instead, the documentary focuses on the handful of Israeli legal officials who, working largely in the shadows, set the ground rules for an occupation now in its forty-fifth year.

Hezbollah’s threat to Israel

Michael Totten recently reviewed Warriors of God by Nicholas Blanford. Totten writes that Hezbollah is probably the best-armed and most militarily capable threat that Israel has faced in its 60-plus years of existence, a marked contrast, he notes, to the mostly inept armies of the neighboring states. It’s an interesting review of what sounds like a very good book.

Jerusalem and the peace process

This past summer, Michael Totten analyzed the prospects for dividing Jerusalem between Israel and a Palestinian state. He gave a history of Jerusalem since 1948 and explained the difficulties of dividing the city, especially the Old City. Palestinian negotiators want East Jerusalem as their capital, but Totten’s article suggests that the issue is quite complex. Here are some paragraphs that help explain this, but take a look at the whole thing if this is a subject that interests you:

Before 1948, Jerusalem had a Jewish majority. But in May of that year, the British Mandate in Palestine expired, Israel declared its independence, and the new country was promptly invaded by Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq. The war lasted until the following year, when Israel signed separate armistice agreements with each of the aggressors. The Jordanian-Israeli armistice line, drawn where each army happened to be standing at the time of the cease-fire, slashed right through the center of Jerusalem, with the Jordanians controlling the eastern, northern, and southern sectors (what today is generally called “East Jerusalem”) and the Israelis controlling western Jerusalem and an enclave in the east on Mount Scopus. The line became known as the Green Line. Neither Israel nor Jordan ever declared it a border; each side hoped that it was temporary and that Jerusalem’s final status would be decided later, either by negotiation or by conquest.

Israel’s toehold in western Jerusalem was surrounded on three sides and connected to the rest of the country by a narrow strip of land just a few miles wide. Jordanian soldiers held the high ground overlooking that corridor and the rest of the city, and despite the armistice, they frequently fired artillery shells, mortars, and sniper rounds at Jewish civilians on the Israeli side of the Green Line. Jews caught on the Jordanian side were even less fortunate; those who weren’t expelled were killed or taken to prison camps, and their property was confiscated or destroyed. The Jordanians ravaged Jewish cultural and holy sites in East Jerusalem—bulldozing an enormous 2,000-year-old cemetery on the Mount of Olives, razing the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, and reducing synagogues to rubble. Abdullah el Tell, a Jordanian commander and later the military governor of the Old City, even boasted about it. “For the first time in 1,000 years, not a single Jew remains in the Jewish Quarter,” he said. “Not a single building remains intact. This makes the Jews’ return here impossible.”

Jordan, Egypt, and Syria launched their second war of annihilation in 1967. This time, the Israelis defeated all three armies in six days and pushed the 1949 armistice lines outward, taking the Golan Heights from Syria; the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip from Egypt; and the West Bank, as well as East Jerusalem, from Jordan. Egypt and Jordan later relinquished their claims to Gaza and the West Bank, and Israel returned the Sinai to Egypt. Israel never formally annexed those territories because adding millions of Palestinian Arabs to its population would threaten its Jewish majority over the long term.

But East Jerusalem was another story. Israel did annex that—partly because Israelis yearned to reunite their capital but also because they had vowed never again to let a hostile army surround them on high ground. And one of the first things the government did was to build Jewish neighborhoods in empty areas formerly used by the Jordanian army. (Some of the new neighborhoods, in fact, were in places that had been Jewish before the Jordanians destroyed them after 1948.) Today, about 200,000 Israeli Jews live in East Jerusalem, in neighborhoods like French Hill, Ramat Shlomo, and Gilo, on what was once the Jordanian side of the Green Line. Residents can look down the dizzying heights into the heart of the city from hilltops once occupied by snipers and artillery crews.

“Annexing East Jerusalem was a dramatic event,” says Orly Noy of the Ir Amim organization, an Israeli center-left, human rights nonprofit. “That meant that, at least according to Israel, all of Jerusalem became a part of the sovereign state of Israel.” She unfolds a map of Jerusalem that her organization has produced. It shows the Green Line and another line, this one blue, which marks the edge of Jerusalem since annexation. The blue line, dividing Jerusalem from the West Bank, is what Israel now considers its national border.

The Green Line is invisible in Jerusalem. You’d have no idea where it was just by looking. “After annexation, it became a national task to erase the Green Line,” Noy says. “We didn’t want anything to remind us that the city was ever divided.” The blue line on Ir Amim’s map, though, can’t be missed. During the Second Intifada, in the 2000s, the Israeli government built an imposing concrete wall along the border to keep Palestinian suicide bombers from the West Bank out of Israel. “Most of us don’t expect a real peace any time soon,” says Israeli historian Yaacov Lozowick, author of the books Hitler’s Bureaucrats and Right to Exist. “So we suspect that the reality of that barrier after several decades will become the border.”

Totten believes that divided Hebron could foreshadow Jerusalem’s future, as he expresses in the article (see here for more detail), quoting Lozowick’s warning that Hebron is what happens when there’s a dividing line but no commitment to peace, a lesson that needs to be learned with respect to Jerusalem: “The myriads of observers, pundits, politicians, dreamers, visionaries and true believers who all know for a certainty that dividing Jerusalem is the key to peace in the Middle East, need urgently to visit Hebron.” Totten concludes his article with these reflections:

The same overoptimistic attitude, in fact, characterizes the entire Middle Eastern peace process, in which a number of major players, including the most experienced diplomats, have convinced themselves that they know what the future holds. “Many people still say, ‘We all know what the final settlement is going to look like, so we just need to get the two sides together and work it out,’ ” Israeli political analyst Jonathan Spyer tells me. “To that I say: ‘No, you don’t know what the final status is going to look like. The final status you have in mind is what you came up with by negotiating with yourself.’ ”

It has been years since I’ve managed to find an optimist who lives in the region and believes that the conflict will end soon. Hillel Cohen sums up this grim realism when I ask him what he expects for Jerusalem 50 years from now. “Some war,” he says, shrugging. “Some peace. Some negotiations. The usual stuff.”