Trying to explain Palestine
A young member of the family asked how the recent horrors had come about. This was my best shot. I made four points.
Ottomans
- Under the Ottoman empire before the First World War, Jews and Arabs lived side by side in Palestine without too much trouble. The Ottoman empire came to an end in 1918, and was broken up. The centre continued as Turkey. Palestine was put under British control.
(Backstory. The Ottomans had laws which — for the times, at least, until the 19th century — were generous, which allowed Jews and Christians their own worship for as long as they paid an extra tax. At the turn of the twentieth century, Britain needed to keep control of the Suez Canal, which was the best route to India, and it was useful to keep Palestine under control, so as to keep control of Egypt, where the canal is.)
Europeans
2. In Europe at the start of the twentieth century, Zionists were Jews (as well as socialists) who wanted a Jewish state (and just society). To begin with, South America and Africa were possible locations but Palestine became the desired place. Jewish migration to Palestine increased; Jews in Poland and Russia had been subject to intermittent persecution.
(Backstory. In ancient times there had been Jewish kingdoms of Judaea and Israel in what became Palestine. According to Christian and Jewish scripture it was the land which God promised to Moses as a land special to the Jews. Islam came along only in the 7th century, although it claims to be the only accurate telling of God’s original revelation to humanity — going back to Noah and Abraham.)
Hitler
3. With the rise of Nazism in Germany (1933–45), Jewish migration accelerated. The UK already faced Arab revolt in Palestine (1936–39), so its borders were closed. In 1946, a UN commission criticised British policy in Palestine. The UK took this as its reason to pull out. This made it possible to have a new and modern State of Israel, and after the Shoah / Holocaust, world support was overwhelming.
(Backstory. The Arabs had already lost land to Jewish settlers. Now they were forced to leave: they call this the Nakba. The State of Israel was imposed on them. They never recognised it as a legitimate state. The UN wanted a two-state solution, with a Palestinian state next to the state for Jews. The UK was happy to withdraw because it also intended to withdraw from India. Bankrupt after the Second World War, it could no longer afford the commitments.)
Arab-Israeli Wars
4. The state of Israel that was founded in 1948, however, had indefensible borders. Immediately it was attacked, and it would be attacked again in 1967 and in 1973. In 1982, terrorists based in Lebanon would attack it, and Israel invaded Lebanon. Each time, Israel took more than had been granted to it, so as to achieve defensible borders. Israel feels it needed to do this to survive at all, and its critics point out the unlawfulness of going beyond the indefensible original state. Israel took the West Bank and half of Jerusalem from Jordan, as well as the Gaza Strip, in 1967. In 1973, it held on to the Golan Heights taken from Syria. You might say that an impossible map in the first place made Israel’s actions subsequently both, illegal, and, necessary to its survival. Palestinians do not see it like that because they do not recognise its right to exist in the first place.
(Analysis. The key actions in the history were, therefore: 1. Britain’s promise to the Zionists to give the Jews their own homeland, in 1917, when already Palestine consisted of land that belonged to Palestinians (at the time, it seemed obvious that after the First World War, the Ottomans would have fallen and there would be no ruler to decide that the map should be divided one way rather than another, but it was not fully thought through); 2, the exact borders of the new state, which made an attack by its neighbours inevitable in 1948, and meant that if Israel did survive such an attack, it would need to expand.)
No true friends of Palestine
5. Today there is another element in the big picture. From the 1940s to the 1980s, the Middle East was one of several areas in which powers backed by the USSR vied with powers backed by the US/UK. From the 1990s, the USSR had collapsed, and became Russia (the historical centre of that empire). Under Putin, Russia has tried to regain its empire. Putin’s Russia has backed Syria. Iran has backed Islamist movements in Syria and throughout the Middle East. Iranian-backed Islamists have tried in Yemen and in Saudi Arabia itself to overthrow the Saudis. The US has backed Saudi Arabia, and had brought Saudi Arabia round to alliance with Israel (!). This alliance would have been a force equal to Iranian or Russian expansion in the Middle East; in October 2023 that alliance is on pause. Iranian-backed militants attacked Israel from Lebanon in 1982, and Iran backs Hamas, which has attacked Israel from Gaza in 2023. Hamas in 2023 has used tactics employed in the 2010s by ISIS/Daesh, whom Iran backed then. Iran’s aim is to destroy any alliance against it between Muslim powers and Israel — increasing its own dominance. (It also hopes to develop nuclear weapons, to deploy against Israel’s secret nuclear weapons.) The Islamists’ aims coincide with Iran’s, because Islamists want to wipe out Israel. The Palestinians are being used by competing states in the Middle East, none of which are willing to give them a safe refuge.
(Backstory. The real turning-point was 2003, when Blair and Bush invaded Iraq. Iraq is Iran’s neighbour. They fought a war for a decade in the 1980s. The one restrained the other. Iraq was a secular dictatorship and Iran was a religious dictatorship. By invading Iraq, Blair and Bush increased Iran’s relative power, and created a vacuum in Iraq, and in Syria on Iraq’s other side, in which Islamists could act.)
Three footnotes
1. Antisemitism came into the picture in the 1930s. It was then that the Grand Mufti, who led Muslims in Palestine, cosied up to the Nazis (in the end he visited Berlin). He saw the Nazis as allies against Jews in Palestine since they were opposed to Jews anywhere and completely. Nazi propaganda flooded the Middle East and the situation as it had been under the Ottomans was totally altered.
2. Imperialism comes into the story because Israel is seen by many of its opponents as a European country. It was founded by settlers from Europe, backed by empires in Europe and America. Critics of Israel’s critics say that if Israel were successful, because it has democracy, this would make Arabs look to overturn their own regimes, which are not democratic. (There has already been an ‘Arab Spring’ in the 2010s.) But many on the Left oppose Israel as an imperialist power because they see it as the tool of American imperialism for keeping the Middle East divided. It is an awkward question, whether a Middle East under Iran’s domination, or Saudi Arabia’s, would be the kind of society that the Left would want to see.
(Backstory. Since the 1980s, governments in Israel have gone ever further to the Right. Israel has a very pure or extreme form of proportional representation. Small parties tend to hold the casting vote in any coalition, and PR makes coalitions more likely. In 1980s Israel there was a religious party called Likud. Most Israelis are not religious, but Likud wielded increasing power. Today several parties are further to the Right than Likud.)
3. The definition of ‘antisemitism’ that has now been adopted both by the Labour Party and the Scottish Government includes criticism of the state of Israel in the list of things that define antisemitism. On this definition, a critic of Israel shows antisemitism. It would not be possible to criticise Israel without seeking harm to Jews. (Obviously, critics of Israel claim that antisemitism is never their motive; equally obviously, in some cases, they are antisemites, and it is.)
(Backstory. As terror against Israel continued, the religious right wing in Israel gained support. As noted, the electoral system did nothing to restrain this. Christians were driven out of Jerusalem by planning and rent decisions, a wall was built to stop bombers, surveillance increased, and religious Jews built whole new villages on the edges of Israel and on land where Jews had never lived. This made it very hard to separate Israel’s actions into ‘state’ policies on the one hand and ‘religious’ actions on the other.)
