My views on Zionism
Monday, May 5th, 2008 10:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lethargic_manBy popular request, my views on Zionism. (All facts are reported to the best of my knowledge, which means I may be perpetuating inaccuracies here; but I did the best I could. Parts of this have been pasted from notes I have posted on my blog before.)
My first point is that you can't discuss Zionism without considering the historical background. This has turned this into a rather long email, but I would urge you to read the whole of it anyway, if you wish to become informed about the subject. (Also, it's only polite since I went to all this bother writing it.) You don't have to read it all in one go if you don't want.
I'll start two and a half thousand years ago, when the Babylonian king Nebuchadrezzar conquered the kingdom of Yehudah (Judah), and its capital, Jerusalem, also known as Zion; and carried off its people, the Yehudim (Jews) into exile. The pains the Jewish people went through in this they captured for posterity in the certain books of the Bible, particularly Lamentations, and certain of the Psalms: "If I forget you, Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill."
Most peoples carried off into captivity like this would eventually have been absorbed and lost their ethnic identity in such circumstances. However, within a century the Persians had conquered the Babylonian Empire, and their king Kurash (Cyrus) gave the Jews permission to return to their land and rebuild their Temple.
Six centuries later, when the Jews of Judaea rose in revolt against the Romans, the Romans once again besieged and destroyed Jerusalem, and carried the Jews off into exile. However, because the Jews had returned from exile once already, they had the inner strength to believe that G-d would again return them to their land.
It was at this time that rabbinic Judaism emerged, and as it did it absorbed the messianism that was rife at that time, leading to the belief in a future messiah who would return the Jews to their land becoming a core belief of normative Judaism.
This time, centuries passed and the Jews did not return to their land. But their yearning for it never went away. The story is told of how Napoleon once entered a town in eastern Europe and found it empty. The people he sent to find out what had happened came back reporting that the inhabitants were all in the synagogue mourning and praying, as this was the anniversary of the day on which the Jewish Temple had been destroyed. Napoleon was incensed, and demanded to know what enemy had committed such an offence in his empire—and had to be told the act had taken place seventeen hundred years earlier, but the people were still mourning.
Since the Roman destruction of the Temple, Jews have, unfortunately, been used as a scapegoat from one end of the world (especially the Christian world, whose scriptures blame the Jews for the death of their god) to the other. The Nazi Holocaust was only the most recent example. In 1920s hundreds of thousands were killed in pogroms in the Ukraine. In the 1660s, Chmielnicki's Cossacks killed off a third of the Jewish people—the same proportion, though lower numbers, as the Nazis. And between the Crusades, the Black Death, and pogroms based on the belief that the Jews were responsible for the Black Death, the Ashkenazi population dropped between 1096 and 1500 from 100,000 to 10–20,000.
If the Jews had their own country—somewhere where Jews persecuted in other countries could go—none of this would have happened. In particular, if the British had not placed quotas on the numbers of Jewish refugees coming to Palestine*, millions, literally millions, of Jews, and millions more of their descendants, would be alive today.
* Any time I use this name referring to a time before 1948, I am not using the name as it is used today, in contradistinction to "Israel": this was simply the name the country went under at the time.
There is not a single Jewish family which did not lose members in the Nazi Holocaust. This is why it was imperative that the Jews have a country of their own. Even in supposedly enlightened western countries, we have seen how antisemitism can arise again, witness particularly France in the early years of this decade.
Zionism arose as a movement in the late nineteenth century; its aim was for the Jews to achieve self-determination in their ancestral homeland. (A later addition was for them to speak there Hebrew, their ancestral tongue, which had been dead as a spoken language since the second century.)
Palestine in the late nineteenth century was part of the Ottoman Empire. There were Arabs living there at the time, but they did not own it; and they didn't seem to care much about doing so. (Indeed, at the time Mark Twain visited Palestine in the late nineteenth century, the land was a wasteland, with the rivers dammed by silt, creating malarial swamps in the hinterland. It was the Jewish settlers who drained the swamps and made the desert bloom.)
However, the nationalism of the growing Jewish population created, as a side-product, nationalism amongst the Arabs also living there: It's unfortunate, but the whole concept of Palestinian nationalism emerged as a side-product of Zionism. There was no violent conflict between Jews and Palestinians at all before 1908.
In 1918 there was a meeting in Paris between leading Jews and Arabs. Representing the Arabs was Emir Faisal, the titular head of the Arab world, from his HQ in Damascus (Syria was then the cradle of Arab nationalism). He also represented the Palestinians, who then considered themselves to be part of southern Syria.
Representing the Jews was Chaim Weizmann, a left-wing Zionist, and physicist, later to be president of the State of Israel. He was an intellectual, which is why he was chosen to represent the Zionists.
These two signed a document together which called for Arab-Zionist cooperation to end all colonialism, and Arab recognition of an independent Jewish homeland in the area of the British Mandate [of Palestine], in return for Jewish guarantee of Arab well-being.
However, the British did not like this, and nullified the agreement, preventing all further meetings unless under British aegis, which meant no more meetings. It also meant Britain had declared itself anti-Zionist.
To cut a long story short, in 1947 the UN approved a plan partitioning Palestine between the Jews and the Arabs; in 1948 the British, who had been given a mandate over Palestian by the League of Nations (the predecessor to the United Nations), pulled out and the Jews proclaimed independence. The principle aim of Zionism had been achieved.
Unfortunately, that wasn't the end of the story; but I think it's important to distinguish between the core principle of Zionism—the right of the Jews to self-determination in their ancestral homeland—and any additions that have accreted to it in the eyes of some parties since.
The problem arose in the 1920s and 30s, with fighting between the Palestinian Arabs and the settlers of the Jewish yishuv in Palestine—a flame of conflict that was fanned by the British, as if the Jews and Arabs were fighting each other, that meant they weren't fighting the British.
When in 1947 the UN voted to partition the country into a Jewish state and an Arab state, the Arabs rejected this plan. This is important to note: we could have had an Israeli state side by side with a Palestinian one, and so many lives on both sides saved and so many lives on both sides not blighted, back in 1948, if that had not happened.
Instead, when the State of Israel was proclaimed, the armies of the five neighbouring Arab countries all invaded the country seeking to wipe it off the map. It was at this time that a large number of Palestinians fled into exile. There was more than one reason for this. Firstly, the Arab armies had called for the Palestinians to get out of the way so they would not get caught up as the Arabs drove every last Jew into the Mediterranean. (This was the language they used.)
The Israeli national myth—and I use myth here not in the sense of something that never happened, but in that of an idea culturally accepted regardless of whether it happened or not—records that the Israelis pursued the Palestinians as they fled, calling on them to come back, as only together could they build a country.
It turns out that this wasn't the full story, but it's important to note that this is what the Israelis believed happened, and that they approved of it. The other half of the story, is that many of the Palestinians fled because of fear of Jewish terrorist groups operating in the 1940s, such as the Irgun and the Stern Gang.
Yes, there were Jewish terrorist groups. It's not something I'm proud of—in fact I'm downright ashamed of it—but I'll admit it; if the truth is ugly, you have to deal with it, not cover it up. After independence, these terrorist groups were given a chance to disband, and if they did not, the Israeli army forcibly broke them up.
The Israeli War of Independence came to an end in 1949 with an armistice, and international border drawn along the ceasefire lines. It's important to note that these lines did not run along ethnic lines: there were Jewish areas that ended up in the West Bank, and Arab areas that ended up in Israel. Nevertheless, this resulted in the Green Line that was the border from then onwards.
With the cessation of the War of Independence, a Palestinian state should have been established in the West Bank according to the UN partition plan. Instead, Jordan illegally annexed the West Bank, because King Abdullah had his own ambitions to be head of the Palestinians—even though no Palestinians recognised him as such as he was a Saudi! The Palestinians who were living in displaced persons camps in Jordan remained in the camps; indeed, they remain there to this day, though the camps have grown up into regular towns.
I am sure you are aware of the refugee crisis caused by the partition of Pakistan from India. The same thing happened here on a smaller scale: 600,000 Palestinians fled Israel, and 140,000 Jews were refugees, 110,000 fleeing from Iraq and 30,000 from the West Bank. In addition, during the 1950s the situation turned nasty for Jews living in Islamic countries, and during the course of that decade almost all of the Jewish communities of Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, etc, fled to Israel. (Later, the Yemenite community had to be airlifted out by Israel, and Syria helds its Jews as prisoner within the country.)
One hears a lot on the news about the Palestinian right of return. But one doesn't generally hear about any countermatching right of return for Jews who had to flee Arab lands. In reality, the Palestinians are going to have to recognise that the status quo will remain in the long term: these Israelis will not be going back to their countries of origin, and nor will the Palestinians.
Why the Palestinians will not be is because, unlike any of its neighbours, Israel is a full democracy. Palestinians who were on the west side of the Green Line in 1949 became full Israeli citizens, able to vote and to sit in the parliament. That Israel gains a lot of negative press coverage has a lot to do with the fact it allows the international press free rein (and doesn't always manage its relations with the press well). If Israel were to allow all Palestinians who fled the country in 1948 to return, and have full citizenship, the country would soon cease to have a Jewish majority, its parliament would turn it into just another Arabic state, and the Jewish state, the justification for which I have already gone over, would have ceased to exist.
The Israelis have (by and large) never wanted anything but to live in peace with their neighbours; what they have been come is largely in response to the way their neighbours treated them. For two decades Israel was constantly troubled by raids from its hostile neighbours, and in 1956 President Nasser of Egypt blockaded the straits of Tiran, cutting off Israel's then only port, Eilat. (Since then it has developed Mediterranean ports so it is no longer at risk this way.) This resulted in the Suez War, which the British and French have been commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of recently as a complete failure. From the Israeli perspective, however, it was a complete success: it resulted in the lifting of the blockade on Eilat.
As a result of all this, the Israelis developed a tough man psyche; they had to be tough in order to survive.
In 1967 Nasser—a man whose dogged pursuit of his first dream, destroying Israel, undid all the good work he had achieved in pursuit of his second dream, making Egypt a great nation again—began making plans for a second invasion of Israel by all its surrounding countries to once again attempt to drive the Jews into the Mediterranean. This began by militarily occupying the Sinai, which had been a neutral zone under UN supervision since the Suez War, and massing troops on the Israeli border.
There was a real feeling at the time that Israel was on the verge of being annihilated, as a second Holocaust perpetrated. So Israel preempted its enemies, and struck first, on the eve of the planned invasion.
The result was a complete rout—the Egyptian soldiers in the Sinai famous fled so fast they even left their shoes behind—and Israel was left in possession of the Sinai, Gaza Strip, West Bank and the Golan Heights. The Israeli myth was that David had beaten Goliath; in fact, during the previous decades Israel had become militarily superior to its neighbours without anyone—including the Israeli man on the street—realising.
There were arguments at the time for giving the territories back; indeed Israel offered to do so in exchange for peace, but the Arabs turned this down. There were good arguments for Israel now holding on to the occupied territories—doing so created buffer zones keeping the core of Israel safe. Until that point, Jordanian snipers in the Old City of Jerusalem would take potshots at any Israelis coming into view in the new city. Further, there were places in Israel where the borders constricted, rendering it uncomfortably easy for an enemy to literally divide the country in two. And in the north, Syrian soldiers sitting up on the Golan Heights used to lob shells down at the Israeli farmers in the Chulah valley down below. (The Israelis couldn't hear the shells falling because of the noise of their tractors so they had to post boy scouts at the side of the fields with white handkerchiefs ready to wave in the event of an attack.)
And so Israel kept hold of its newly acquired terrorities. Separate to the military occupation of them was the decision—taken some time after the Six Day Way—to plant Jewish settlements in them. In some cases these consisted of the reoccupation of Jewish villages which had been lost due to ending up on the wrong side of the Green Line in 1949. In other cases there were settlements founded by religious Zionists who believed they had a Divine mandate to settle the whole of the historic Land of Israel. It is important to note, however, that this is not at all a matter of religious consensus; indeed strong arguments can also be made in the opposite direction. Still other people settled in the Occupied Territories simply because the government made housing very cheap there.
I think the Israeli attitude towards founding settlements also had a lot to do with the fact that the settling the land had worked beforehand: in 1870, there were almost no Jews in the land; now they had their own state. Indeed, when the UN first started drawing up plans for partitioning of Palestine, the whole of the Upper Galilee was due to end up part of Lebanon. The Jews responded by planting new kibbutzim and moshavim in the southern Upper Galilee, and the border was redrawn, literally, around their northern permiters.
I think a large part of the problem with Israeli settlers is that they haven't realised that this kind of thing is no longer politically acceptable.
Anyhow, on to Jerusalem. As I alluded to before, the Green Line had gone down the middle of Jerusalem, separating the Old City and eastern half of the city, from the western half. During the War of Independence, the Jordanians had vindictively bombed the Jewish Quarter of the Old City as they retreated, but had then conquered it back, leaving the Israelis with no access to their holiest site, the Western Wall of the Second Temple. When the Israelis captured Jerusalem back in 1967, they annexed the eastern half to Israel. But they also handed the responsibility for the Temple Mount—Ḥaram al-Sharif as you might know it—back to the Waqf, the Islamic authority which had been running it until then.
Jerusalem, because of its associations with King David and King Solomon, and the two Temples which stood there, is one of the four holy cities in Judaism. (The other three are Hebron, where the patriarch Abraham lived; Tiberias, where the Mishna was compiled in the third century, and Safed, where Jewish mysticism flourished in the fifteen and sixteenth centuries. This is why there is a hard core of Jewish settlers today in the middle of Hebron.) As a result, Israel has long insisted that it is the eternal undivided capital of the Jewish state; however this ignores the reality on the ground, which is that it is still effectively divided into western Jewish, and eastern Palestinian halves—you can see this clearly on a satellite map. On the other hand, Jerusalem has grown beyond the limits it was constricted into by the Green Line. (It's on a spur of Israeli territory surrounded by the West Bank on three sides; this was due to a valiant attempt to keep Jerusalem from falling during the War of Independence.) Consequently, if there is ever to be a two-state solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, Israel is going to have to recognise it's going to have to give East Jerusalem back, and the Palestinians are going to have to accept that the municipal districts north and south of the Green Line are going to have to remain part of Israel.
In 1973, the surrounding Arab countries invaded Israel again, on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar. Israel was caught unprepared, and only barely survived. This demonstrated the benefit to Israel of military occupancy of the Occupied Territories whilst it was surrounded by hostile neighbours: had this not been the case, it was unlikely Israel would have survived.
Not all of Israel's neighbours remained hostile forever. In 1978 the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat took the bold step of making peace overtures to Israel, and 1979 peace was signed between the two countries, in return for which, Israel returned the Sinai to Egypt. As part of doing so, it had to demolish the one settlement it had founded there, called Yamit. This was the prototype of the "land for peace" arrangement that has been talked about with reference to the Palestinians since.
In 1994, King Hussein of Jordan likewise made peace with Israel, and the two countries have cooperated on issues such as water management since.
This has left Israel with hostile neighbours only in the north: Syria—where the border has been absolutely quiet—and Lebanon, where Syria's proxy Hizbollah has harried Israel, sending Katyusha rockets over the border pretty much ever since. This is why Israel invaded and occupied southern Lebanon from 1982 to 2005—to put northern Israel outside of Hizbollah rocket range.
Unfortunately, this same period has seen the rise of a new hostile force within—Palestinian terrorism. The Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) originated as a terrorist group; its charter calls for the destruction of the State of Israel. The PLO got kicked out of Jordan for drawing attacks from Israel, and then got driven out of Lebanon by the Israelis. The most infamous incident of Palestinian terrorism was the massacre of eleven Israeli athletes at the Munch Olympics in 1972.
I mentioned above that I entirely support Israel's military occupancy of the Occupied Territories whilst the country was surrounded by hostile states. Whilst this is the case, I do not support, indeed I deplore, the way in which this military occupancy has been carried out. It could have been done in a light-handed way; instead it has been carried out in an increasingly heavy-handed way, with disruption of Palestinians' lives, treatment of Palestinians as second-rate citizens, restrictions on Palestinians' movements, gunpoint raids on Palestinians' houses searching for terrorists, with no apologies afterwards should the raid turn up nothing, and removal of access to the fields and olive groves on which Palestinians' livelihoods depended. Under such circumstances, it is scarcely surprising that young Palestinians should have turned so strongly against Israel.
The Palestinians' frustration erupted in 1987 with the outbreak of the first intifada. This was characterised by nothing worse than stone-throwing, but it drew international attention to the Palestinians' plight, and led indirectly to the first peace conference between Israel and the Palestinians in Madrid in 1991, and then later to the Oslo Accords of 1993.
These led to the creation of the Palestinian Authority, transfer of power for certain area in the West Bank to Palestinian control; and initiated a plan which should have led to the transfer of all of the West Bank and Gaza Strip to Palestinian control, and ultimately the creation of a Palestinian state.
This would have involved Israeli withdrawal from almost all of the settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, an issue Israeli public opinion is strongly against, but the Israeli withdrawal from Yamit, and more recently from the Gaza Strip, shows it could be done. A just peace would allow old, well-established Jewish areas to remain, with their members as Jewish citizens of a Palestinian state, in the same way that Israeli Arabs are Arabic citizens of the Israeli state.
Why did the peace plan outlined above not come to fruition? The most major factor was Yasser Arafat, a man for whom I have nothing but contempt. He stood on the White House lawn with Yitzchak Rabin, even shook hands with him; he held within his hands the possibility of peace and an end to the suffering of his people, and he rejected it. (As the late Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban put it, the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.)
I mentioned earlier that the PLO charter calls for the destruction of Israel. The Oslo peace accords called for the PLO to amend this; but they still have not. (Indeed, to this day, Arab maps show "Palestine" according to the 1948 borders, i.e. with Israel not existing at all.) Yasser Arafat, whilst talking peace to the international media; continued to fan the flames of hatred amongst his own people, in Arabic-language newspapers and broadcasts. Israel provided the Palestinians with guns for use by their police, but under Arafat's leadership, those guns were used instead against the Israelis (which may shed some light on why the Israelis went on to destroy many Palestinian police stations during the second intifada).
In 2000, in President Clinton's final attempt to broker a peace deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians, Israeli PM Ehud Barak offered a deal which effectively gave in on everything the Israelis had been holding back on: full Palestinian autonomy, with movement in a few years to a state comprising the Gaza Strip and 95% of the West Bank (plus territory transferred from Israel to bring the total up to 97% of the equivalent area of the West Bank). Now, admittedly Barak had by then lost the mandate from his people to deliver this, but if Arafat had accepted, he would have gone down in history as a spurned peacemaker. All Arafat's negotiators begged him to accept it. The ambassador of Saudi Arabia—scarcely a friend of Israel—to the United Nations told Arafat if he turned this down it would not be a tragedy, it would be a crime.
And Arafat turned it down. And hence we had no peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians, and hence the second intifada broke out, and creates untold tragedy and misery for both peoples; but I'm getting a bit ahead of myself, because I haven't mentioned the rise of the Islamists amongst the Palestinians.
Whilst the PLO is a secular movement, and could make a deal with the Israelis if it were in the best interests of the Palestinian people; Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which are, as movements, only a couple of decades old, and which have grown very rapidly, are ideologically opposed to any idea of peace with Israel. Peace with Israel would mean happy Palestinians, and movements such as theirs need unhappy people to recruit to their cause. And with the Islamic terrorist movements came a new development which had been unknown (except in Sri Lanka) beforehand: suicide bombers, striking against unarmed civilians.
After Yitzchak Rabin—the one man amongst the Israelis who could have pushed through a peace deal and got almost all his people behind it—was assassinated by a right-winger amongst his own people, elections were arranged in Israel for a few months' time.
At the time Rabin was assassinated, public sentiment was very much behind the peace process, and the left-of-centre Labour party was ahead in the polls. But during the election campaign, Hamas carried out a protracted campaign of terror against the Israelis, and with every suicide bomb support for the peace process dropped, until, come the election, the right-wing Likud party, opposed to land-for-peace, was elected.
This was the other main reason the peace process failed: because Hamas actively sabotaged it.
In 2000, a second intifada broke out; the international press blamed this on Israeli PM Ariel Sharon' ascension of the Temple Mount. However, that happened on a Thursday and only a few rocks were thrown then. As a quid pro quo, Israel allowed Palestinian police to take responsibility for security on the following Friday [the Muslim sabbath and day of prayer], and it was only then that the riots broke out, fomented by those Palestinian police. The rest of the world got confused about this sequence of events. Maybe if the visit had been on Monday, the riots on the Friday would have come across as more artificial. Nor was Sharon's ascent so unusual. It was not the first time an MK had gone up there. The intifada was preplanned; Sharon's ascent was just an excuse.
The second intifada was much more violent than the first; it was characterised by suicide bombings of buses, cafes, etc. And it was the worst thing the Palestinians could have done for their cause: not only did it make the military occupancy in the Occupied Territories much worse, but it destroyed both the Palestinian and Israeli economies (by killing off the tourist industry on which both were heavily reliant).
It was this violent intifada which has caused the Israelis to build a security fence around the West Bank. Now, the international press talks a lot about this barrier, but what doesn't get mentioned so much is that pro-Palestinian groups inside Israel have challenged the route of the barrier in the Israeli Supreme Court, and won. Also, the Israelis have every right to lead their lives free from terror; and the security fence has brought the number of terror attacks right down. It is an evil, but a necessary evil.
Unfortunately, the continuance of Palestinian terror has been continuing to act to drive Israeli opinion away from a comprehensive peace settlement—and this is a big mistake, in my opinion. The window of opportunity for a peace settlement with Fatah is beginning to close, as continued Israeli oppression drives the Palestinians further and further into the arms of the Islamists. And this is why the peace initiative started last November by the Americans is so important; and I wish someone would bash together some heads in the Israeli government so they could see this.
Finally, I'd like to say something about Hizbollah. In 2002 Israel withdrew from the Lebanon in full compliance with the UN resolution to do so. That resolution also called for Hizbollah to cease their struggle and disarm. Hizbollah, however, manufactured an excuse to continue, in the form of claiming the Shebaa Farms area was occupied Lebanese territory. It isn't. At the time of its occupation by Israel in 1967, it was on the Syrian side of the border, and hence part of the Golan Heights. The Israelis claim this; the UN agrees with them; nobody ever claimed it was part of Lebanon until 2002. Since then Lebanon has supplied a map claiming to date from 1966 showing the area on the Lebanese side of the border; the UN does not accept this map's provenance.
In general, however, Israel has not tended to pay an awful lot of attention to the UN because Israel has a small voice there, and tends to be shouted out by those of all the Arab and Muslim countries, which is how you ended up with UN resolutions such as the one equating Zionism with racism.
Zionism isn't racist. Zionism is merely the Jews' right to self-determination in their own country. Now, admittedly some Israelis do interpret Zionism in a racist manner; however, to rule that Zionism itself is racism is to disagree with Israel's right to exist.
Unfortunately, this has created a major distrust of the UN amongst Israelis, which is why Israel has been so reticent of allowing a UN force to supervise peace in the West Bank. (This is also why the independent international monitors running the crossing between Gaza and Egypt are from the EU, not the UN.)
So, in summary, to answer your original question of my views on Zionism:
I am entirely behind the idea of a Jewish state in the Jews' ancestral homeland. I am also entirely behind the idea of the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. However, such a settlement must be created with security for Israel, which means the Palestinians must suppress terrorist movements amongst their own people; and, in my opinion, this Palestinian state must be policed by an international force with sufficient powers to act.
I recognise that creation of a Palestinian state will involve withdrawal from the vast majority of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, but argue that old, well-established settlements, i.e. those dating from the 1920s and 30s in Gush Etzion, should remain. Also, the natural growth of West Jerusalem beyond the Green Line should be recognised. However, it is not realistic to expect that the whole of Jerusalem would remain as part of Israel; splitting the city would reflect the reality today on the ground.
I am appalled by the racist attitudes towards Palestinians many (not all!) Israelis possess, and I deplore the way the military occupation of the West Bank has been carried out. But I also deplore the PLO's lacklustre attitude to encouraging a pro-peace mentality amongst the Palestinian people; and abhor the Islamic movements' terror campaign, which kills innocent citizens in Israel, and is not in the interests of peace for their people. That said, I also deplore the Israeli army's targeting of terrorists in such a way as to always involve killing and injuring of innocent Palestinian bystanders too.
I support the idea of an Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights, provided there is a international force, provided with sufficient power, to ensure the entire Golan Heights is kept demilitarised. (Ideally, I would like to see Israeli settlements on the Golan Heights remain after the transfer, but with today's autocratic regime in Syria, I can't see that happening.)
I deploy Hizbollah's manipulation of the Blue Line as regards the Shebaa Farms in order to maintain their armed struggle against Israel, in contravention of the UN resolution.
I deplore Hamas' targeting of Sderot with Qassam missiles from the Gaza Strip; it only brings Israeli retribution, which serves to keep Gaza oppressed and in grinding poverty. That said, I don't know what can be done about Gaza, with Hamas in charge. Hamas remains opposed to recognising Israel's existence, and engaging them, and bringing about a ceasefire, would only allow them to regroup and rearm. Hamas is a Gordian knot which I am not able to unravel.
I do not support the concept of the Palestinians' right to return, as it would put an end, indirectly, to the existence of the Jewish state. Both sides will have to recognise that the status quo is going to remain, as regards both Palestinian and Jewish refugees. However, financial compensation by both sides is a possibility.
I deplore the biased reporting of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict one often finds in the media. The British press like supporting the underdog, so they've gone from pro-Israel prior to 1967, to pro-Palestinian today. The BBC in particular has a reputation amongst the Jewish community for pro-Palestinian bias. To an extent that's true, though the bias I have seen on the television news is—Orla Guerin aside—more one of omission than of commission. However, I have found the coverage on the BBC News website to be much more balanced than that of the television; and would like to draw attention to this article as a rare example of the British media reflecting the subtleties of the conflict.
Finally, I should point out that many Jews are sensitive about criticism of Israel. In my opinion anti-Zionism does not necessarily equal antisemitism; however the two are linked. It is important that Israel does hear the voice of dissent towards the way it is acting; however I would argue it is more important that it hears that voice coming from Jews such as myself; where non-Jews are concerned, Israel has often written such dissent off, as motivated by antisemitism, or a pro-Arab stance (itself motivated, in the case of governments at least, by the need to keep on the good side of their oil suppliers).
Well, there you are, Sara; there's my views on Zionism, probably at somewhat greater length than you were expecting; but in my opinion you really needed to know the full picture to understand what was going on, and why I was answering the way I was. There are more subtelties to the situation than I've presented here, of course, but I had to draw the email to a close at some point.
I hope you find the above eddifying; don't hesitate to ask if you have any questions.
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Date: 2008-05-05 04:17 pm (UTC)There are a few things that jumped out to me which I disagree with, but I suppose that's down to personal point of view. :)
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Date: 2008-05-05 04:22 pm (UTC)Phew, passed the lecturing-to-Israeli-on-their-own-history test! ;^)
There are a few things that jumped out to me which I disagree with, but I suppose that's down to personal point of view. :)
Dare I ask what?
no subject
Date: 2008-05-06 02:00 pm (UTC)There is not a single Jewish family which did not lose members in the Nazi Holocaust.
That's decidedly not true. I have friends whose families came from Middle Eastern and North African countries, and they never lost a single family member in the Holocaust.
I think it is true about most European and European decent Jews, but you can't say it is true about all Jews.
[...] treatment of Palestinians as second-rate citizens [...]
That's one I disagree with because of my political views, I suppose:
Israeli Arabs are treated as second-rate citizens.
Palestinians... I can't call it third-rate, because, to be honest, they're not treated as citizens at all. I'm not sure how to define what they're treated as, but it's nothing good.
This would have involved Israeli withdrawal from almost all of the settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, an issue Israeli public opinion is strongly against, but the Israeli withdrawal from Yamit, and more recently from the Gaza Strip, shows it could be done.
Recent polls, and by recent I mean since before Sharon declared his plans to withdraw from Gaza so say five years, show that a majority of the Israeli population supports a complete withdrawal (with the possible exception of the Golan Heights).
Unfortunately the settlers are louder, and better established as a unified group (which means they are also better connected), than the few small groups that have been promoting land-for-peace agreements.
I have one request at the end of this all: increase contrast on your lj design. Grey text on a patterned background make it very difficult to read long posts like this one. :)
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Date: 2008-05-05 10:01 pm (UTC)And I am really curious to find out how your friend Sara responded. Yasher koach for engaging in the debate!
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Date: 2008-05-11 05:32 pm (UTC)Finally, I should point out that many Jews are sensitive about criticism of Israel.
This is, in my experience, massively counterproductive and far more likely to lead to dismissal of even intelligent and thoughtful Jewish opinions that anything else I can think of. I've been on the receiving end of it and what starts out as as reasoned discussion very quickly becomes personal once the bigotry card is played - not surprisingly since very few people like being accused of racism of any description.
If criticising Israel is antisemitism then you better hand me my KKK robes for all the things I've said about Robert Mugabe. Oh, and my Black Panthers beret for all the things I've said about George W Bush, too. This may make for a clashing outfit but it's the only logical conclusion.
no subject
Date: 2018-11-11 06:33 pm (UTC)