The Bloody Past and Sanguine Future of ISRASTINE

Israel has never defined what it considers its borders to be. When the Zionist movement to create a Jewish state was sparked by the publication of the book Der Judenstaat by a  nonpracticing Jewish journalist, Thoedore Herzl, in 1896,* there was much talk about Eretz Yisrael (the Hebrew term for the land promised the Jews by God) stretching “from the river of Egypt to the Euphrates” (Genesis 15:18-21); but this expansive gift, including as it does the Sinai Peninsula, Palestine, and much of present-day Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, was more as a rallying aspiration than a geographic delineation. In fact, Herzl himself was open to the Jewish State being located in Argentina!

Presciently, Herzel advised against “a gradual infiltration of Jews” as such would be “bound to end badly”, as there would come “the inevitable moment when the native population feels itself threatened and forces the government to stop a further influx of Jews.” He foresaw, “Immigration is consequently futile unless we have the sovereign right to continue such immigration.” Imbued with the imperialistic bravado of the time, Herzl proposed the Zionists could gain their assumptive right by putting themselves “under the protectorate of the European Powers.”

The Zionists got their “sovereign right” when the British announced they were terminating their League of Nations-authorized mandate over Palestine (a province of the Ottoman Empire until its defeat in World War I). The newly-founded United Nations, where veto power was invested in two aging imperialists, two aspiring contenders, and a rump party which claimed to be the government of China, debated throughout 1947 what should be done with the soon-to-be liberated land of Palestine. At that time, the Jewish population of Palestine had grown to 600,000, while the Arab population (including a sprinkling of Armenians, Circassians, Europeans, and others) numbered 1.2 million. The Arabs proposed that a secular, democratic, binational state be created in all of Palestine; the Zionists demanded a state of their own. In the end, the UN opted for the two-state solution, partitioning Palestine more or less equally (acreage-wise) between the Arabs and the Jews.

Even before the mandate had ended the fighting began, with the Zionists—better armed, better led, and better motivated—getting the upper hand. Atrocities abounded, one of the more horrific being when a Zionist terrorist group, Irgun, killed some 200 men, women, and children in the Arab village of Deir Yassin, stuffing their bodies down the village well.** In May 1948, the British departed, Israel declared its independence, and the Arab-Israeli conflict was on, thanks to the nationalistic priorities that motivated those who led the august body just created “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war” (UN Charter). In the end, the new state of Israel held three-quarters of Palestine and 700,000 Palestinians became refugees, fleeing to un-Zionized parts of Palestine or neighboring Arab countries. There wasn’t enough land left to create a viable Arab state, so the West Bank was annexed by Jordan and the Gaza Strip was put under Egyptian administration.

The violence subsided for a while, but in 1956, ostensibly because of armed incursions by refugees in Gaza attempting to regain their homes, Israel attacked Egypt and marched all the way to the Suez Canal. At that point, Britain and France intervened, ostensibly to separate the combatants, but really to secure their ownership of the canal, which Egypt had announced they would nationalize. The United States, desirous to replace the area’s longstanding but spent imperialists as the dominant power in the Middle East, took the opportunity to flex its muscles and forced the attackers to withdraw. The Israel-British-French collaboration proved the acuteness of a suggestion by a British governor of mandate Palestine that it might prove useful to have “a little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism”.

The next dramatic moment in the saga came in 1967 when Israel again invaded Egypt (preemptively, Israel claimed) and in six days gained control of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, all of Arab Palestine, and Syria’s Golan Heights. Israel’s victory in the Six Day War introduced a new persona dramatica to the stage—the Palestinian National Liberation Movement, colloquially known as “Fatah”. Founded a few years before the war, when the Israelis marched on Fatah’s headquarters in the Karameh refugee camp in 1968 and were turned back, the victory (in the Arabs’ eyes) secured Fatah’s role as the leading faction in the armed struggle to retake Palestine. While the actions of Fatah and other Palestinian resistance groups were no more than pinpricks in Fortress Israel, they at least made the world aware that a people called “Palestinians” existed, as did the infamously famous killing of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.***       

Tit-for-tat battles between Palestinians and Israelis continued over the years, leading Israel to invade Lebanon in 1978 and again in 1982 to put an end to Palestinian resistance once and for all. Israel’s advance to the Litani River, Lebanon’s main source of water, shocked the Lebanese into the realization that they, too, could be turned into refugees. Just as with the post-Six Day War rise of Fatah, the invasion of Lebanon gave birth to a new actor: Hezbollah (The Party of God). Attacks by Hezbollah over the years led the Israelis to invade Lebanon once again in 2006; but just as Fatah’s victory in the 1968 battle of Karameh, enhanced its reputation, Hezbollah’s successful resistance to Israel’s umpteenth invasion was seen as a victory, greatly enhancing the group’s reputation in Lebanon and beyond. 

While all this was going on, Israeli plopped Jewish settlements on any land it could acquire, by hook or by crook—from the earliest kibbutzim built on land purchased from Arab owners to rabidly Zionist settlements on land usurped by force. The ubiquitous settlements, along with the Israelis-only highways linking them, have made it impossible to create a viable Palestinian state on the scraps of land that remain. Any such state would be but a ghetto, a la Gaza, on a larger scale.

A Jewish state was originally conceived as a refuge for endangered Jews, but it has hardly turned out that way. The in-gathering of the Jews has not occurred, with more Jews choosing to live in their real Promised Land (despite its reputed undercurrent of anti-Semitism), the United States, than in Israel.**** As the recurrent violence leading up to the present conflict attests, those who, by choice or lack of alternative, live in Israel face constant insecurity. Is it time to recognize that the Zionist dream has been a nightmare not only for Jews and Palestinians, but—less vividly, but equally frighteningly—for the rest of us?   

Whoever defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results” might well have had in mind those well-meaning but delusional Pollyannas who have been unsuccessfully trying to implement the two-state solution to the Palestine Problem for 75 years. Is it time to institutionalize (or at least de-institutionalize from the halls of power) such persistent maniacs (and megalomaniacs) and seek the alternative: the one-state solution—a secular, democratic, binational (better, multinational) state in all of Palestine, as the saner have been proposing all along?**** Couldn’t an “Israstine”, where people of the three faiths which consider the land of Palestine holy live happily side-by-side, inspire all of us to believe in and strive for a world at peace?  

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* Despite the title of Herzl’s book translating to “The Jewish State”, Israel has never declared itself to be such, as that would cause their sizable non-Jewish minorities to conclude they are not just de facto but de jure second-class citizens, as well as offend modern sensibilities about diversity and inclusion (Imagine our declaring the United States a Christian state!). 

** The leader of the Irgun, Menachem Begin, wanted to get credit for his contribution to making Israel Arabrein and so boasted in his memoir, The Revolt, “In a state of terror the Arabs fled, crying ‘Deir Yassin’.” Twenty years later Begin got the recognition he sought for his heroic leadership when he was named Prime Minister of Israel (and, even more remarkably, was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize).

*** In 1969 Gold Meir, the Prime Minister of Israel, contemptuously opined (in between puffs on her ever-present cigarettes), “There is no such thing as a Palestinian people… It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn’t exist.” She also exhaled the grossly unfair and insulting line, “We will only have peace with [the Arabs] when they love their children more than they hate us”. As the mother of my children is a Palestinian, I can attest that no one loves their children more than her people (The Israelis I can’t speak for).

**** When the Soviet Union allowed its Jews to emigrate en masse starting in 1989, 90% of them chose to reside in the United States. Ultimately, more of the rest of the Jewish emigres opted to live in Germany (of all places!) than in Israel. I would bet that in the next year or two more Jews will be emigrating from than migrating to Israel.

***** One believer in the one-state solution is Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Speaking at the UN two weeks before Hamas’s rocket attack, Netanyahu displayed a map which showed all of Palestine (ominously including Gaza) as one country, but I suspect the one-state solution he has in mind is not the one I hope for.