An attempt at an overview of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
Just in case there turn out to be some who find it useful.
I had an online interlocutor back in 2020 who was neither Israeli (or otherwise Jewish) nor Palestinian (or otherwise Muslim or Arab) and who claimed not to understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They wanted to know more, so I did what I could to explain it as simply as I have the capacity to. It wasn’t long before I realized that I wanted to keep working on the piece and updating it continuously as new developments pertaining to the conflict arose in the months and years that followed. As of May and June 2021, I’ve decided to abandon the goal of perfect simplicity in the interests of greater thoroughness and clarity, but I’m still fairly confident that this attempted “encapsulation”, as it were, will prove useful to at least some of those who encounter it. I pray that that should turn out to be the case.
“So. You wanna know more about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. What I've done is try to present an overview, in order to aid those who might not know what's going on with the conflict at all, and then explained my own view, with a final paragraph tying up a couple loose ends.
Here in Canada, and also in much of the rest of the world, Israel is substantially less popular than in the USA – there is a fairly large and enthusiastic Zionist community here, but also quite a large number of Muslims, secular Leftists, and social justice-oriented leftish Christians who make rather a big deal of their opposition to it and support for the Palestinians instead. University campuses in particular are hotbeds of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (which aims to turn Israel into a pariah on the international stage on the level of apartheid South Africa), and can be kind of toxic for Zionist students. But I was raised a Zionist, so I have some understanding of why Israel is not necessarily hated, and is in fact loved, by some reasonable people. Speaking for myself, although I identify as Jewish by ethnicity only (the religion I personally practice is the Bahá'í Faith, not Judaism, and I also have connections to the Unitarian Universalist and Inayati Sufi communities that are more influential upon my spiritual life than Judaism is), both Judaism and Zionism are in my heritage, and although I'm uncomfortable with many iterations of Zionism, I am certainly not an anti-Zionist either – I try to be relatively evenhanded in terms of assessing injustices on both sides. So I will try to be reasoned and unbiased in explaining the nature of this issue in the post that follows. I went all in, so this is quite long – several long paragraphs, a few each devoted to a) an effort at a rough overview of the Israeli case, b) an effort at a rough overview of the Palestinian case, and c) my own personal view, and then d) an effort to tie up some loose ends. I don't really believe this issue is worth discussing at all unless one is going to discuss it as thoroughly as possible, and to leave as few stones unturned as one can, in the interest of understanding it as accurately and assessing it as fairly as possible, so please bear with me.
There are two basic bog-standard views of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One is that Israel is essentially a Jewish re-indigenization project, a legitimate homecoming to their one and only true homeland by the true indigenous people of the land that is called Israel, and that its legitimacy is bolstered by its commitment, at least in terms of the functioning of its civil institutions, to liberal democracy of a kind recognizable to the West. In this telling, the decision of the United Nations to partition the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea into a Jewish Israel and an Arab Palestine in 1948 was legitimate as a moral decision as well as according to international law, and the choice of the Arabs to reject it was a cruel and misguided effort by Muslim bigots to prevent the emergence of a sovereign non-Muslim entity on what had previously been Muslim-occupied land.
The situation was made worse in 1967, when, in a war that was either unilaterally declared by Israel or very intelligently preempted by Israel in order to wisely guard against an imminent attack by Arab armies (depending on whom you ask), it captured from Egypt and Jordan the lands of the West Bank and Gaza, and promptly started building Jewish-only settlements on those lands, assuming that the land now belonged to them according to the custom of what typically happens when a victor wins land in a war (in the same way as, for example, the region of the Suditrol in Austria became Alto Adige in Italy after World War I), regardless of the fact that there were millions of Arabs living there already and that international law declared that the Israelis should give the settlements back. There had been waves of Arab attacks, including terrorism, to try to prevent the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in Israel dating back to before the founding of the state – if I understand things correctly, the first recorded Arab terror attack to try to prevent Jewish settlement in Palestine was in the 1890s, and there was a particularly horrendous wave in the 1910s and 1920s, carried out by a militia known as “the Black Hand.” The situation was fraught from the very beginning – the British were the colonial administrators of the area at the time, and some powerful Englishmen, such as the diplomat Bertie Harry Waters-Taylor and the military man John Glubb, supported the Palestinians, while a quixotic figure named Orde Wingate backed the Jews. Israel routed the Arab armies (primarily those of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq, backed by Saudi Arabia and others) that arose to destroy it upon its declaration of independence in 1948, but terror attacks by Arab militiamen known as the fedayeen were steady throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, and then the 1967 fiasco made everything worse, and rendered the conflict even more intractable than it had been.
In particular, after 1967, when the specific Palestinian land claim to the West Bank and Gaza developed (the “Palestine Liberation Organization” only having existed since 1964, when it was set up with the help of the Soviets, who backed the Palestinians partly out of Cold War calculation, and the Palestinians never having made much of an issue of the previous control of Gaza by Egypt and the West Bank by Jordan), terror intensified, and so the most extreme Zionists will tell you that Israel is essentially justified in keeping those lands and that the occupation, with its separation wall and everything, is essentially a legitimate device to keep Israelis safe from Palestinian terror attacks, which are the chief method they've been using for decades to try to force the Israelis to liberate them, and/or also to try to destroy Israel itself, depending on whom you ask. It is quite frequent for Zionists to believe that anti-Zionism – that is, the belief that Israel is not or should not be the national home of the Jewish people – constitutes a denial of national rights to the Jews alone, using a standard that is not applied to non-Jewish peoples, as well as the application of human rights standards that anti-Zionists almost never apply to the surrounding Muslim nations; this is why you will find some people who believe that anti-Zionism is actually a form of anti-Jewish hatred.
Some pissed-off Zionists will also point out that the Palestinian people were not generally referred to internationally as such until the mid-1960s; some (though notably not all) Zionists believe that the Palestinian national identity and movement are fabrications invented in order to deny land and legitimacy to the Jews by changing the common 1950s narrative of "tiny plucky Israel against massive and angry Arab Muslim states" by fabricating the existence of a previously unheard-of, even tinier people. Because these extreme Zionists believe the claims of the Palestinian national movement are essentially fraudulent, the willingness on the part of a significant percentage of commentators on these issues to go along with the Palestinian national movement’s view of itself, and to endorse its hostility to Zionism, is considered by such people to be evidence of yet more anti-Jewish bias. (It is actually true that, as late as the 1970s, some Palestinian terrorists believed this themselves, and actually wanted Palestine to unite with Syria or Jordan, believing that no separate Palestinian people actually existed, and that the whole point of the struggle was just to get the Jews out of an Arab and Muslim land. This was the belief of a terror leader named Zuheir Mohsen who gave an interview to a Dutch magazine called De Trouw in 1977, and he was by no means alone. A compilation of statements by other Arab leaders rejecting, at various times across the twentieth century, the idea that Palestine has ever been a separate country, or that it has or should have any existence of its own as anything other than a stick with which to beat the Zionists, is here.)
In the Zionist view, Israel itself is a worthy endeavour, not least in light of the traumatic experience of “the Shoah” (the Hebrew word for the event we know as the Holocaust) and of other attacks on Jews all across Christian Europe, plus the trauma of Jews who were either mistreated in Arab and Muslim lands, expelled from them, or both (many of the world’s most ardent Zionists are Jews whose heritage goes back to places like Morocco, Iraq, Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, Algeria, Turkey, Lebanon, Iran, and Egypt, and there were terrible anti-Jewish pogroms in many of those lands motivated by Judeophobic interpretations of Muslim theology, notably a horrendous atrocity in Iraq in 1941 known as “the Farhud”.) They generally believe that the history of atrocities committed by both Christians and Muslims against Jews across the centuries justifies the need for a sovereign Jewish state.
Zionists also often boast of Israel's ostensibly robust commitment to human rights, including to legal, civil, and political equality for non-Jews and for women, as well as of its relatively humane record on LGBTQ+ rights and its democratic institutions. (LGBTQ+ rights in Israel stop short of full marriage equality, and irreligious civil marriage is illegal in Israel across the board thanks to the stranglehold upon marriage laws in the country exercised by the Orthodox Jewish rabbinical courts, but Zionists generally whitewash this. They tend to implicitly claim that because Israel’s record on these matters is so much better than those of the Muslim countries which are hostile to it, the flaws in its own approach to these issues don’t count for much.)
In the Zionist view, the Arabs have been cruel and intransigent for not laying down their arms and making peace, especially for walking away when offered fairly comprehensive peace deals in the 1990s and early 2000s. In particular, the demand for the "right of return" of Palestinian refugees to the homes from which they were expelled in the population transfer when the Ottoman province of Palestine became the Jewish state of Israel is seen by Zionists as a cruel attempt to re-Arabize and re-Islamize an area in which the Jews have a right to exist as a sovereign people, and to deny the right of the lone Jewish state to exist in favour of one more Muslim country among many (it would be the fifty-seventh, to be precise), probably one in which non-Muslims would experience the same mistreatment, harassment, and oppression which is common, to a greater or lesser degree, to the experience of non-Muslims in virtually all Muslim countries. In this telling, if the Palestinians would only give up the right of return, peace would be much easier to achieve, and a major stumbling block to the achievement of peace and a solution to the conflict is that they won't.
Informed Zionists will also tell you that, according to sharí’ah, Muslim religious law, there is a rule called waqf that actually forbids non-Muslim sovereign entities to exist on any land that was once ruled by Muslims, arising out of the principle, well-established according to the jihad theory that is part of classical Islamic law, that non-Muslims do not actually have the inherent right to rule any part of the world, which belongs by right to the Muslims and to Allah. (The details of this have been documented by Muslim scholars, notably by the Pakistani Islamic supremacist Syed Abul Ala Maududi, one of the great villains of the twentieth century, as well as by Majid Khadduri in his authoritative 1955 text War and Peace In The Law of Islam.) Zionists who believe that the re-Islamization of Israel would be unjust connect this with the reasons why groups like Daesh and Al-Qaeda do what they do, and the reasons why life is so shitty for non-Muslims in Muslim countries in general. They claim that the Palestinian refusal to recognize a sovereign Jewish state in Israel is thus essentially racist and Muslim supremacist, especially when you take into account that, when you study the life of the Prophet Muhammad, you realize that most of his early enemies were Jewish, and there are very many verses of the Qur'án (as well as saheeh ahadeeth, reliable reports of the words and deeds of the Prophet) which condemn Jews because of that context. (The most notorious of these is the infamous “hadith of the Gharqad tree”, which is so bloodthirsty I dare not even quote it.) And so, as with Christianity, there is a longstanding tradition of hatred and mistrust of Jews which predates the conflict in Palestine and which, as long as there are people who believe that the relevant Scripture is perfect and eternally applicable, will never change.
This is why you get some Zionists who say that the conflict will never be solved, that any peace deal will only be a stepping-stone to a point at which the Palestinians can mount an attack on a weakened Israel and finally go in for the kill, that Israel is lying to itself if it ever pretends it actually has a partner for peace, and so it should just keep doing what it's doing, and doing what it has to do to defend itself, the opinions of the Arabs or the world be damned.
Less extreme Zionists hope that Israel's occupation of the 1967 lands will eventually be dismantled, but they do believe that the claim of Jewish indigeneity in the historic land of Israel is essentially legitimate and morally just, and they believe that Israel's right to exist as a majority-Jewish state should be respected as long as it maintains its liberal democracy and does not deprive its Arab and other non-Jewish citizens of rights. They posit that that the Israeli and Jewish record of humanitarian involvement in the wider world, such as its help with irrigation projects in sub-Saharan Africa or the way it sends aid to its Muslim neighbors when they experience natural disasters, is the true nature of Israel, and that there are enough happy Muslim, Christian, and Druze citizens of Israel, including many who identify as Zionists, that the idea of Israel as an essentially supremacist place is a lie, and that if the Palestinians would only lay down their arms, they could enjoy peace and prosperity as Israel's neighbours. A standard refrain is, "If the Palestinians laid down their arms there would be no more war; if the Israelis laid down their arms there would be no more Israel." Another common refrain is from a former Israeli Prime Minister, Golda Meir, which says, "We will have peace when the Arabs love their children more than they hate us."
The more pro-Palestinian view is that, regardless of the injustices suffered by European Jews during the Holocaust and the potential indigeneity of some Jews to the area, Israel's presence in the Middle East is a massive and transparent colonial project. The idea that the Jews are the indigenous people of Israel, when they haven't actually had sovereignty over it since the destruction of the Second Temple thousands of years ago, is a stretch at best, a deliberate fiction at worst, designed to dispossess the legitimate Arab and Muslim denizens of the land. Zionism was and is fatally racist in having failed to take into account the wishes of the Arab population before the state's founding, and both the European colonial powers who controlled the Middle East in the aftermath of World War I and the Arab client rulers who permitted the development of Zionism over and against the wishes of their people (including King Faisal, as well as various absentee Ottoman-era Arab landlords who let the early Zionists buy property from them in what became Israel over and against the protestations of the local Arab citizens) were treacherous collaborators. The racist views of many (although certainly not all) of the early Zionists regarding their perceived superiority to the Arabs is not only excoriated but held to be representative of Zionism – here is a thread which makes plain that at least some early Zionists were racists and saw themselves as engaged in a transparently settler-colonial endeavour. Israel is held to bear responsibility for the suffering of the Palestinians under the occupation, as well as for terrorist massacres committed by Jewish militias against Arabs in the run-up to its founding, including the one at Deir Yassin, which was a particularly appalling crime. Indeed, it’s very common for people who take the pro-Palestinian view to regard Israel as responsible for an ongoing project of ethnic cleansing – roughly 750, 000 Palestinian Arabs were displaced from their homes, and roughly 531 Arab villages were liquidated, between the years 1947 and 1949, and they hold Zionism responsible for that cruelty. Anti-Zionist Palestinians and their allies refer to the cataclysmic population transfer events that facilitated the foundation of the State of Israel as the naqba (“the disaster, the catastrophe”), and they blame the Israelis for inflicting this misfortune and suffering upon them, regarding Zionist protestations that the vast majority of Palestinian Arabs were not forced out by the Jews, but chose to leave in accord with the instructions of Arab leaders such as Ahmed Shukairy (who was the Secretary-General of the Arab League at the time and who allegedly called upon the Arab civilians of the area to temporarily flee their homes, urging them to get out of harm’s way and fostering in them the assumption that they could safely return after the five Arab armies that initially rose up to try to destroy the nascent state of Israel had exterminated the Zionists once and for all), as total hogwash, as a hasbara talking point founded on lies. (“Hasbara” is a Hebrew-language term meaning “apologia for the existence and/or behaviours of the State of Israel” – Zionists generally think it’s a good thing, and especially love to enlist LGBTQ+, Black, and/or Arab Zionists to engage in it, but anti-Zionists hate it and use the term pejoratively.)
I think it would be useful here to pause for a second to note two important pieces of data concerning the nature of what went on when the Palestinian refugees were forced out of what became Israel. It occurs to me to be worth noting that Khalid al-Azm, who was Prime Minister of Syria when the State of Israel was founded, confessed in his memoirs the belief that when the Zionists say that the Palestinian Arabs mostly were not forced out by the Jews, and that, rather, Shukairy and other Arab leaders encouraged them to leave so they could return after Israel had been destroyed, the Zionists are telling the truth. This strikes me as a noteworthy confession, because there would be no reason for an anti-Zionist partisan to concede this point unless it were true. That said, however, as of May 2021, I’ve encountered data from an important pro-Palestinian source, Decolonize Palestine, which claims that the number of Palestinians who left their homes in what became the Israel of 1948 voluntarily in accord with the instructions of people like al-Azm and Shukairy is only about 5% of the total, and that a much larger number were made refugees by a strategy of ethnic cleansing known as Plan Dalet. This strategy was employed by the pre-independence Jewish militia known as the Haganah, which later became part of the nucleus of the Israeli Defense Forces. The activities of the Haganah, and of the Irgun and Lehi militias that split away from it for not being violent enough against (or hateful enough of) non-Jews, are something I don’t know enough about, not least because the Israeli education system tends to whitewash this stuff, or not even teach it, and the Zionist apparatus in the global Jewish diaspora is similarly lax about it. I will need to add to this piece in order to fill in details regarding these issues, including the history of terror attacks by pre-independence Jewish militias on not just Arabs but also British colonial targets, at some future date. But I digress. (It is true that, despite my belief that it’s important to pay attention to what sources like Decolonize Palestine say on the grounds that they represent the anti-Zionist self-perception accurately, it is nonetheless the case that many of the perspectives expressed by its writers strike me as bad-faith misrepresentations of the views of mainstream Zionists and/or morally repugnant intentional sanitization and denial of the ugly Judeophobic, genocidal, and otherwise cruel stances taken by many Palestinians and pro-Palestinian activists. But, again, far be it from me to show my hand in haste.)
Back to an attempt at a summation of the anti-Zionist narrative. In the pro-Palestinian, anti-Zionist view, Israel's much-touted democracy is a grotesque lie, given that, notwithstanding the civil and political equality granted to Muslims and other non-Jews within Israel proper, there in fact exists in Israel a systemic racism that amounts to Jewish ethnic supremacy, with the usual indicators familiar from the system of white supremacy in America and Europe, such as life expectancy, access to jobs, housing, employment, clean water, state funding, welfare, freedom from harassment by the police, and the like, and that, in the Palestinian territories, the so-called Israeli Defense Forces are essentially an occupying imperial fascist army ensuring Jewish dominance in lands that don't belong to them, including the maintenance of a system that, with its separate and better facilities for Jews and its system of checkpoints and barriers designed to keep the Palestinians in line, amounts to apartheid or segregation, or even something resembling Nazism, depending on whom you ask. It’s important to note that there are Israelis who agree with this view, notably the human rights group B’Tselem, which announced in 2021 that it believes all of Israel is an apartheid state. Zochrot is another firmly anti-Zionist Jewish-run non-governmental organization in Israel, and there are a handful of anti-Zionist political parties there, embattled though they may be. There have certainly always been many thousands of anti-Zionist Jews in the global Jewish diaspora.
(There’s a lot that could be said about the complex and painful intra-Jewish disputes over Zionism – some of the most heated Jewish critics of Israel include a favourite film director of mine, Mike Leigh, and a playwright and screenwriter I respect, Tony Kushner, plus the popular Leftist academics Noam Chomsky, Judith Butler, and Norman Finkelstein, as well as Israeli figures such as Miko Peled and Ilan Pappé and the organizations IfNotNow, Independent Jewish Voices, and Jewish Voice for Peace, which between them have chapters all across the Anglosphere – the USA, Canada, the UK, and Australia – as well as in some parts of continental Europe. Most of these people and organizations strike me as reasonable dissenters with legitimate human rights concerns, but a small minority do bother me, including the British group Jewdas, which has longstanding ties to Jeremy Corbyn, a former candidate for Prime Minister of the United Kingdom who has faced accusations of Judeophobia and of sympathy with Khomeinist, Islamic supremacist, and anti-Zionist terrorists that I believe are credible and true, as well as every Muslim extremist’s favourite Jewish group, the virulently anti-Zionist and also wildly homophobic ultra-Orthodox sect Neturei Karta, who were excommunicated by virtually the entire Jewish world after they fraternized with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and David Duke at a thinly disguised Holocaust denial conference in 2006. The further you go down this rabbit hole, the weirder these people get, until you end up at the nadir of Gilad Atzmon, an ethnically Jewish jazz saxophonist in the UK who has said such hair-raisingly derogatory and hateful things about not just Israel but Judaism itself that even the majority of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement has disavowed him. But I digress once again – all this is really a subject for another piece.)
Anti-Zionists, Jewish and not, generally allege that Israel is responsible for a reign of terror in the occupied 1967 lands. One anti-Zionist of my acquaintance, the Palestinian activist Ramzy Abueita, puts it like this (I’m quoting from a much longer jeremiad against Zionism, authored by him, which I can reproduce in full if anyone reading this tells me they’d find it helpful):
“Palestinians are repressively occupied under a system of institutionalized racist persecution. As a result, they have no power over their daily lives. They live in constant fear. They're collectively punished and economically exploited. They are denied free expression, assembly, movement, and other basic rights. Gazans are besieged. Residents of the West Bank and East Jerusalem face militarized state terror, cantonized separation, closed borders, imposed curfews, roadblocks, checkpoints, electric fences, land theft, isolation, neighbourhood incursions, destruction of their homes, dispossessions, targeted assassinations, mass arrests, torture, and virtually all other forms of cruel indignity and abuse. When you add up all of the things that have resulted as a consequence of Zionism, there’s no way anyone can rightfully justify its continuous oppression of the Palestinian people.”
In the anti-Zionist telling, claims of Islamic supremacism among the Palestinians are wildly overblown – mostly they are scaremongering fictions designed to fool gullible white Christians into thinking that the Jews have to be supported against the scary Brown Muslims. The Palestinian resistance movement is first and foremost a national struggle for self-determination by the people who should rightfully be considered indigenous to the area, having lived there for centuries well after the Jews were dispersed from the land two thousand years ago. (A minority of pro-Palestinian activists, notably the academic Joseph Massad, has also tried to argue that the Palestinians are the descendants of the people who inhabited the area before the ancient Israelites came along, and thus have a much better claim to indigeneity than the Jews do even after one factors in the history of ancient Israel.) The hypocrisy of the Zionist project in claiming to be democratic and liberal is shown up by the fact that, although many Zionists make much of the fact that Israel is a project of indigenous reclamation and not a mere outpost of the West (and many also dispute the idea that there is any such thing as a “white Jew”, wanting to make sure outside observers know that white-passing Jews with ties to Europe are exactly as authentically indigenous to Israel as Jews of colour are), the truth in practice is that white-passing Ashkenazi Jews enjoy the most privilege in Israel, in like wise as white supremacy is endemic in the USA and much of the rest of the West. In particular, Black people in Israel, whether they are Black Jews from Ethiopia or non-Jewish African migrants from Eritrea or the two Sudans, almost inevitably get treated like shit (notably by frequently being subjected to nightmarish conditions when trying to immigrate, although a minority, such as the Sudanese-refugee-turned-IDF-soldier Ibrahim Bari, manage to triumph over the odds.) So do almost all Arabs, whether they are Palestinian citizens of Israel or citizens of the Occupied Territories. It is also true that the Israeli Chief Rabbinate takes a view of who counts as a Jew that is very punitive and arguably thoroughly racist – it has recognized certain Jewish communities of colour as authentically Jewish, including the Ethiopian “Beta Israel” community, the Cochin Jews of India, and the Kaifeng Jews of China, but it has cruelly denied that status to the Sefwi-speaking “House of Israel” Jews of Ghana, the Abayudaya Jews of Uganda, the Lemba Jews of Zimbabwe, and the Igbo Jews of Nigeria. They claim to be required to deny these four Black African Jewish groups’ claims to authentic Jewish peoplehood as a matter of the letter of Jewish law, but it is not hard to detect a despicable racism in their selectivity.
Palestinian rights activists generally regard the wars that Israel justifies as necessary defenses against terror – against Hamas, for example – as brutal campaigns of deliberate and wanton destruction of what remains of Palestine in order to ethnically cleanse its people and terrify them into submission. Many of them hold that Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (which is nominally Communist, although that didn’t stop spokespeople such as the infamous George Habash from promoting the Islamic supremacist program), the Lebanese Shí’ah extremist group Hezbollah, and other enemies of Israel are legitimate freedom fighters, and some, such as Judith Butler, have even intimated that they deserve to be embraced as part of the global progressive Left; this latter view seems nightmarishly evil to me personally, but I feel duty-bound to acknowledge it. Anti-Zionists tend to regard Israeli protestations that they have a right to exist and to defend themselves from things such as rocket attacks by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad as spurious justifications for overreactions which are so wild, and which result in so many Palestinian (or, when the wars happen to be against Hezbollah, Lebanese) civilian deaths and so much destruction of civilian infrastructure, that they render Israel’s claim to occupy the moral high ground howlingly false.
In May 2021, in the thick and then the aftermath of yet another war between the IDF and Hamas in Gaza, I encountered the view that, given the power differential between the massive Israeli war machine (lavishly funded as it is by the USA, another country whose geopolitical activities Israel’s opponents generally hate) and the Palestinians, to hold terror groups such as Hamas partially culpable for the cycle of violence, and to call upon the international community to condemn not just the Israelis but also the Palestinians for contributing to the orgy of bloodshed, is an act of moral turpitude equivalent to using the slogan “All lives matter!” to deflect attention away from the spate of terrorism enacted by police against Black people in the USA. To discuss the set of moral assumptions that goes into the understanding that exterminationist, Muslim supremacist anti-Zionist terror groups such as Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah cannot or should not be held to account for their genocidal bloodlust and their ongoing efforts to bring about the eradication of the Zionist project (or, not necessarily but certainly not infrequently, the slaughter of all Jewish people as such) would require an examination of Leftist postmodernist approaches to foreign policy and to the human condition in general that goes beyond the scope of this piece – the principle that any and all human rights abuses can or should be excused or explained away if those responsible for them are people of colour who are held to be sufficiently “marginalized” and “oppressed” has a lot to do with it, and so do Foucaultian notions of how power works, Chomskyan foreign policy analysis, and the Saïdist conviction that any and all criticism of Islam is inherently racist and imperialist and dehumanizing and bigoted, no matter how mild or how scrupulously human rights-focused the critique may be, and irrespective of the pigment colour of those issuing that critique. (Here again, this is probably a subject for another piece – it’s relevant to the matter at hand, so I’m permitting myself to bring it up, but I don’t wish to play my hand so definitively that it compromises my capacity to comment authoritatively and fairly on both positions, so although it’s probably easy to detect in this paragraph that I have very little sympathy for many aspects of the typical anti-Zionist view of things, let’s please proceed under the assumption that I’ll continue to represent the anti-Zionist point of view as fairly as I have the capacity to going forward.)
Whether or not they excuse-monger for terrorists, Israel’s opponents tend to point out that Israel's government, whether nominally Left or Right (but especially Right), is held hostage to a military-industrial complex, and to the Jewish fascist movement of far-right settlers in the 1967 lands who refuse to ever give that land up, because of the supremacist belief that the Jews should never be required to give up any part of the land in which they lived in the era of the Bible, especially the minority who believe it is necessary for Jews to occupy all of historic Palestine in order for the Messiah to come, a belief they share with some conservative evangelical Christians.
Palestine solidarity campaigners reject all Zionist arguments. They usually support the campaign of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions against Israel in order to punish it for its repeated and cruel violations of international law, in the hope of destroying the edifice of its system of Jewish supremacy (Zionists, of course, deny that it is any such thing) by treating it the same way the international community treated apartheid South Africa. They point to the fact that Israel historically actually did ally with apartheid South Africa, as well as the fact that there was at one point in the mid-twentieth century an Israeli government program to forcibly sterilize Ethiopian Jews, another heinous crime. (This article tries to make the case that the Israeli government has never forcibly sterilized anyone, but I think its arguments are flawed and specious at best.) They either argue for the full right of return of Palestinian refugees and their children to what is now Israel, or advance the idea of a one-state solution in which Muslim Arabs, Christian Arabs, and Jews could enjoy one-person one-vote democracy. They reject the idea, put forward by Zionists as a reason to reject BDS, that this would mean "a Palestine next to a Palestine" (a motto advanced by key BDS figure Omar Barghouti) and a stamping out of legitimate Jewish national hopes and dreams; to them, it's a simple matter of anticolonialism, human rights, and democracy.
My own personal view is the liberal, less extreme Zionist one. In my spiritual practice I am a Bahá'í, not a Jew (I also have ties to Unitarian Universalism and Inayati Sufism), and as a matter of religious doctrine I'm actually technically forbidden to take sides on partisan matters, but the liberal Judaism I was raised with dies hard, so I do actually have a pretty well-defined position. I believe that the Jews constitute the closest thing that exists to an indigenous people of the land of Israel, and that, as long as they remain a liberal democracy, they should have the right to a sovereign Jewish-majority nation in the land they were granted by the United Nations in 1948. However, this entails the dismantlement of the system of Jewish privilege which denies the fullness of rights, dignity, and equality to non-Jews and to Jews of colour. I also accept the national claims of the Palestinians to the lands that were captured by Israel in 1967, and I support the immediate and total dismantlement of the settlement enterprise and the occupation, and the establishment of a free, sovereign, and (ideally) territorially contiguous State of Palestine with East Jerusalem as its capital. (I believe that the city of Jerusalem should either be divided or internationalized; neither side should have exclusive possession of it.) I believe this would carry significant risks of violence, but I would task the United Nations with the responsibility to prevent Palestinian militias from rising up to finally conquer the now-smaller Israel. I also very firmly oppose the “Nation-State Law” that was passed by the Israeli Knesset in 2018; it comes very close to formally institutionalizing second-class citizenship for non-Jewish Israelis, and as much as I respect Jewish national rights and aspirations, it’s never, ever worth denying equality of rights and dignity to non-Jews in order to achieve Zionist goals. I am grateful to those non-Jewish Israelis (who include even the odd Palestinian in the Occupied Territories!) who are fervent Zionists and love Israel (Ala Wahib, Khaled Abu Toameh, Yoseph Haddad, Anett Haskia, Father Gabriel Naddaf, Bassem Eid, Elinor Joseph, Mazen Warra, Mohammad Zoabi, Bassam Tawil, Maikel Nabil Sanad, Rania Fadel, Falach Hayib, Muhammad Zahran, Ismail Khaldi, Yahya Mahamid, George Deek, these people, and more), but I believe more needs to be done in order for Israel to truly live up to its claims to be a real liberal democracy. I think the national anthem should be revised to include a verse acknowledging Arab connections to the land, for example, and with regard to issues such as life expectancy, police brutality, and jobs and housing discrimination, I basically take the position that the solutions advocated for by the international Left as they apply to the fate of Black people and other people of colour in the USA should apply to Arabs and to Black people in Israel. I think it’s perfectly possible for Israel to remain a Jewish state and do all this at the same time. Call me delusional if you wish, but from what I know about Jewish law, custom, and tradition, there is no reason to suspect that a Jewish state cannot be a liberal democracy in which non-Jews can thrive. The fact that many extremist and fascist Zionists have been very religious Jews (including the powerful late rabbis Ovadia Yosef, Joseph Levinger, and Avraham Isaac Kook) is a problem, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. I am mindful that arguments to the effect that Jewish supremacism is a valid interpretation of the Jewish texts which has ancient roots, and which liberal and Leftist Jews ignore at their peril, are out there, but as much as I admire the introspection involved in making such an argument, and as important as it is to me to speak out vociferously against Jewish fascism, I’m not entirely convinced that the whole of the Zionist cause is corrupted thereby. The humane and universalistic branches of Jewish thought are too powerful and too deeply rooted for forces like the ultra-fascists of Lehava to carry the day – or so I’d like to believe. So I have a lot more faith in the durability of the “Israel can be both a Jewish state and a liberal democracy!” dream than most.
More generally, I am one of those people who is very skeptical of the human rights records of Muslim nations overall, and of the treatment of non-Muslims and heterodox Muslims in Muslim societies, whether they are Jews, Hindus, Christians, Sikhs, Bahá'ís, Zoroastrians, Buddhists, heterodox Muslims such as the Ahmadis and Nizari Ismailis, atheists and other nontheists (including ex-Muslims), or any others (Yezidis, Yarsanis, Mandaeans, Shabaks, the Kalasha indigenous people of Pakistan, secular Kurds, the Imazighen of North Africa, whomever), and who believes in the reformation of the doctrines that lead to that oppression, and so I support the humane liberal and reformist Muslims who tend to argue in favor of the development of liberal interpretations of the Qur'án and the traditions of Muhammad which could support the existence of a sovereign Jewish state of Israel. But I don't blame the Palestinians exclusively – I think the conflict is essentially a turf war between Muslim and Jewish fascists and supremacists, both of whom have their respective governments and different sectors of world opinion in their grasp (the Zionist fascists and Jewish supremacists have the American Right, the Palestinian fascists and Muslim supremacists have the UN and most of the American and international Left), and I think they can all go fuck themselves as hard and as painfully as humanly possible. I don't believe that any government that isn't a liberal democracy deserves to exist, so I fondly hope and pray for the overthrow of the Netanyahu government (which may not be outright fascist itself but which does pander to the Jewish supremacists), or at least for its downfall and replacement with genuine Israeli humanitarians and liberals. The anti-Arab hatred and prejudice in Israeli society disgusts me (especially the naked Jewish fascism of Lehava, who are obsessed with Jewish racial purity and who frequently attack interfaith marriages and assault innocent Muslim and Christian Israelis), as do relatively mainstream and popular Jewish supremacist political figures such as Bezalel Smotrich, Naftali Bennett, Michael Ben-Ari, Miri Regev, Yoav Eliassi, Baruch Marzel, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Benzi Gopstein, and Ayelet Shaked. If I were an Israeli citizen, I pray that I would have the courage to refuse to serve in the IDF, which, although not necessarily inherently evil, certainly functions too much like an occupying army for me to ever allow myself to participate in it. I don't support the one-state solution, because I do think there's a history of Muslim domination of non-Muslim peoples from which no non-Muslim people has ever historically escaped, and I don't want the Jews in Israel to have to be dominated by Muslim fundamentalists the way that, let's say, Christians and Hindus and Sikhs are in Pakistan or Afghanistan, or the Christians are in Lebanon or Egypt or Iraq, to say nothing of places like Iran, where Zoroastrians are discriminated against and Bahá'ís and converts from Islam to Christianity are horribly persecuted and often murdered, or Saudi Arabia, which suppresses all non-Muslims tout court. I support a two-state solution – a liberal, democratic, Jewish-majority Israel which upholds the equality of rights and dignity for Arab Muslims, Arab Christians, Blacks of whatever faith, LGBTQ+ people, the small minority of Israeli citizens who are Thai or Hindu or Filipiné or Vietnamese, and all others, next to a liberal, democratic, Muslim-majority Palestine which upholds the equality of rights and dignity for Palestinian Christians, Blacks of whatever faith, LGBTQ+ people, women who choose not to wear the hijab or niqab, any remaining Jewish citizens, and all others.
A couple miscellaneous points, concerns, and loose ends. I don't know what to say to the apartheid analogy – South Africans who lived through apartheid are notably divided on this matter themselves, ranging from Kenneth Meshoe, the Black evangelical Christian who believes the idea of Israel as an apartheid state is absurd (and whose daughter Olga is married to Joshua Washington, the son of the influential Black Christian Zionist Dumisani Washington – the younger Washington is currently the director of something called the Institute for Black Solidarity with Israel), to Ronnie Kasrils, the white South African Communist who believes that Israel is clearly as bad as South Africa ever was. First Nations peoples I know are similarly divided – both camps involve themselves in considerable First Nations outreach, and a substantial number of First Nations activists believe the Palestinians to be indigenous, but others, notably the very vocal and obstreperous Métis Zionist Ryan Bellerose, believe it's the Jews. As a Bahá'í, I am quite grateful to the Israelis for allowing the Bahá'í holy places, which date back to the time when the Prophet Bahá'u'lláh was exiled to the city of Acre in Ottoman Palestine (it used to be a penal colony), have been allowed to remain, when virtually all Muslim countries heavily persecute their Bahá'í populations and the Bahá'í holy places in Iran, Iraq, and Turkmenistan have long since been destroyed. I also really like the fact that Israel has an Ahmadi Muslim population, which lives safely in Israel, despite the fact that, like the Bahá'ís, the Ahmadis are persecuted by conservative mainstream Muslims with horrible viciousness. (We are both messianic movements that accept a Prophet after Muhammad; our faith originated in Iran and theirs originated in what became Pakistan, and it's a blasphemy against Islam for either of us to exist, but in some ways it's even harder for them, because they consider themselves Muslims and we don't, so authorities tend to be even harder on them than they are on us. I respect any government that protects both them and us.)
I tend to agree with, or at least sympathize with, Zionists who are neither Jews nor evangelical Christians – I find the huge pro-Israel constituency among Hindus fascinating, and I have a huge amount of sympathy for people like Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury, Raheel Raza, Amna Farooqi, Salim Mansur, Tahir Aslam Gora, Hasan Afzal, Mohammad Mostafa Kamal, Tawfik Hamid, Tufail Ahmad, Abdul Hadi Palazzi, Irshad Manji, Noor Dahri, Qanta Ahmed, Mithal al-Alusi, Maajid Nawaz, Supna Zaidi, Asra Nomani, Abdullah Saad al-Hadlaq, Zainab Zeb Khan, Hassen Chalghoumi, Mohammad Tawhidi, and Zuhdi Jasser, as well as the late likes of Courtney Lonergan, Abdurrahman Wahid, Abdallah Mwidau, and Tashbih Sayyed, all pro-Israel and anti-supremacist Muslims whose stories are worth looking into. There is also a constituency of pro-Israel ex-Muslims, some of whom have compromised their integrity by trafficking in vengeful Islamophobia (although I admit to finding far more good than bad in the speeches and writings of Wafa Sultan and Ibn Warraq), but some of whom, notably Nemat Sadat, Ali Rizvi, Noha Hashad, and Kasim Hafeez, have been able to offer Israel sincere support without saying anything I know of to demonize Islam or the Palestinians as such. I particularly recommend looking up Aziz Shehadeh, a Palestinian Muslim statesman who advocated amiable relations between the Palestinians and the Zionists as early as 1947, but who was assassinated by the hit squad controlled by the virulently Judeophobic, pro-Nazi mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, whose nephew was the seminal Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. (Arafat is a bête noire in the eyes of most Zionists because he is regarded as only ever having attempted to make peace in bad faith. Sadly, Aziz Shehadeh is so obscure that he does not have a Wikipedia entry!)
Okay. That's all I have to say for now. I hope I managed to do a decent job. If you managed to make it this far, thanks for reading. Hope it helps.“