Israel/Hamas/Palestine

I have studied over the past 4.5 months.? I believe that Jews in America have the obligation to understand the nuanced history of the Levant.? (For me, the “Levant” is shorthand for the entire region that includes Israel, Palestine, and the surrounding Arab world.) ?As an American Jew, you don’t get to comment on these events in the superficial manner of pro-Palestinian/anti-Israel marchers or social media influencers.? Your cousins live in Israel, and if 4,000 years of history teach us anything, you or your children or grandchildren may be forced into exile to Israel if the right group of racists come to power in the USA .? I know; that’s a very dark thought, but it is a thought that many Jews had in Germany in 1931, and they probably had the same reaction you are having now:? “This is a highly troubling thought, but no way that could happen here.”

It has, therefore, taken me 4.5 months to come to my own understanding.? My grandfather on my mother’s side, a reform rabbi in the 1920s and 1930s, was anti-zionist.? He believed that the best place for the Jews of Europe was in the diaspora, most likely in the USA, but also spread throughout the world (including the Arab world).? My grandfather on my father’s side, a New York City businessman, was highly Zionist, even sitting on the Board of Governors of Technion.

It should not be a surprise that I therefore come to this thought:? if I were living in 1946, and someone asked me if the outcome of the Holocaust should be a State of Israel in the Levant, I hope that in that moment, I would have been against such a world-changing, geo-political upheaval despite the horrors of Europe in WW2.? But now, 76 years after the founding of the State of Israel, I desperately want Israel to survive.? Does that make me a Zionist today even if I do not think it was the right decision in 1946?? The answer is not easy.

It’s hard to make sense of an initiative that, in 1946, that would cause the emigration of 2 million eastern Europeans (very few of whom spoke Hebrew) to the Levant, which would ultimately mean that tens of thousands of Arabs would have to be displaced.? But in 1946, Zionism was nearly 70 years old, and the Balfour Declaration was already 30 years old.? And then came the Holocaust.

Right now, there is frequent online ranting declaring that Israel should not exist; not just “river to the sea” chants, but serious YouTube professorial dissertations.? The last time I heard anything like this was soon after 9/11, but it was said privately and quietly.? This has made me ask the question:? How, really, did Israel happen?? Here is my answer in a single paragraph:

Centuries of antisemitism in Europe, accelerating with the Kaisers of Russia in the 19th century (e.g. Pogroms) caused the intellectual Jews of Europe to seek alternatives.? One answer was to emigrate to the USA, which is why my great-grandfather found his way to Burlington, Vermont, in 1886.? Another answer was a vision to return to the Holy Land of Israel, and thus Zionism was born.? The Zionist movement lobbied hard over the next 35 years and, with great support from the Rothschild family, helped secure the Balfour Declaration in 1917.? Then, a few years later, the British Mandate for Palestine began, and the British armed forces largely supported and protected the Jewish immigrants for the next 30 years, allowing the infrastructure for a Jewish State to solidify.? Working diligently all the time was Israel’s George Washington, David Ben-Gurion.? All this was promising for a Jewish State in the Lavant, but the Holocaust sealed the deal.? Collective guilt for their collective antisemitism led the British and American powers to support and finally ratify the State of Israel in 1947.

A thought:? could it be that the power brokers in England and the USA in 1946 very much harbored the antisemitism of their countries that had percolated over the years between WW1 and WW2?? (For just one example, see the biography of the founder of our automobile industry, Henry Ford, and the Wiki entry on The Dearborn Independent.)? So, they thought, give the Jews this land in the Levant; it is very likely that the Arabs will militarily force the Jews out, once again, and then we “kill two birds with one stone.”? We can allow the newly exiled Jews to come to the USA, and we will have satisfied the Jewish lobby in the USA, and we will have solved the Jewish refugee problem in Europe.

History had other plans.

Equally frustrating is the massive media out of Israel right now attempting to explain away the founding of Israel as very pure because “Jews have never left the land of Israel, and the Nakba never really happened in the way that the Palestinians describe it or think about in their written legacy.” ?The founding Godfather of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, did not come to that kind of rationalization.? Here is a Ben-Gurion quote from 1956:

"Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader, I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it's true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-Semitism the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that? They may perhaps forget in one or two generations' time, but for the moment there is no chance. So, it's simple: we have to stay strong and maintain a powerful army. Our whole policy is there. Otherwise, the Arabs will wipe us out.? I will be seventy years old soon. ?If you asked me whether I shall die and be buried in a Jewish state I would tell you Yes; in ten years, fifteen years, I believe there will still be a Jewish state. But ask me whether my son Amos, who will be fifty at the end of this year, has a chance of dying and being buried in a Jewish state, and I would answer: fifty-fifty."

Which brings me to the Hamas war.? A friend of mine with a master’s degree in international politics, who lived in Amman, Jordan, for 9 months and traveled extensively in Syria, said the following to me: “No country has the right to exist.? Countries are here because A) they have the military might to protect their borders, and B) they can provide internally for the reasonable needs of the inhabitants of their country.”? This sounded, at first, cold and harsh; what about the “Shining City on the Hill.”? Well, even that, a quote from John Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, becomes tainted with the history of human conquest that has created nearly every country that now exists.? The only “aboriginal” country that I could find is Greenland where, today, 90% of the citizens are Inuit and the governing leaders come from the tribe.? But this is rare.? Winthrop eventually performed his own Nakba.? Here is the Wiki entry:

However, cultural differences and trade issues between the colonists and the Indians meant that clashes were inevitable, and the?Pequot War?was the first major conflict in which the colony engaged. Winthrop sat on the council which decided to send an expedition under John Endecott to raid Indian villages on?Block Island?in the war's first major action.[100]?Winthrop's communication with Williams encouraged Williams to convince the?Narragansetts?to side with the colonists against the Pequots, who were their traditional enemies.[101]?The war ended in 1637 with the destruction of the Pequots as a tribe, whose survivors were scattered into other tribes or shipped to the?West Indies.[102]

Therefore, the comment that Countries are here because they have the military might to protect their borders and can provide internally for the reasonable needs of the inhabitants, is seemingly very logical and consistent, as it can be applied to nearly all countries today.? It is not “nice” or “noble”; it is simply the historical legacy of humans as they populated the planet.

Israel exists because it has fought off efforts to destroy its borders since the first war against the nation was launched within months of its founding in 1948.? Many today probably assume that it was US or British weapons and training that allowed the Israeli fighters to win that first war.? My understanding is that it was Czechoslovakia that sold the weapons to the Israeli forces.? Going back to my thoughts above, it is not clear to me that the US or Britain really wanted Israel to succeed in 1948.

I think it is obvious that asking today if Israel is in the right or the Palestinians (represented now by Hamas) are in the right is the wrong question.? A better question might be: why has this conflict continued, largely uninterrupted, for about 104 years, dating from the first Arab revolt after the Balfour Declaration?? I could spend another 1500 or 3000 words on this essay trying to defend either side in its actions, but an easier answer is that we are watching, in real time, on Instagram, a proxy war between fundamentalist Islam and post-enlightenment Democracy.? The Levant is the crucible.? It is very dangerous because an unthoughtful action on either side by Israel, Iran, the USA, or another party could lead to WW3.? Or, maybe, another way to look at it is that this is a continuation of a single war that began in 1914 as 18th and 19th century empires crumbled, and a clean resolution of West versus East has yet to be achieved.

I hope it is clear from this that I am not taking sides in the current conflict. This is an effort to add some nuanced thinking and history to a horrible and horrific chain of events now happening in the Levant.