Most of us, I hope, have a far more nuanced understanding of the conflict. Those who look at the dispute with a modicum of seriousness recognize that it is essentially a clash between two nationalisms, Jewish and Palestinian Arab. In my opinion, both are legitimate. At its heart, Zionism advances the premise that the Diaspora Jews should return to their historic homeland of Eretz Yisrael and form therein a sovereign state, because history has demonstrated that Jews cannot rely on assimilation or the tolerance of the Gentiles for their survival. Palestinian Arab nationalism argues that, because the territory of Filastin had a predominately Arab character throughout most of the period following the Roman expulsion of the Jews (even though a Jewish presence did remain), it ought to be an Arab state. At the present, both national claims stand on relatively solid ground. Israel is an incontrovertible fact, recognized within its pre-1967 borders by almost all the world. Reasonable people also believe that in the predominantly Arab territories captured by the Israelis in 1967, a Palestinian Arab state should come into being.
The problem lies with those on both sides who remain convinced that the conflict is simplicity itself, who remain blindly obedient to the most extreme vision of their national ideal (or the one with which they sympathize) without considering the logic on the other side. For Palestinians, it may make one’s case more clear-cut to ignore historical Jewish connections to and the millennia-long Jewish presence in Palestine, but such omission flies in the face of established fact. It may be easy to declare that Zionism is an inherently and singularly racist ideology, but to do so discounts as illegitimate the natural aspiration of a nation for political actualization in its homeland. Ask a Kurd, a Tibetan or a Saharawi if they find Zionism to be a ludicrous proposition. It may be simple and morally satisfying to contend that Israel was a state born into the sins of expulsion and war crimes, but more honest to recognize that many factors, including Arab propaganda, caused the mass Arab flight of 1948, not just expulsions carried out by Jewish forces. Also, Israel is hardly the only country whose founding involved forced population transfer. To try to delegitimize Israel by recalling the more unsavory events of 1948 calls into deep question the “right to exist” of states as far-flung as the United States, Australia, India, Pakistan and many of the modern states of Central and Eastern Europe.
Obviously, this sort of unbalanced viewpoint is hardly limited to anti-Zionist ideologues. There are many in Israel, and among its supporters, who conceive of the conflict in a way that leaves little room for compromise. I speak here of those who adhere to the “Whole Land of Israel,” the maximalist philosophy that holds that the Jews are biblically entitled — indeed obligated — to control Israel-Palestine from the Jordan to the Mediterranean and who view maintaining this suzerainty as more important than preserving Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. They argue that Jordan is the true Palestinian homeland and West Bank Palestinians are Jordanian subjects living on Israeli land, meaning that Israel can hold onto the West Bank while denying citizenship to its Arab inhabitants. While this position might appear to have superficial value because of Jordan’s Palestinian majority and the fact that West Bank Palestinians were Jordanian citizens until 1988, the “Greater Israel” partisans’ denial of Palestinian nationality remains as unjustifiable as its mirror image in Hamas and Islamic Jihad and no more grounded in geopolitical reality. The “Greater Israel” fanatics ignore the fact that Jordan would never agree to take back the West Bank’s restive Palestinian population, let alone do so without regaining the territory itself. They ignore the reality that, short of expelling the Palestinians from the territories, holding on to Greater Israel would force Israel to choose between its Jewish identity and its democracy. It’s little wonder that many Greater Israel adherents believe in the imminent appearance of the Messiah, at which point, presumably, these issues would become null.
As the radical Right and Islamist factions grow more powerful in Israel and the Palestinian territories, respectively, it becomes even more important for those of us who care about preserving a mutually acceptable peace to be attentive to the nuanced nature of the conflict and to spurn the head-in-the-sand self-righteousness that only breeds more polarization. I encourage those who are sympathetic to the Palestinians to refrain from overly lionizing Hamas, and from bandying about terms like “apartheid” in defining the politics and society of the State of Israel. With regard to the first point, portraying Hamas as a heroic resistance force bypasses the fact that the group’s current position extends beyond liberating the Occupied Territories to include driving the Jews into the Mediterranean. In pursuit of those aims, lest one forget, Hamas has proven quite willing to use its Gazan constituents as cannon fodder, and has a long-running program (unlike Israel) of actively targeting enemy civilians, its weapon of choice being the explosive-laden Palestinian teenager.
With regard to the second point, declaring Israel to be an “apartheid state” is simply factually false. Under apartheid, a small minority of whites ruled over a large majority of blacks within South African territory, denying the blacks all political rights and social advancement, and rigidly segregating society. In pre-1967 Israel, there are almost four times as many Jews as Arabs. Arabs can vote (11 representatives from non-Zionist Arab-led parties sit in the Knesset), are allowed in all public places, attend university and advance in all walks of society. While strides need to be made to ensure greater equality and Arab cultural participation, Arabs in Israel are, in aggregate, as well or better off than their brethren in Arab states. Nor does the situation in the Occupied Territories constitute apartheid. While Palestinians certainly have little freedom of movement and few political or civil rights, the fact remains that Israel has not annexed the territories for itself. Thus, so long as the West Bank remains a zone of military occupation, the system in place there remains fundamentally different from apartheid, which was intended to be the permanent socio-political system in South Africa.
Divestment is probably the most troubling manifestation of the unbalanced pro-Palestinian outlook. Academic divestments have famously been utilized against apartheid South Africa and Sudan, and to lump Israel’s wrongdoings in with those malevolent regimes is to make a mockery of morality. Anyone with a sense of fairness will agree that there are scores of states far more worthy of divestment than Israel. To be sure, the occupation is repressive. At the same time, to demand that Israel leave the West Bank on pain of divestment demonstrates a profound lack of concern for Israel’s legitimate security needs. If one recalls, Israel’s last two withdrawals (Lebanon and Gaza) created power vacuums that were filled by Hezbollah and Hamas, respectively. For Israel to withdraw from the West Bank unilaterally would put every Israeli citizen under risk of rocket fire. Israelis, even on the Left, dismiss divestment as a frontal and anti-Jewish attack on the state’s ability to defend itself. Those who advocate it, like supporters of Hamas, place themselves on the fringe of the political scene.
Those who, like myself, are more sympathetic to the Israeli side should hew to similar moderate positions and rhetoric. We need to be careful not to be uncritical of Israel when it acts badly, a trap into which many stalwart supporters of Israel fall, and one that encourages Israel to perpetuate flawed policies. When the Israelis use white phosphorus in Gaza or are tardy in allowing medical and humanitarian aid to reach civilians, we need to remind them that we don’t find such behavior acceptable. We need to move toward improving the lot of Arabs in Israeli society by pressing for more affirmative action, an end to the remaining discriminatory laws, the provision of better government services to the Arab sector and the isolation of racist anti-Arab political parties. We need to demand that the Israeli government stand up to outrages committed by settlers and other radical Jews, notably the annual assaults on the Palestinian olive harvest. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we need to be clear with Israel that our support for its national rights does not extend to an endorsement of trampling those of the Palestinians. True friends of Israel must make it known that the only acceptable solution is of the two-state variety, and that we will not stand by and allow a clique of messianic settlers to destroy Israel’s Jewish and democratic identity. We must make Israel aware that when the Obama administration applies pressure to halt settlement expansion, we will support the president for the good of Israel.
For too long, moderate sympathizers of Israel and the Palestinians have allowed the hard-liners to control the agenda in propaganda and diplomatic battles. In doing so, they have perpetuated the myth that the conflict is a simple zero-sum game. I disagree. I hold that a better future awaits both Israelis and Palestinians if they accept the permanence of each other’s presence in the region and the fact that the conflict has two sides, each with legitimate claims. As people of good will, we must work towards the achievement of that outcome, which means rejecting Greater Israel, settlement growth, Palestinian rejectionism and Islamic terrorism, and recognizing that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a multifaceted affair that can have but one just ending — two states for two peoples.