Palestine and Israel—One State, Two States
or ????
Palestinian boy
HISTORY BOOK CLUB MEETING Wed. Feb. 27,
2013
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
فلسطين ישראל
Rockport’s
History Book Club meets monthly at Rockport Public Library. If you live nearby, we invite you to join
us. Next month we’ll read and discuss
books on modern history of Mexico
and Central America. For details, see the end of this post.
"To move back from the
edge of this abyss, (Israeli and Palestinian) leaders and their societies alike
must now begin to acknowledge that the writing of their own unfinished story
depends, in great part, on the ability of the other society to continue writing
its story."—Kimmerling and Migdal, The Palestinian People, 2003.
On February 27th, Rockport’s History Book Club met to discuss Israel and Palestine in the 20th and 21st centuries. Following are reviews of books that members read.
Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal, The Palestinian People: A
History, 2003.Harvard
University Press
The Israelis we know. Some of them have strong
Jewish roots in the Zionist movement that began in the 1880s.
Others were Jews who came to Palestine
from all over the world after World War II, determined to establish an
internationally recognized Jewish homeland after the terrible years of the
Holocaust. By well-planned force of arms, they carved out the Jewish
state of Israel
which has become a vibrant democracy with a strong economy.
But who are the Palestinians? What are their
roots? Are they a nation, too, as their leadership forcefully contends?
These questions and many more shape an important and
highly informative book, written by two highly regarded teachers and
scholars of the politics, sociology, and history of the
interminable Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The authors are the
late Baruch Kimmerling, Professor of Sociology at the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem at the time of publication, and Joel S. Migdal, currently Robert
F. Philip Professor of International Studies at the University of Washington
who has also taught at Harvard and Tel-Aviv University.
On the highly contentious question about Palestinian
nationality, Kimmerling and Migdal disagree with the conventional
interpretations repeated by both Palestinian and Israeli historians.
Palestinian historiography takes the position that Palestinians have always
been a singular people whose solidarity and cohesion date back to the Fertile Crescent. Conversely, Israeli scholars
assert that no self-identified Palestinian people ever existed until the Arabs
living in the region's villages and cities began to struggle
against Zionism and Jewish settlement.
No one could have presented this
historical perspective better than Golda Meier, prime minister of Israel
from 1969 to 1974. She said:
"There was no
such thing as Palestinians. When was there an independent Palestinian
people with a Palestinian state?......It was not as though there was a
Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and
we came and threw them out and took their country from them. They did not
exist."
In response to the Israeli and Palestinian
interpretations, Kimmerling and Migdal construct a strong argument from recent
scholarship that Palestinian identity began to emerge at a grassroots village
and city level in the early years of the nineteenth century when the
region's Arab populations began to encounter European market society and
government administration. Later in the century this identity became
stronger in reaction to Zionism and Jewish settlement.
In taking a strong position against established
Israeli historiography, Baruch Kimmerling was considered one of the New
Historians of the last quarter of the twentieth century in Israel.
The New Historians not only questioned the official historical narrative
of the Israeli state but most importantly became outspoken critics of
government policy toward the Palestinians.
In finding the roots of Palestinian identity in the
nineteenth century, Kimmerling and Migdal open their presentation with several
well-crafted chapters on Palestinian society and economy in the nineteenth
century. The Ottomans controlled Palestine except for a brief period
in the 1830s when an upstart Egyptian governor overran the region and allowed
his son to rule with a heavy hand that brought rebellion by the Palestinian
population, a revolt that is still seen as a formative time of Palestinian
identity because of the atrocities committed by the Egyptian forces in
curtailing the opposition.
After the Ottomans reestablished control of Palestine in 1840, the
Palestinian peoples prospered for the rest of the century, according
to the authors.
"Palestine on the eve
of the Great War scarcely resembled the country of a century earlier. It
was now a land connected to Europe by
railroads, shipping lines, and a telegraph network. It joined Europe, too, through the increased number of Europeans,
both Jews and gentiles, now appearing on the docks almost daily; by the cinema;
and by the European plays that began to be staged in 1911. More and more,
the notable Arab families sent their children to foreign schools in the
country, or even abroad. Life in Jaffa, Haifa, and Gaza
resembled that in other Mediterranean cities---Marseilles,
Athens, Beirut,
and Alexandria---more
than the towns of the Palestinian hinterland."
Kimmerling and Migdal tell us that while the empire
of the Ottomans may have been crumbling elsewhere, in Palestine there were no wars, no major
revolts, and much less internal violence. Then everything
changed with the war to end all wars. British troops arrived to
replace the Ottomans after the war. Very little would go right for the Palestinians
in the twentieth century.
During the interwar period the British mandate was
harsh. Increased Jewish immigration brought growing ethnic
friction. Arab rebellion against British rule in the years 1936
to1939 was severely suppressed by thousands of additional British
troops. The authors also mention that the increasingly capable
Jewish leadership mobilized 15,000 armed militia to protect Jewish
settlers. Palestinian leadership
was demoralized and decimated.
When Jewish forces mobilized to take control of Palestine in 1948, the
Palestinians were unable to respond. The Jews won Palestine. Thousands of
Palestinians were herded into refugee camps that still exist today, more than
sixty years later. Hundreds of Palestinian villages were deserted.
The British left. The new state of Israel was born.
The telling of this history by Kimmerling and Migdal does
not glorify or condemn either Palestinians or
Israelis. Their ambition is not to support either side's
interpretation but to offer their own. They are critical of leaders on
both sides for their inability to understand the suffering of their opposite,
the other.
What they want to do is to challenge the too-easy
answers inherent in the national myths told by both Israelis and Palestinians. They
want to change the relationship between the two peoples in order to
find a way Palestinians and Israelis can accept each other on the tiny piece of
earthly space that each has claimed for itself.
The authors approach this well-written, extraordinarily
detailed work as historians using the tools of sociology and political
science and not as partisans for one side or the other. They
conclude:
"To move back from the edge of this
abyss, (Israeli and Palestinian) leaders and their societies alike must now
begin to acknowledge that the writing of their own unfinished story depends, in
great part, on the ability of the other society to continue writing its
story."
Kimmerling died a few years ago. Migdal has moved
onto other projects in international studies at the University of Washington.
Tragically, Israelis and Palestinians still cannot talk to
each other. They cannot hear the other's historical narrative.
Without recognition, there can be no peace, no future for either people.
--Rick Heuser
Tyler, Patrick, Fortress Israel:
The Inside Story of the Military Elite Who Run the Country, and Why They Can’t
Make Peace. 2012.
Patrick Tyler has spent 30 years as a journalist in
many overseas assignments, first for the Washington Post as their Near East
reporter and then for 18 years as bureau chief for the New York Times in
Moscow, Beijing, Baghdad and London.
Fortress Israel
is his third book on international relations and history. Tyler’s thesis
is that a peaceful solution to the Palestine/Israel situation has failed
because harsh military force was preferred to diplomacy by Israel leadership, which has always
been dominated by hard-liners.
Westerners have been encouraged to view Israel as a tiny besieged democracy in a sea of Arab
hostility. Israel’s leaders have preached that
their dominant national focus is the pursuit of peace. However, Moshe Sharett, the Jewish state’s
second prime minister, documented in his journals: military ambition too often
smothered moral aspirations so coveted by the founding Zionists.
Today Israel
has formidable constituencies in the free world, lending economic and military
support to encourage “shared values” in less than a decade. Under the strong armed leadership of David
Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister, Israel
fielded the most powerful army and air force in the Middle
East. Then, with the help
of France,
it secretly became a nuclear power. By
the time the United States
got deeply involved in arming Israel
during the late 1960s, Israel
had already defeated the Arabs in two rounds of war.
After the Six Days’ War in 1967, any thoughts of
relinquishing hard-won occupied territory was a moot point for the cabinet and
military.
The Israelis had good cause to be unforgiving in settling
claims with any Arab foe. From the
outset, Arab leaders, with few exceptions, displayed a deep hatred towards a
Jewish homeland and Zionist dreams. The Muslim leaders rejected Palestinian a
United Nations partition plan in 1947 and showed no sympathy for a people
almost annihilated in Europe. The Jews stood alone, hated by all their
neighbors.
This book seeks to explain how Israel’s militarily dominated
society has ruined many chances for reconciliation with neighboring foes. Only Egypt was able to secure a peaceful
solution to the chaos in the Sinai. Israel
had the solid opportunity to build on this great success but the unremitted
distrust within the Israeli power brokers stalled any other peace accords.
Jordan
was ready to accept new borders and thousands of refugees. The United
States guaranteed the Golan Heights as a neutral zone,
allaying all impediments to a pact between Syria
and Israel. Lebanon was battered by war on
three fronts and desperately wanted a solution to the political nightmare. Years passed, the borders remained scenes of
carnage.
After seven wars and hundreds of terrorist attacks, over
60 years, the same military elitism dominates all political decisions in Israel
with no end in sight. This military
force has worked for the Jewish state.
The real question, according to Tyler,
is whether diplomacy instead of force would have yielded better peace solutions
with the Palestinians.
--- Richard Varrengia
Palestinian schoolchildren
at Jenin
Gerner, Deborah L., One
Land, Two Peoples: The Conflict Over Palestine, 1991,
Westview Press.
Deborah Gerner is an assistant professor of political
science at the University of Kansas, and a lecturer on U.S.
foreign policy in relation to the Middle East. Her book is one of six in a collection, Dilemmas in World Politics,
written for introductory classes at the college level. The text is augmented by an extensive
chronology, maps, photos, charts, tables and five discussion questions per
chapter that serve to direct the reader’s attention to key issues.
Gerner describes the conflict over Israel and Palestine
as one of the most significant and difficult dilemmas facing the international
community. She lists a dozen fundamental concerns, among which are national
identity, self-determination, the role of non-state powers, the impact of
violence in conflict resolution, strategic location, natural resources and
religion in politics. Four of these
factors provide the themes that run through the four long chapters that make up
the book.
Search for
National Identity and Self Determination.
Israelites ruled the area intermittently beginning with Abraham around
2000 BCE, and were finally driven out, first by the Babylonians in the 6th
century BCED and then by the Romans in 135 CE.
They’ve lived in other parts of the world, but they’ve retained their
religion and culture and continued to view Palestine as their homeland. Late in the 19th century a Zionist
movement began, which inspired European Jews to migrate back to Palestine.
The Palestinian Arabs occupied the land at the eastern
end of the Mediterranean continuously since
the 7th century, although ruled by a succession of subjugators, and
never as an independent nation. By the
mid-15th century in Europe people
began to shift from loyalty to the church to formation of nation states, e.e.
political unites with fixed territory and population. However, people in the Levant, under control
of the Ottoman Empire were slow to join this
change. When the British succeeded the
Ottomans in 1918 they kept a tight lid on the Arabs, even forcing their leaders
into exile in Tunisia. In 1948 when the Americans and British
cooperated to allow the Jews to emigrate to Palestine,
many Palestinians were forced from their homes, often into squalid refugee
camps, in Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, Syria
and Iraq.
Pressures by
External Powers that have manipulated the conflict to enhance their own
interests. Britain, the U.S., France
and Russia,
over the years, have been involved in this debate for many reasons. Oil, strategic alignments, Cold-War
side-taking, socialism, military,
economic factors are among the pressures.
Domestic factors
within each side that influence attitudes and actions and make efforts to
resolve the conflict so complicated. Gerner lists eight political organizations
that the PLO has to deal with and Israel had 14 smaller political
groups. Then there are dissenting
religious groups, especially among the Jews.
Efforts of
international interest groups attempting to mediate the conflict and the
failure of their involvement to bring about a lasting solution. Participation by nations and
organizations has contributed to the extreme violence, especially in supplying
arms and money, but international actions have also played constructive roles.
In Gerner’s view, no solution will work but the Two-State
Solution. In 2013 it looks like she’s
right, as over 60% of members of the U.N. have accepted Palestine as a non-member observer state,
an upgrade over being labeled an “entity”.
--Beverly Varrengia
Morris, Benny, One
State, Two
States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine
Conflict, 2009, New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press. 240 pp.
Americans have followed the drama of Israel since its creation in 1948,
and Benny Morris does a good job of filling in some of the blank spots, at
least in this reader’s understanding.
Although Morris wants us to get an impartial view, this
Professor of History at Ben Gurion University
in Israel
does not give us anything which might approximate the Arab point of view. I have had Arabs and friends of Arabs try to
give me their point of view before, and I was unable to take it on board. I found that the whole matter of deciding
upon a place for a home for the Jews was one that was doomed to cause conflict
no matter where it ended up.
Arabs don’t agree, but the Jews have a pretty solid prior
claim to the Land
of Milk and Honey, going
back over 6000 years.
Morris tells about the first gathering of Zionists in
1882, which began the drive to find a national homeland. The assassination of
Tsar Alexander II in 1881 set off a wave of pogroms in Russia and led to the idea of a
Zionist organization. Alexander had been a very liberal tsar, freeing the serfs
and allowing Jewish merchants in certain areas (that is the “Pale of
Settlement”) to join guilds, and some
Jewish children could attend schools.
Alexander was assassinated by
an anarchist, atheistic group called “The People’s Will”, but one of the
assassins had Jewish heritage.
After centuries of
being abused and murdered, with large and small pogroms, the Jews were fed up
with always being a minority in any setting.
The Arabs in Palestine
first developed a national consciousness as Palestinians in the early
1920s. Up to then, the Arabs who lived
in Palestine
were simply Arabs. They were the
majority in a land with a significant minority of Jews (800,000 to 160,000 in
1928).
The extermination of some 6,000,000 Jews by Hitler in
World War II created an international impetus to find a home for the Jews. Britain,
which had captured Palestine in World War I, had
been leaning toward Palestine
as a national home for the Jews since then.
The final decision to bring Jews displaced from Europe fell to President
Harry Truman, with agreement of Great
Britain, and approval of the United
Nations.
The central
question in this book is whether the area between the Jordan and the
Mediterranean which was set aside for the Jews and the Palestinian Arabs would
be One Nation or Two, whether there should be a Jewish nation alongside a
Palestinian nation, or one nation, partitioned.
That is the question that has swirled about since
1948. The Jews knew what it was like to
be the minority. They had done that for
ages, and they would not permit that.
Being a Jewish minority with
a majority of Arabs? They would be
exterminated.
The Arabs bitterly resented having the Jews land in Palestine, and they fought
it, resisted it, hated it, in every way, from the start until now.
Could there be a Palestinian state existing in the West
Bank and Gaza, as well as Israel? Palestinians have bitterly objected, and have
never relented in their demand for ejection of the Jews and “the Right of
Return” to the homes from which they had been removed when the Jews arrived.
Morris details the many discussions and agreements, or
semi-agreements or non-agreements that have tossed around various peace
arrangements. There was the United
Nations General Assembly partitioning of November 1947;
The Six-day War of 1967 which
resulted in huge loss of territory by the Arabs;
The Allon Plan of 1967-68
giving back some land to the Arabs, but retaining a strip along the Jordan;
And there was the infuriating meeting hosted by President
Clinton at Camp David in July 2000, that ended with Yasser Arafat not agreeing
to anything.
The Palestinians have steadfastly opposed any plan that
gives them land, including part of Jerusalem,
most of the West Bank, etc., etc. as long as
the Jews are still around.
The British and Americans did a heroic think in making
the way for Jews to build Israel. I’m sure all Muslims, especially Arabs, think
that move was Satanic. Some Americans
think it was, as well.
As I finished this book, I asked myself: What will it
take to have peace between Palestinians and Israelis?
-- Samuel W. Coulbourn
Also attending this meeting was Beth Ingram, who did not report on a book. We welcome interested persons, even if they
have not read a book on the subject we are discussing. We had a lively, interesting exchange. But we did not achieve a recommended
solution.
NEXT MONTH: We
will meet at Rockport Library on Wed. Mar. 27th at 7 p.m. to discuss
Mexico and Central
America in the 20th and 21st Centuries. Please join us!
April 24th: In April, we’ll read about Africa,
from 1900 to 2013. Any subject—the independence movement of the 1960s, Rwanda,
the Congo, Zimbabwe and Mugabe,
South Africa and Mandela, Idi Amin and Uganda, Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan, Chad,
Niger, Burkina Faso, Angola, Tunisia, Algeria ---- your choice!
In
May we’re looking at BRIC-- four big,
powerful countries all in a similar stage of advanced economic
development: Brazil, Russia, India and China.
We’ll meet May 29th.
Wed. June 26: Women's Suffrage and other
Women's Movements from 1900 to 2013.
OR, Female oppression
from 19th cent. on. Your choice!
Wed. July 31: Labor Movement in America 1900-2000. Eugene V. Debs, Triangle Shirtwaist, ILGWU, the Wobblies, CIO, AFL, John L. Lewis, David Dubinsky, more.
Wed. Aug. 28: America and its wars or near
wars with European powers, viz.: France, Spain and England. Starts with
the French and Indian War. Takes in the Monroe Doctrine. Could go all the way
to the Spanish American War.
Wed. Sep. 25: History of political revolutions and their commonalities
Wed. Oct. 30: History of the North Shore. That opens the way to looking at the rich
history of the Gloucester fishing industry, Essex boat building, the fashionable
summer resorts in Manchester and Magnolia at the end of the nineteenth century,
etc.
Wed. Nov. 27: The Industrial Revolution in America. [You
might wish to home in on the textile industry in New England in the 19th
c.]
December-- no meeting.
Next topics:
History of life changing
inventions
Tribalism in the 20th-21st cents.
Political corruption and its
effects on government
