“As Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said on the White House lawn in 1993 during the Oslo Accords, the progenitor initiative of what is required exactly now: ‘Enough of blood and tears. Enough.”
“Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.”
This is Charles Dickens in Hard Times, the English tory socialist’s condition-of-England novel of 1854, a broadside against the crass, materialistic utilitarianism that defined the spirit of the age, dedicated to his reactionary friend, the fellow writer and labor sympathizer, Thomas Carlyle. Substitute “Interpretations” for “Facts” and add a question mark in brackets after the phrase “boys and girls,” and we have the spirit of the third decade of the 21st century. If Jeremy Bentham was the eminent grise of early industrial British society, then Friedrich Nietzsche, refracted, to be sure, through woke ideologues such as Judith Butler on the Left and juvenile neo-reactionaries such as Nick Land and Curtis Yarvin on the Right, is the guiding intellectual light of our time. “There are no facts, only interpretations;” facts, sorry, interpretations, are what the powerful say they are.
Broadly correct, this fact—sorry, interpretation—is also deeply facile. However paltry the evidence, however dominant the paradigm, we cannot dispense with facts and the pursuit of objective knowledge. Just because truth can, it seems, only ever be provisional, that is no reason to thrust it aside in favor of simple assertion; yet thrust it aside we have.
Nowhere perhaps is this more disgracefully clear than in the journalistic coverage of the current war Israel is waging on Hamas, after the Gaza-based terrorist organization’s cruel and deadly assault on Israeli citizens and security forces on October 7th of last year, an equally misreported event in international media. As the British journalist Aris Roussinos has argued, the conflict between Israel and Palestine has become a proxy for other tribal loyalties, relating to the misnamed culture wars which have divided many Western nations down the middle.
The Left, frequently showing contempt for the destruction of innocent Israeli lives on October 7th, in some cases even applauding the massacre, describing the deplorable event on X, for example, as “a day of celebration for supporters of democracy and human rights worldwide,” typically insist that Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza while offering only tenuous evidence to support this poorly formulated claim. The Right, meanwhile, obsessed with Muslim asylum seekers and increasingly Islamophobic, circulated allegations—seemingly untrue—that Hamas terrorists beheaded 40 Israeli babies and equate the Palestinian flag and disdain for unjust Israeli aggression toward the Palestinians with apologism for terrorism, tout court.
There is, in short, a complexity deficit, as well as an empathy deficit, in both the Left trench and the Right trench of the so-called culture war. The purpose of this article is not to provide a conclusive answer to the question of whether or not Israel, or particular Israelis, are committing genocide in Gaza or have the intention to do so, though it will argue that the conceptual cap fits in certain instances. In the light of the fact that Israel, for good reason or not, proscribes foreign journalists from entering Gaza, allowing only short visits embedded with the Israeli military, and that it would be unwise perhaps to suppose that many Palestinian journalists could be trusted to report events impartially, it would be sensible, or respectful rather—expedient even—to be cautious about the utterances one issues in public on this matter.
Words are also deeds, after all. Sometimes, they have tangible consequences. They have the potential to create an environment where persecution of certain groups of people becomes legitimate, where violence against them becomes licit.
II.
Ethnicism against Jewish people on the Left is hardly new. Karl Marx, the son of a converted Prussian Jew, traded in sloppy stereotypes in “On the Jewish Question,” written in 1843, for example—a time, that is, when Jews were being abused and discriminated against in the German states following the short period of Napoleon Bonaparte’s liberatory rule there. Under the guise of a utopian universalism, socialists have continued to advance prejudicial opinions and remarks about Jewish people ever since, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party providing a particularly egregious case in point. Now Jean Luc Mélenchon, a man also guilty of anti-Jewish bigotry, with an instrumental approach to Islamic extremism, may well become the next President of France. The Right’s relationship to anti-Jewishness, meanwhile, needs little introduction.
The current slew of far-right parties in Europe are of course generally supportive of Israel. Anti-Muslim, as opposed to anti-Jew, the question is merely how long that will last. For those animated by fear or hatred tend to locate new scapegoats when their old scapegoats have expired. Anti-Jewishness, moreover, has deep roots in Europe. In 1947, just two years after the end of the Holocaust, even liberal Britain was subject to anti-Jewish riots with Jewish synagogues, property, and people attacked and the language of the Third Reich deployed in the streets following bigoted anti-Jewish statements by Labour’s Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin and The Sunday Times newspaper. It is worth remembering that the post-War British Conservative Party was far from sympathetic to Israel. It was Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who helped rescue a young Austrian Jewish girl, her sister’s pen pal, during the War, who was primarily responsible for changing that.
The irony, at any rate, so far as the Left is concerned, is that the less safe Europe and the United States are for Jewish people, the more inclined Israel will become to expand its territory, making a just settlement of the historic conflict between the two nations close to impossible. A small number of socialists has perhaps recognized the impasse, noting the Left’s failure properly to criticize Hamas or indeed the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), reminding their audience of the existence of class as well as nation. For the most part, however, the Left cleaves to romanticism, speaking of Palestine, prior to the formation of Israel, as “a paradise,” or the Palestinian cause as “wedded to international justice, to solidarity among oppressed peoples, and to the preservation of a rules-based order.” The charge of genocide is also often weaponized against Israel by the Left, who—unfathomably—increasingly resents the fact that European Jewish history is a history of almost continuous ill-treatment, culminating in industrial slaughter in Nazi-occupied Europe. I am, for obvious reasons, reluctant to use the phrase, but “Holocaust envy” accurately describes this phenomenon.
Blighted by anger at various Israeli governments’ mistreatment of the Palestinians and the actions of different groups of Jewish extremists in the West Bank, the Left typically engages in desultory utopianism, arguing that “anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism” ought not to be conflated. Yet, despite drawing parallels between the current situation in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank and events in Nazi Germany—not all of which are without credence—as far as I am aware, not a single Western Leftist has joined Hamas’ fight against the Israeli military. That is the preserve it seems of other Iranian sponsored Islamist groups in the region, not natural allies of the modern secular Left.
Hamas is a tyrannical, nationalist, relatively moderate (for what that is worth) Islamist terrorist group. The genocidal actions and intentions of its leaders should not be overlooked. Nor should the power of anti-Zionism in the broader region be ignored. If the Left is guilty of exaggerating for effect, critics of Israel are also culpable of credulity. Francesca Albanese, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, for instance, said the following: “When assessing genocide, one is to look at the words spoken by leaders, but also the capacity to commit genocide, which Hamas per se doesn’t seem to have.”
Little wonder, then, that even among Israelis who “recognize the injustice of the occupation” and “profess a love for humanity,” at this moment “this is not what they are focused on,” feeling instead, according to the Israel-born historian Omer Bartov, “that in the struggle between justice and existence, existence must win out.” It is a salutary reminder, perhaps, that imprudence begets imprudence, that radicalization does not occur in a vacuum but is context-dependent and frequently cumulative. For Israel has not always been an aggressively colonizing nation, and the majority of Israelis has not always been Right-wing and illiberal. Indeed, it was only last year that 80,000 Israeli citizens were out on the streets of Tel Aviv, protesting against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s unprecedentedly extreme government’s plans to overhaul the judiciary, undermining the democracy’s separation of powers and capacity to protect the rights of minorities.
It is against the backdrop of the failure of Russia and China to condemn Hamas’ massacre of innocent Israeli civilians in October, alongside the Western Left’s anti-Zionism and anti-Jewish sentiments and behavior, that the overwhelming support among Israelis for their government’s aggressive and often dehumanizing approach to Palestinian combatants and civilians in Gaza should be understood.
This article will examine three related topics. First, it will investigate the claim that Israel is indeed committing genocide in Gaza. It will do this in a perfunctory way. Second, it will consider the historical context in which conflict between Israel and Palestine plays out. And, third, it will propose, with hesitation, “A Temporaneous Solution to the Israel-Palestine Problem.” Pace Roussinos, the Israel-Palestine conflict did not “cease to be a matter for British involvement at midnight precisely on May 14, 1948.” On the contrary, given Britain’s callous mishandling of its governance in Mandate Palestine, it is especially obligated to seek a just and lasting settlement. Britain, moreover, as Roussinos has also pointed out, is a country on its knees: If it has one reliable export to trade on world markets, it is its tradition of ethical liberalism—its commitment to the rule of law, tolerance, fairness, decency, compromise, gradualism, and, ultimately, progress.
III.
In November of 2024, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for both Prime Minister Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, Israel’s former Defense Minister. At the same time an arrest warrant was issued for Hamas leader Mohammed Deif. They were all accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity, the former accused of bearing “criminal responsibility” for causing mass starvation in Gaza, the latter believed to be responsible for crimes against humanity and war crimes including murder, torture, rape, and hostage taking. War crimes and crimes against humanity are not the same as genocide. Yet, a case was also brought against Israel, accusing it of genocide, by South Africa in the International Court of Justice in December of 2023. The case is ongoing.
According to the Genocide Convention, the international treaty criminalizing genocide, ratified by 153 countries, which went into effect in 1951, genocide is “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:” (1) killing members of the group; (2) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (3) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (4) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and (5) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. While the International Criminal Court prosecutes individuals, at the International Court of Justice a nation must bring genocide charges against another nation, furnishing evidence that the state as a whole is culpable, not just specific individuals.
Genocide has been a more or less permanent feature of human history. Veracity aside, the first reports of genocide can be found in the Hebrew Bible, in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian Wars, the Old Testament, and in the works of Homer, among other ancient sources. But there are only three genocides which have been officially recognized as such under the terms of the Genocide Convention which led, accordingly, to trials in international criminal tribunals, namely the Srebrenica Massacre in Bosnia in 1995, the Rwandan Genocide in 1994, and the genocide perpetrated by Khmer Rouge leaders against Cham Muslim and ethnic Vietnamese people in Cambodia in the 1970s.
The evidence adduced to charge Israel with genocide is of mixed quality and ultimately, it seems, unpersuasive. Yet if Israel is not guilty of committing genocide in Gaza, that is not to say that numerous government officials and military personnel have not committed genocidal acts, either there or in the West Bank, or that many Israeli citizens do not express genocidal intentions toward the Palestinians.
In Nicole Narea’s article which addresses the topic in Vox, she reproduces three statements by Israeli officials cited in the International Court of Justice’s preliminary ruling. Gallant called for a “complete siege” on Gaza, proclaiming, with, he says, reference to Hamas, “we are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly;” Isaac Herzog, Israel’s President, said “it was an entire nation out there that is responsible” for Hamas’ attack on October 7th; and Israel Katz, a former Israeli minister of energy and infrastructure, and now Minister of Defense, vowed “no electric switch will be turned on, no water tap will be opened and no fuel truck” would enter Gaza until Hamas returned its Israeli hostages.
Out of keeping, certainly, with the values of a nominally modern, Western nation and, plainly, morally unacceptable, these statements, ambiguous, at any rate, extracted from their proper context and connection to Israeli action in Gaza, do not, probably, reach the threshold for what constitutes genocidal behavior. War crimes and crimes against humanity? Highly likely it seems. But it is imperative that the categories are not conflated, especially when there are potentially individuals who have committed genocide in Gaza or the West Bank.
In an article for the BBC, Natalie Merzougui and Maria Rashed provide further evidence drawn from South Africa’s case. They cite, for example, an X post by Nissim Vaturi, the deputy speaker of the Knesset, that stated: “Now we all have one common goal—erasing the Gaza strip from the face of the earth.” They invoke the link between what politicians say and what Israeli soldiers say, which formed a core part of South Africa’s case against Israel—when, for instance, a group of Israel Defense Forces soldiers chanted “Occupy, expel, and settle” in a video posted on YouTube. They mention religious leaders, such as Rabbi Eliyahu Mali who, without doubt, made remarks motivated by genocidal intent in a talk he gave for Israel’s Zionist yeshivas (religious schools). And Merzougui and Rashed discuss South Africa’s claim that Israel had failed to censure or sanction genocidal messages that are supposedly “routinely broadcast” in Israeli media.
Once more, there is nothing clear cut about any of this material. Vaturi’s odious X remark may be in some way criminal and worthy of punishment, but how it translated into practical action is an open question. If Israeli soldiers have committed genocidal acts as a result of being radicalized by Israeli politicians, it needs to be proven. The law-abiding soldiers who treat their adversaries, who they may hate, with the dignity due to all human subjects, and civilians with respect and due care, will probably not be visible on social media. In a country where church and state are not fully separated, Rabbi Eliyahu Mali’s remarks strike a particularly sinister note, but, again, his practical influence would need to be measured—investigators must establish properly the relationship between cause and effect. Finally, while Israel may have failed to punish hate speech which falls foul of its laws, this may simply be because the state is currently overburdened with other matters. Or, indeed, it could be state tactics, intended to give the state and the military free reign in Gaza.
There are, however, counterexamples to this apparent lawless and indiscriminately penalizing approach to the conflict in Gaza and beyond. In August, for example, Israel’s domestic intelligence chief Ronen Bar wrote to ministers warning that Jewish extremists in the West Bank were carrying out acts of “terror” against Palestinians and causing “indescribable damage” to the country. While right-wing ministers in Netanyahu’s coalition government, such as Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich—the leaders of Otzma Yehudit and The National Religious Party-Religious Zionism respectively—may seek the expulsion of Gazans from Gaza and large numbers of Palestinians, if not all Palestinians, from the West Bank, believing that the “Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right over all areas of the Land of Israel,” the Israeli state is not comprised exclusively of far-right religious fundamentalists.
It is the fundamentalists, at any rate, rather than those simply fearful for Israel’s security (and lacking good judgment and sound ethics) who are most likely perhaps to be guilty of genocidal acts in Gaza. It is no accident that Israeli settlers are establishing more settlements, judged illegal in international law, under the cover of war. In the year since October 7th, 171 children have been killed by Israeli settlers and soldiers in the West Bank.
Zionism, in its initial form, was an entirely secular project. Left-wing and liberal, “we do not mean to found a theocracy,” wrote Theodor Herzl, the convenor of the first Zionist Congress, in 1896, “but a tolerant modern civil state.” Recognizing the necessity for the construction of a Jewish nation state, after the attempt to assimilate to the cultures of the nations to which they belonged had ultimately been denied to them, it did not matter to Herzl if a Jewish nation state was established in Argentina, or parts of East Africa, or Palestine; “We will take what is given us,” he wrote, two years after the Dreyfus Affair began in France and the leader of an important faction of French socialists, Jules Guesde, dismissed the high-profile case of Jewish persecution as a mere squabble within the ruling class.
Zionism, on Herzl’s view, was ethnically heterogeneous too. Envisaging a polyglot nation, “We shall remain there,” he wrote, “in the new country what we now are here, and shall never cease to cherish the memory of the native land out of which we have been driven.”
Zionism is not what it was. Neither is Israel. Just as Hamas supplanted Fatah in 2006, asserting the need for the destruction of Israel and the creation of a “state of Islam,” Zionism has become increasingly religious, making possession of Jerusalem a core facet of Israeli nationhood. Historically, ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel, or Haredim, did not recognize the idea of a Jewish state. Remaining aloof from Zionism, they were exempted from military service. This is now changing with national religious Israelis like Ben-Gvin and Smotrich enthusiastically promoting their shared performance of the duty. Since 1967, “the national religious camp,” notes the historian Michael Brenner, “has developed into the spear-head of the right-wing settler movement.” Mostly opposed still to Zionism, yet subsidized by the Israeli state to live in Israel or on the West Bank, ultra-Orthodox families produce a great number more children than ordinary Israelis. If the trend continues and Ben-Gvir and Smolitch continue to drive Zionism down a religious and fanatically Right-wing path, then Israel will become a very different society with huge implications for both the Palestinians and the Jews.
IV.
At the root of the conflict between Israel and Palestine, or Zionists and Arabs or Palestinians, is a dispute over land. As the historian Martin Bunton writes, it is “a modern territorial contest,” not an “ancient and religious one.” Yet Bunton is mistaken when he claims the quarrel is between “two nations.” The quarrel, historically, has been between at least three, namely Israel, Palestine, and Jordan.
Before 1918, “Palestine” did not exist. The territory which became known as Mandate Palestine between 1920 and 1948 were districts of the Ottoman Empire: Jerusalem, Nablus, and Acre. A Palestinian national identity was forged primarily in struggle against Zionism, and local Arab notables and neighboring Arab nations sometimes promoted that and sometimes thwarted that. Aside from the morality of the various native and non-native actors—Palestinian notables, Palestinian peasants, the British, Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen—of seeking to deny the Jews a homeland away from the continent of Europe at a time when racial anti-Jewishness was in the ascendancy, reaching its horrific crescendo between 1933 and 1945, alongside the resurgence of traditional religious anti-Jewishness in Russia before the revolution in October 1917, it ought to be recognized that many of the Arab states have also behaved in a way that falls far short of noble toward the Palestinians.
Contrary to the idea that before the establishment of Israel, Palestine was an Elysian place, the reality is that in the 19th century, Palestinian peasants were poor and lived in fear of Bedouin raids. In the first half of the 20th century, absentee Arab landlords were greedy and selfish and sold land to Jewish purchasers for high prices. And, in 1936, grown weary of the economic exploitation and the political diffidence of many Arab notables who enjoyed British patronage, Palestine erupted into mass demonstrations against British rule and the Zionist project, which lasted six months. This then turned into a fully-fledged violent revolt, which was eventually put down by the British in 1939.
In 1917, a month on from the successful Bolshevik revolution which finally emancipated the Jews in Russia, the British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Lord Arthur James Balfour, famously announced that Britain viewed “with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” Between 1915 and 1916, Sir Henry McMahon, Britain’s high commissioner in Egypt, promised to recognize Sharif Hussein, the Hashemite ruler of the Hijaz region of Arabia, as ruler of an independent Arab kingdom, which appeared to include Palestine. And, in 1916, Britain and France, hoping to divide the region between themselves, agreed to place Palestine under the control of an “international administration.”
Britain, in short, was never a reliable ally of the Jews in Palestine, and two years after the anti-Jewish and racist Nuremberg Laws came into force in Nazi Germany and a year after Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists marched through the East End of London, intimidating British Jews, mostly refugees from pogroms in Russia, the Peel Commission pledged in 1937 to divide the land of Palestine between a new Jewish state and the neighboring emirate of Transjordan: 20% of the land apportioned to the former, the remaining 80% allotted to King Abdullah.
In 1939, less than a year after Kristallnacht, or the November pogrom, in Germany, which resulted in widespread destruction of Jewish lives and property and the arrest and incarceration of over 30,000 Jewish men in concentration camps, Britain abandoned the idea of partition, issuing a new White Paper that announced that Jewish immigration would be restricted to 75,000 people over a five-year period and then end, that the purchase of land by Zionists would be limited, and which called for a bi-national state.
During the war the Palestinian nationalist leader Amin al-Husseini established himself in Nazi Germany and sought assistance from Adolf Hitler in opposing the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, however territorially small and insignificant in terms of population size. And, in 1947, Britain, upholding the policies of its 1939 White Paper, turned back 4,500 Holocaust survivors, Jewish men, women, and children, who arrived in Haifa on a boat named Exodus.
Asked to remain in, and return to, the countries which had organized and participated in the industrial murder of their families, friends, and neighbors, as well as the people to whom they were connected by only dim religious and ethnic ties, it is hardly surprising that Zionists resorted to terror and expulsion to establish the state of Israel in the immediate post-war years, when Britain refused to help impose the United Nations’ benign 1947 plan for partition, titled Resolution 181. This plan, framed in moral terms by the members of the United Nations Special Committee who drafted it, was significantly more accommodating of Zionist aims than the Peel Commission. The areas proposed for the establishment of a Jewish state comprised 55% of Palestine’s territory and were rich in natural resources.
Following the withdrawal of British forces on May 15, 1948 and the subsequent invasion of Israel by seven neighboring Arab states, 750,000 Palestinians either fled or were expelled from their homes. “It was an unimaginable catastrophe,” writes Bunton unironically in Oxford University Press’s prestigious Very Short Introductions series on the topic, apparently forgetting about the Russian pogroms of the late 19th and early 20th centuries which led, directly or indirectly, to the migration of 2.5 million Russian Jews and the six million Jews exterminated in the Holocaust between 1941 and 1945, the European genocide of the Jewish people, that is, which ended only three years before the Palestinian Nakba—a tragic event also but scarcely comparable in either nature or scale.
When Bunton argues that the persecution of the Jews in Europe does not make Zionist nationalism “any more valid” than other nationalisms, he is dangerously wrong, as wrong perhaps as the writer Adam Shatz, who argues in a borderline ethnicist article in the London Review of Books that Holocaust remembrance has the status of a “civil religion” in the West. If only. Showing a phenomenal lack of respect, if not contempt, for the victims of the Holocaust and their descendants—for the principles of humanism indeed—Shatz writes that Israel’s methods in Gaza “may bear a closer resemblance to those of the French in Algeria, or the Assad regime in Syria, than to those of the Nazis in Treblinka,” but that does not mean they do not constitute genocide.
He is right of course—in essence. The suggestion, however, that there is any ambiguity about the equivalence between what the Nazis did to the Jews in Europe during the Holocaust and what Israel is currently doing to the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank is either maliciously dishonest or the result of shocking and almost unforgivable ignorance.
During the Holocaust the Jews were imprisoned, enslaved (subjected to forced labor, including the performance of sex acts in brothels), they were “scientifically” experimented on (Josef Mengele, notoriously, tortured identical twins), systematically dispossessed of their belongings, down to the hair on their bodies, and eventually they were murdered by poisoning on mass in gas chambers specifically designed for the purpose.
V.
To depict the role of the British in Palestine as consistently barbarous as far as the Jews experienced it would also be wrong. Their tutelage in Palestine was far from enlightened, but it was not, for the most part, consciously malignant. A major factor, for example, in the White Paper of 1939’s emphatic rejection of both the Balfour Declaration and the findings of the Peel Commission was the imminence of war with Nazi Germany and Britain’s capacity to fight that war effectively. Which is to say, Britain was rarely motivated by ideology in the courses it took in Palestine. On the contrary, it was constantly attempting to balance conflicting, yet not irreconcilable, interests. The Palestinian leadership, by contrast, was both inept and extreme.
Inspired by Islam, Palestinian nationalists massacred Jews in Hebron in 1929. At the same time as 170,000 Jews reached Palestine as refugees, fleeing European anti-Jewishness, the Syrian religious preacher Shaykh ‘Izz al-Din al-Qassam carried out terrorist attacks on Jewish settlements. Establishing a non-aggression pact with the Nazis in 1939 (the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact), following the war, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s communist leadership pursued a campaign against “the rootless cosmopolitan,” culminating in the persecution of a group of mostly Jewish doctors in the so-called “Doctor’s Plot” in 1953. Skipping the Arab Revolt in 1936-39, the pan-Arabist Egyptian President Gamal Abdel-Nasser, an ally of the Soviet Union, promised in the 1950s to confront what he called the “Zionist entity.” And returning directly to Palestine, members of the Palestinian militant organization Black Hand murdered Israeli athletes in a terrorist attack in Munich in 1972, the city where Hitler staged the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923, the spiritual home and testing-ground for Nazism.
After the Nakba, at any rate—and the regional war fought between Israel and her Arab neighbors—the Arab states hosting the newly homeless Palestinian refugees failed to integrate them in any meaningful way. Absorbing Palestinian territory in the West Bank, Jordan granted citizenship to the dispossessed Palestinians—the only Arab country to do so. Yet the terms of its offer of citizenship was that Palestinians “were prohibited from using the term Palestine.” Not surprisingly, the relationship between Palestinian nationalists and the Jordanian monarchy was disharmonious. Declaring war on the PLO in 1970, accusing it of creating a “state within a state” and killing 3,000 Palestinians, King Hussein expelled the PLO from Jordan in 1971.
Regrouping in Lebanon, a country with a complex and delicate sectarian balance, Lebanon’s Christian leaders sought help from Israel to deal with the challenge the PLO posed. In 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon, expelling the PLO, which withdrew primarily to Tunisia and Syria. With the acquiescence of the Israeli military, Lebanese Christian militiamen massacred thousands of unarmed Palestinians, including women and children, in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. Finally, when the PLO sided with the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War, alienating Arab League nations that condemned the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the Kuwaiti government expelled over 300,000 Palestinians resident there.
Victims of history or circumstance, victims of their own substandard leaders, all too ready to resort to violence as opposed to dialogue, negotiation, and compromise, and victims, like the Jews before them, of fickle and duplicitous allies, the history of the conflict between the Zionists, and then Israel, and the Palestinians is no Manichean tale of good versus evil. At the beginning, a difficult, yet far from insuperable, problem, as Bunton explains, many layers of complexity have “been added to the conflict over successive periods of time.” For Bunton, “a fundamental turning point in the evolution of Zionism,” and therefore the evolution of the conflict itself, was Israel’s conquest in 1967 of the West Bank during the Six Day War.
VI.
Prior to 1967, Jerusalem was viewed by most Zionist leaders as a non-essential part of a Jewish state. Following Israel’s decisive military victory, confronted by the intransigence of the Arab leaders, who, while formally accepting the “land-for-peace” proposition in United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, nevertheless issued a statement of “three noes”—no recognition, no negotiation, and no peace with Israel— after 1967, a consensus emerged that the whole of Jerusalem ought to be under Israeli jurisdiction. The millenarian movement Gush Emunim, “whose goal was to secure an indissoluble degree of Israeli control over the occupied territories,” sprang up, and the Labour-led government invested heavily in settlement infrastructure in the occupied territories, despite, likewise, formally proclaiming its support for Resolution 242.
Under Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and his right-wing Likud Party, who won the most seats in the Knesset in the election of 1977, settlement activity increased dramatically. Refusing outright to commit to any recognition of Palestinian self-determination in the West Bank and Gaza, Prime Minister Begin made a point to refer to the occupied territories by their Biblical names only: Judea and Samaria. The PLO was similarly intransigent.
Formed in 1964, the PLO’s vision of a Palestinian Arab state was monolithic, involving the whole of Mandatory Palestine, an “indivisible territorial unit.” Declaring the establishment of Israel as “illegal and null and void” and pursuing “armed struggle as a strategy and not just a tactic,” the PLO shifted only gradually toward a more diplomatic approach, involving the recognition of Israel. Palestine, envisaged on this newly irenic orientation, would be based on the West Bank and Gaza.
In the aftermath of the organic explosion of anger against the Israeli occupation on the part of Palestinians in 1987, which came to be known as the intifada, the Oslo Accords of 1993 established—beginning afresh after the Camp David Accords of 1978—the Principle of Palestinian Self-Rule, which was subsequently realized in the formation of the Palestinian Authority. Yet Jewish settlements in the occupied territories proliferated again, the number of Israeli Jews living in the occupied territories increasing from 250,000 in 1993 to 400,000 in 2003, along with the Israeli confiscation of Palestinian land for future settlements.
Frustrated by Fatah’s leadership of the Palestinian Authority—which was charged with simply performing the role of Israel’s policeman—and successive governments alike, including Prime Minister Netanyahu, or “Mr, Security’s,” first, notably belligerent, term in office, Hamas responded with suicide bombings targeting civilians inside Israel.
The Israel-Palestine conflict had descended, in short, into colonization, paralysis, and terror. With a brief and meaningful revival of negotiations to end the conflict in 2000 at Camp David II, where American President Bill Clinton devised a plan to give Palestinians 94% of the occupied territories, the conflict has largely remained that way ever since. It is a dangerous moment for Palestine and Israel.
VII.
The Palestinian nation, a nation of two parts geographically and no doubt spiritually too, is the subject of expropriation, actual and expected, and its population has been systematically abused and diminished. The number of Palestinian innocents murdered by the Israeli military and Jewish settlers is unclear, but the figure is substantial. The anger within Arab states, if not among Arab leaders, will not go away. A repetition of the spontaneous regional revolutions that made up the Arab Spring in 2011 could spell the end for Israel. So, too, could a regional war with Iran.
Israel needs more perspicacious leaders than Prime Minister Netanyahu and those in his Cabinet. It needs now, above all, intelligent and equanimous men and women motivated by fairness and decency (and possessing foresight) rather than fear, religious fanaticism, and greed.
Palestine, meanwhile, needs friends, both within Israel and among the international community, not fair-weather friends who praise the country’s leaders when they are wrong, or worse, when they behave in depraved and sadistic ways, or who support them only when it is convenient to do so, but friends who will stay the course and help find a way out of the country’s century-long deadlock with its adversary, which has turned into a humanitarian disaster.
As a priority, the neighboring Arab states must step in, principally Jordan and Saudi Arabia. The historic diplomatic breakthrough, brokered by former United States President and current President-elect Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, closely allied to the Saudi’s, is an excellent foundation to start from. But the long-term interests of the Palestinians must be ranked infinitely more important than the short-term transactional goals of an American presidential advisor who has spoken in an amoral way about the value of “Gaza’s waterfront property.”
President-elect Trump himself has vacillated on the conflict between Israel and Palestine, controversially moving the United States embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in 2018, recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights in 2019, and describing himself often as the “best friend that Israel has ever had,” as well as criticizing Israel for its policy of settlements in the West Bank and the wish of some Israeli leaders to annex parts of it. President-elect Trump’s appointment to the post of United States Ambassador to Israel, however, of Mike Huckabee, who backs the Israeli occupation of the West Bank; insists on using the terms Judea and Samaria to describe it; and believes that a two-state solution in Palestine is “unworkable” is hardly promising. Neither Israel nor the majority Muslim nations of the region should be pleased by it. The appointment to the post of Defense Secretary of Pete Hegseth, another evangelical Christian with “tattoos of Christian symbols and slogans often associated with the Crusades and the far right” on his body, is also less than encouraging.
A true friend to Israel would intone at this moment that the strongest guarantee of Israel’s security—indeed the only one—is Palestinian sovereignty. In the West Bank, Israel must withdraw to its pre-1967 borders.
The true friends of Palestine would demand this also. In addition, as a mere interim measure, Jordan and Saudi Arabia should absorb all of Gaza’s refugees, offering them sanctuary not in dusty and Darwinian makeshift camps, as has happened in the past but, rather, in benign conditions consistent with the Islamic teaching of zakat.
The ultimate goal ought to be the division of Jordan, where 60% of the population is already of Palestinian heritage, creating in conjunction with the West Bank a viable, contiguous Palestinian state—secular, ideally—a bastion, with the assistance of the international community, of modern scientific methods and liberal values, as the first Zionists conceived of Israel at the turn of the 19th century.
And Gaza? A prison, perhaps, for those guilty of genocide and war crimes and crimes against humanity, whoever that might be: Prime Minister Netanyahu, Gallant, Deif, President Vladimir Putin? Or better still: a United Nations-run university, expounding and promoting the liberal values that Britain once attempted to embody and export—the rule of law, tolerance, fairness, decency, compromise, and progress.
VIII.
If Huckabee and Hegseth spell trouble and potential disaster for the future of Israel and Palestine and indeed the United States as well, in the latter’s capacity to avert a new, ultimately unwinnable war in the Middle East with Israel’s enemies, comparable to the United States’ morally and financially ruinous war in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, then New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, President-elect Trump’s pick for Ambassador to the United Nations, provides more hope that a sane and sensible path to peace and collective prosperity can be taken. Involved in questioning the now disgraced presidents of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States Congress hearing on anti-Semitism in 2023, Congresswoman Stefanik, who is herself ethnically Jewish, will at least be aware of the persistence of anti-Jewishness in Christian nations.
Subject to special taxes, condemned to live in ghettos where their movement was constrained and policed, forced to wear identifying headgear or badges, coerced to participate in humiliating and violent ceremonies, debarred from owning land (at bottom, the source of life for human beings), and excluded from most trades and professions in pre-emancipation Europe, in post-emancipation Europe life for Jewish people improved dramatically, but emancipation was slow to arrive, unevenly spread geographically, often reversed in places, and, almost without exception within the citizenry of European nations, deeply resented. The German scholar Paul de Lagarde spoke for many in the late 19th century when he argued that “Christianity is doomed to extinction because of the Jewish elements which it absorbed” and that Jews, who had “become the master of non-Jews,” should be sent to Madagascar.
Anticipated by Johann Gottlieb Fichte in Germany and matched for the virulence of his anti-Jewishness by the French philosophe Paul d’Holbach, by the end of the 19th century Lagarde’s anti-Jewish sentiments were embodied in the Christian Social Workers’ Party formed in Germany in 1878, in the League of anti-Semites formed, likewise, in Germany the following year, in Karl Lueger’s leadership of Vienna’s City Council as Mayor between 1897 and 1910, and in the Boulangist movement of General Boulanger in France. Formally equal before the law in many European nations, hatred of Jewish people had perhaps never been quite so bitter and widespread.
An ethnic and religious minority wherever they were, unlike the Arab Muslims of what subsequently became Mandate Palestine, Jewish people needed a nation state of their own in the 19th century. In the 20th century, that need became urgent, a matter of life and death for all Jewish people. And, in the 21st century, that need has not gone away. It will not go away, either, not until the human species becomes reasonable, as opposed to simply rational, when privileged sections of it, that is, find themselves able to grant equality before the law to minorities without stipulating that minorities discard their cultures in exchange.
With most French philosophes remaining, at best, ambivalent about Jewish emancipation in the 18th century, it should come as little surprise that Napoleon Bonaparte revised the terms of emancipation in France in 1808 with his “Infamous Decree.” If Jewish people are ever going to be truly safe in this world, in advance of the global population, or merely sections of it, attaining real enlightenment, then there must be justice in the West Bank and Gaza. There must be a Palestinian nation state. And there must be a secular Israel.
As Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said on the White House lawn in 1993 during the Oslo Accords, the progenitor initiative of what is required exactly now: “Enough of blood and tears. Enough.”.
Seamus Flaherty is a historian of ideas and the author of Marx, Engels and Modern British Socialism. He lives in the United Kingdom.
