I recently read Jews and Power by Ruth R. Wisse, a book written nearly twenty years ago, but more relevant than ever. I knew much of the content, but Wisse’s framing, particularly of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (for which increasingly read, Islamic-Jewish Conflict) is helpful. She argues that nearly two thousand years of powerlessness and life in communities that were never positively disposed to Jews, sometimes indifferent to them and often hostile to them produced a Jewish politics of conciliation and appeasement as well as self-criticism. The urge is always to do something that the non-Jewish majority wants and to blame ourselves for our problems, exonerating the outside world.
This has been carried over to the Arab-Israeli Conflict, where Israelis beat themselves up endlessly over “the Occupation” and other real or perceived current and historical errors (or “crimes”) and try to conciliate Palestinians and the world at large by offering to give up power and land to build a compromise peace. Unfortunately, the Palestinians/Arabs, coming from an Islamic political tradition of conquest and jihad (religious war) see such offers as a sign of weakness and a summons to redoubled military efforts against an enemy perceived as being on the point of collapse as no strong nation would offer such generous terms. The conflict is therefore not nationalistic or religious, but purely political: two different conceptions of how to run a polity: conciliation or conquest.
I think this is a valid interpretation of the conflict, although not the only possible one, but I don’t know what the way forward is. Binyamin Netanyahu’s policy of paying off Hamas to play them off against Fatah was ultimately another diaspora conciliation plan, although he doubtless did not intend it as such, letting Hamas receive Qatari money in the hope that they would moderate and focus on running Gaza instead of fighting Israel, as well as dividing the Palestinians internally between pro-Hamas and pro-Fatah factions, preventing the creation of a fully-fledged Palestinian state.
This ultimately turned out as badly as the Oslo Peace Process and the Gaza and Lebanon withdrawals. The West won’t let Israel win on the battlefield and it’s doubtful that the Palestinians could be beaten militarily without committing genocide or ethnic cleansing anyway – literally their entire culture, from the way they educate their young children onwards, is geared around fighting Israel, so to bring peace by force would either require massive deprogramming or deportation to some distant corner of the Middle East. Deprogramming is only possible with support from the international community, particularly the Islamic world and this will not be forthcoming. As for deportation, even aside from being unethical and illegal not to mention the diplomatic ostracism from the international community that would surely follow, Israelis (not to mention diaspora Jews) have no stomach for such brutal policies. In any case, the Palestinian cause would just thunder on from there too.
In her conclusion, Wisse records that Sebastian Haffner, a German who lived through the Third Reich, noted that the Nazis obtained power by provoking a discussion, not about their (the Nazi’s) existence, but the right of their victims to exist. Wisse notes that Israel’s enemies similarly attack Israel’s legitimacy to obscure their own human rights abuses. It is easy to see this reflected in the news from the last nine months — and the last seventy-six years.
In related news, the new UK government has restored supplies of aid to the Palestinians through UNWRA, despite UNWRA’s by now undeniable support for Hamas. I think it’s now just the USA that isn’t funding UNWRA among the countries that withdrew support and I imagine that would change in the (unlikely, IMHO) event that Kamala Harris became president.
I think this is a retrograde step. Granted, it’s an impossible situation. The Palestinians have been socialised to think of themselves as the greatest victims in history, victims whose victimhood is so great that they can not do anything except wallow in their victimhood and fight for “their” land. In many countries where they live (bear in mind UNWRA supports Palestinian “refugees” across the Middle East), they are forbidden to work by law by their “brother” Arabs, so someone needs to support them. And as Haviv Retteg Gur has said in a podcast about UNWRA, any aid agency supporting the Palestinians is of necessity going to end up using Palestinian and other Arab workers and so end up being “captured” by their anti-Zionist and antisemitic worldview sooner or later.
Even so, for Western governments to support this, rather than to try to force the Arabs and other Muslim states to do it just allows Westerns to salve their consciences and wash their hands of the situation, as well as buying into the UNWRA narrative of Israel = oppressor = bad; Palestinians = helpless victims = good. Historically, UNWRA has largely been funded by the West, not the Islamic world. See here on donors from the official UNWRA site — only four Islamic countries were in the top twenty UNWRA donors, two in the top ten and none at all in the top five, despite Arab oil wealth. Sadly, even if all Western countries were to withdraw funding, I think the Palestinians would be left to starve by the Arab world to blame Israel for “genocide” ahead of them either supporting them or pressuring Hamas and other groups to make peace. It is, again, an impossible situation.
There are many things that can be said about Trump, but one of the best things to come out of his presidency was the Abraham Accords. Perhaps eventually the member nations can come together on a mutual rehabilitation plan (e.g., deprogramming) for the Palestinians. Israel is not the only country with an interest in a secure Middle East and Iran has given us a potent demonstration recently of how its proxy wars might play out.