Antisemitism or Antisemitism? — A Correspondence

A correspondence between the Editor, his father (Todd), and his son (Max) on the origin of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the categories of evil vs. conflict.

Summary. An extended email correspondence reframing the modern conflict as a distinction between evil (Hitler's manufactured Jewish enemy as galvanizing political tactic) and conflict (the inevitable competition over the Yishuv between returning Jews and the existing Arab population). The Editor argues that conflict is unavoidable in any contested territory but that terrorism and Balkanization escalated conflict into evil. The proposed solution echoes post-WWII Japan and West Germany: decisive defeat followed by sustained investment. The correspondence preserves Todd's and Max's replies.

The Article (Verbatim)

(I wrote this in response to Dad's recommending Side by Side: Parallel Histories of Israel-Palestine.)

Palestine 1936 has more information than I've found before on the first Arab revolt in 1936 that set the tone for all the violence that has followed. It also touches on the broken and conflicting promises made by Great Britain to both the Arabs and the Jews. And (as most of these histories do) it covers the rise of Hitler, and the impact that had on Jewish immigration to the Yishuv.

It paints a picture that, seen through my lens, boils down to this comparison: evil vs. conflict.

On the one hand, you had Hitler: He manufactured the Jews as an enemy in order to galvanize his own popular support, and give the dispirited Germans both a charged sense of racial pride, and (in the Jews) a target they could hit, and a runway of escalating (but egregious) victories. This was evil. It was pure tactic. It didn't need to happen. The Jews were integrated citizens of Germany, most all of them having abandoned Hebrew for German/Yiddish, and many of them having converted to Christianity.

On the other hand, the Jewish return to the Yishuv (Ottoman and then British Palestine): It had been their land for 3,500 years until the Muslim Arabs finally ejected all but a small population in the 8th Century. Of course they would want it back, especially as fascism rose, and they were unwelcome literally everywhere. But there was a small population of Arabs there. Of course those Arabs wouldn't want the Jews taking over, especially in context of the whole region's wider revolts against the Ottomans, and their ambitions at creating an Arab federation. This wasn't evil on either side, but it was conflict.

Sure, one could say, "The Arabs had the whole region, a region of 26 countries today, and there were only a few hundred thousand of them in Palestine at that point anyway—why not just give that little block of land to the Jews?" But when in history—ever—has anyone said, "Yeah, you need this land more than I do, it's yours."

Conflict and bloodshed were inevitable. Absolutely unavoidable. The matter can only be decided by a contest of might, and will.

But it very quickly escalated to evil, with two embodiments:

1. The rise of terrorism, which has so often proven a crime against both its targets and its perpetrators: those Muslims in power convincing the rank-and-file that their lives should be grist in the bloody mill, and that they should never accept compromise or comfort, but rather, sacrifice all they have for an imagined (but patently impossible) victory.

2. The regional Balkanization resulting in factional power structures that hem in the Palestinian Arabs, making defeat almost equally impossible. Jordan won't take Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), even if the land comes with the people—it would reverse the demographic balance of power and threaten King Abdullah II bin Al-Hussein. And likewise, Egypt won't take Gaza or its people.

So, what's to be done?

I remain convinced (as I have been for years) that the only solution will very likely mimic the defeat and rebuilding of West Germany and Japan post-WWII. First: defeat them, soundly. Next: install a provisional government and invest-invest-invest in their future. The very most formidable enemy of extremism is comfort. When people are educated, fed, busy, successful, and comfortable, they can't be troubled with anger and ideology.

Todd's reply

While I agree with most of your points, I still view the conflict fundamentally being the UN's making by giving the Jewish people land it had no right to give, and especially doing it in a way that did not adequately compensate or provide for the people that were already there.

That said, 75 years later it is what it is now: a demographic mess driven by demographic factors that are very much not in favor of the Isrealis. And time may be rapidly running out for Israel. The dominoes have already started falling for Iran to be a nuclear power within as little as the next six months, and I would estimate 24 months on the outside. The dominoes are North Korean troops lives potentially in the 100s of thousands being traded to Russia for Russian oil and nukes, and then the PRK trading some of those nukes to Iran for more oil. We are no longer living in a world where there are just major powers with nukes that can be more or less held in check with strategic deterrence. I will be surprised if we don't see a tactical nuke being used within the next 24 months. In this regard, I was going to be ok with President Trump not being elected because I think whoever is the upcoming president will go down in history as the president that "allowed" the use of tactical nukes. And I don't think even Trump with his peace through strength philosophy will be able to stop it.

The Editor's response to Todd

Israel is the little engine that could. It's not going anywhere. The demographic factors have never been in their favor, and yet, they win and win and win. Their Arab neighbors see this, and have (and are moving back toward) normalizing relations with Israel because they recognize that Israel is the power in the Middle East. MBS in Saudi Arabia has all his grand aspirations for building impossible cities and owning US sports franchises, but he knows very well that Israel is the tech, military, and security power in the region.

Israel has a better equipped army and navy than Iran. And though it has fewer regular troops, it has more reservists—and a population that supports the government. And, it already has nukes.

The Iranian regime is living on borrowed time. And a bright spot of a Trump presidency may well be that he'll authorize a joint US-Israeli operation against Iran that can and will succeed at destroying Iran's nuclear infrastructure.

Israel spanks Iran, over and over again, and Iran can just sputter.

And for all his push toward having a nuke, Khamenei knows full well that if they ever deployed it against Israel, Iran would cease to exist within 48 hours.

I still view the conflict fundamentally being the UN's making by giving the Jewish people land it had no right to give, and especially doing it in a way that did not adequately compensate or provide for the people that were already there.

But why didn't the UN (and Britain) have the right? They bankrolled the region's independence from the Ottomans. They built the region's infrastructure. There was no meaningful, pre-existing power or leadership hierarchy. There were certainly no democratic institutions, or even mechanisms (or appetite) to establish them. The UN and Britain stepped into an almost total governance vacuum. Who else had a better (and more enforceable) right to decide? And even so, look at what the region has done with the independence and autonomy that the UN and Britain gave it: a few powerful families have stolen all the land's wealth, and plunged the rest of the population into abject poverty.

Simply as a matter of recompense for the blood and treasure spent in freeing the region from Ottoman rule, the UN and Britain certainly had the right to give a small, barren plot of land with only ~300k residents on it (who had opportunities to sell or develop their land and benefit from everything the Jews were bringing to it, but who instead chose violence), back to the people whose land it had been for 3,500 years, to establish a single, reliable bastion of democracy and rule of law in a region of despotism and chaos.

Todd's reply

Good points, and I likewise enjoy the discussion. I agree that Israel is currently the technological, military, and economic powerhouse in the region. I don't agree with your premise that the UN and Britain had the right to exercise imminent domain in the manner they did on the current residents of the region - 300,000 is a lot different than 3,000. But nor am I condoning the violence that ensued in the late 1940's (on both sides). That said, I am not so interested in determining who is to blame (it is what it is now, and no turning back the clock) as I am in solutions. The only lasting solutions are morally reprehensible, and therein lies the root of the problem in the region, and why it seems to be locked in an endless cycle. I agree that one potential solution not so morally reprehensible is the one you suggest regarding post WWII nation building. However, we failed to succeed in doing so in Afghanistan and I know why we failed, and we as a nation still lack the conviction to make it work in Palestine as doing so would require the majority of the nation to understand and acknowledge that the rights set forth in the Constitution do not apply to a foreign nation where we are engaged in such effort (particularly those regarding the protection of religious freedom over all else).

The main point I am making is we are entering into a period of even more pronounced asymmetrical warfare on all fronts (inexpensive drones that can inflict as much damage to an enemy as multi-million dollar systems, cyberwarfare, and shifts in tactical nuke employment doctrine). It is going to be a rough next few years - especially for Israel. And by extension for the US as well. Let's just say I won't be moving to Tel Aviv any time soon, and I would stay away from investing in stocks with significant Israeli exposure.

The Editor's response to Todd

You know the Afghanistan failure far better than most, and it does bode poorly for my proposed solution.

To your point, I don't see the US as having either the understanding or conviction for successful nation building at this point. It would have to come down to the Israelis. And the US would have to get out of their way and let them do it.

In my mind, the reason we were so successful in Japan was precisely because (again, to your point) we did not try to extend constitutional protections to the Japanese. We put Douglas MacArthur in charge, and he essentially ran a dictatorship for as long as it took to rebuild and reform, and put a credible government in place.

But… the Palestinian Arabs are not the Japanese. They have no tradition of conformity to the rule of law, and no parallel sense of honor in defeat. So what took the US a decade in Japan might take Israel a generation.

It will be a tough few years for Israel. But I remain convinced that—especially in this new world of asymmetric warfare where the tech leader has the pronounced edge—Israel will prevail, and grow stronger. At least as of a month ago, not a single one of the major tech companies with an Israeli footprint has made a move to reduce it.

And just this morning, I heard a report of a credible rumor that Khamenei is in a coma.

One other thing I'll say re. the UN/British land grant: Jewish re-immigration to the Yishuv had been happening for a century before the UN grant. The fractional Arab tribal presence in the 1930s and 1940s had no ability to repel a Jewish return. It was British mandate that curbed Jewish re-immigration, and continually reduced the land that would eventually be granted by the UN. The Jews had already formed the Haganah defence force, which did more for the security of Jews than the British did, and which eventually fought the British for Israeli independence.

If not for the British, and then the UN, there is a real possibility (arguably a probability) that Jewish re-immigration would have proceeded much, much faster, and that—left solely to a struggle of might and will—the Israeli state would be, today, all of present-day Israel and Jordan (which was all initially promised by Churchill to the Jews). And calling this re-conquering unethical would be a stretch, being that the Jews, themselves, had been forcibly ejected by the Muslim Arabs in the 8th Century.

As you say, looking forward at this point is more important than looking backward. But forward positioning is disadvantaged by a perception that the Jews are inhabiting the land unethically. Indeed, that is the notion behind all the crazy, ignorant, and sometimes evil pro-Hamas demonstrators in this country. There is very widespread lack of knowledge about how all of this came about—and that Israel has agreed repeatedly to give Judea and Samaria to the Palestinian Arabs, and has been continually rebuffed, told that "every Jew pushed into the sea is the only acceptable solution".

Max's reply

All good thoughts. If you don't mind me jumping in re. Israel's demography, legitimacy debate:

From a purely practical standpoint, I have to agree the UN had no fundamental right to pawn off nationally-held territory–the Palestine mandate–from a sovereign state to one manufactured by committee. But I am still in favor of the Israeli state for a few reasons, most relevant here being the fact that the UN also had no fundamental right to form the C-24 Special Committee on Decolonization and spend the better part of the 20th century dismantling the European great powers–something generally recognizable as a good thing, at least conceptually. Beyond the immediate concerns post-holocaust of empowering the Jewish people, the recognition of Israel was a stepping-stone to the decolonializing, indigenous-first campaign immediately following.

…Which leads to the next big talking point of Israeli sovereignty. Are the Jews indigenous?

Sort of. If they aren't, they're certainly the closest to it, going by the (extremely muddy) anthropological definition of a land's first distinct, settled culture. The Jews are a Canaanite people, part of the Levant's original Assyrian breakaways–which is a direct tie to indigeneity, but is obfuscated by what you consider the Jews; are the Jews (the Hebrews at this point) the people that came out of Egypt? Are they the seed of Abraham? Are the Jews defined by their faith, or is broader Canaan Jewish by genetics? If their faith is the Jewish people, does that faith start with the early cults of YH in the Bronze Age, or the arrival of Moses? It's all very messy, but what's very certain is that the Arabs are a far cry from indigeneity–excepting, if things weren't already clear as mud, Jordan, which has been in the hands of–builders of Petra, and frequent Judean ally!–the Nabateans, a decidedly Arab tribal confederation, for about as long as the Arabs as a people have existed. (As an aside, the Nabateans come to be a very similar polity to the Kingdom of Judea in middle antiquity, casting off Hellenized empires on a similar timeline and representing the sparse local opposition to Macedonian hegemony. How times have changed.)

This isn't any kind of counterargument to the modern state of Israel–quite the opposite–but the discussion is fraught, and reaches effectively to the origin of human civilization. Is Israel occupying the land unethically? Given the background, there are any number of obnoxious what-ifs you can spin off from that–Does that make the Apache migrations into destroyed Pueblo land unjust occupation? Do we eject the Apache from New Mexican reservations in favor of the fragmentary ethnic remnants of the Pueblo? etcetera.

A more specific comment:

It's unlikely a non-sponsored, land-hungry Haganah (or following revolutionary Israel) would conquer Jordan. While it's a shadow of its former self now, then-Transjordan's Arab Legion was the most capable, best-equipped army in the Levant. Some of the meanest, pettiest politicking in the modern middle east took place specifically to arm-twist the King into deploying it as the keystone of the Islamic cause in 1948. Just a bit of pedantry on my part (if this whole email didn't already qualify).

Where Denominations Diverge

Modern political analysis; not a halachic or theological question. The defense of Israel is shared across Jewish denominations (with anti-Zionist Haredi sects an exception). The specific policy prescriptions are the Editor's own.

Sources Cited in the Article

Oren Kessler, Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict.

Sami Adwan, Dan Bar-On, Eyal Naveh, Side by Side: Parallel Histories of Israel-Palestine.

Daniel Gordis, Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn.

Further Reading

Michael Oren, Six Days of War.

Yossi Klein Halevi, Like Dreamers.

Daniel Gordis, We Stand Divided.