Long-time readers know that I am continually ruminating on the inward guts of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict– in all the bewildering amount of sincerity on both sides, strength of cases on both sides, numbers of morally decent moderate and thoughtful people on both sides, numbers of violent or pro-violent or “maximal-claims” extremists on both sides, and in all its absolute intractability and interminableness.

Starting with Israel this time. Sometimes after doling out a large bit of deserving criticism, I note that nonetheless “Israel has a strong case.” But often that case is made ludicrous to Europe and educated Americans by absurd notions that make it incredible to educated people with good sense, who just have to shake their heads in disbelief.

And what is Israel’s “case” in the first place? What is credible about it?

So let’s start here: First with “incredible,” and then with “credible”– and what Israel’s true case actually is.

Incredible: Claims that ancient history authorizes modern migrations, claims, and boundaries. The educated West sees these as irrelevant and fanatically outmoded. Erich Fromm summed it up when he said that if all peoples moved to where they had lived millennia ago, the world would become a madhouse. In this alone he has become a “prophet for our time”: Where in the world is it nothing but a madhouse but the modern Middle East?

Credible: Claims of rights of the oppressed to refuge. As Europe’s persecutions worsened, Europe imposed imperial Balfour on the Palestinians as the *only* escape for the Jews. Balfour consolidates for Israel into a single event what — in the case of America — is dispersed over time into many far-flung events spanning centuries, a wide span of history that can both alienate us from the activities and worldview of Christopher Columbus and yet also warmly endear us to those of Ellis Island. It is recognition of these human rights ambivalences and complexities both here and abroad that allows reasonable people to be both pro-American and pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian.

And yet nevertheless: even the Balfour Declaration with all its concentrated moral complexity does not mitigate the starkest of facts that without Arab violence and warfare, from the beginning, against overwhelmingly peaceable Jewish migrants and refugees, there would have been no Arab refugees leaving Israel, and no Arab-expelled Jews entering Israel, and so, as I have said before, therefore and simply demonstrably, no possible — no demographically and therefore politically possible — “Jewish-majority state.”

No Jewish state.

The startling fact is that it is not Balfour but rather Arab violence which created Israel.

And now, long afterward, it has become a religious-ethnic conflict not unlike any of the other tragic “grudge matches” and feuds on the planet, which in an unending cyclical nutshell is aggravated on the one side by half a million illegal settlers, and their rampant construction projects, alongside demolitions of Palestinian homes and farmlands and neighborhoods, coupled with hair-trigger bloody and ultra-efficient overreactions, and, on the other side, naked raw bloody mass-terrorism intentionally targeted against innocent men and women and children and families just like you and me and us and ours, where the more innocents maimed and slaughtered are obscenely glorified as the “more successful ‘martyrdom operations.’”

Now, first. Does this “balance sheet” — actually no comprehensive balance sheet, just some selected salient points for each side — mean moral equivalence? I have not nearly arrived there yet, although it is a matter I continue to explore on this site — from the vantage of both sides’ complaint that there should be considered *no* moral symmetry or equivalence.

And second. Though Arab violence created the post-Shoah Jewish state still threatened and living out the Shoah nightmare, didn’t the Arabs have the right to resist the essential secession from Palestine of Ben-Gurion’s would-be state? Do they (or don’t they) they have a right be considered John Hancocks and Sam Adamses and Paul Reveres and Thomas Jeffersons? Or do only they have that right if they had so far won, when they have not, and that so far the victors 200 years ago were the American patriots and today so far the Israelis — who both have had the power to”write the history books”?

And, so, third. “Two states” or “one state” for the future of Israel-Palestine? I am getting less of a sense than ever that a “two-state solution” will actually ever truly take place — practically take hold — on the ground there.

Nonetheless I can also definitely see, from the Israeli side, the practical-moral case for it. That after these long decades of anti-Jewish violence, we have come to realize that violence against minorities is a global plague. And such that self-empowerment for minorities has far more importance than we used to believe that it did. Oppression of minorities throughout the Mideast shows why Jews should not have to be the first people to surrender their power. (Use it more wisely and humanely, yes.) And that nor should Palestinians have to surrender their hopes for empowerment. That both sides deserve statehood.

And, continuing judicious moderates’ and liberals’ case, that, liberated from extreme and fanatical claims on both sides, a humble and modest honesty would indicate a Case for Israel — and Palestine — that most educated Westerners could then embrace with honesty and integrity.

But whether this cause will lead to a practicing working two-state solution is another — and increasingly doubtful — question, given the century of cumulative grievances and resentments on both sides.

Is this the final word (from me) on this? Of course it isn’t. If there ever was a work-in-process, this is it — perhaps an endless process, which may be the sign of a true conflict — of not complete right versus wrong but of some degree right versus right — so that the next trenchant point could easily be made for the other side, and ultimately there could well be neither side’s case which, after making a crucial point for it, one could then stop all talk and say:

There is nothing crucial further to add.

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Rev., from Harvard Square Commentary

www.HarvardSquareCommentary.org

August 4, 2008