Context on the Conflict

Why I'm writing this 
A lot of people have been asking me for my opinions on the current Israel-Gaza conflict, since I have been living in Israel the past 6 months and plan on being there another year. This blog gives me that platform. But I also feel the need to provide a coherent message. I've found myself sucked into the Facebook-twittersphere propaganda war, posting and sharing links to try and counter all the scary radical stuff I've seen in social media lately. This kind of sharing is lazy, fragmented and incoherent: one hyperlink can't provide the whole story. Even if I do share a link that sums up my thoughts, the words are not mine.

A lot of the deep-seated anger from both sides seems based on historical misconceptions, not on what's going on currently. Living in Israel, I've realized how much each side has developed its own narrative over the past 100 or so years. These narratives really are lovely, but the more time goes by the more the truth is blurred and the more the narratives become false mythology.

Before I begin...

This is where I stand:

I believe Israel has a right to exist and defend itself. While Syrians are getting killed in the tens of thousands, while Iraqi Christians are facing expulsion, and while Nigeria's kidnapped girls have still not been found, the IDF is dropping warning leaflets, treating wounded Gazans at their hospitals, funneling humanitarian aid into Gaza, and putting their troops at greater risk to minimize civilian casualties. The IDF's careful actions are unprecedented in modern-warfare.

I also believe Israel has received a lot of undue blame for Hamas' misfired rockets that land in Gaza, Hamas's grossly inflated civilian casualty counts, Israeli attacks on weapons caches stored in UN schools and hospitals, and Israeli responses to rockets fired from civilian areas.

But I believe the IDF deserves strong criticism and investigation when I see news of children who were playing on the beach and then gunned down by an IDF artillery boat, and other unexplained attacks on civilians. Israeli human rights groups are already calling for such inquiries.

I believe Hamas is a terrorist organization which has prioritized the destruction of Israel over the well-being its own people.  Hamas uses its civilians as human shields, counting on this sinister strategy to deter Israeli forces from killing innocents. If one were to hypothetically reverse the two sides' roles, and Israeli soldiers were to use Israeli civilians as human shields, the situation would be comical. Hamas terrorists would relish in killing any and all Israelis -- soldiers and civilians alike -- and they have demonstrated this time and time again. They're demonstrating it right now with every rocket they launch at Israeli cities.

I believe the IDF started this official round of fighting. Instead of hunting down the kidnappers themselves, the IDF collectively punished all of Palestine, especially Gaza.

But I also believe that Israel needed to respond to the kidnappings with deterrent force, because Hamas members don't mind sacrificing themselves and becoming Martyrs if it means achieving their goal of dead Israeli children. Also, Hamas has been encouraging kidnappings of these kind for years, so even if the kidnappers themselves were not operating with Hamas complicity, Hamas still bears a large degree of responsibility.

I believe Israel has been unjust and often brutal in its decades-long occupation.

But I also believe Israel, in the past two decades (sometimes more and sometimes less), has been committed to ending the occupation and fostering a two-state solution, but has been met with betrayal from Palestinian leadership, which has left everyone worse-off and created mutual mistrust. 

I believe that if you suddenly take an interest in human rights when it comes to Gaza, but don't give a damn about any other human rights issues, you need to ask yourself why.

And lastly, I believe law-abiding Palestinian civilians need to receive freedom of movement and freedom to live normal lives.

Context 
This is NOT A COMPLETE HISTORY and I still have a lot to learn. If you are interested in learning more about the conflict, I recommend first reading Righteous Victims by Benny Morris, which has been lauded as one of the most impartial accounts, although many in the pro-Israel camp would disagree. If you can't get through Righteous Victims because it's too long and boring, I recommend My Promised Land by Ari Shavit, a beautifully-written and fair -- if sometimes bombastic -- historical memoir. Talk to me if you want to branch into more the more biased books out there. 

Each of these points is a refute to some hashtag or tweet or sound byte I've observed lately in both traditional media and social media.

1. There has never been a country called Palestine, but there are a lot of people who rightly identify as Palestinians (And that's not a contradiction). For centuries the area was divided into provinces ruled by the Ottoman Empire. It was called Palestine, derived from the Roman name of Philistine. The area was an undeveloped backwater of the empire, and sometimes was classified as part of "Greater Syria." After World War 1, 80% of this area was set aside as an Arab state called Transjordan (later to become Jordan), and Jews were not permitted to live there.  The remaining 20% of the land was to be shared or divided. 

As you've probably learned in history class, nationalism began to really develop in the early 1900s. This was true not only in Europe but also the Middle East. Historically, the Arab residents in Palestine were loyal first to family, second to clan, and third to village. The "nation" was an abstract concept. But over time, this identity developed, influenced by both external events and Jewish immigration, and it is no less legitimate than any other nationhood. Karl Deutsch defines a nation as "a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbours." Palestinians define themselves as such and want a right to self-determination, and they deserve it.

But so do the Jews.

2. The Jews were not your typical Colonial Imperialists. Jews have been living in this area for millenia, especially around Sfat, Jerusalem and Hevron, where they constituted a majority in certain parts. Under Ottoman rule, the Jews were classified as Dhimmis, second-class citizens subject to all manner of persecution and discrimination.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Eastern European and Russian Jews migrated to Palesine not as imperial colonialists, but as refugees escaping oppression. They did not seek to subjugate or convert the native population like other colonial powers; in fact, they were godless hardcore socialists who glorified in working the land themselves in an egalitarian manner. When settling here, the Jews purchased land legally, and the land was often non-arable swampland until the Jews began farming it. That said, in many cases the land was purchased from absentee owners living in Beirut or Damascus. The tenant farmers were local Arabs, who were either hired as workers or forced to leave. This, needless to say, created friction. All the way up to 1948, there would be many tit-for-tat attacks between Jews and Arabs, as well as many instances of Jews and Arabs living peacefully side by side as neighbors and friends.

3. In 1948, Arab states invaded Israel and Israel won. Many Arabs chose to leave, but many were expelled. And some were massacred. The Arabs in the area had chosen the losing side in both World War 1 and World War 2, and the Jews allied themselves with the winning side. I'm not going to go into detail about how the Arab Grand Mufti of Jerusalem wanted to carry out Hitler's plans in Palestine, or how his policies of violence influenced Britain to cap Jewish immigration at the exact time when hundreds of thousands of Jews could have been saved from the gas chambers, or how the Arab leadership's policy during the war was annihilation and extermination of the Jews; because these points are not as pertinent to the situation today. So let's just say the Arabs lost both wars, and as can be seen from so many wars throughout history, the victors often receive territorial gains. Still, the Arabs got a pretty good deal in the U.N. partition plan: they received sovereignty over the areas in which they had a majority. The Jews received slightly more land, but much of that was the uninhabitable Negev desert. The Arabs actually received more cultivable land. Further, a large portion of the Jewish allocation had previously been swampland and desert, until the Jews transformed it for agriculture. The Jews did not receive Western Jerusalem even though they had a majority there, and the Jews did not receive Hevron even though they had a significant presence there throughout history. 

The Jews reluctantly accepted the plan, but it should be noted that David Ben Gurion saw this compromise as merely a first step towards acquiring all of Palestine for the Jewish Nation. On the other hand, the Arabs rejected it, not willing to give their former Dhimmi servants self-determination on a single inch of "Muslim soil."

So the U.N. mandated a state for Israel and Israel declared their independence in 1948. The Arab states invaded, and the fledgling Israeli army fought them off, and then some. During this war, it's extremely uncertain how many Arabs fled to escape the violence, and how many were forced to leave. It's also uncertain how many Arabs fled due to the breakdown of law and order after the British left (there were a lot of violent Arab clan rivalries to be considered as well). But there are clear and undisputed examples of forced Arab expulsion ordered by Israeli leadership, and well-documented massacres committed by both sides. In regard to Lydda (now called Lod), where one such massacre took place, Shavit said: "Lydda is our black box. In it lies the dark secret of Zionism. The truth is that Zionism could not bear Lydda. From the very beginning there was a substantial contradiction between Zionism and Lydda. If Zionism was to be, Lydda could not be. If Lydda was to be, Zionism could not be."

The homes of the vacated Arabs were typically either demolished or used to house Jews, to ease Israel's housing shortage.

This exodus of between 400,000 and 700,000 Arabs, both those who fled and those who were expelled, led to the refugee problem. It has happened before throughout history. I'm not saying it's right, but it has happened before. Indeed, the Jews have plenty of experience being expelled from their home countries. As I write this, Christians in Iraq are facing expulsion. In most cases, refugees are assimilated into their new country (and most often want to resettle to get away from the oppression they were facing). But this was not to be the case with the Palestinians, because...

4. The Refugee Problem is due to a typo. Did I get your attention? Ok, not really. Not at all. But listen to this. The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) is the only UN refugee department that deals with a specific group of people. Every other refugee group in the world is under the purview of the UN High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR) which was created one year after the UNRWA. Not only are the two groups' definitions of "refugee" different, but their mandates are completely at odds.

The UNRWA could not define a Palestinian refugee as someone who fled to a country outside his nationality, since Palestine was never a nation, so you can let that slide. However, the UNRWA also defines someone as a refugee if he fled in the 1948 war after living in Palestine between 1946 and 1948 - only two years. The UNRWA also classifies refugees' descendents as refugees, in perpetuity.

But most importantly, the UNHCP's mandate includes helping refugees to resettle in permanent homes in their new locations. The UNRWA has no such mandate, and instead focuses on maintaining temporary refugee camps. According to Alan Dershowitz, "instead of integrating the refugees into the religiously, linguistically, and culturally identical society (in Jordan), they were segregated into ghettos called refugee camps and made to live on the U.N. dole, while being fed propaganda about their glorious return to the village down the road that had been their home for as little as two years."

Now that's certainly an overstatement, but it brings into clarity how needlessly awful the refugee problem has become. I have not seen any clear evidence that this bureaucratic technicality was somehow a sinister Arab conspiracy to let the refugee problem fester for decades, using the Palestinian refugees as pawns towards the demonization of Israel, but some people certainly hold that conjecture. More likely, the young Jordanian country did not want to deal with the dangerous demographic shift of incorporating these Palestinian refugees, whose views ranged from suspicious to hostile toward the Hashemite king. Lebanon took a similar viewpoint. And there may be something to the self-interested bias of the UNRWA, which would cease to exist if it actually provided a permanent solution. (The UNRWA has been caught employing Hamas terrorists within their staff and has been accused of an Anti-Israel bias. Rocket caches have been found in three UN schools so far in the current fighting).

Regardless, the result is that the original 700,000 refugees now number more than 4 million, and they're still wallowing their lives away in refugee camps intent on returning to their homes that don't exist anymore. As I discussed in my last post, Palestinians call Yom Ha'atzmaut (Israeli Independence Day) the Nakba, Arabic for "catastrophe." In my opinion, the Nakba is still happening every day in these camps.

4. The settlement of the West Bank and Gaza was and is a COMPLETE BALLAGAN (That's Hebrew for MESS) But it's not the only obstacle to peace. After Israel's miraculous 1967 victory against all odds, Israelis were celebrating. They had gone from facing imminent extinction to clear triumph, and some solid real estate conquests to boot. I wasn't there, but I've spoken with people who were. People believed they were living in Messianic times.

Israel, in fighting a defensive war, had been able to occupy the West Bank, Sinai and the Golan Heights, had annexed Jerusalem (evicting the Arab residents from the Old City's Jewish quarter), and had international support on its side after proving itself a regional superpower and stable ally. Many in Israel believed they could trade these territories for peace with its neighbors, and finally coexist with the Arabs. But soon after, the Arab states responded with the Khartoum Resolution, which contained the famous "Three no's." No peace with Israel, no recognition with Israel, and no negotiations with Israel. (Some countries, like Jordan and Egypt, did eventually make peace with Israel.)

Many Israelis, on the other hand, were not interested in a land-for-peace deal. Some were secular but most were religious nationalists, and they wanted Israel to be restored to its biblical boundaries. Without government permission, hardcore right-wingers and religious zealouts began to form outposts in abandoned Jordanian military installations and other areas of what is now called the West Bank. According to Benny Morris, "the war unleashed currents within Israeli society that militated against yielding occupied territory and against compromise. Expansionism, fueled by fundamentalist messianism and primal nationalistic greed, took hold of a growing minority, both religious and secular, getting its cue, and eventually creeping support, from the government itself."

Their numbers grew. The Israeli government, rather than evicting these people, instead installed power and water utilities for the outposts, providing tacit consent. And their numbers continued to grow, with the goal of installing as many "facts on the ground," as possible in order to support eventual Israeli annexation.

There was not any official policy on the settlements in the West Bank until the Likud victory in 1977. Government ministers ranged from ambivalent to quietly supportive, and they were reluctant to remove Jews using force (such forceful evacuations did eventually occur, both in the subsequent peace treaty with Egypt and also recently in the pullout from Gaza).

The settlements were completely ad-hoc. They also present a demographic nightmare, because so many Arabs live there and -- if Israel was to annex the West Bank -- would need to become either voting Israelis or second-class citizens. Settlements were a bad idea then, and they're a bad idea now. The decades-long occupation has been humiliating and sometimes brutal for Palestinians. Some believe that the unofficial Israeli policy has been, at times, meant to influence Palestinians to leave.

But the settlement issue is not the over-arching barrier to peace that so many people believe it to be (Myself included, until recently). A surprising July 2014 poll from the Washington Institute showed Palestinians favor release of prisoners over settlement freezes: Asked what Israel could do "to convince Palestinians that it really wants peace," a large plurality picked "release more Palestinian prisoners." That option far outranked the others, each in the 15-20% range: "share Jerusalem as a joint capital," "stop building in settlements beyond the security barrier," or "grant Palestinians greater freedom of movement and crack down on settler attacks." 

Further, there is a strong current of Palestinians that will not be satisfied until every inch of Muslim Soil is under the rule of Arabs, regardless of the settlements. The same poll found that 60% of Palestinians "say that the five-year goal should be to work toward reclaiming all of historic Palestine, from the river to the sea."

This is troubling to say the least. But the takeaway is that the settlements are not the only issue in this highly complicated and nuanced conflict.

5. There have been a few chances for total and comprehensive peace, most recently in 2000. Arafat blew it. There is a saying, that "Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity." In 2000, Ehud Barak offered the most concessions of any Israeli PM in history, giving 97% of the territories, the Old City of Jerusalem other than the Jewish and Armenian quarters, and $30 billion in refugee compensation. Despite pleas by his advisers to take the deal, Yassir Arafat refused and did not make any counter-agreement. Prince Bandir of Saudi Arabia, who closely assisted Arafat during the entire process, lamented the decision, calling it a crime against Palestine and against the entire region.

Soon after Arafat's rejection, the second intifada began. Arafat has been accused of orchestrating this uprising, because he thought he could improve his PR fortunes by bombing mothers and children to provoke an Israeli over-reaction. And, as he predicted, he succeeded in swaying the international community from being furious and blaming Palestine, to blaming Israel and sympathizing with Palestine. And this tried-and-true terrorist tactic is being used by Hamas today.

6. Call the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza what you want, but it initially provided a chance to show what a two-state solution could look like. Admittedly I don't know as much as I should about what happened in 2005; shame on me because I was old enough to pay attention and think critically about the events unfolding, and I didn't. Looking back, though, there are several dimensions to it. Ariel Sharon, for whom I have very little love, was actually being complemented by the Left and condemned by the Right. Palestinians reluctantly cheered the move, because it meant Israelis were moving out of a territory that would -- in any final agreement -- be Palestinian land. But Palestinians were also skeptical because the decision had not been made in conjunction with the Palestinian Authority, and Sharon was continuing to permit settlements in the West Bank at the same time. Many also criticized the withdrawal because it wasn't true disengagement -- Israel still controlled Gaza's airspace and coastline. International leaders, in general, praised the move as a step in the right direction, although some leaders faulted Israel for giving up a non-useful, demographically-Muslim territory in an attempt to consolidate its hold on the West Bank.

So, although Gaza wasn't exactly set up for success, the fact is that the Israeli settlements were uprooted, often forcefully. After disengagement, Gaza was completely free of Israelis, and could have shown, however imperfectly, what a two-state solution can look like. Instead, the people of Gaza elected Hamas as their government, Hamas and Fatah (the Palestinian Authority) engaged in a vicious war, and Hamas took over the Gaza strip. Since then, Hamas has become increasingly authoritarian, cracking down on opposing political groups and abusing the human rights of its own people. Hamas has also, as we've seen recently, amassed a huge stockpile of weapons and tunnel infrastructure to attack Israel by air and underground. It is estimated that each of its tunnels cost $2-3 million to build. All this money and resources could have been used for schools, hospitals, commerce, and other economic development. 

Hamas was just as much of a terrorist organization back in 2005. Its takeover has been the main reason for the Israeli / Egyptian blockade of Gaza. Despite the blockade, as I mentioned, Hamas has been able to smuggle in weapons and use the concrete, meant for humanitarian aid and development,  to build terror tunnels.

It should be noted that current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was strongly against the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza because he predicted exactly this situation happening. 

Alright, that's all I got, for now. 
Hopefully this put some things in perspective.