Vox's distortion of Middle East history

Sar Shalom

David Gerstman of Legal Insurrection last week posted a critique of Vox's history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. While Gerstman is spot on with the recent material, in order to cover the recent history he leaves the pre-history of the conflict unaddressed. Unfortunately, the misperception of the pre-history of the conflict is responsible for the perception that there is nothing illegitimate in any Palestinian objective.

The offending part of the Vox video comes from the first minute. In it, the narrator states:

One of the biggest myths about the Israel-Palestine conflict is that it has been going on for centuries all about ancient religious hatreds. In fact while religion is involved [the] conflict's mostly about two groups who claim the same land and it really only goes back a century to the early 1900s. Around then, the region along the eastern Mediterranean we now call Israel-Palestine, then under Ottoman rule for centuries was religiously diverse including mostly Muslims and Christians, also a small number of Jews who lived generally in peace.

Leaving aside the inaccuracy of the subsequent claim that Palestinian nationalism started at the same the Hertzl started the Zionist movement in Europe, the included quote is technically accurate, but obscures the reality of Jewish-Muslim relations in Palestine under Ottoman rule. Yes it was generally peaceful, that is mass violence against the Jewish population only occurred every few years and episodes were not prolonged, but it was peaceful in the sense that "relations between the white and Negro races" were "amicable" under Jim Crow as the signers of the Southern Manifesto described their objection to Brown v. Board of Education. Just as peace was maintained in the Jim Crow south by blacks learning their place under Jim Crow, peace was maintained in Ottoman Palestine by Jews learning their place under the Pact of Umar. The conflict that began in the 20th century is the result of the influx of Jews who refused to abide by the Pact of Umar.

Not all Arabs living in Palestine were offended by Jews abrogating the Pact of Umar to the point that they would wage an unceasing war to reimpose the Pact. Unfortunately, the British gave one such Arab a platform from which he could brand as a traitor any Arab who acquiesced to any rollback of the Pact by naming him Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Since the rise of the Mufti, the Palestinian national movement (PNM) has been about one thing, and it is not "freedom" for the Palestinians as Vox's Max Fisher would have you believe. Rather, it is about reimposing the Pact of Umar and teaching its trespassers a lesson the way Abu Ishaq did in 1066.

Returning to Gerstman's rebuttal to the Vox post, Gerstman recognizes Vox's distortion of the pre-1920 record as he responded to one of the commenters that he did not have enough time to include a response to that distortion and respond to the more recent material. The problem is whether or not one knows the reality of the Pact of Umar in 19th century Ottoman Palestine, and that the founding of the PNM was about restoring that social order, sets the framework for how one evaluates what happened subsequently. If restoration of the 19th century social order is not on one's radar screen for the PNM's motives, then one would naturally conclude that the PNM is concerned with protecting the rights of the Palestinian people. If that is so, and the PNM harps on the refugees from the Independence War, it must be because Israel did really bad things in creating that refugee crisis. If the PNM hasn't reached a deal with Israel, it must be because Israel hasn't offered enough to establish the Palestinians' rights.

All of this changes once one recognizes that the core of the conflict is Arab irredentism for the 19th century social order. From that perspective, a plot of land the size of a postage stamp where the Pact of Umar does not hold is an inexcusable humiliation to the Palestinian-Arab psyche. However, the Arabs have learned through decades of war that they cannot restore the Pact of Umar against western objections and it goes without saying that the West will not support restoring the Pact of Umar. What is feasible though, is to convince the West that the Palestinians just want their rights and specific actions under "international law" to secure those rights where it just so happens that those actions would enable the restoration of the Pact of Umar the way control of the Sudetenland facilitated the occupation of all of Czechoslovakia. Enter the Oslo Accords and western fascination with the notion that the 1967 "borders" should be the starting point for the final border between Israel and Palestine. Viewing Oslo through the lens of social order-irredentism would show that talks have failed to yield a result because the PNM will not accept anything less than their gaining the capacity unilaterally reinstate the Pact of Umar over time.

There are three points that are needed to ground the notion that the conflict is about social order-irredentism. First is establishing that there was a social order in the 19th century to which the Arabs could be irredentist. This part is trivial, it just requires showing the history and not allowing anyone to dismiss it as irrelevant (such as Vox describing that century as generally peaceful and moving on). The second part is establishing that the Mufti was animated by a desire to preserve and restore that social order as it was breaking down. Finally is to establish that today's PNM is a continuation of the Mufti's mission.

A partially balanced evaluation of the conflict at Vox, but still 150° wrong (Part 2)

Sar Shalom

In my introductory post on Max Fisher's deconstruction of the "myths" about the Israeli-Arab conflict, I reviewed the one card that I agreed with and started presenting what is wrong in the others. In this post, I shall pick up, in order what is wrong with the remaining cards from Fisher's list of myths.

Card 2, The conflict is about religion

In and of itself, there is nothing wrong in stating that the conflict is something other than religion. Indeed, until the Islamists started turning on the the Christians, the Christians were united with the Moslems in opposing Jewish self-determination. Even today, many Christians-Palestinians are on the side of the Moslems, though there has been an awakening among some Palestinian-Christians, such as Christy Anastas and Gabriel Nadaf, that they are better off under Jewish-Israeli rule than under Moslem-Palestinian rule.

However, Fisher states that the conflict is "over secular issue of land and nationhood." In this statement, Fisher creates the impression that the Palestinians' objective is a positive one, as opposed to the negative goal of eliminating Jewish self-determination, whatever replaces it. For the most part, I discussed that in the last post, but in this card, Fisher added a few words about Jerusalem: "The long-divided city has, in its ancient center, Islam's third holiest site (the al-Aqsa mosque compound) located physically on top of the much older Temple Mount, the Western Wall of which is Judaism's holiest site." Contrary to Fisher's assertions in that paragraph, the Western Wall is not Judaism's holiest site, the Temple Mount is, and within the Temple Mount, the holiest site is the site where the Temple stood, though there is a degree of controversy of its exact location. One common feature at EoZ has been Moslem reactions to Jewish visits to the Temple Mount. What is that animates them so much? The Jews visiting do nothing to interfere with Moslem religious activities there nor do they disrespect it such as by playing soccer. Could it be Jews visiting the Temple Mount undermines their right to lord Islam's supremacy of Judaism just as barring Jews from sitting at the Western Wall did during the British Mandate era?

More egregious is "[t]he European Jews who first encouraged and organized mass Jewish migration to what we now call Israel" which writes out the the Middle Eastern and North African Jews who migrated to the Yishuv. Unlike their European coreligionists, many of these Jews were religious. The role of Jews from the East will be brought up further in Cards 3 and 4.

Card3, They've been fighting for centuries

It is true that there has not been open conflict between the Jews and the Arabs in the Levant for centuries in the same way that there was not open warfare between whites and negroes (the polite word of the era) between the end of Reconstruction and the Civil Rights era.

However, Fisher claims that the conflict began in 1948, yielding that it can be as much as 100 years old, ignoring the anti-Jewish hostilities from the Levant that were present in the early 19th century. Fisher characterizes the pre-Zionism relations in the region as " those two religious groups have been coexisting in the region, for the most part peacefully, since Islam was first born in the 7th century." It is a short stretch from that to saying that Zionism destroyed the amicable relations between the Moslem and Jewish faiths that have been created through 12 centuries of patient effort by the good people of both faiths. It has planted hatred and suspicion where there has been heretofore friendship and understanding.

More egregious is Fisher's insinuation that the conflict started after the arrival of European Jews. The reality is that the 19th century was a time that saw numerous blood libels and other massacres across the Levant. The most notable instance was in Damascus in 1840 (which incidentally was the true spark for Zionism, albeit a spark that laid dormant until Herzl discovered it decades later after the Dreyfus affair). However, there were many other locations across the Levant where the blood libel manifested itself, Aleppo (1810, 1850, 1875), Beirut (1862, 1874), Safed (1834), Jerusalem (1847), Alexandria (1870, 1882), and others. The situation of the Jews was such that British diplomats saw that there might be a need to protect the Jews of the Levant. While much of the violence against the Jews was a result of the Ottoman authorites lacking the capacity to prevent, as opposed to with their blessing, and indeed plenty of it was perpetrated by the Christians, it demonstrates that anti-Jewish sentiment was well entrenched in the Levant by the 19th century.

Fisher goes on to characterize the Arab view of the Zionist project as European "colonial theft." A better characterization is that the Arabs were used to Jews in their midst who were willing to accept their inferior place in society. What the European immigrants represented were Jews who insisted on living in Palestine as equals. Early on, many of the fellahin would have been content to let the Jews come in and build the economy. However, many of the effendi were loathe to give up their privilege under the earlier system. One of their members, Amin el Husseini, threatened riots in order to induce the British to appoint him as Mufti in 1921. If there was any event that cast the die for the subsequent conflict, that was it. While most Arabs were unwilling to participate in violence against the Jews when Husseini took office, his promulgating that Arab honor required that Jews learn their proper place induced most of them to participate in the riots of 1929, less than decade after he assumed office, and set the seed for their intransigence which persists to today.

A final misconception of Fisher's is the role of the UN's 1947 partition plan. Following Fisher's reasoning, if the UN had not passed the partition plan, the Jews would have had no right to any of the land and partition only allocated a fraction of the land west of the Jordan for the Jews. The reality is that the League of Nations at the San Remo Conference allocated all of the land west of the Jordan (actually, it allocated more for the Jews, but included a clause that allowed Britain to reduce that amount, which Britain did invoke) and placed it under the British Mandate. What partition did was provide for the winding up of the Mandate and recommended that the Jews should yield a significant portion of the land allocated for them at the San Remo Conference in order to achieve peace with the Arabs. The Jews accepted this recommendation while the Arabs did not and responded by trying to take everything. They succeeded in taking part of what the UN suggested that the Jews should give them, with the Jews holding the rest and forming the State of Israel on it.

There were multiple categories of Arabs who left during the war. One was Arabs who had little connection to the land, such as those who arrived only a few years beforehand looking for work, who thus had no reason to stay in a war zone. Another was those heeded the call of the advancing Arab armies to vacate the area temporarily to facilitate the liquidation of the Jews, after which they could return. This group was augmented by Arabs who were forced by the Arab forces to join this exodus. Finally, there were Arabs who lived in towns and villages that gave sanctuary to the advancing Arab armies. This category was the only one that was forcibly removed by Israel. While the members of the final group were the only ones forcibly removed by Israel, the reality about them cast a cloud over all the others who left either voluntarily or because of Arab coercion, leading Israel to bar their reentry. Unlike all other refugee crises, outsiders saw this one as a bloody shirt to wave about Israel rather than a problem to solve, hence talk about permanent settlement of the Palestinian refugees outside of Israel has been verboten at the UN.

A partially balanced evaluation of the conflict at Vox, but still 150° wrong (Part 1)

Sar Shalom

Recently, Vox, a left-of-center news and analysis site, updated its explanation by Max Fisher of the Israeli-Arab conflict. While the collection of 11 cards correctly identifies several facts that would engender sympathy for Israel, overall, it feeds a narrative that circumscribes Jewish rights and sets Israel as the party to blame for not accepting that circumscription.

{Editor's note - Fisher's reference to "cards" is a pedagogical device he uses to denote each of his points of argument.}

I'll start with Card 7, the one card from the collection that I can endorse. It starts off

There is a common trope, especially on the left, that the Israel-Palestine conflict would end overnight if only the US were not so unflinching in its support of Israel, and instead used its influence to bring the conflict to an end.

The main points of this card are: the premises of that trope are the mistaken (the narrative of the card demonstrates that Fisher considers it mistaken) notion that Israel is fully responsible for the conflict, that American support is not (neither presently nor historically) as absolute as popular imagination would have it, and that pressure on Israel merely creates a sense of isolation which induces Israel to do the opposite. The author cites several facts supporting this position such as the lack of a close relation prior to 1973 and conflicts between Israel and the George H. W. Bush and Obama administrations. This card also did not include any reason to justify those administrations stoking conflict with Israel. Altogether, nothing objectionable.

The remaining cards all have issues in which they highlight issues that misdirect people or ignore others that would create needed context with the overall effect of facilitating unfavorable narratives regarding Israel. Some of the cards are problematic by their very premise, others are neutral or even Israel-supporting by their premise, but turn their premise in a direction that supports an Israel-detracting narrative. I'll address those cards in order over a series of posts.

Card 1 posits that the conflict is not as complex as it is made out to be. This is a premise which is on its surface neutral. Further, the three major supporting points are also neutral. Those points are that any point about the conflict requires knowledge of the relevant history in order to be properly understood, the two sides tend to shout their conflicting narratives, and that the two sides try to present the conflict as complex unless they are saying that their own side is right and the other wrong.

However, Fisher's main point in this card, "[a]t its most basic level, the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is over who gets what land and how that land is controlled," is at the root of why people think that all that's needed to solve the conflict is for Israel to give the Palestinians what is "rightfully" theirs. Proper evaluation of that assertion demonstrates Fisher's first supporting point, but contra Fisher in Card 3, the relevant history did not begin in 1947.

While Fisher might be accurate that Jewish objectives revolve around maximizing the amount of land under Jewish control, the Palestinian national movement is after the nihilistic goal of ending Jewish self-determination in any portion of the Middle East with who winds up in control being besides the point and promulgates that it is treason for any Palestinian to oppose that goal. Saying that one side has only nihilistic goals is anathema to most people who try to evaluate others fairly. However, just because a concept is anathema does not mean that it is false, although it does create reason to require justification before stating it that otherwise might not be required.

Needless to say, the Palestinian national movement would be at considerable advantage if westerners believe their objectives are positive, that is more land for the subjects' benefit, relative to westerners believing their objectives are negative. Thus we can not just go by what they tell western audiences. One alternative way to assess the Palestinian national movement's aims is to look at the history leading to its establishment. In the late Ottoman period, there were three categories of people: believers, equal infidels, and inferior infidels. The believers are those who like the Ottoman rulers accepted the faith of Islam. The equal infidels were those who while not accepting Islam, shared a faith with the rulers of others powers with whom the Ottoman rulers dealt on equal terms, that is to say the Christians. The inferior infidels were everyone else. Naturally, the Christians liked the distinction between equal infidels and inferior infidels because this gave them an opportunity to be accepted as equals. One result of this is that it was a Christian who founded the Baath Party and Christians were as much in the forefront of opposition to the UN Partition plan as were Muslims. As to why there would be such a distinction, this is speculative, but if every power on earth treats a particular group like clay in a potter's hand it is easier to claim that your ability to treat that group like clay in a potter's hand as due to divine will than for a group which is like the potter under other powers.

While such thinking could animate a political party, it would not naturally become a motivating factor for a larger public. However, this way of thinking did not have to take root naturally to become the dominant mode of thought for the masses. In 1921, the British appointed Haj Amin el Husseini as Mufti of Jerusalem and inflated his title to Grand Mufti. Husseini was a believer in the notion that Jews are to be like clay in a potter's hand and used his office of Grand Mufti to promulgate the notion that grant any higher status to Jews constitutes treason. To those of a European guilt-culture background, suggesting that a mode of belief is treason, particularly a mode of belief that liberal multiculturalism holds to be central to maintaining a peaceful world, would be simply meaningless bluster. But, in the honor-shame culture of Islam (analagous to Christendom in this instance, not Christianity), being told that an authority figure considers something treason means that you have to stop doing what the authority figure considers treason. Hence, the Mufti used the Islamic shame-culture to bring the rest of the Arab public to believe as he did that Jew are to be a subjugated people and should not be allowed to bring any relief for themselves from their subjugation.

The Arabs' negative goal would explain why they rejected every partition plan that has been proposed in the past. They did not want Jewish self-determination on less land, they wanted there to be no Jewish self-determination. It also explains their steadfast adherence to the right of return. Simply put, achieving the right of return is enough on its own to achieve an end to Jewish self-determination since the demographic effects of it would result in an Arab government in the next election which would be in position to dismantle Jewish sovereignty from within.

It is one thing to present evidence that the Palestinians' goal is positive rather than negative. The issue with mainstream thought is that it dismisses the possibility that their goal is in fact negative and refuses to entertain any evidence that it is so. If their goal is positive, then the peace process would be a viable way to reach an end of claims agreement. However, if their goal is in actuality negative, then a peaceful settlement leaving both sides standing would require either breaking the Palestinians of their negative goal or imposing a regime on them that does not hold by it since Israel surviving and holding so much as a postage stamp sized piece of land would constitute failure to achieve the negative goal. Wishing that the Palestinians' goal is positive, and thus amenable to some sort of peace process, does not make it so.

Future posts will respond to Cards 2 through 6 and 8 through 11.