I meant to blog this days ago:
I really don't think it's viable to support independence for every ethnic minority group everywhere around the world. So why Palestine? What makes the Palestinians so special that they deserve their own country when the Catalans and the Québécois and all the rest don't have them? The answer is pretty simple -- the alternative to independence is citizenship. The Québécois don't have an independent country, but they are citizens of Canada. Catalans are citizens of spain. Flemish and Walloons are both citizens of Belgium. Komi are citizens of Russia. When you see legal discriminatory treatment against citizens -- as with African-Americans in the United States until very recently -- that's a problem. People are owed equal citizenship.
It's clear, though, that granting Israeli citizenship on terms of equality to residents of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip is incompatible with the idea of Israel as a Jewish state. Thus, Palestinian independence emerges as a reasonable, practical, and moral alternative. Basically, there are four things you could do with Israel-Palestine. One option is partition and independence. Another option is equal citizenship and the end of Israel. A third option is "transfer" and ethnic cleansing. And a fourth option is apartheid. I wonder which of the alternatives to Palestinian independence Peretz favors?
Unlike Matt, I'm quite happy with the notion of little polities getting to secede from the larger one. But I think in the next decade Israel is going to have to confront the fact that the occupation has gone on too long to keep calling it an occupation--i.e. a temporary solution. Unless Israel gets out of the West Bank, it's going to have to recognize that it is the government--and that it is therefore responsible for the health and welfare of the Palestinians. In a liberal democracy, that recognition is incompatible with the way things are currently run in the West Bank.
Another option is equal citizenship and the end of Israel.
Why is citizenship with Jordan and/or Egypt not even listed as an option? Remind me, what was in place for the West Bank/Gaza Strip prior to '67?
I know Egypt and Jordan refuse to entertain the question but why is Mr. Yglesias refusing to list it as an option.
Most recently, Belgium governance or lack thereof came into question. I believe some suggested the Walloons join up with the French and the Flemish with their neighbors to the north.
I'm also ok with the notion of little polities getting to secede from the larger one. So what do you think of Kosovo? And why are even pro-Kosovo governments against the idea of them merging with Albania?
You neglected a 5th alternative, which is far more practical and moral than any of the 4 tenditious ones suggested by Yglesias. Return the West Bank and Gaza whence they came, namely, to Jordan and Egypt, respectively, and give the Palestinian Arabs citizenship in those other Arab countries.
The 'return it to Jordan' solution, while sensible, is far less likely to happen than actual Palestinian independence. There is a reason that the government of Jordan, the population of which is mostly Palestinians of the same ethnicity as those in the West Bank has not allowed those Palestinians in refugee camps to actually join the rest of Jordan.
I agree they should be independent. So long as if the terrorists keeping coming over into Israel and bombing pizza joints, hotels, and parties with the tacit support and/or approval of the Palestinian Authority Israel has full right to move in and destroy said government and its supporters.
I would expect nothing less if we had a bunch of people in Mexico or Canada crossing over our borders bombing our citizens and chanting "Death to America" in the streets as the people dress up their kids in front of the camera with sticks of dynamite wrapped around them.
The really issue is, it won't work. Lebanon has its own government and yet they feel the need/right to kidnap soldiers and bomb Israel.
Until you or someone else tells me how Israel should handle those in government, and those who have the support of their governments, who try to murder Israelis and destroy its nation then I'll agree with them.
But so far, all I see are people asking for a nation to make more concessions to people who do not deserve concessions to be made.
This is not a commentary on some of the Palestinian people, who just want to live a peaceful life. But unfortunately for the sheep of the world, you have to fight for the right to have peace, and many Palestinians are fighting against the wrong people to win peace for their children.
And here come the Israel hawk morons who peddle blatant untruths that 'there is no such thing as palestine' before the British came. Please. Everyone knows that is a lie--stop peddling it.
RICKM,
The only person referring to the past was referring to 1967, not 1947. The situation was that, yes there was no independent Palestine, but more importantly, instead of Israel being the occupier it was Egypt and Jordan.
amondebus-
Implicit in advocating for giving the West Bank to Jordan and the Golan Heights to Syria is the idea that Palestinians do not need their own state or be equal citizens in a state, that Palestinians do not have right to self-determination, that Palestinians are simply run-of-the-mill Arabs with no attachment to the land.
Unless Israel gets out of the West Bank
They've already gotten out of Gaza, in a manner I'd describe as "giving them their independence whether they want it or not," and I rather expect the West Bank is next.
When you're not an occupying power you can blockade your enemy and/or respond to rocket attacks with massive counterbattery fire and it's not a "collective punishment" war crime.
It is, of course, a lie that there is no such thing as a Palestinian.
But there are two roadblocks to "return to Jordan and Egypt":
1. The neighboring countries don't want the territories, and they have peace treaties with Israel so Israel has an interest in not ticking them off.
2. Israel doesn't want to give up the territories, at least not in full. There are some legitimate security reasons for this (e.g., the ease of attacks from the Jordan valley) but there is also the settlers and the "Greater Israel" religious belief that God gave the West Bank to the Jewish people.
Why not just remove the theocratic elements of Israel and make it a secular all inclusive state?
RICKM,
That was a much more productive comment. Thank you.
I believe he was following Yglesias' lead and within that context asking why there are not other options.
Palestinians born in the West Bank before 1967 have Jordanian citizenship, I believe. Jordan, at any rate, doesn't want the West Bank yet. Egypt never wanted Gaza. Israel could've given the West Bank back to Jordan at any time up to the first Intifada in exhange for peace, but chose not to. After that, it was too late, and this solution is entirely anachronistic.
Israel is responsible for...Israel. And that means it has the right to self-defense from genocidal Arabs.
Israel has no obligation whatsoever towards people who have consistently been trying to kill its citizens -- other than the obligation to ensure that *it stops*.
The so-called "occupation" is, in fact, quite humane, as there has never before been a state under such a threat that has been so *benevolent* towards its adversaries.
Of course, what we're seeing here is the typical "progressive" mindset at work (whether it's called "libertarian" or not). Care to count the attention paid to Israel on this blog (and Yglesias') compared with attention paid to genuine atrocities in Somalia, Angola, Liberia, etc., etc., etc.?
Put another way, as long as, say North Koreans have a "state", then the "stateless" Palestinans are therefore worse off -- and therefore must be agonized over ad nauseum.
Maybe the solution would be to deport the Palestinians to a another state, like Kuwait or Jordan, where they would have a state. Except, oops, they were tossed out of those places. Was this ethnic cleansing? Of course not. They're all part of the "other". We'll save the criticism for Israel.
RICKM,
The problem with your formulation is that the Palestinian national movement didn't originate as way of achieving Palestinian self-determination; the PLO was created by Nasser as a political weapon against Israel. At the time it was created, in 1964, the West Bank and Gaza were in Arab hands, but the PLO didn't seek independence from Egypt and Jordan, respectively, to declare its own state. The PLO was still more Pan-Arab and Leftist at this point than it was a true national movement. Partly this is simply because the national consciousness of Palestinians (as opposed to a broader pan-Arab identity) didn't develop until Palestinians were herded into refugee camps by the neighboring Arab states after the end of the 1948-49 war.
Remember: if the Palestinians had thought of themselves as such and were eager for their own state in 1947, they would have accepted the UN partition plan (or at least made a counterproposal). Instead, they essentially let the Arab League speak for them in rejecting it and declaring war on Israel, when Israel declared its independence at the expiration of the British Mandate. This isn't to deny that the Palestinians think of themselves as a national group now, or to say that they shouldn't have their own state. But the history is relevant here, because the Palestinian national identity, such as it is, is tied to opposition to Israel. That explains why, even when they win land and force Israel to withdraw, as in Gaza and Southern Lebanon, Palestinian groups continue to attack Israel. Without this conflict they have nothing left, nothing to bind them together as a people.
Until and unless Palestinians can create a national identity that doesn't rely on conflict with Israel to unite and define them, they won't be able to create a viable state, and Israel will have no motivation to help them build one.
"Unless Israel gets out of the West Bank, it's going to have to recognize that it is the government"
Actually, The Palestinian Authority is the government of most parts of the West Bank, and is funded by UN, EU, and American government aid.
"But the history is relevant here, because the Palestinian national identity, such as it is, is tied to opposition to Israel."
It goes back further than that, and has links to Nazism. The spiritual leader of the Palestinian Arabs, the Grand Mufti Haj Muhammed Amin al-Husseini (here's a photo of him with his friend Hitler), started the modern Mideast conflict with his pogram against Jews at the Western Wall in 1920. He then received financing from Nazi Germany to launch a murder campaign against Palestinian Jews in the late 1930's. After 1941, he spent the rest of the war in Europe, where he trained Muslim SS units for Hitler (scroll down here for a photo of him inspecting his SS troops).
Juan-
The problem with your formulate is that you are completely ignorant of the actual historical record. You wrote that the PLO was a narrowly anti-Israel organization at its conception partly, but "simply because the national consciousness of Palestinians...didn't develop until Palestinians were herded into refugee camps by the neighboring Arab states after the end of the 1948-49 war." That is simply not true--every scholar farmilar with the history of Palestine knows that it is not true. Honest commentators on the Israel-Palestine conflict know that it is not true. For just one example, one could persue the school textbooks in the first decades of the 19th century to find elements of Palestinian national consciousness. Cf. R. Khalidi.
Why you attribute the PLO's pan-arabism in the organizations early years to the rise of pan-arabism during that time, or the the explicit instructions made by the Arab League when the PLO was founded, is beyond me. Why you attribute the PLO's early pan-arabism to an outright lie is also baffling.
You also wrote "if the Palestinians had thought of themselves as such and were eager for their own state in 1947, they would have accepted the UN partition plan." It is precisely BECAUSE the Palestinians considered themselves a nation that they rejected the partition plan. With rising Jewish immigration, the Palestinians saw their country being taken over by immigrants. The only way one could believe otherwise is if one imbibes the lie that Palestinian nationalism was born while the Israelis expunged them in the 1948 war.
Also, by your logic, one could deduce that the Zionists in the Holy Land "had [not] thought of the themselves [as a nation] and were eager for their own state in 1947" because the Zionist rejected the fair partition plan offered by the Peel commission. After all, if the Zionists really wanted a state, they wouldn't have assassinated Bernadette.
Of course, your logic is silly.
RICKM,
The Peel Commission, which was set-up by Britain, was rejected by the British government itself. But you're right: the Zionists wouldn't have accepted a plan that limited Jewish immigration to 12,000 per year while the Germans were throwing Jews into ovens and every country, including ours, had closed its doors to most Jewish refugees.
Not only did the Arabs reject the UN Partition Plan, they did so out of hand, without offering a counterproposal, and chose war instead. They did so thinking they could get all the land after the neighboring Arab countries invaded and drove the Jews into the sea.
They gambled and they lost. Then they went from siding with the Nazis in World War II, like Steve pointed out, to the Soviets in the Cold War, and Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War. Even after all that, Clinton gave them another shot at a state, and they rejected that plan too, and started a terrorist war.
How many mulligans do we need to give the Palestinians when they keep making disasterous choices? At some point there are consequences for choosing war, terrorism, and nihilism over more constructive choices.
Juan-
There was no political entity called "the Arabs". The Palestinians rejected the plan--Jordan, Syria, and Egypt invaded Israel.
Steve's post was bullshit--The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was in many ways a unsavory person, but he was only one individual. The right wing Zionist and Jewish press in Palestine during the 1930s frequently expressed praise for Hitler and the Nazi regime. To make a big deal of either fact is foolish.
Though a dubious claim about the "right wing Zionist and Jewish press" praising Hitler in the 1930's -- note that this was during the 1930s.
The Mufti was an enthusiastic supporter during the 1940s Holocaust -- and his nephew, Yasser, carried the "Final Solution" tradition through his death and beyond.
Of course, the Grand Mufti was only one individual. And so was Arafat. And so was Hitler. No biggie. Just some lone individuals.
Bill Nelson-
Its not a dubious claim. Its in Tom Segev's The Seventh Million. If you doubt me, look it up.
Actually there is a huge difference between the "right wing zionists" and the grand mufti. The "right" was a tiny minority of the jewish population at the time. The vast majority were leftists, both socialists and communists, with a good amount of centrists thrown in. The leadership of the Jewish population was left of center (if not farther left than that). Not to mention the fact that those people changed their tune in the 40's, while the Grand Mufti (who was the most pronounced "leader" at that time) certainly did not.
.. would someone remind me why Israel needs to be a Jewish state in the first place? A place where Jews are guaranteed equal protection under the law; sure, that's great. But a _specifically_ Jewish state? We wouldn't stand for the US being a _Christian_ state, so ... why does Israel gotta be Jewish?