Good Reddit -Explaining the Israel -Palestine conflict

 On occasion while I am doom scrolling Reddit, i come across a post that makes me stop, read and then re-read again, because of how insightful it is.

The following was on r/AskHistorians . It felt like a well-explained summary and I decided to save it and re-post it here. I did not write the below, though I wish I did.

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Can someone explain the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

 

Hi, I’ll take a stab at giving a relatively short explanation that tries to get to the root of the problem. While people often make the mistake of thinking the Israel Palestinian conflict is ancient, you don’t have to go back thousands of years to understand it, but you do have to go back over 100, to the late 1800s in Europe to really understand the origins of the Israeli Palestinian conflict. In this time period, the majority of the world’s Jewish population lives in Europe. While in lots of parts of Europe Jews are integrated into society and relatively successful, basically everywhere they are seen as the default “other” in Europe—the question of if Jews can really be part of a modern nation-state (IE can Jews really be French, or Polish) is an active debate across the continent, so much so that “the Jewish question” is a common phrase, a shorthand used to express this uncertainty over how Jews can possibly fit into European states. In some parts of Europe, this debate is mostly “intellectual” and in other parts, its active violence, but all over Europe Jews face exclusion, discrimination, and an uncertain future.

Jews of course aren’t passive actors in this debate, and they try a variety of means to secure safety and security. MANY especially from Russia and Poland (where antisemitism can be more violent, and there are fewer paths to acculturation in the dominant society) move to the United States. Others in Western Europe acculturate and try to prove their loyalty by proudly proclaiming their national identity to be that of the state they live in and Judaism to be merely their religion, or even convert to Christianity. Many become socialists, hoping a socialist revolution will replace the nations that reject them (some even become explicitly Jewish socialists in a group called the Bund, and hope for a socialist revolution but to maintain a national identity). And of course, some turn to religion, rejecting the secular world and hoping that messianic redemption will be their salvation.

The vast majority of European Jews try one of the above “solutions,” however, a small group of Jews takes another approach. Hoping that some form of autonomy will be a solution to the Jewish problem a small group of Jews in the Russian empire begins to advocate a return to a land they see as their ancestral home, Palestine. At this point, Palestine is part of the Ottoman Empire, a multiethnic empire which, until at least 1908 largely rejects the framework of European nationalism. So while Palestine’s population at this point is mostly people who speak Arabic, they don’t necessarily see themselves as Arab, rather as Muslims in the Ottoman empire (there were also Jews and Christians in Palestine but less). This description of identity in the Ottoman Empire something of an oversimplification, and my point isn’t to say that some people living in Palestine had formed a sort of Palestinian identity, just that Palestine at this point wasn’t an independent state, and national identity was not the major vector of identity.

So back to these Jews in Russia, some of them start moving to Palestine and trying to setup farms. While these Jews have essentially been rejected by Europe they’ve still absorbed a lot of European thinking about “the East” so In their mind Palestine is basically empty and those that live there are just a bunch of primitive people who will be happy that Jews are bringing superior European technology, right!? Of course they're wrong, right away there is conflict, Muslims in Palestine as well as the Ottoman administration are highly suspicious (and with good reason) of any European incursion, and right away there are skirmishes between Jews and Muslims in Palestine. And that European technology? It turns out the Jews who came didn’t know a ton about farming in Palestine and end up having to hire Arab laborers to support their agriculture. This only increases conflict as these European Jews aren’t only unwelcome newcomers, but suddenly bosses, employing Arabs in large cash crop farms.

All of this heats up quite a bit when Theodore Herzl, a Vienanese playwriter comes to a similar conclusion that the solution to the Jewish problem will be autonomy. Herzl had been one of those Jews who had advocated assimilation, and he was part of the bourgeois circles in Western Europe. However, he became disillusioned with the possibility that assimilation will solve the Jewish problem, and instead comes to his next conclusion, in order to be accepted Jews need their own autonomous state (when Herzl said state he probably meant a semi-autonomous unit inside a larger empire, but this is beside the point). At first, he’s not set on Palestine as necessarily being the location for this state, but when he learns that there’s a group of Jews already settling there, he ends up deciding that’s the best choice.

Herzl brings a lot to this movement for Jewish autonomy to Palestine (now called Zionism). As a Western European assimilated Jew he has access to a lot more money. Perhaps more significantly he has access to Western European ideas, specifically, ideas of colonization. Herzl proposes solving the Jewish question through a movement to colonize Palestine—they’ll secure a colonial charter, form land purchasing organizations, move Jews in mass etc. While today colonization is rightfully a dirty word, at the time Herzl wasn’t shy about it. In proposing having Jews colonize Palestine he simply thought Jews would be doing what other good Europeans were doing all over the world. Like so many Europeans he had no conception that the native population of Palestine merited the same sort of freedom and control over their destiny as Jews did. He hardly bothered to mention the non-Jewish population in Palestine, and when he did (which he especially did in the years before his death) he imagined they would gladly welcome the Zionist settlers and the advanced, secular, European style civilization they brought.

Herzl’s movement didn’t develop exactly as he imagined, but it more or less did. As Jews started arriving in Palestine in increasing numbers, and as the native population realizes these Jews intend to colonize their land resistance increases. It doesn’t help that the Jews in Palestine often buy up land that was being rented to Arab farmers (who would work the land for generations but never own it) and then kick these farmers off. Partially in response to the threat posed by these Jewish settlers the Arab population of Palestine (both Muslims and Christians) begin to see themselves as a single group, and this identity hardens as conflict and exclusion with the Jewish population continues over generations.

Ultimately this pattern of Jewish immigration, tension and violence plays out over and over. In the background conditions for Jews in Europe, are getting worse in the run up to World War II, so more Jews, even those who couldn’t care less about Zionism are moving to Palestine (Ruled by the British since WWI) to escape Nazism. Arabs in Palestine, who mostly couldn’t care less about this Hitler fellow just see more Jews arriving and the Zionist movement getting stronger. Jews, meanwhile see the destruction of European Jewry as proof that Zionists were right and an independent state capable of defending itself is the only real solution to “the Jewish problem.”

Following WWII the world doesn’t know what to do with Jewish survivors in Europe. They can’t leave them in displaced person's camps forever, but they still mostly don’t want to take them back into their home countries. In a way, the path of least resistance is to let them move to Palestine. Recognizing that the majority of the population is still Arab the UN decides to partition the land into two states, one for the Arab population and one for the Jews. For Jews, this is a somber victory (Jerusalem, which is kinda a big deal traditionally for Jews wasn’t to be in the Jewish state which symbolically difficult to stomach). For the Arab population this seems absurd, what did they do to deserve this? They hadn’t been part of the war why were they being punished, and how were world leaders discussing an end to colonialism while simultaneously handing over their land to colonizers?

Not surprisingly a war breaks out, first between the two communities, but then, when Israel declares independence, the newly formed surrounding Arab states, looking to cement their position in the Arab world fight what they see as a colonial invader and defend Arab honor attack too. Israel wins this war and captures more territory in the process (Jordan and Egypt take areas that were originally intended for the Arab Palestinian state and claim it for their nations). In doing so Israel engages in a sort of ethnic cleansing forcing hundreds of thousands of Arabs from their homes. After the war, peace is never officially reached, and Israel is unwilling to accept these refugees back. They continue to see Arabs in the state as potentially dangerous and a threat both physically and demographically to the Jewish states. The parts of the state that are still populated by Arabs are initially put under military rule until the state can figure out what to do with them.

19 years later another war is fought and Israel conquers the areas of Palestine that Jordan and Egypt had taken in 1948. Suddenly Israel finds itself in control of the biblical heartland, the areas that have the most historic significance for religious, and frankly many secular Jews as well. But they also find themselves in control of many many more Arabs, many of whom had been expelled from Israel in 1948. Israel has never decided what to do with this land or these people. In a way Israel has always wanted its cake and to eat it too, not wanting to give up the land, but also not wanting to take these people on as full citizens. Israel has at times shown a real willingness o exchange the land for peace, but also taken action, like allowing Jewish settlers to move onto this territory, that make such a deal much much less likely.

In a way this is the core of it, the tragic irony of the Israeli Palestinian conflict. The internal other of Europe seeks to control their own destiny, but in doing so reproduces a European system of oppression onto another people. 

I think it’s somewhat important to highlight just how inescapable and tragic this is—many of the Jews in Europe who rejected Zionism and instead believed they had a future in a multiethnic Europe ended up dead (of course others moved to the US and survived). 

Those that moved to Palestine, even if they didn’t do so for ideological reasons inevitably ended up participating in oppressing another people. And in a way this oppression was inevitable, there has never been a benevolent, or even benign form of colonialism