naraburns nihil supernum
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Israel-Gaza Megathread #3
This is a refreshed megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.
I’m not a progressive, but I do disagree with some of this and sympathize with the position of the Palestinians (not necessarily with any particular faction and certainly not with Hamas). I do also sympathize with present-day Israelis, while thinking the Zionist movement was a bad idea that led to bad outcomes that ought to have been foreseeable to an ethnic group not known (regardless of the reasons) for warm relations with its neighbors, which was the whole impetus for leaving Europe in the first place.
I’m not going to be defending Hamas - I’m more familiar with modern nationalism and the associated brutality in Eastern Europe, especially Poland and the surrounding countries (despite the handle, I’m not Polish or Czech (also not Jewish or Arab, FWIW). I would compare Hamas to the Ukrainian OUN-B.
Before WWII, Ukraine was divided between the Second Polish Republic (with a well-deserved reputation for ethnonationalist dickbaggery) and the USSR, which had already completed its (relatively) kind and gentle phase and started cracking down on regional languages, cultural organizations, and education in the Ukraine as elsewhere. So one overlord wanted to forcibly assimilate them, while the other wanted to impose communism and suppress markers of national distinctiveness, and also killed a ton of Ukrainians with terrible economic policy. So I’m sympathetic to the Ukrainian position at that time.
During WWII, and after some bitter infighting, OUN-B became the dominant Ukrainian faction in Galicia-Volhynia after overcoming the relatively moderate OUN-A. They allied with the Nazis and actively participated in the Holocaust in the area, which involved rounding up Jews and shooting them rather than transport to camps as in more westerly areas. With the Soviet advance, they deserted the Germans with their weapons and extensive experience with genocidal massacres and proceeded to ethnically cleanse the Poles from the region, with about 40,000 Poles killed in the fighting.
So the OUN-B were the actual worst. They committed atrocities on a much greater scale than anyone in the Israel-Palestine conflict has ever managed. Suppose someone had conducted a valid poll at the time and they had 70% support with local Ukrainians. That would genuinely be bad. But that wouldn’t justify the Polish attempt to forcibly assimilate them and acquire territory through ethnic colonization (most of the Polish population was of long resistance however), nor Soviet attempts to force them into the Soviet Union with all that entailed. Total dickbags can achieve dominance over a movement responding to real injustice.
“The scattered Jewish diaspora suffered unrelenting oppression across millennia virtually anywhere they went” Jews were subject to expulsions and mass violence. I’m willing to believe this was more common and/or severe than with other mercantile minorities (the Armenian diaspora from Poland to India, the medieval Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia, the coastal Arab and Persian diasporas), though the people making this argument tend not to have the background knowledge to actually know this (if you are well-informed as to the comparative treatment of pre-modern commercial minorities and the Jews did have it distinctly the worst, this is not meant as a criticism of you).
Now consider the Jews of the former Poland-Lithuania. In interwar Europe, 5.5 million Jews lived in former Polish-Lithuanian territory (3 million in the Second Polish Republic, 2.5 in the Soviet Union), making up about a third of all Jews. During most of the period, they had lived there by invitation and served as a middle-man minority. They had communal self-government, the standard package of obnoxious religious limitations on tolerated minorities (e.g., requiring permission (and often a bribe) to build or repair synagogues), and an intermediate position in the hierarchy between landowning nobles and peasants. Their religion was denigrated and subject to official restrictions. But overall, they had better corporate privileges than peasants, who made up about 90% of the population (due to negotiation based on their economic usefulness). I do not consider these oppressive conditions by the standards of the time. The very reason why there were so many of them was rapid natural expansion under generally favorable conditions. The major massacres occurred in specific wartime or near wartime conditions, such as the Chmielnicki rebellion and after World War I, and were important and horrible but also not constitutive of “unrelenting oppression.”
“The-land-formerly-known-as-Canaan exchanged bloody hands multiple times” This is not a distinctive feature of the region, and would not normally be taken as supportive of ethnic-based in migration in other circumstances (e.g., if Poles organized to move to Germany east of the Elbe because it was Slavic until the late Middle Ages and the land has changed hands a number of times, I think that would be ridiculous). Egypt and the rest of the Levant have similar historical trajectories. Anatolia had an even more dramatic ethnoreligious turnover in the late Middle Ages. Maybe Persia had less, though their language is unrelated to Arabic, so a language shift would have been harder. The bloodiness and hand-changing-quotient or whatever of the region doesn’t strike me as notable or abnormal, and it’s not clear how that would justify a project to create a new ethnic enclave there over the objections of the current occupants at the time.
“the area historically represented the only cogent Jewish political entities to have ever existed.” You may note that the last independent such entity in that region was conquered more than 2 thousand years ago. There were also Jewish ruled states in other locations more recently (most notably the Khanate of Khazaria - one anti-Semitic conspiracy falsely holds that Ashkenazim are descended from them rather than historical Judeans. I always find it odd, because the Khazars were pretty interesting, and I’m not sure what the insult is supposed to be). None of this is either here or there, because again, that was two thousand years ago. Israeli Jews are overwhelming descended from new migrants from the Zionist era. The country was already inhabited. This would be like Greece claiming Sicily.
Regarding the 700,000 of the Nakba. This was half of the local Arab population. It resulted in their dispersal into surrounding countries and to two threatened, difficult to defend enclaves, one of which is slowly being settled by the competing ethnostate. The current bitterness is partially due to these effects, rather than to the absolute number moved.
One notable feature of the Israel-Palestine conflict was the ethnic mix that led to the tension was produced deliberately during the age of nationalism. In many of the other major comparable conflicts (Indian partition, Balkans, former Poland-Lithuanian), the ethnic dispersion pattern was a product of medieval and pre-nationalism modern practices (Muslim invasion of India, Muslim coastal trade, migration of orthodox Serbs into Bosnia and Croatia to escape the Ottomans, city formation by transplanted ethnic groups different from surrounding rural peoples) that bore bitter fruit only under new conditions of nationalism and democracy (which made ethnic cleansing and/or assimilation very important to ensure control of government). I personally would find the whole situation much more murky if a bunch of Mizrahi formed a majority in a weird patchwork in Israel/Palestine and that was just what we had to work with historically. But the reality was a nationalist movement of primarily Ashkenazim and to a lesser extent Sephardim who actively went way out of their way to create the situation.
Apartheid - I don’t know or care if Israel is an apartheid state. The substance of the complaint has to do with expelling enough of the non-Jewish population to ensure Jewish dominance and actively encouraging further Jewish immigration while limiting non-Jewish immigration. Israel can afford to treat its current Arab citizens decently, partially out of self interest, partially because of their own moral standards, while still slow-slicing the West Bank and creating faits-accompli with settlers. But they aren’t going to take any steps that would allow Arabs to have more than minority power, for reasons that are understandable but also are going to be correctly perceived as hostile by Arabs.
The economy is better in Israel. This is true. After half the Palestinian population was expelled during the initial war. Only about half still live in Israel, the West Bank, or Gaza. If millions of Americans moved to, let’s say, Sri Lanka, the GDP per capita would rise dramatically. If we expelled half the Sri Lankans in the ensuing fighting, those who remained would wind up with much better pay than their neighbors in South India. Should they desire this outcome? Would South Indians be jealous of their good fortune?
“Colonization” narrative and “settler-colonialism” - I’m torn on this issue. On the one hand, it’s a struggle over who gets to use the affect-loaded terminology, as with “apartheid,” and shouldn’t matter to the reality of the situation. On the other, I don’t understand how it’s not settler colonialism, unless you choose to define that phenomenon very narrowly. The linked article claims, as somehow being contrary to the colonialism claim, that most Jews there today are descended from 1881-1949 arrivals. Yes. They settled there as part of a concerted nationalist movement despite the area already being populated, and consciously pursued policies to establish Jewish-majority areas and then an overall Jewish majority. One of the major Zionist organizations was literally called the Jewish Colonization Association (now Jewish Charitable Association). Is the distinction supposed to be that they weren’t also the sovereign power during most of the period (as opposed to British settler colonies)?
Western culture, functioning democracy aspects - in most respects I greatly prefer Israeli culture to Palestinian or other Arab cultures of the present day. It’s not clear how this should be read as a benefit to Arabs, since the precondition for the situation was their own displacement and subordination. As with GDP - if you moved millions of Americans to a random third world location and expelled half the locals, leaving an 80% American population, the resulting culture would almost certainly be more western and democratic.
One way to describe the Palestinian reaction here is as violent anti-immigrant vigilantism fueled by racial animus.” Whether the Arabs’ conduct at this stage was good, bad, or otherwise, it seems reasonable to point out that the violence arose in protest to an explicit project to create a “Jewish National Home” where they were already living. I don’t think anyone, including Jews, would accept such a project directed at them.
Objections to Zionism - I object to nationalist projects to retake ancestral land that was not in a continual or at least recent state of contestation, and usually even then. Germany had a much better claim on the Sudetenland in the interwar period than Jews as a group had on Israel/Palestine before Zionism (though they pursued it in the most destructive and dickish way possible). Thus I object to the historical Zionism that produced Israel on the same grounds I object to the Czech claim on the Sudetenland, the Polish claim on what is now western Poland (but not on Vilnius, which was reasonable), maximally expansionist claims by Balkan countries, etc. To be fair to the nationalists of the 1800’s and 1900’s, they were looking forward and not backward at the rivers of blood that would be spilled to create all the new national homes purged of electorally threatening proportions of minorities (I am very much not only talking about Israel here).
I object to the arguments that the Jews are entitled to a state. I don’t think diasporas are entitled to a state, especially not when it involves displacing a dense (by historical standards) pre-existing population. I have much less objection if the people displaced are low-density farmer-hunters or the like, not because their displacement is justified (I think it wasn’t), but because those people were totally screwed anyway and Jews are no worse than Brits or Dutch for this. So Jewish subset of what became Argentina would be about the same level of objectionable as actual Argentina, or the U.S., or any of the Latin American countries. (All assuming it was practical to pull this off).
Persistent Palestinian grievances - I think anger over the initial colonization and the expulsion are still valid. Palestinians are either dispersed when there were not before, living as a minority where they were the majority until very recently and where they were displaced as a consequence of a concerted plan to establish a foreign ethnic enclave, or living in one of two non-contiguous statelets. In a period of 70 years, they went from being the overwhelming majority of the population in the whole territory to being in a worse position than the Irish after 800 years of British rule. In addition, their position is still actively eroding due to slow settlement of the West Bank.
Displaced people elsewhere - depends on the circumstances. Numerous peoples (almost all Amerindians, the remnants of pre-Chinese people south of the Yangtze, etc.) have or had it much worse. Much of the ethnic cleansing in Eastern Europe has been horrible, even if you ignore the Holocaust, which is the single worst one that was actually carried out. Land grievances can go away when most people who care die off (East Germans, aided by Germany having a great economy), when the overall exchange has some degree of balance, the new status quo is tolerable, and the leadership are committed to maintaining the status quo (that time the whole country of Poland shifted to the left), when the contending groups merge (Bulgars and Bulgarian Slavs - this tends to take hundreds of years), etc.
This highlights the difference between a deontological vs consequential framework. Using an inverse categorical imperative, I have a hard time pin pointing exactly what actions Israel has done that I would forbid everywhere and that would have changed the outcome. I admit that in total the actions of the Israelis has caused grief in the region. I don't see a way out without an atrocity on the part of Israel or Hamas. Several of Israel's individual actions are bad, but the substantive, broad strokes actions that created the bulk of the mess seem ethical to me.
Regardless of what Jews called their organization (at a time when "Colonialism" was an acceptable activity, and therefore calling it that might have been propaganda to make their actions appealing to Euopeans), the majority of Jews came as refugees. They had a real, genuine, rational fear for their lives in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. They don't have anywhere they could conceivably go back to. Jews have always lived on "other people's land."
Let's play alternative Earth. Groups of Indigenous people in South America are under severe persecution by their governments. Simultaneously, the Native American lobby in the USA is able to convince the Federal Government to fast track immigration for these persecuted refugees. Both refugees and locals buy large swaths of Wyoming over several dozen years through legal and fair transactions. Several thousand white Americans lost their homes and were evicted as their landlords sold their houses out from under them, but they were able to move to other parts of Wyoming or the US. These people were upset and anti-Native American sentiment increased.
Gradually the number of South American refugees outnumber the local Wyoming Native American population 10:1, and achieve parity with the white Wyoming population. The local Wyoming Native American population mostly does not mind, and is happy to bond with the newcomers over shared history and goals.
Fifty years later, the US Federal Government decides Manifest Destiny was a bad thing with terrible consequences. Therefore, they are reducing their territory to just the original 13 States. Every other state is going to need to self-govern. They want to do this with the least amount of bloodshed, and the case of Wyoming poses a problem. The Federal Government is aware that the white population of Wyoming hates the natives, and left to their own devices without US Marshals keeping the peace, a massacre will likely happen. Therefore, the Federal Government performs one last act, splitting up Wyoming into two seperate States. The Native Americans agree to the deal, the Whites attack the Native Americans once the Federal Government exits. Astoundingly, Native Americans win, and even take over more territory than was allocated to them by the Federal Government.
Which parts of this process would you object to? Which specific action would you universally outlaw?
The analogy you set up differs in important respects from the Israel-Palestine situation. Notably, the Ottomans repeatedly refused mass Jewish immigration to the region, which continued due to their limited state capacity. The temporary period of imperial promotion of Zionism occurred during the British Mandate, which would be more like China taking temporary control of the western United States following WWIII and initially encouraging the foreign immigration before reversing course when the policy provokes a rebellion.
Again, the bad situation arose from the settlement and the whole project. By the 1940’s, partition was a reasonable least-bad option.
The original sin (which isn’t a real thing) was setting up a new ethnic enclave in inhabited territory with ethnonationalist aims. It’s creating a Bosnia/Lebanon/Syria/Kresy-type situation where there didn’t need to be one.
Edit: But yes, that was a crucial contributing factor, and I think that large-scale Muslim immigration to Europe is a potential catastrophe (due to mission creep on the part of immigrants as they gain relative power)
I sympathize with the position of the Ashkenazim during the age of democracy and nationalism. The new ideologies screwed over ethnic minorities everywhere by creating strong incentives to expel or forcibly assimilate them for security reasons. This tended to cause bloody chaos in areas like Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and the Levant. The Ashkenazim were unusual but not unique in being numerous but thinly dispersed without a large contiguous territory due to their niche in the pre-nationalist order.
The initial settlers weren’t refugees, and the later absorption of pogrom refugees depended on the settlements and international organizations previously established. People don’t like accepting refugees anyway, much less people specifically organizing to establish a de novo ethnic enclave on their territory who claim entitlement to the whole area based on their religion that you don’t share. I wouldn’t accept that. I know Israelis wouldn’t accept it. Would you accept it?
The Ashkenazim had reasonable security concerns in Eastern Europe. As with many other Eastern European group, including Poles, Germans, Czech, Ukrainians, Croatians, Serbs, Greeks, Turks, etc., this led them to take steps that ultimately resulted in wide-scale bloodshed and ethnic cleansing. They wanted land, so they took it using the means at hand, current residents be damned. In the run up to independence they consciously imported at many Jews as possible to ensure electoral dominance - by that point it would have been suicidal not to, but only because of the situation that Zionism itself had created.
This doesn’t distinguish them that much from other peoples. Other successful land seizures with partial or complete ethnic cleansing occurred in the new western Poland, the Kresy, the Sudetenland, Vilnius, Galicia-Volhynia, etc.
Now that I'm near my computer I am more confident that I can reject the idea that all the Jewish immigration during the Ottoman empire were Zionist settlers, but rather the majority were still refugees during this era.
The First Aliyah was assisted and funded by Zionists, but as Wikipedia states:
Jewish immigration to Ottoman Palestine from Eastern Europe occurred as part of mass emigrations of approximately 2.5 million people[12] that took place towards the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. A rapid increase in population had created economic problems that affected Jewish societies in the Pale of Settlement in Russia, Galicia, and Romania.[7]
Persecution of Jews in Russia was also a factor. In 1881, Tsar Alexander II of Russia was assassinated, and the authorities blamed the Jews for the assassination. Consequently, in addition to the May Laws, major anti-Jewish pogroms swept the Pale of Settlement. A movement called Hibbat Zion (love of Zion) spread across the Pale (helped by Leon Pinsker's pamphlet Auto-Emancipation), as did the similar Bilu movement. Both movements encouraged Jews to emigrate to Ottoman Palestine.[citation needed]
Meanwhile, a large number of other Jews in the Ottoman Empire, primarily Yemen, moved to Ottoman Palestine at the same time.
The Second Aliyah was also driven by widespread emigration from Eastern Europe. Two million Jews emigrated, only twenty thousand went to Ottoman Palestine. There were many pogroms at this time, the most well-known being the Kishinev massacre.
The Third-Fifth took place during British rule, so I don't know if I need to keep going to make my point.
If I amended my above scenario to state "Some indigenous groups in less hostile South American countries helped pay for these people's flight to Wyoming, because they were one day hoping for a Native American State" does that substantially change the morality of these people's flight to Wyoming?
I’m having trouble finding too much information on the demographic history with high enough granularity to interpret. I don’t have expertise here, to say the least, and it’s very possible my views would move toward yours if I were informed in more detail. Regarding the first Aliyah, the Bilu do seem to have had Zionist ideology in the modern and (to me) objectionable sense David Engel’s book Zionism describes them as refugees, but neither that book nor the Wikipedia articles goes into much detail on composition. Currently trying to read some very poorly-edited books on the history of Hamas (as in, clearly written by non-native speakers and Routledge didn’t feel the need to provide good editors I guess) - will need to find something good on the relevant demographic history next.
Internal movement of Yemeni Jews, assuming it was legal under the Ottoman framework, doesn’t particularly bother me, even if it happened to have bad effects later (not claiming that it did). Supposing that the Yemeni movements did have net negative effects - I would compare that to the forces that led to ethnic town-country differences in Eastern Europe that ultimately led to so much violence, where the process is less worthy of blame because the bad outcome wasn’t reasonably foreseeable at the time.
The Second Aliyah seems to have been in response to the Russian Revolution. It seems most of the refugees went elsewhere as you said. To the extent that in-migration at this stage was guided or motivated by Zionism, I think that’s blameworthy (not in each individual case) for the same reason that I’d disapprove of the Russian Mennonites engaging in Mennonite-homeland-ism at the same time for the same reasons.
The third and onward occurred after the Balfour declaration - at that point I blame the British and those Zionists who had laid the groundwork for the declaration. To my understanding, this early stage of British rule is what created the conditions that underlie the current situation (e.g., Engels claims, IIRC, that the Yishuv didn’t realistically foresee a Jewish-majority anything until the 30’s).
With regard to the South America analogy, if I’m following correctly the difference is that an indigenous diaspora is now organizing and financing the enclave-formation rather than it being refugee-driven? I think that’s morally worse overall (because I’m less forgiving of wrongdoing not done out of desperation), with more of the wrongdoing shifted from the refugees to their backers.
As with GDP - if you moved millions of Americans to a random third world location and expelled half the locals, leaving an 80% American population, the resulting culture would almost certainly be more western and democratic.
I would happily volunteer all of India, but there's so damn many of us that deporting merely 650 million people wouldn't achieve the stated goal.
Well, I suppose if my most useful routes for immigration to the States are blocked, I can't complain..
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Notes -
I’m not a progressive, but I do disagree with some of this and sympathize with the position of the Palestinians (not necessarily with any particular faction and certainly not with Hamas). I do also sympathize with present-day Israelis, while thinking the Zionist movement was a bad idea that led to bad outcomes that ought to have been foreseeable to an ethnic group not known (regardless of the reasons) for warm relations with its neighbors, which was the whole impetus for leaving Europe in the first place.
I’m not going to be defending Hamas - I’m more familiar with modern nationalism and the associated brutality in Eastern Europe, especially Poland and the surrounding countries (despite the handle, I’m not Polish or Czech (also not Jewish or Arab, FWIW). I would compare Hamas to the Ukrainian OUN-B.
Before WWII, Ukraine was divided between the Second Polish Republic (with a well-deserved reputation for ethnonationalist dickbaggery) and the USSR, which had already completed its (relatively) kind and gentle phase and started cracking down on regional languages, cultural organizations, and education in the Ukraine as elsewhere. So one overlord wanted to forcibly assimilate them, while the other wanted to impose communism and suppress markers of national distinctiveness, and also killed a ton of Ukrainians with terrible economic policy. So I’m sympathetic to the Ukrainian position at that time.
During WWII, and after some bitter infighting, OUN-B became the dominant Ukrainian faction in Galicia-Volhynia after overcoming the relatively moderate OUN-A. They allied with the Nazis and actively participated in the Holocaust in the area, which involved rounding up Jews and shooting them rather than transport to camps as in more westerly areas. With the Soviet advance, they deserted the Germans with their weapons and extensive experience with genocidal massacres and proceeded to ethnically cleanse the Poles from the region, with about 40,000 Poles killed in the fighting.
So the OUN-B were the actual worst. They committed atrocities on a much greater scale than anyone in the Israel-Palestine conflict has ever managed. Suppose someone had conducted a valid poll at the time and they had 70% support with local Ukrainians. That would genuinely be bad. But that wouldn’t justify the Polish attempt to forcibly assimilate them and acquire territory through ethnic colonization (most of the Polish population was of long resistance however), nor Soviet attempts to force them into the Soviet Union with all that entailed. Total dickbags can achieve dominance over a movement responding to real injustice.
“The scattered Jewish diaspora suffered unrelenting oppression across millennia virtually anywhere they went” Jews were subject to expulsions and mass violence. I’m willing to believe this was more common and/or severe than with other mercantile minorities (the Armenian diaspora from Poland to India, the medieval Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia, the coastal Arab and Persian diasporas), though the people making this argument tend not to have the background knowledge to actually know this (if you are well-informed as to the comparative treatment of pre-modern commercial minorities and the Jews did have it distinctly the worst, this is not meant as a criticism of you).
Now consider the Jews of the former Poland-Lithuania. In interwar Europe, 5.5 million Jews lived in former Polish-Lithuanian territory (3 million in the Second Polish Republic, 2.5 in the Soviet Union), making up about a third of all Jews. During most of the period, they had lived there by invitation and served as a middle-man minority. They had communal self-government, the standard package of obnoxious religious limitations on tolerated minorities (e.g., requiring permission (and often a bribe) to build or repair synagogues), and an intermediate position in the hierarchy between landowning nobles and peasants. Their religion was denigrated and subject to official restrictions. But overall, they had better corporate privileges than peasants, who made up about 90% of the population (due to negotiation based on their economic usefulness). I do not consider these oppressive conditions by the standards of the time. The very reason why there were so many of them was rapid natural expansion under generally favorable conditions. The major massacres occurred in specific wartime or near wartime conditions, such as the Chmielnicki rebellion and after World War I, and were important and horrible but also not constitutive of “unrelenting oppression.”
“The-land-formerly-known-as-Canaan exchanged bloody hands multiple times” This is not a distinctive feature of the region, and would not normally be taken as supportive of ethnic-based in migration in other circumstances (e.g., if Poles organized to move to Germany east of the Elbe because it was Slavic until the late Middle Ages and the land has changed hands a number of times, I think that would be ridiculous). Egypt and the rest of the Levant have similar historical trajectories. Anatolia had an even more dramatic ethnoreligious turnover in the late Middle Ages. Maybe Persia had less, though their language is unrelated to Arabic, so a language shift would have been harder. The bloodiness and hand-changing-quotient or whatever of the region doesn’t strike me as notable or abnormal, and it’s not clear how that would justify a project to create a new ethnic enclave there over the objections of the current occupants at the time.
“the area historically represented the only cogent Jewish political entities to have ever existed.” You may note that the last independent such entity in that region was conquered more than 2 thousand years ago. There were also Jewish ruled states in other locations more recently (most notably the Khanate of Khazaria - one anti-Semitic conspiracy falsely holds that Ashkenazim are descended from them rather than historical Judeans. I always find it odd, because the Khazars were pretty interesting, and I’m not sure what the insult is supposed to be). None of this is either here or there, because again, that was two thousand years ago. Israeli Jews are overwhelming descended from new migrants from the Zionist era. The country was already inhabited. This would be like Greece claiming Sicily.
Regarding the 700,000 of the Nakba. This was half of the local Arab population. It resulted in their dispersal into surrounding countries and to two threatened, difficult to defend enclaves, one of which is slowly being settled by the competing ethnostate. The current bitterness is partially due to these effects, rather than to the absolute number moved.
One notable feature of the Israel-Palestine conflict was the ethnic mix that led to the tension was produced deliberately during the age of nationalism. In many of the other major comparable conflicts (Indian partition, Balkans, former Poland-Lithuanian), the ethnic dispersion pattern was a product of medieval and pre-nationalism modern practices (Muslim invasion of India, Muslim coastal trade, migration of orthodox Serbs into Bosnia and Croatia to escape the Ottomans, city formation by transplanted ethnic groups different from surrounding rural peoples) that bore bitter fruit only under new conditions of nationalism and democracy (which made ethnic cleansing and/or assimilation very important to ensure control of government). I personally would find the whole situation much more murky if a bunch of Mizrahi formed a majority in a weird patchwork in Israel/Palestine and that was just what we had to work with historically. But the reality was a nationalist movement of primarily Ashkenazim and to a lesser extent Sephardim who actively went way out of their way to create the situation.
Apartheid - I don’t know or care if Israel is an apartheid state. The substance of the complaint has to do with expelling enough of the non-Jewish population to ensure Jewish dominance and actively encouraging further Jewish immigration while limiting non-Jewish immigration. Israel can afford to treat its current Arab citizens decently, partially out of self interest, partially because of their own moral standards, while still slow-slicing the West Bank and creating faits-accompli with settlers. But they aren’t going to take any steps that would allow Arabs to have more than minority power, for reasons that are understandable but also are going to be correctly perceived as hostile by Arabs.
The economy is better in Israel. This is true. After half the Palestinian population was expelled during the initial war. Only about half still live in Israel, the West Bank, or Gaza. If millions of Americans moved to, let’s say, Sri Lanka, the GDP per capita would rise dramatically. If we expelled half the Sri Lankans in the ensuing fighting, those who remained would wind up with much better pay than their neighbors in South India. Should they desire this outcome? Would South Indians be jealous of their good fortune?
“Colonization” narrative and “settler-colonialism” - I’m torn on this issue. On the one hand, it’s a struggle over who gets to use the affect-loaded terminology, as with “apartheid,” and shouldn’t matter to the reality of the situation. On the other, I don’t understand how it’s not settler colonialism, unless you choose to define that phenomenon very narrowly. The linked article claims, as somehow being contrary to the colonialism claim, that most Jews there today are descended from 1881-1949 arrivals. Yes. They settled there as part of a concerted nationalist movement despite the area already being populated, and consciously pursued policies to establish Jewish-majority areas and then an overall Jewish majority. One of the major Zionist organizations was literally called the Jewish Colonization Association (now Jewish Charitable Association). Is the distinction supposed to be that they weren’t also the sovereign power during most of the period (as opposed to British settler colonies)?
Western culture, functioning democracy aspects - in most respects I greatly prefer Israeli culture to Palestinian or other Arab cultures of the present day. It’s not clear how this should be read as a benefit to Arabs, since the precondition for the situation was their own displacement and subordination. As with GDP - if you moved millions of Americans to a random third world location and expelled half the locals, leaving an 80% American population, the resulting culture would almost certainly be more western and democratic.
One way to describe the Palestinian reaction here is as violent anti-immigrant vigilantism fueled by racial animus.” Whether the Arabs’ conduct at this stage was good, bad, or otherwise, it seems reasonable to point out that the violence arose in protest to an explicit project to create a “Jewish National Home” where they were already living. I don’t think anyone, including Jews, would accept such a project directed at them.
Objections to Zionism - I object to nationalist projects to retake ancestral land that was not in a continual or at least recent state of contestation, and usually even then. Germany had a much better claim on the Sudetenland in the interwar period than Jews as a group had on Israel/Palestine before Zionism (though they pursued it in the most destructive and dickish way possible). Thus I object to the historical Zionism that produced Israel on the same grounds I object to the Czech claim on the Sudetenland, the Polish claim on what is now western Poland (but not on Vilnius, which was reasonable), maximally expansionist claims by Balkan countries, etc. To be fair to the nationalists of the 1800’s and 1900’s, they were looking forward and not backward at the rivers of blood that would be spilled to create all the new national homes purged of electorally threatening proportions of minorities (I am very much not only talking about Israel here).
I object to the arguments that the Jews are entitled to a state. I don’t think diasporas are entitled to a state, especially not when it involves displacing a dense (by historical standards) pre-existing population. I have much less objection if the people displaced are low-density farmer-hunters or the like, not because their displacement is justified (I think it wasn’t), but because those people were totally screwed anyway and Jews are no worse than Brits or Dutch for this. So Jewish subset of what became Argentina would be about the same level of objectionable as actual Argentina, or the U.S., or any of the Latin American countries. (All assuming it was practical to pull this off).
Persistent Palestinian grievances - I think anger over the initial colonization and the expulsion are still valid. Palestinians are either dispersed when there were not before, living as a minority where they were the majority until very recently and where they were displaced as a consequence of a concerted plan to establish a foreign ethnic enclave, or living in one of two non-contiguous statelets. In a period of 70 years, they went from being the overwhelming majority of the population in the whole territory to being in a worse position than the Irish after 800 years of British rule. In addition, their position is still actively eroding due to slow settlement of the West Bank.
Displaced people elsewhere - depends on the circumstances. Numerous peoples (almost all Amerindians, the remnants of pre-Chinese people south of the Yangtze, etc.) have or had it much worse. Much of the ethnic cleansing in Eastern Europe has been horrible, even if you ignore the Holocaust, which is the single worst one that was actually carried out. Land grievances can go away when most people who care die off (East Germans, aided by Germany having a great economy), when the overall exchange has some degree of balance, the new status quo is tolerable, and the leadership are committed to maintaining the status quo (that time the whole country of Poland shifted to the left), when the contending groups merge (Bulgars and Bulgarian Slavs - this tends to take hundreds of years), etc.
This highlights the difference between a deontological vs consequential framework. Using an inverse categorical imperative, I have a hard time pin pointing exactly what actions Israel has done that I would forbid everywhere and that would have changed the outcome. I admit that in total the actions of the Israelis has caused grief in the region. I don't see a way out without an atrocity on the part of Israel or Hamas. Several of Israel's individual actions are bad, but the substantive, broad strokes actions that created the bulk of the mess seem ethical to me.
Regardless of what Jews called their organization (at a time when "Colonialism" was an acceptable activity, and therefore calling it that might have been propaganda to make their actions appealing to Euopeans), the majority of Jews came as refugees. They had a real, genuine, rational fear for their lives in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. They don't have anywhere they could conceivably go back to. Jews have always lived on "other people's land."
Let's play alternative Earth. Groups of Indigenous people in South America are under severe persecution by their governments. Simultaneously, the Native American lobby in the USA is able to convince the Federal Government to fast track immigration for these persecuted refugees. Both refugees and locals buy large swaths of Wyoming over several dozen years through legal and fair transactions. Several thousand white Americans lost their homes and were evicted as their landlords sold their houses out from under them, but they were able to move to other parts of Wyoming or the US. These people were upset and anti-Native American sentiment increased.
Gradually the number of South American refugees outnumber the local Wyoming Native American population 10:1, and achieve parity with the white Wyoming population. The local Wyoming Native American population mostly does not mind, and is happy to bond with the newcomers over shared history and goals.
Fifty years later, the US Federal Government decides Manifest Destiny was a bad thing with terrible consequences. Therefore, they are reducing their territory to just the original 13 States. Every other state is going to need to self-govern. They want to do this with the least amount of bloodshed, and the case of Wyoming poses a problem. The Federal Government is aware that the white population of Wyoming hates the natives, and left to their own devices without US Marshals keeping the peace, a massacre will likely happen. Therefore, the Federal Government performs one last act, splitting up Wyoming into two seperate States. The Native Americans agree to the deal, the Whites attack the Native Americans once the Federal Government exits. Astoundingly, Native Americans win, and even take over more territory than was allocated to them by the Federal Government.
Which parts of this process would you object to? Which specific action would you universally outlaw?
The analogy you set up differs in important respects from the Israel-Palestine situation. Notably, the Ottomans repeatedly refused mass Jewish immigration to the region, which continued due to their limited state capacity. The temporary period of imperial promotion of Zionism occurred during the British Mandate, which would be more like China taking temporary control of the western United States following WWIII and initially encouraging the foreign immigration before reversing course when the policy provokes a rebellion.
Again, the bad situation arose from the settlement and the whole project. By the 1940’s, partition was a reasonable least-bad option.
So the original sin is illegal immigration and porous borders, if we can use such terms when discussing the Ottoman Empire?
The original sin (which isn’t a real thing) was setting up a new ethnic enclave in inhabited territory with ethnonationalist aims. It’s creating a Bosnia/Lebanon/Syria/Kresy-type situation where there didn’t need to be one.
Edit: But yes, that was a crucial contributing factor, and I think that large-scale Muslim immigration to Europe is a potential catastrophe (due to mission creep on the part of immigrants as they gain relative power)
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I sympathize with the position of the Ashkenazim during the age of democracy and nationalism. The new ideologies screwed over ethnic minorities everywhere by creating strong incentives to expel or forcibly assimilate them for security reasons. This tended to cause bloody chaos in areas like Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and the Levant. The Ashkenazim were unusual but not unique in being numerous but thinly dispersed without a large contiguous territory due to their niche in the pre-nationalist order.
The initial settlers weren’t refugees, and the later absorption of pogrom refugees depended on the settlements and international organizations previously established. People don’t like accepting refugees anyway, much less people specifically organizing to establish a de novo ethnic enclave on their territory who claim entitlement to the whole area based on their religion that you don’t share. I wouldn’t accept that. I know Israelis wouldn’t accept it. Would you accept it?
The Ashkenazim had reasonable security concerns in Eastern Europe. As with many other Eastern European group, including Poles, Germans, Czech, Ukrainians, Croatians, Serbs, Greeks, Turks, etc., this led them to take steps that ultimately resulted in wide-scale bloodshed and ethnic cleansing. They wanted land, so they took it using the means at hand, current residents be damned. In the run up to independence they consciously imported at many Jews as possible to ensure electoral dominance - by that point it would have been suicidal not to, but only because of the situation that Zionism itself had created.
This doesn’t distinguish them that much from other peoples. Other successful land seizures with partial or complete ethnic cleansing occurred in the new western Poland, the Kresy, the Sudetenland, Vilnius, Galicia-Volhynia, etc.
Now that I'm near my computer I am more confident that I can reject the idea that all the Jewish immigration during the Ottoman empire were Zionist settlers, but rather the majority were still refugees during this era.
The First Aliyah was assisted and funded by Zionists, but as Wikipedia states:
Meanwhile, a large number of other Jews in the Ottoman Empire, primarily Yemen, moved to Ottoman Palestine at the same time.
The Second Aliyah was also driven by widespread emigration from Eastern Europe. Two million Jews emigrated, only twenty thousand went to Ottoman Palestine. There were many pogroms at this time, the most well-known being the Kishinev massacre.
The Third-Fifth took place during British rule, so I don't know if I need to keep going to make my point.
If I amended my above scenario to state "Some indigenous groups in less hostile South American countries helped pay for these people's flight to Wyoming, because they were one day hoping for a Native American State" does that substantially change the morality of these people's flight to Wyoming?
I’m having trouble finding too much information on the demographic history with high enough granularity to interpret. I don’t have expertise here, to say the least, and it’s very possible my views would move toward yours if I were informed in more detail. Regarding the first Aliyah, the Bilu do seem to have had Zionist ideology in the modern and (to me) objectionable sense David Engel’s book Zionism describes them as refugees, but neither that book nor the Wikipedia articles goes into much detail on composition. Currently trying to read some very poorly-edited books on the history of Hamas (as in, clearly written by non-native speakers and Routledge didn’t feel the need to provide good editors I guess) - will need to find something good on the relevant demographic history next.
Internal movement of Yemeni Jews, assuming it was legal under the Ottoman framework, doesn’t particularly bother me, even if it happened to have bad effects later (not claiming that it did). Supposing that the Yemeni movements did have net negative effects - I would compare that to the forces that led to ethnic town-country differences in Eastern Europe that ultimately led to so much violence, where the process is less worthy of blame because the bad outcome wasn’t reasonably foreseeable at the time.
The Second Aliyah seems to have been in response to the Russian Revolution. It seems most of the refugees went elsewhere as you said. To the extent that in-migration at this stage was guided or motivated by Zionism, I think that’s blameworthy (not in each individual case) for the same reason that I’d disapprove of the Russian Mennonites engaging in Mennonite-homeland-ism at the same time for the same reasons.
The third and onward occurred after the Balfour declaration - at that point I blame the British and those Zionists who had laid the groundwork for the declaration. To my understanding, this early stage of British rule is what created the conditions that underlie the current situation (e.g., Engels claims, IIRC, that the Yishuv didn’t realistically foresee a Jewish-majority anything until the 30’s).
With regard to the South America analogy, if I’m following correctly the difference is that an indigenous diaspora is now organizing and financing the enclave-formation rather than it being refugee-driven? I think that’s morally worse overall (because I’m less forgiving of wrongdoing not done out of desperation), with more of the wrongdoing shifted from the refugees to their backers.
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I would happily volunteer all of India, but there's so damn many of us that deporting merely 650 million people wouldn't achieve the stated goal.
Well, I suppose if my most useful routes for immigration to the States are blocked, I can't complain..
I’m sure that won’t produce any intractable violence.
As you can see I only advocate for sensible, well thought out policies after a great deal of consideration instead of occasionally making obvious jokes!
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