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the sheer cruelty—the scope of the violation of human, i.e., natural individual rights—of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians warrants the concern of all who favor freedom and other (classical) liberal values: justice, social cooperation, free exchange, and peace.
Would things change drastically if U.S. aid ended? It’s hard to say; ending the aid would be a big blow to the pocketbook, but the ideological commitment to keeping the Palestinians down is strong. Nevertheless, Americans’ forced complicity in this injustice must end.
The reasonable minimal steps toward a just remediation therefore follow: complete Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, including dismantling of the settlements; removal of the wall and compensation for those whose property was damaged by its construction; the liberation of Gaza, permitting the Palestinians full “self-government” (alas, libertarianism isn’t on the menu today); the right of return for Palestinian refugees driven from their homes 70 years ago (although monetary compensation may figure in lieu of this), and full rights for the Palestinian citizens of Israel.
A libertarian approach to this matter offers a perspective that tends to get overlooked by conventional analysis. Examining whether the Palestinians as a group constitute a “people” deserving of “national” self-determination or liberation can yield useful information, but that question cannot be fundamental because whether or not “Palestinians” qua communally conscious people lived in “Palestine” before the Israeli statehood movement (Zionism) got underway, we do know this: individual human beings who were not recent European Jewish immigrants legitimately owned property there.
The dehumanization of the Palestinians was manifest in the Western attitude that these individuals saw themselves merely as undifferentiated members of an Arab horde, indifferent to their immediate surroundings, that is, to their homes, towns, villages, farming communities, market relations, and ultimately their larger homeland, and thus would accept “transfer” to other Arab areas. No westerner ever thought of himself in such nonhuman terms, but thinking of Palestinians that way came easy. That’s the stuff of mass injustice, of literal and cultural genocide.
To proclaim Israel’s right to exist is to proclaim that a political entity founded by a group of individuals on an ideology of ethno-racial chauvinism has a moral right to land it obtained through brutal ethnic cleansing. The Zionist movement had (and has) as its premise that Palestine is “Jewish land” and that non-Jews are unfit for it. Thus it had (has) to be “redeemed.” The outcome was what the Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe. The political entity known as Israel thus occupies land stolen from Palestinian people.
To say that the state of Israel has no right to exist is not to say that the individuals living in Israel have no right to exist—quite the contrary—and the Palestinians would agree.
The arbitrarily drawn “national” boundaries cut through sectarian, ethnic, and tribal lines, planting the seeds of future conflicts that continue to this day.
Reform Judaism opposed any Jewish State for two reasons: first, Judaism, in this view, is a religion comprising a worldwide faith community made up of many different peoples; it is not “a people.” Declaring that Jews were a single people with their “own state” would distort a religion that was held as embodying universal values and compromise the Jewish citizens of other countries through the suspicion of dual loyalty. Second, Palestine was already inhabited largely by Arab Muslims and Christians—the Palestinians. Palestine was not, contrary to myth, a “land without a people.” Full stop.
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The Arabs of Israel are like serfs in a socialist state run for the benefit of someone else.
The ideology that mandates official, governmental discrimination against non-Jews is Zionism. Without it, Israel could not be a Jewish state.
Anyone who tries to understand contemporary events in the Middle East without cognizance of the record of American intervention in that region labors under a severe disadvantage.
Saying you support negotiations toward a Palestinian state is not the same as actually being for a viable Palestinian state.
It is also safe to say that Americans would have a lot more sympathy for the security problems of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians if the major U.S. media would provide even a modicum of information and photo coverage of Israeli policies to turn these civilians, through terrorism, against their leaders and each other.
the media’s ignoring of the decades-long Israeli terror campaign against Arab civilians is something more than careless reporting. It betrays a systemic bias which implies that Arab, particularly Palestinian, deaths, no matter how gruesome, matter little, while the endangerment of Israeli Jews is an intolerable crime that takes precedence over all other considerations such as journalistic balance, elementary fair play, and the right of the American public to have access to all of the facts in order to make its own informed decisions.
Thus it became apparent that the Arabs had not always refused to discuss peace with Israel and that Israel has not done all it could possibly do to reach peace with its neighbors at all costs. A large number of Palestinian Arabs were expelled from their homes, not only during the war of 1948–1949, but afterwards as well. It was not the “gathering of exiles” in accordance with the Zionist ideal that was the primary purpose for Israel, but rather its own needs for manpower in agriculture, industry, and the army. Jewish immigrants from Arab countries have been discriminated against, partly as a
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Before, during, and after the so-called War of Independence, Palestinians were pressured or terrorized into leaving their homes. Hundreds of thousands did. Tens of thousands of others who held on through the war were expelled by the army afterwards. Some were removed to Arab countries; others were placed elsewhere in Israel. Why? Two reasons: to isolate the Arabs within Israel and to build villages for Jews. Segev’s chapter “Dividing the Spoils” describes how the property left behind was shamelessly allocated to the Israelis.
It is important to realize that the Arab armies did not attack the Jewish state, as it was defined in the UN partition plan. The fighting occurred in the Palestinian part, into which the Israelis had pushed from their UN-recommended borders in order to realize expansionist ambitions. The Israeli government had deliberately refused to specify its borders in its declaration of statehood in order not to foreclose opportunities for expansion.
That the West Bank and Gaza Strip have been the focus since 1967 shows, ironically, how far the Palestinians have been willing to compromise.
Partisans of Israel never tire of lecturing the rest of us that there is no unified Arab people—until it is convenient for them to invoke it.
The 1973 war, as Israeli leaders have conceded, was an attempt by Egypt and Syria to regain their occupied territories, not to destroy Israel.
Its chairman, Herbert Zweibon, said that “the greatest friends the state of Israel has in America are the Christian conservatives.”
Since the mid-1970s, the Palestine Liberation Organization has expressed its willingness to make peace with Israel on the basis of a two-state solution.
To grasp the difficulty inherent in Zionism, consider this: Zionism would be problematical even if the land the Zionists wanted was uninhabited.
Zionism, writes Shahak, “can be described as a mirror image of anti-Semitism,” since it, like the anti-Semites, holds that Jews are everywhere aliens who would best be isolated from the rest of the world.
Given Zionism’s premises, it is unsurprising that Arabs would have been seen as obstacles to be swept away ruthlessly and that the state of Israel would be run ostensibly for the benefit of “the Jewish people,” no matter the cost in the lives and liberties of non-Jews.
Reform Judaism was, in other words, anti-Zionist. It foretold with perfect accuracy the violence that Zionism would do to Judaism even had there been no Arabs in Palestine.
It’s not association that requires aggression, but dissociation. True, freedom of association entails freedom of dissociation, but historically the liberal struggle has not been over the freedom to stay apart from The Other but rather over the freedom to get together in all sorts of ways.
Love (romantic, familial, etc.) trumps difference, fear, hate. We know it. Fear and hate need the state; love and cooperation need only freedom.
