The Case for Israel... in spite of all it's done lately...

It is difficult to support Israel these days. The little nation has long since lost its underdog status. It is not a valiant collection of socialist cooperatives, fending off the armies of three kingdoms and assorted feudal principalities. It is the militarily dominant power of its immediate region, swaggering with confidence that it doesn't have to offer its neighbors anything. Like any power acting with such arrogance, it will eventually come to a long fall, just as Mubarak and Qaddafi did. But there are reasons it is worth saving.

Approximately eight million people live in Israel, a majority of them Jewish. One can argue about whether they should be there in the first place. That argument doesn't have any clear-cut resolution. Anyway, there is no feasible place to ship them off to. It is a little like Argentina's historical claim to the Falkland Islands. The people living on the islands are not longing for liberation; they are British by descent and culture. The living descendants of the one-time Argentine occupants have made other lives for themselves for many generations.

The Israelis are there. They do not have family roots or estates to return to when they get tired of being in the Middle East, as French and British estate holders in the Caribbean islands did. Since there are those who would like to dominate them or push them out, even exterminate them, they have a right to self-defence.

The Jewish population of Israel is no longer dominated by European immigrants. A large portion are immigrants from North Africa, the Tigris-Euphrates valley, and other places where well established Jewish populations had lived for many centuries. An unfortunate side effect of the creation of Israel is that these Jewish communities became persona non grata to their neighbors, who were mostly, although not entirely, Muslim, and somewhat Arab, although Berbers and Chaldeans are not Arabs.

King Abdullah of Jordan, in his 1947 address to the people of the United States, asserted that the long-established Jewish communities in the Arabic-speaking countries had no interest in the project of European Jews who wished to settle in Palestine. He said these Jewish communities had an honored and respected place where they were. Perhaps so. If that place had continued to be honored, the argument for Israel might be a bit more precarious. But it was not. Those Jews were forced to flee to Israel, where their descendants now live.

Unless all their former homelands welcome them with sincere open arms and restore their property to them, this counts in favor of leaving Israel be. The claim of Arabs forced out of their homes by Israeli occupation is at least partly balanced by the fact that the land of Israel is providing a home to Jews forced out of their homes by Arabic-speaking people.

The United Nations voted in 1947 to partition the former British Mandate of Palestine. This may not have been the best solution, but it is the solution the world voted for. Perhaps the territory should not have been a British Mandate in the first place -- anyone who has watched the movie "Lawrence of Arabia" can see injustice in this decision. But by 1947, that was a moot point. It had been a Mandate, the Mandate was ending, a large Jewish population was there, and the territory was partitioned.

But that partition, which is the legal basis for Israel to exist as a nation, was a partition, not a transfer of the entire territory. Israel is the size and shape it is today, not because of the partition boundary, but because various Arab armies elected to challenge the partition militarily. They lost. Fortunes of war. The land that can reasonably be considered the territory of a Palestinian state is all the territory of the former British Mandate that was not Israel when the war was settled in 1948.

If Israel cares about its own survival, more than enjoying the next few years in a state of indifferent comfort, it should be facilitating the development of a peaceful, prosperous Palestinian state in that territory, principally, the West Bank and Gaza. There is no basis in either justice or international law to push the Jews into the sea. Neither is there any basis in justice or international law to keep the rest of the former British Mandate of Palestine in a state of limbo, semi-occupied by the Israeli Defense Forces, semi-autonomous, and incapable of long-term development or investment.

Israel remains to this day a heavily subsidized entity. It needs to learn to cut the apron strings, and live by its own means. It needs to stop relying on its history as a tail that can wag the dog of international power, no matter how irresponsible the policies of its own government. But when the dust settles, Israel should still be on the map. If Israel doesn't wise up in a hurry, perhaps it will not be. That would be a shame.

Rewriting history: the middle east in 1947 and 1967

An anonymous comment on a previous article, What Really Happened in Palestine has posed the question, what would you have done in 1947?

I'm not sure I can answer that, but let me start by working backward from 1967. I can't blame anyone for not recognizing, in the heat of the moment in 1967, what seems evident now with 20 / 20 hindsight, from a comfortable desktop in mid-America. But the last half century could have worked out so much better.

In 1967, there was no question that Israel was under attack from at least three nations, backed by the resources of at least a few more. Israel moved pre-emptively, but only when it was blatantly obvious that armies were mobilizing for all out war in Egypt, Jordan and Syria. Israel won, hands down. It was the last time in history when Israel could credibly present itself as a scrappy underdog acting in pure self-defense.

Among the territories Israel militarily occupied were the Gaza strip, illegally seized by Egypt in 1948, and the west bank of the Jordan River, illegally seized by the Hashemite monarchy of Jordan in 1948. Both territories had been part of the British Mandate of Palestine, and therefore, if not part of Israel, should have been the land of an indpendent Arab state in Palestine. That's what the UN resolution to partition the mandate had directed.

So, Israel could, at that moment in 1967, have proclaimed itself the liberator of an independent Arab Palestine, in conformance with the UN resolution, from illegal occupation by neighboring kingdoms. The national socialist Arab successors to some of those monarchies would have howled, infiltrated saboteurs, etc. of course. But, if a truly independent self-government had been rapidly developed behind the protection of the victorious Israeli army, the feudal monarchies and national socialist republics might have had to move on to some other pretext for demagoguery.

A Talmudic scholar who fought in the 1967 war, and now lives in America, has suggested that Israel should have outright annexed the entire territory. His personal experience was that Arab civilians told him they were looking forward to Israeli citizenship, after experiencing the Hashemite monarchy and its minions. That would have raised howls of protest at the UN. But, if Israel moved quickly, dissolved the stinking refugee camps, moved the population onto available land or into available industrial work, when feasible even returned traditional family homesteads (where that did not displace people who had been improving the land for themelves for over 20 years), it might have drained the abcess of "resistance" politics.

Either solution would have been better than the stalemate of the last forty-four years, keeping "Palestinians" in limbo, breeding various forms of protest and terror.

Could anything better have been done in 1947? The British had no will at all to do this, but if control had passed to a power that did, it would have been good to delay partition, keeping the entity of Palestine intact. It would also have been good to develop a highly trained military strike force to exterminate the Grand Mufti's most loyal forces, especially the Nazi-trained legions (and kill the Nazi refugee trainers), then either remove or isolate the man himself. Balance would have required taking out the Stern Gang also, and possibly the Irgun.

Then, a period of testing out what worked, slowly and painfully, might have involved dividing the territory into rather small political units of at least five varieties. In places where Jewish Kibbutzim and Arab villages led by Muktars had been getting along, combine them into regional cantons, leaving local self-government unimpaired, with cooperation only on larger projects, like water and irrigation. Were there such valleys? Leon Uris wrote about that in different ways, in Exodus and The Hajj. Absent the Grand Mufti and his allies, either one could have been worked with.

There would also have been overwhelmingly Arab areas, to be left alone and excluded from Jewish settlement, and overwhelmingly Jewish areas, to be administered as such, and open to additional Jewish settlement. There would be some area where various populations were intermixed, and happy to be so. And there would have been vacant lands, which would be designated for development by people from various adjacent areas. Some, but not all, would have been available for Jewish settlement.

Major cities and religious shrines would have had to be handled to provide general access, if that could be done while preserving public order and security. Hard work? Yes. Impossible? Maybe not. The British didn't care to even try. It would have been worth pointing out that, when the mosque on the Temple Mount was built, the rashidun caliphs went to great lengths to assemble as many pieces of the Second Temple as they could find, on the site where the Romans smashed the entire complex, and incorporated them reverently into the walls of the mosque.

In ten or twenty years time, decisions could have been made to partition the territory into two, or three, independent states, or a federation with a common national defense policy. All this assumes that British mishandling set off a racial and religious war that didn't need to happen at all.

Or, perhaps it was inevitable. If enough Arabs were willing to kill all Jews, and all Arabs who didn't join in the campaign, if enough Jews were willing to kill Arabs indiscriminately, then perhaps open bloodletting to set boundaries was unavoidable, however sad. In that case, the next opportunity would have been 1967.