Israel and Palestine: Cousins in Continuous Conflict

We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children … We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.

—Golda Meir, former Israeli PM1

I remember how it was in 1948 when Israel was being established and all my Jewish friends were ecstatic, I was not. I said: what are we doing? We are establishing ourselves in a ghetto, in a small corner of a vast Muslim sea. The Muslims will never forget nor forgive, and Israel, as long as it exists, will be embattled … I can’t help but feel that the Jews didn’t really have the right to appropriate a territory only because 2,000 years ago, people they consider their ancestors were living there. History moves on and you can’t really turn it back.

—Isaac Asimov, American writer2

We will not rest and will not abandon the path of Jihad and martyrdom as long as one inch of our land remained in the hands of the Jews.

—Raed Saed, senior Hamas leader3

Neither the liberation of the Gaza Strip nor the liberation of the West Bank or even Jerusalem will suffice us. Hamas will pursue the armed struggle until the liberation of all our lands. We don’t recognize the state of Israel or its right to hold onto one inch of Palestine. Palestine is an Islamic land belonging to all the Muslims.

—Mahmoud al-Zahar, Hamas Foreign Minister4

What can New York City and London teach us about sectarian conflict in Israel? Both cities are home to larger and more diverse populations. Compared to about eight million Israelis there are 8.3 million Londoners and 8.5 million New Yorkers. Like Israel, both cities have been built in large part by immigrant populations; but the populations of these two cities have far less in common than the Jews and Arabs who make up the majority in Israel. There are more than 100 different languages spoken across London,5 and an astonishing 800 languages spoken in New York City.6

And the differences are more than just linguistic. Both New York City and London rank in the top five globally in terms of the size and diversity of their immigrant populations (first and fifth, respectively).7 About 37 percent of New Yorkers are foreign born, and only 45 percent of Londoners describe themselves as white British (as of the 2011 census).8 Yet for all these differences Londoners and New Yorkers do not have to wall themselves off from one another with military checkpoints to control movement.

Typically, poverty is brought up as a cause of civil conflict. But compare Israel with the city of Mumbai. Around 70 percent of Mumbai’s 22 million people live in slums with limited access to electricity, clean water, food, and education. There are more children under the age of 14 in the slums of Mumbai (about seven million) than there are Jews in Israel (just over six million).9 Yet the residents of Mumbai do not require United Nations mediation to settle differences among their ethnic groups.

Even population density cannot explain the conflict. Take the case of Singapore, which crams about 5.3 million people into an island chain about the size of the San Diego metro area (but with less usable land). Like New York and London, it has a large foreign population (about 40 percent of all residents); like Israel, its population consists of just a few large ethnic groups (notably Chinese, Malay, and Indians).10 Unlike Israel, however, the ethnicities of Singapore have even less in common. The languages and cultures are, despite some cross-pollination over the centuries, much more diverse than those of the Arabs and Jews. Yet Singapore is an extremely peaceful and economically successful nation, one of the original “Asian Tigers.” What allows the Singaporeans to work together while Arabs and Jews in Israel cannot peacefully coexist?

There are two factors at work in the Israeli-Arab conflict which prevent their coexistence. One is already familiar—a toxic theological view which is radically intolerant of a Jewish state in the Middle East. The other is the flow of financial aid which encourages the very violence it is supposed to solve. Put together, these two factors have kept this conflict festering for too long.

THE ORIGINS OF ISRAEL

One of the major forces supporting political Zionism—the 19th century movement which eventually produced the modern state of Israel—was the editor and journalist Theodor Herzl. Herzl’s Der Judenstaat (1896) is an essential early work expressing the Jewish desire for a nation. He noticed that the contemporary movements toward nationalism were making it impossible for Jews to live as they did before in the European diaspora:

In vain are we loyal patriots, sometimes super-loyal; in vain do we make the same sacrifices of life and property as our fellow citizens; in vain do we strive to enhance the fame of our native land in the arts and sciences, or her wealth by trade and commerce.11

Herzl, like many other European Jews, found that increasing nationalist sentiment meant increasing hostility toward Jews, who were seen by many as incompatible with an ethnically-defined national identity.

At first, Herzl and other political Zionists were not particularly fixated on the ancient Jewish homeland as the place to form a political community of their own. But it soon became apparent that Palestine, as it was then known, provided the most viable spot. The First Zionist Congress, which Herzl organized at great personal expense in 1897, would eventually declare its intention to establish a Jewish home in Palestine—a program which would be adopted by the vast majority of political Zionists. When the Ottoman Empire began to collapse in the early 20th century, this program moved quickly from dream to reality.12

At the time of the First Zionist Congress, Palestine was under the control of the Ottoman Empire, an Islamic caliphate—an empire of Muslims under a ruler with sovereign political and religious authority. In 1897, the Ottomans were already on the decline, a source of concern to the European powers who worried that an Ottoman collapse would seriously disrupt the existing balance of power. Palestine itself was a sleepy backwater with no political identity of its own. There were about half a million people living in the region, about 5 percent of them Jews (though the number would increase with Jewish immigrants from Russia fleeing there to escape the pogroms).13

When World War I broke out, the Ottomans allied with the Central Powers against Russia, France, and the United Kingdom. While the war was raging, British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour issued a declaration of his government’s support for Zionist aims—a statement that became known as the Balfour Declaration:

His Majesty’s government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.14

In 1919, with the Ottoman Empire in collapse at the end of the war, the League of Nations gave Britain a mandate to administer a large tract of Middle East territory— including Palestine. The Balfour Declaration was received in the Middle East with surprising equanimity. There was no storm of protest. As Jews moved to the region, native Arabs found them to be a boon.15 An analysis of the region by the League of Nations in 1920 found Palestine inhabited by 700,000 people:

Four-fifths of the population are Moslems. A small proportion of these are Bedouin Arabs; the remainder, although they speak Arabic and are termed Arabs, are largely of mixed race. Some 77,000 of the population are Christians, in large majority belonging to the Orthodox Church, and speaking Arabic … The Jewish element of the population numbers 76,000.16

At the same time as Jews were coming to Palestine, however, the Ottoman collapse also triggered a surge of Islamic revivalism. In Egypt, the newly-formed Muslim Brotherhood was already disseminating a heady cocktail of insurgent populism and militant Islamic supremacy. In Palestine itself, religious leadership passed to a virulent Jew-hater named Hajj Amin Husseini. As Mufti of Jerusalem, Husseini embarked on a long career of genocidal machination that would include negotiations with Adolf Hitler during World War II to eliminate Jewish communities from Palestine once Germany won the war.17 He first showed his intentions in 1929 by instigating a series of local pogroms in which Arabs murdered 133 Jews.18 In 1936 he launched a campaign of boycotts and violence against Jews which saw “a growing number of armed gangs roam[ing] the country, attacking Jewish neighborhoods, British forces, and fellow Arabs who dared to defy the anti-Jewish boycott.”19

In 1937, the British government’s Peel Commission proposed the first two-state solution to the violence between Arabs and Jews. The Commission proposed 85 percent of Palestine to become an Arab state with the remaining 15 percent, consisting of a small coastal strip and Galilee, reserved for a Jewish state. The Jewish community in Palestine accepted the recommendation.20 Arab leaders rejected it, declaring “this country does not belong only to Palestine Arabs, but to the whole Arab and Muslim worlds.”21

The issue remained tabled during World War II, during which time the Jewish presence in Palestine increased. After the war, the increased presence, combined with the horrific realities of the Holocaust, inclined world opinion toward the creation of a Jewish state. The newly formed United Nations reflected that opinion and proposed a partition of Palestine in 1947. Every major Arab leader rejected the partition, with one official announcing, “even the tiniest Jewish state will be a rotten apple in a box of other good apples.”22 Despite these complaints, the UN approved the partition, and in 1948 the state of Israel was created. Almost at once, violence between Arabs and Jews went from skirmishes between irregular militias to open warfare.

SEMITIC COUSINS

Before looking further at the conflict in Israel, it’s useful to have in mind just how similar the major players are. By tradition, Arabs and Jews have been regarded (and have seen each other) as Semitic cousins. They trace their lineages back to the Biblical patriarch, Abraham.

Jews consider themselves the children of Isaac, Abraham’s son by his wife Sarah. Arabs consider themselves the children of Ishmael, Abraham’s son by Sarah’s handmaiden, Hagar. In 2000, a genetic study found that these Semitic cousins really were cousins indeed. An examination of the genetic material passed from father to son down through the generations revealed that “Arabs and Jews are essentially a single population, and that Palestinians are slap bang in the middle of the different Jewish populations.”23 A later study confirmed this, finding that the male lineage between Jews and Palestinians was basically indistinguishable. Studies of female genetic heritage showed more deviation between the two groups, but the basic finding was still the same. Genetically speaking, Jews and

Palestinians (and more generally all Arabs) are indeed Semitic cousins.
The similarities between the two groups are cultural as well as genetic. Both Jews and Palestinians are cosmopolitan peoples with a lot of experience living among different populations. Most Israeli Jews descend from European and Middle Eastern Jewish populations (referred to as Ashkenazim and Sephardim, respectively). Both groups spent centuries living among non-Jewish peoples. In the case of many of the Sephardim, those centuries were spent among Arabs and Muslims. Many still speak Arabic or maintain connections with their former homelands. They are certainly familiar with the Arabic and Islamic way of life. The Palestinians themselves are descendants of Jews, Arabs, and other groups who have lived in the region for hundreds if not thousands of years. They have been

at the center of trade and human migrations since before Muhammad was even born. The cultural similarities between Jews and Palestinians extend to religion. Judaism and Islam are in many ways more like one another than either is like Christianity. Both are strictly monotheistic (even the Trinitarian views of most Christian groups are sometimes regarded as vaguely polytheistic) and believe in a strictly transcendent god. Both religions are extremely legalistic, emphasizing correct action in accord with the laws revealed by god rather than rightness of belief. In synagogue and mosque, there are no priests: instead, religious leaders are those who have become very well read in the written traditions of the faith. The religiously observant will set their boys to learning the religious traditions—a learning which begins in both faiths with memorization and recitation. Both religions involve numerous purity rituals and dietary restrictions (such as a ban on eating pork).24 While specific details may differ, Judaism is, in the words of Rabbi David Rosen, “overwhelmingly rooted in its Semitic world view and is extremely similar to Islam in its

fundamental religious outlook, structure, jurisprudence and practice.”25
Other cultural similarities include a close affinity between languages. Arabic and Hebrew share a number of family resemblances (both are classified as Semitic languages), including similarities in grammar, pronunciation, and even vocabulary.26 Many of the differences between the two cultures lie in their different responses to modernity. Jews living in Europe during the Enlightenment of the 18th century tended to become more secular and less isolated from mainstream European society. They brought that same attitude with them to Israel, where only about 10 percent of Jews are strictly observant of religious law. Most Israeli Jews today accept modern life, though religiously strict Jews are the fastest- growing demographic group due to their extremely high fertility rate. Among Muslims, every concession to modern life—particularly its secularism and religious freedom—has been bitterly contested.27

The argument is sometimes advanced that the history of Jews living in Arab land shows that the two groups should be able to get along. This historical situation was much as Rabbi Rosen puts it: “as long as they accepted their second class status, [Jews] lived peacefully and cooperatively with their Muslim neighbors.”28 But there is a difference between being allowed to live and being able to flourish. The medieval Jewish scholar Maimonides, who spent his whole life as a second-class citizen in Arab lands, was under no illusions about the Arab attitude towards Jews: “never did a nation molest, degrade, debase, and hate us as much as they.”29 As the conflict in Israel shows, Arabs will not peacefully coexist with Jews if they are not the undisputed rulers.

AN INTOLERANT THEOLOGY

Arab intransigence towards Israel is rooted in theology. Muslims have traditionally divided the human world into Dar al-Salaam (“The House of Peace”) and Dar al-Harb (“The House of War”). Dar al-Salaam, also known as Dar al-Islam, consists of those parts of the world governed by Muslims. Dar al-Harb is everywhere else. It is a religious duty for Muslims to convert Dar al-Harb into Dar al-Salaam. For most of Islam’s history, the pattern has been conquest first, then conversion. The Qur’an also promises Muslims that the whole world will one day be under their control. Therefore, Muslims see it as a religious manifest destiny to take over the world. For any part of the world to revert back to Dar al-Harb after being conquered by Islam is an abomination and a deep shame. Southern Spain, Greece, and India are all territories Muslims believe belong to them by divine right—“once Islamic, always Islamic” is the rule. Israel is another such territory.

The Islamic attitude towards territory that “belongs” to Islam is sometimes expressed by the term waqf. A waqf is an inalienable religious endowment—usually a building, a small plot of land, or even a sum of cash. By figurative extension, the term is also applied to all current and former lands of the Dar al-Salaam, naming them as belonging to the Muslim ummah (i.e., to the community of all Muslim believers, taken as a whole). This is the meaning Hamas gives to the term in its Covenant of 1988:

This is the law governing the land of Palestine in the Islamic Sharia (law) and the same goes for any land the Moslems have conquered by force, because during the times of (Islamic) conquests, the Moslems consecrated these lands to Moslem generations till the Day of Judgement … This Waqf remains as long as earth and heaven remain. Any procedure in contradiction to Islamic Sharia, where Palestine is concerned, is null and void.30

The same theological attitude informs most the political leaders of the Palestinians. A co-founder and Hamas’ so-called foreign minister declared in 2005:

First of all this Palestinian land, and all the Arab nation, is all part of the same area. In the past, there was no independent Palestinian state; there was no independent Jordanian state; and so on. There were regions called Iraq or Egypt, but they were all part of one country … Our main goal is to establish a great Islamic state, be it pan-Arabic or pan-Islamic.31

The notion at work here, that all the different regions are part of “one country,” shows that the speaker is thinking of the Islamic ummah. What he has in mind by a “great Islamic state” is nothing less than a caliphate like the late Ottoman Empire which formerly ruled Palestine.

Because of this outlook, the Arabs have been singularly intransigent over Israel and Palestine from the beginning. Prior to the first Arab-Israeli War in 1948, the Secretary of the Arab League told an Israeli official:

The Arab world is not in a compromising mood. It’s likely, Mr. Horowitz, that your plan is rational and logical, but the fate of nations is not decided by rational logic. Nations never concede; they fight. You won’t get anything by peaceful means or compromise. You can, perhaps, get something, but only by force of your arms. We shall try to defeat you. I am not sure we’ll succeed, but we’ll try.32

It is not often that someone will admit to going to war out of irrational hatred and greed, but here we have it. Of course, the Arab League was unsuccessful and ended up with less than a peaceful compromise would have granted them—Israel ended up expanding its territory beyond the original UN-proposed borders.

Humiliation and anger over the 1948 defeat festered among the Arab nations. In 1964, the Palestine Liberation Organization was founded with the explicit goal of “purg[ing] the Zionist presence from Palestine.”33 With the PLO conducting militia attacks and Egypt and Jordan massing troops along its borders, Israel launched a preemptive strike in 1967. Now referred to as the Six Day War, this conflict saw the Arab nations again enduring a painful defeat. Israel captured still more territory from Egypt and Jordan, including complete control over the city of Jerusalem.

Since the 1967 defeat, opposition to Israel has largely taken the form of terrorism and rhetoric. Former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been particularly outspoken, with Holocaust denial, prayers for the destruction of Israel, and predictions that Israel will be wiped off the map to his credit. From his comments, it is clear that Ahmadinejad’s attitude toward Israel is informed largely by the theological view described above. In 2008, while playing down any suggestion that Iran was planning a war against Israel, he explained that his objection was “against the Zionists” but that he had no necessary objections “against the Jew[s].”34 However, the implication that Ahmadinejad’s main objection is only to the Jewish state won’t wash when stacked up against his other public statements about the Jews and Israel.

Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the terror group Hezbollah in Lebanon, is more outspoken—likely because he does not need to answer to world opinion. Nasrallah has launched a number of terror attacks and rocket strikes against Israel since he took over the leadership of Hezbollah in 1992. In an interview on Egyptian television he justified these attacks as part of a fight to “liberate” the Palestinians. The clear implication is that Israel has no legitimacy because it has been “imposed” upon the Palestinian population whom it now oppresses. But Nasrallah is a hypocrite. He has opposed granting Palestinians asylum in Lebanon, and he has made quite clear in other statements that he is motivated by hatred of Jews not just “Zionists.” If the Jews gather in Israel, he has said, “it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.”35

For hatred of Jews, too, there is religious justification in Islam. Although it is sometimes claimed that the Qur’an only professes scorn for Jews known to Muhammad, it declares, “Verily, the Revelation that has come to you from Allah increases in most of [the Jews] their obstinate rebellion and disbelief. We have put enmity and hatred amongst them till the Day of Resurrection.”36 Such sentiments find even fuller development in the Hadith, most notably in a famous description of the Day of Judgment:

(Muhammad said:) The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him.37

This very passage has been invoked by the Palestinian Authority for its ongoing struggles with Israel:

We the Palestinian nation, our fate from Allah is to be the vanguard in the war against the Jews until the resurrection of the dead, as the Prophet Muhammad said: “The resurrection of the dead will not arrive until you will fight the Jews and kill them.” We the Palestinians are the vanguard in this undertaking and in this campaign, whether or not we want this.38

Instead of “the devil made me do it,” we have Palestinians saying “Muhammad made me do it.”

ENDING THE MADNESS

There have been several attempts to defuse the Arab-Israeli conflict and reach an understanding on secular terms. From the very beginning, the Jews have been willing to do so. David Ben-Gurion, one of the founders of the modern Israeli state, said in 1937:

All our aspiration is built on the assumption—proven through all our activity in the Land—that there is enough room in the country for ourselves and the Arabs.39

It took about 40 years for an Arab leader to come to the same conclusion. In 1978, Egyptian President Anwar El Sadat signed the Camp David Accords with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. With a stroke of the pen, Sadat officially ended a state of war which had existed between his country and Israel since 1948 and recognized in principle the existence of Israel. He was at once perceived by the other Arab nations as a traitor. Egyptian Islamists were outraged. In 1981, a jihadist assassin killed Sadat and 11 other officials during a parade in Cairo. Despite the assassination, however, American cash has helped ensure that the peace between Egypt and Israel has remained intact. 40

Another opportunity came in 1994 when King Hussein of Jordan signed a peace treaty with Israel. Later, he proclaimed the following hopeful message:

The two Semitic peoples, the Arabs and the Jews, have endured bitter trials and tribulations during their journey through history; let us resolve to end this suffering and to fulfill our responsibilities as leaders of our peoples, and our duty as human beings toward mankind.41

At the same time, PLO leader Yasser Arafat negotiated with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to come to a two-state solution to the Palestinian problem. Again, religious extremists were outraged. In February 1994 a Jewish extremist killed 25 Palestinian Arabs in the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron. In response to the Arafat-Rabin deal, Hamas launched a series of suicide bombings targeting civilians across Israel (a practice the group has continued to engage in). A right-wing Jewish radical assassinated Rabin in 1995.

In 2000, the push for a Palestinian state collapsed when Arafat rejected a proposal that would have given him Gaza, most of the West Bank, and a portion of Jerusalem. A new wave of violence known as the Second Intifada soon followed, at Arafat’s instigation. There was a second factor at work behind Arafat’s rejection of Israel’s generous offer—a factor that has to be taken into account when asking why the conflict between Jews and Palestinians continues to persist.

FOREIGN AID AS INCENTIVE TO VIOLENCE

Money is the other element which continues to fuel divisions over Israel. Since the Oslo Accords, the U.S. government has provided about $5 billion in foreign aid to the Palestinian Authority.42 Although the money was intended to buy a certain measure of peace, the end result has been the Palestinians doing just enough to keep the aid coming but not so much that foreign donors feel they can shut off the money supply. In the past five years in particular the Palestinian Authority received $500 million annually from the United States, about 40 percent of which was plugged right into the budget.43

One of the worst-kept secrets in the region is that the PA uses its foreign cash to subsidize terror attacks against Israel. About 6 percent of the PA’s operating budget is devoted to a program that provides generous salaries to Palestinians who have been imprisoned for their actions against Israeli civilians and/or property. Although such funding violates laws (particularly in the U.S. and Britain) prohibiting such use of funding, it still occurs.44

Any Palestinian convicted of a terror strike on Israel or its citizens is automatically given a salary by the Palestinian Authority which is tied to their time in prison and the nature of the attack. The Ministry of Prisoner Affairs administers the salaries and a private watchdog group called the Prisoners Club ensures that prisoners are paid regardless of any budgetary shortfalls. A three year prison sentence will net a prisoner about $400 a month. Three to five years is worth $560. At the higher end, 10-15 year sentences are worth about $1,690 a month, while a terrorist who attacks civilians and gets a 20 year prison sentence can expect close to $2,000 a month. To put it in perspective, $560 a month is more than most ordinary jobs in the West Bank will pay; $2,000 a month ranks among the best available in the Palestinian territories.45

These salaries can even be augmented with bonuses and incentives. In 2009, the PA offered a $150 per prisoner bonus for the religious holiday of Eid al-Adha. Some prisoners receive extra pay if they are married or have children.46 Compared to the tribute paid to Egypt, the money spent on the PA is only so much wasted effort. Why would the Palestinians make lasting peace with Israel, knowing that peace would inevitably reduce the flow of foreign aid?

HARD QUESTIONS

With the signing of the Geneva interim agreement on November 24, 2013, the issue of Israel living in peace with itself and its neighbors has become even more acute. If, as seems likely, Iran uses this agreement to acquire nuclear weapons (and the Saudis and other Arab states follow suit, as they have warned), the region will be bristling with weapons far more deadly than rocks and car bombs. And unlike the Cold War standoff, the powers around Israel are not rational actors. Problems between Palestinians and Jews will have to find some resolution other than tragedy.

But there will be no resolution so long as Arabs, including Palestinians, cling to notions of Israel as “Islamic land” or as “sacred waqf.” Much of what passes as Islamic land was originally taken by conquest; is it reasonable for Muslims to object to a New Jersey-sized Jewish state that was established by international agreement amid a massive swath of Arab- controlled land? As recent history has shown, the moments of breakthrough in Arab-Israeli relations have been built on the grounds of secularism and pragmatism. On those same grounds the cities we began this chapter with—New York, London, and Singapore—have achieved economic greatness. Despite the diversity of human life living within those cities, the people live together in relative peace. The scriptural dogma that currently dominates Palestinian political thinking can only produce endless conflict.