ISRAEL AND PALESTINE MAIL: Also without replies. Here’s the initial post.

Mike Daley: The statement [by a Jordanian ambassador a few decades ago]: ‘There was no situation similar to this in the East, particularly with the civilization where for centuries the majority of Jews lived happily and productively and to which they contributed in every way, namely, the Arab civilization,’ leapt out at me. My enduring thought was I imagine the Southern US aristocracy of the mid-19th Century had somewhat the same description for their African-American residents/slaves.

I don’t know why, but virtually all of the history of the Islamic/Arab world is fictionalized by the Islamists themselves. There seems to be no credible and/or widely disseminated histories written by Western Liberal thinkers/academics, ever.

How else to explain the Muslim’s brutal occupation of Western Europe for 800 years coming to be thought of as a “Golden Age”. Or the centuries long Islamic occupation of Eastern Europe where, among other atrocities, children were taken from their families and sent to Turkey where they were enslaved and brainwashed to eventually end up as a feared Janissary, the Ottoman Empires elite attack force.

Michael Yaeger: Israelis’ self-understanding is, I think, different than it was at the time the stuff I gave you was written. It is less zionist, more “vanilla” liberal-democratic. (Not that it isn’t still zionist, just less so.) Witness the moves of the Israeli Supreme Court to extend citizenship, and generally make the place more liberal, less nationalist.

Also, the religious community is larger and more powerful than it was at the founding of the modern state.

So the Israeli self-conception is changing, I think. I have no idea if this is good or bad in general, but it may be good for the client state thing.

More concretely, it is true that the Israeli economy has become less socialist, and they now have some real industry. (E.g., software.) If they can get some peace for a while (hah!) I’m confident they will become less dependent on U.S. aid.

[Eve wrote:] “My goal is simply to point out that for Jews living in America, this exilic and spiritual understanding of Israel is necessarily going to persist, even among Jews who also support those other Jews who live in

and fight for the state of Israel.”

Right on. In fact, I think it persists to some extent in Israel itself (though to what extent I have no idea). For example, people still yell “next year in Jerusalem!” after the Israeli national anthem, “Hatikva.” Of course, this now has a more defiant tone; something like “we’ll still be here next year too.”

In any event, even if I’m wrong about the anthem, I think Israelis still feel in exile in the sense that they are an outpost of liberal democracy in a repressive, autocratic region. So Jews may not be at home in the West, but in some ways they don’t feel very at home in the Middle East, either.

Zack Ajmal: I just finished reading Benny Morris’s “Righteous Victims” which I highly recommend. It’s a detailed, balanced history of the conflict detailing all the atrocities, stupidities, etc. of all sides in the conflict. It starts in 1881 I think and covers the end of the Barak government. The website http://www.mideastweb.org has this to say about the book:

“A balanced and readable history of Israeli-Palestinian relations, from which partisans of either side will draw their own conclusions, and those who seek truth will find that it is complicated and illusive. Morris documents the subjugation and humiliation of Jews under Islam, the miserable state of Palestine under Turkish rule, the plans by Zionists to force Arab immigration, the Nazi associations of the Mufti, the perfidy of the British against both sides, the flight and expulsion of Palestinian Arabs, and the history of each war. If you are going to read one book about the Israel-Palestine conflict, read this one.”

Benny Morris also has another book “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949” specifically about the refugee problem created during the 1948 war and founding of Israel. I believe he concluded that there was no one reason for the fleeing Arabs. Some were expelled by Haganah/IDF or the extremist groups, a lot more left because of the fear of war, and some left on the call of their leaders. As usual the truth is much more complex than either side is willing to acknowledge. I should mention that this book looks only at the refugee problem and its causes and hence neglects the big picture. Therefore, it is probably harsh on the Zionists/Israel. The book I mentioned before has the requisite background. However, “Righteous Victims” has only 70 pages on the 1948 war and only 7 pages directly addressing the refugee issue.

Kevin J. Maroney: You wrote: “The essays, perhaps unsurprisingly, didn’t really clear up whether the Arabs fled in anticipation of getting their land stolen, or simply because they didn’t want to live in a Jewish state, or what. If people have reading recommendations on that I’d be interested.”

The short answer is, “they fled because they feared for their lives”.

A longer answer is that during the Israeli War of Independence, various Zionist forces including the Stern Gang and Irgun strongly encouraged the Arabs to flee before the advancing Israeli armies. This message was

particularly strong after the Dair Yassin massacre, in which an entire Arab village along the Jerusalem road was killed. There are surviving accounts of Stern Gang broadcasts warning Arabs that the “Jews have the nuclear

bomb” and would use it on any Arabs who didn’t flee.

There’s a common myth that the Arabs fled from the areas they fled on orders of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in the expectation that the Arabs would quickly reconquer the lands held by the Israelis, but I believe there’s no strong evidence that such orders were given and no evidence at all that they were obeyed.

The seminal work in this field is Benny Morris’s The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949.

Matthew Hogan: Some of the information you got on Israel appeared to be one sided ( I didn’t notice any Arab perspectives referred to in the packet) though still accurate to an extent (the point about 19th century nationalism is very true). The big problem was the one about Palestinian Arabs inside Israel/occupied territories being from elsewhere.

No.

That was a basically settled peasant society for the past centuries that was not mobile. People did come in and out and there were Bedouin but most were peasants who had settled like most other places in the Middle East.

There was nothing spectacularly abnormal or migratory about Palestine’s Arab population, even after Jewish settlement began. THe rate of growth is the natural rate.

Egotistically, I would recommend my own article in the academic journal the Historian — the background and concluding sections — which deal with a massacre by extremists in the course of the 1948 departure of the British that helped spark the refugee situation and is broadly agreed to have been a major spark for the refugee and war situations.

The cause of Palestinian displacement was not that much different than the Kosovar refugees in 1999, a general forced displacement. Remember Israel was founded by East European nationalists and East European nationalists have had a strain of heavy beliefs in homogeneity and forced relocation of outside communities.

The following article from Le Monde Diplomatique is shorter and better and covers the issue of Palestinian Arab displacement in summary, as mine is a military history/analysis with political background.

Use your own critical judgment, but the viewpoint in the latter article (actually both, Ronald Radosh praised my conclusion) is increasingly mainstream.