Can of Worms: The Middle East

If you have been watching the news at all, you are aware of the latest violence in Israel and the Gaza strip. A few years back I realized I had absolutely no real concept of what Israelis and Palestinians were fighting about, and no context for the conflict. A wealth of information and opinion is available to you, of course (hence the “can of worms” label), but I humbly offer the brief piece of historical critique that has been most helpful to me. It comes from Thomas Friedman’s 1989 book “From Beirut to Jerusalem.” It was a National Book Award Winner, and my paperback version helpfully carries the blurb, “If you’re only going to read one book on the Middle East, this is it.” You might think that a twenty-year old assessment of the problem might be out of date – it unfortunately is not.

Here’s Freidman’s assessment of what the heck is going on over there, and has been going on since 1947:
“The Zionist Jews who founded Israel had three basic objectives in mind when they thought about the kind of state they wanted to build. They wanted to create a Jewish state, a democratic state, and a state that would be located in the historical homeland of the Jewish people. In November 1947, when the United Nations offered the Jews roughly half this area for their own state, while promising the other half to the Palestinian Arabs, the Zionist leaders were forced to answer that fundamental question: What kind of nation do we want to be?

David Ben Gurion, then the leader of the Zionist movement, essentially said in effect to his nation: ‘In this world we can only have two out of our three objectives. We are being offered a chance for a Jewish state and a democratic state, but in only part of the land of Israel. We could hold out for all of the land of Israel, but if we did that we might lose everything. If we have to compromise on our objectives, let it be on obtaining all the land of Israel.” So between 1947 and 1967 Zionism lived, and even flourished, with two and half of its goals satisfied.

Then came June 1967. Israel, in the course of the Six-Day War, occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, extending in the process Jewish control over virtually all the historical land of Israel. From that moment on, Israelis again faced the monumental question: What kind of nation do we want to be? Once again, it could only have two of its three objectives.

One choice was to keep all the land of Israel, including the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and to remain a Jewish state, but this could only be done by curtailing Israeli democracy. The only way Israel could permanently control the Palestinian inhabitants of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip would be by physically suppressing them and ensuring that they were never given political rights.

The second option for Israel was to annex the West Bank and Gaza and remain a democracy, but this could be done only by giving up the Jewish character of the state, because if the 1 million-plus Palestine Arabs then residing in the occupied territories were allowed to vote, along with the 500,000 Israeli Arabs, by early in the twentieth-first century they would outnumber the Jews. (Current estimates as of 2008 – 2.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank, 1.5 million in Gaza, 1 million in Israel for a total of 5 million – compared to 5,320,000 Jews in Israel)

The third option was for Israel to remain a Jewish and a democratic state, but this could be done only by either getting rid of large areas of the West Bank and Gaza or by getting rid of large numbers of West Bankers and Gazans, in order to guarantee a Jewish majority well into the twenty-first century. Since the world would never tolerate a forced transfer by Israel of Palestinians from the occupied territories, this option really came down to relinquishing territory.

Instead of definitively choosing among these three options…Israel has spent [the intervening years] avoiding a choice – not in theory, but in practice; not on paper, but in day-to-day reality.”

How you would solve this problem likely depends on which side you think has a greater right to the land. Since Friedman wrote this piece, Israel has allowed a limited degree of Palestinian self-government to exist within the West Bank and Gaza, and removed Israeli settlers from the Gaza Strip. About 250,000 Israelis currently live in exclusively Jewish settlements within the West Bank.

That’s the bare bones status of the problem. Each side has embraced the identity of victim-hood. Each side has plenty of blame to go around.

But what is the solution?