With regard to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, people have recently begun to fill in the gaps and make all sorts of claims. What about going back to the 1967 line, Palestinian-Israeli merger, that the Germans should be allowed to offer the Jews a plot of land, that it shouldn’t be in Jerusalem, and so on. Fighting is inevitable, pro-Israel, pro-Palestinian. Most of it is simply taking sides.
I actually reject the idea of looking at this event in terms of an overarching concept like Israel or Palestine.
First of all this is a raid on Israel by the armed forces of Hamas. Palestine at the moment refers to two areas, one in the West Bank and one in Gaza. Hamas is a political and military organization with an Islamic background. The West Bank is dominated by the PLO. Gaza is under Hamas. When Hamas was democratically elected to power back in the day, I interviewed their spokesperson by phone about what Hamas stood for, what was going on, and so on. At that time, I didn’t think they were a terrorist organization. This time, looking at all kinds of information, at least they are armed attacks on civilians, brutal and inhumane, and terrorist acts. No matter what their position is, they must be firmly opposed.
But Hamas does not equal all of Palestine, and that is the first point to make.Seven years ago, I went to Palestine with an Israeli non-governmental organization. Our Jewish and Palestinian friends in the organization took us to Ramallah, the core city in the West Bank, to meet officials and NGOs. A large number of Palestinians there cross checkpoints every day to go to work in Israel. The apartment buildings close to the checkpoints were very expensive. This was before the epidemic.2021 In July, the Israeli media said 16,000 more jobs for Palestinians in the West Bank, when there were about 87,000 Palestinians working in Israel. I think the older sister who treated us to ice cream in Ramallah was one of them. What is she? Palestinian traitor? Slave labor? Obviously can’t talk about it.
Israel and Palestine are two hostile states, but the reality is more complex. And it’s not the same as it was in the 1990s, and it’s even more different than it was in the years of the Arab-Israeli conflict decades ago.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an old, bad book, dating back to the emergence of Zionism in Eastern Europe in the 1880s. It goes back to the dissolution of the Ottoman Turkish Empire in World War I, the invention of the so-called Pan-Arab countries outside the Anatolian Peninsula, the rule of British Palestine in the 1930s, World War II, the post-World War II United Nations arrangements, the evolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the rise of Hamas, the division of power between Gaza and the West Bank, and the Arab Spring. The whole situation was accompanied by the disintegration of Old Europe, the birth of New Europe, WWI and WWII Cold War followed by the Cold War to today. Over a hundred years. These things are all strung together.
Events that took place over the course of a hundred years need to be calibrated vertically, on a timeline, and also taking into account the specific point in time, the changing pattern of the world situation at that point in time. In other words, in order to grasp the context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict with relative accuracy, it is actually necessary to have a general understanding of the world pattern over the past hundred years or so, to have an understanding of the Arab region, and to add to it the different dimensions, religious, geographic, racial, political, economic, social, and so on.
In short, the water is too deep. Each party to the conflict can present positions, codes of conduct that seem logically self-evident, as well as identify the other party’s mistakes and crimes. Each is right, even righteous. Many people don’t realize that Jews have also engaged in terrorist attacks. The first major conflict between Palestinian Arabs and settled Jews was not the first Middle East war in 1948, but in the 1930s, when Jews attacked the British administration and put bombs on buses frequented by Arabs.
So I don’t think the country should take things like exploring solutions too seriously. This is the kind of thing that all the American presidents have tried to fix, but failed to do so. From the possession of intelligence to the degree of professionalism, we are too amateurish.
So what is the reality of Palestine and Israel? In my opinion, this reality is somewhat like HNA and Evergrande, which cannot declare bankruptcy. It is not easy to go on living, but there is no way to dissolve and liquidate them, so they can only make do and move forward. The living are tied together on both sides, 10 million in Israel and 5 million in Palestine, 15 million in total, and it’s just going to wear out. By the way, there are the refugee families in the Shatila refugee camp south of Beirut, Lebanon, where there are refugees from the first Middle East war and their descendants, and where I went for a stroll more than 20 years ago, much like a bullet-hole-speckled urban village.
The mainstream story of Israel’s founding is all over the internet now, so I won’t go into it. Let’s talk about a deeply felt point.
Israel was still founded as a solution to the problem of Paiyo, which was a European problem at the time, and had nothing to do with the Eastern world. after the Isabella’s of Aragon wiped out the Muslim regimes from the Andalusia region of southern Spain 500 years ago, the Jews were also driven away, and many went to the Eastern world to seek refuge with the Ottoman Caliphate, and became Eastern Jews. I have read in the Jewish Memorial in Istanbul that there were Jewish soldiers in the army that built the modern Turkish state.
The Jews of the Eastern world are forced into the story of Israel. Some say the current conflict is a religious war. The history of Jews in the East is precisely a counterfactual. It’s not as if there have been no conflicts, Damascus in the 19th century actually happened, and Muslims, Christians, and Jews clashed with each other, just twice, which is totally insufficient to support the argument of a religious war.
There is a book called the last Jewish in Baghdad, which talks about how in the 1930s the market in Baghdad was opened according to the Jewish way of life. The Jews had the most say in the management of the market, and when I interviewed the then Israeli ambassador to China in 2005, he told me that his family came from Baghdad.
In 2017 I followed an Israeli NGO to Hebron, Palestine, where there is a cemetery for Abraham’s family. There were Jews settled there as well as Palestinians, and relations between the two sides were not good, and the administrator was Israel. The road from the parking lot to the cemetery has all the windows sealed and segregated.
One of the Jewish girls who accompanied us said that their family was originally from here, and they were forced to move because of the establishment of the state of Israel. So with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, it’s not just Palestinian Arab refugees fleeing out of the country, it’s also Eastern Eutopians from the Arab world who are fleeing in reverse to Israel. Their feelings, their identification with Israel, are probably going to be very mixed.
And again, Palestine. To be honest, it’s also a state that was invented later and had to be invented. Granted, it was the original UN resolution, but the prevailing opinion in the Arab world at that time was not Palestinian statehood. Jordan and Syria both wanted Palestine on their own turf. No one said they wanted an independent Palestine. By the time Palestine was recognized later it was to get rid of the burden.
A hundred years ago when the Jews were discussing Zionism, Turkey was discussing dismantling and getting a nation-state. The Arab upper class was probably sort of abandoned by the Turks and had to play by themselves. And here of course there were the Kurds. There were several currents of thought at the time, some said let’s have a religion, an Islamic state, but the Shiites and Sunnis were divided, and those branches of Christianity wouldn’t do it. Probably the most recognized was secular pan-Arabism. Palestinian Zionism was nothing at that time.
The Arab countries we are talking about today, at bottom, are the result of World War I and were basically set up under the domination of the British and the French. Later, when the Arab world was divided into spheres of influence, it was still dominated by the British and the French. The Egyptian lineage knows best, the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea to the Hashemite family, built the three kingdoms of Jordan, Syria and Iraq. In the end, only Jordan remained to retain the bloodline.
Lawrence aided the Hashemite family in moving north from the Arabian Peninsula to inherit the land of the Umayyads and Abbasids. The French fought Lawrence’s buddy, Prince Faisal, to dig Lebanon out hard and form a new state. The fact that the French did this can’t just be said to be Western powers interfering in the internal affairs of the Arabs. That bit of bad blood goes all the way back to the Crusades. I don’t think it was Faisal who suffered the most from this, but the pan-Arabists. According to the latter’s ideals, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan are not right. Since the Jews believe that the Jews should have a state, why don’t these Arab countries assemble together as one? That’s what they wanted to do initially. So you see from Egypt to Palestine to Jordan, Syria, Iraq, the flags of these countries are all related, and some of them are easily confused, and in the 1950’s, Nasser, the Egyptian Chancellor, created the myth of the nationalization of the Suez Canal. This myth is the myth of the victory of a developing country over a developed one. Probably similar examples are the Russo-Japanese War, and the time Kemal took out Churchill’s navy. The problem is that Nasser didn’t so much win that time by hard power as by betting against the Americans. Eisenhower of the United States pressed, not allowed Britain, France and Israel to make a move. This side of Europe is still waiting for American relief food. Israel is also unlikely to go it alone. So Nasser is in the ascendant, from the Egyptian band leader to one of the C-suite figures in the Third World.
It was the time when Egypt had the most money, saved from the 19th century by Sultan Ali.How good was Egypt in the mid-20th century? Let’s put it this way, when it comes to Arab movies, it’s about as good as Egyptian movies. Egypt was the center of the Arab world. Cairo was the New York of the Arab world. Dubai, Abu Dhabi, it’s too superficial.
Nasser’s time was good when Syria and Egypt merged to form the United Arab Republic, which lasted from 1958 to 1971. It was the closest the pan-Arabists ever came to success, and its failure was a serious setback for pan-Arabism.
Arabism and Zionism are both nationalisms, both play on the idea of one nation, one state, and by that reasoning, Arab nationalists are meant to support grand unification. In reality, the two theories are absolutely mutually exclusive. The Israel thing, in the eyes of Arab nationalists, is a failure of unification and a mountain that the Arab nation must overthrow.
Israel has given the pan-Arabist countries destruction, but Israel is not the first. So was Lebanon. What about Syria, Iraq, Egypt? Egypt and Syria got together in the 50’s and ended up splitting up. That’s just the way it is, it’s hard to get together when you’re already divided.
In Egypt in 2011, I was talking to a local journalist friend who was a Nasserist. In favor of taking Israel out. I asked him if it was possible. He said it was possible if he insisted. I didn’t know what to say.
East Asians are actually the easiest to understand my friend’s claim. Because on the whole every country on our side has a dominant ethnicity.
I don’t think this friend of mine is going to make it. The transition from the Arab-Israeli conflict to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict lies precisely in the acceptance of a less pan-Arabist idea of nation-building in the Arab world. Acceptance of the Arab world does not necessarily require grand unification. Without that prerequisite, a Palestinian nation-state cannot be accepted.
Recently, many people have been tracing the Palestinian-Israeli program of territorial change. However, this program did not grow out of Arab soil, but was designed by the United Nations. It was designed because of the establishment of the State of Israel. So we can say that the Palestinian state is the product of Israeli statehood and the intervention of the great powers. Without Israel, without the United Nations, there would be no Palestine.
In fact, what about the invention of modern states throughout the Arab world. When Ms. Laurence Bell, the female version of Britain, drank coffee in Iraq and looked at the map and drew the Iran-Iraq demarcation line, she just drew it on the spot, and anyway, it was the British Empire that had the final say in the future as to whom the territory belonged to. How could she have thought that the lives devoured on the line of the Iran-Iraq war were in the millions.
The first Arab congress was held in the early 1920s, still in Paris. In this sense, the modern Arab world is a place of existing modern states, followed by modern nations. The two Palestinian-Israeli states were entrepreneurial projects invented by the nation-states of the time, and they were just an embarrassingly optimal solution to be able to get off the ground under various qualifications. The project plan looks beautiful and has the endorsement of the British Empire or the United Nations. When it really hits the ground, the potholes are many, deep and large. Today’s Palestine-Israel is the successor of the previous awkward optimal solution, and it is natural that today and the future will have to bear the cost of the beginning.
The Arab world, as a whole, is not paying the price. But then again, how in heaven’s name is a good thing without a cost. If we go back in time to before the breakup of Ottoman Turkey, and someone does come up with a better program, how can we be sure that it will land on its feet?
Another point worth making is since time immemorial. Those who believe in grand unity tend to believe in the phrase “since time immemorial”, which is not very convincing in the Arab world. Since time immemorial is not very convincing in the Arab world, and when I was wandering around Aleppo, Syria, 20 years ago, I met a young man in a café who told me that they were actually Syrians, not Arabs. If you go back to ancient times, you have to be a descendant of the Assyrian Empire. It gets complicated. Damascus, the capital of Syria, is claimed to be the oldest city in the history of human civilization to have lasted. What hasn’t been seen since ancient times.
I don’t even think any of the Promised Land, or Canaanite Land, or ancient Palestinians, or whatever, has anything to do with this country today, it’s all justification for nationhood. The reality is that there were so many new countries reinvented during the invention of the nation-state after WWI to WWII. Since the beginning of time then, the Saudis had to give a large portion of their country back to the King of Jordan, because the Jordanian royal family is owned by the Hashemite family. Most of the Saudi territory was taken from the Hashemite family. Hashem is a close relative of the Prophet ironically more qualified to say since time immemorial than the House of Saud.
The Romans also seemed to be able to assert ownership of the Eastern Roman Empire.
Incidentally, so is India, Pakistan and Bangladesh in South Asia. Ancient India was a cultural and geographical concept, up to the Ganges and Indus basins, and there was no unification of the upper and lower reaches. Nehru couldn’t even explain it in his speech on the eve of India’s founding. He said on the stage, “You ask me what is India, you are India. He would not say that we have been a great Indian nation since time immemorial.
Pakistan is also amazing, the name was made up. The old man who made the name was in England and was later banned from entering Pakistan for the rest of his life. Bangladesh, needless to say, is a failed product of Pakistani invention, originally East Pakistan.
Back to Israel and Palestine. These two states were created more as solutions to certain problems than as ends in themselves. Israel is less likely to emerge without exclusion of Judaism and without the Holocaust, and when Herzl invented Zionism in Eastern Europe in the late 19th century, most of the people of the tribe chose to go to North America anyway. Including Zweig, who wrote When the Stars Shine for Mankind, worked part-time at a newspaper run by Herzl when he was in college, and ended up fleeing not to Israel but first to New York and then to the German community in Brazil. He also wrote a book touting Brazil as the country of the future. At the same time there was another Zweig, also a literary scholar, who went to Haifa, Israel, but did not stay, and after the Second World War went back to East Germany to become the Minister of Culture.
Arafat led the PLO into trouble, won ambushes, created the myth of victory over Israel, and then the Palestinian statehood thing took hold. In fact, in the eyes of the pan-Arabists who support grand unification, this invention of a Palestinian state is undoubtedly tantamount to Palestinian independence.
So, my claim is that the nation-state is not an end, it is a means, a realistic solution of last resort. Israel is a means to an end, and so is Palestine. The purpose of the State is, first and foremost, to enable those who live in the homeland to live well, and at the same time it should not be used as a coal mine for others.
I think that on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, in this part of the world known as the Levant, it just doesn’t lend itself to a mono-ethnic state. When I was a student in Lebanon, I came across an incident where there was a big parade in front of the school and a bunch of people were chanting Syria Syria Syria. The procession was carrying a flag with a symbol that looked a lot like a ninja shuriken. I looked it up later, and it was an old Lebanese political party, a legitimate left-wing socialist party, and one of its core claims was that Lebanon as a country didn’t make sense and should be merged with Syria. Lebanon itself was plucked out of the Kingdom of Syria by the French. But it’s also not true to say that Lebanon’s independence doesn’t represent the views of some of its own forces. Its position was already delicate. During the Crusades, the Catholics went to the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, and when they saw the cross, they asked, “Oh, Nestorians from the East, they don’t recognize the Pope, go away. Then they asked, “Oh, they’re Byzantine, Orthodox, and they don’t recognize the Pope either. When we got to Lebanon, where Jesus traveled, we asked, “Oh, there are actually Catholics, our own people. Don’t think they’re big, but they’re family, they’re from the same clan. So again, Lebanon and Catholicism in Europe are hooked up. The Vatican had a Lebanese Institute at the time. Probably the most famous Arab Catholic in Lebanon was Kahlil Gibran, the great poet. I’ve been to his old house, very ascetic-like, in the mountains. There were monasteries nearby.
Catholicism in Lebanon is connected to the Vatican, and Shia in Lebanon is connected to Persia. in the 16th century there was a Shia dynasty in Persia, the Safavid dynasty. They sent a wave of people to Lebanon to get in bed with the local Shiites and take root against Ottoman Turkey. This group, to this day, is called Hezbollah in Lebanon. The late Ajami, the famous American scholar, their family was from this branch.
So Lebanon is diverse and extremely complex. It is not a big place, and there are quite a number of different ethnic and religious forces.
Israel is right next to Lebanon. The Lebanese civil war and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict are tied together. Geographically, these two places are basically one geographic unit. It is the junction of the Eurasian plate and the African plate extrusion, forming two large folds in the north and south, the Trans-Lebanon mountain range and the Lebanon mountain range. The Bekaa Valley between the two mountains was once the granary of ancient Rome. Rituals were lost, and it was once glorious with the rise of the eastern powers in the late Roman Empire. The Temple of Baalbek in the Bekaa Valley is an architectural marvel of mankind, a temple like the Land of the Giants.
What’s so special about Israel? It’s just one more Jerusalem. Jerusalem is a holy place of three religions, a world city. When we talk about historic world cities, Xi’an, Kyoto, Rome, Paris, London, Calcutta, Cairo, Baghdad, whatever, all of them are centers of civilization, and behind each one of them is a civilization in support. But Jerusalem is totally different. If you don’t look at religion, it’s not even comparable to places like Damascus and Baghdad. By the 19th century the old city of Jerusalem was only 1 kilometer long and wide. Between the Arabian Peninsula and the Anatolian Peninsula, that’s an OK size, but it’s just OK, and Jerusalem certainly wasn’t the center of any of the great empires of antiquity.
In fact, the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, from Lebanon to Israel, was in ancient societies I think a limbo caught in the middle of great civilizations. Between the city-state of Athens and the Persian Empire, between Rome and Assyria and Egypt, between Islam and Christianity. So this place was at heart a civilization-broker zone, and from the heart of civilization, this was the fringe. But to live on the fringe is to be pluralistic, to have a confluence of cultures. When civilizations are at peace, this is the zone that thrives the most, as a civilization broker, earning money from information asymmetry. When civilizations go to war, this zone is the first to suffer, the hardest hit, because it is the front line. Both ends of the spectrum are not favorable. It’s not for nothing that the world’s earliest phonetic script was invented here. It is also not without reason that the ethnic relations in Mount Lebanon are so complex and diverse.
Jerusalem can be a holy place for religion, and I think it’s precisely because of that. But whenever any empire wants to take control of this place, religion tends to become an appendage of power. The space of diversity is a hub for caravans, for people, for logistics, for information, for culture. Therefore, this place should naturally be pluralistic. Even if it has been Arabized, even if the Jews are back, it should be a melting pot, inclusive and pluralistic. This is the destiny of countries on the edge of civilization, the core logic and the way to survive.
Either Israel accepts this, transforms and refrains from nationalism, or it has to guard against adulteration. It is turning itself into an island in a multicultural zone that has been there since time immemorial. The wall is as much about blocking the Palestinians as it is about blocking itself.
Same external conditions, the Lebanese are linguistically proficient, it’s not unusual for them to know five or six languages, culturally diverse, and the president, prime minister, and speaker of the parliament are not of the same denomination. Israel, on the other hand, is very monolithic, just Jews, and bearded Jews. The contrast itself is worth pondering.
In the 1980s, there was the Beirut massacre in Lebanon, and a friend said that Israel was responsible for it. What can be said about that. I went to the refugee camp where the massacre took place 20 years ago. I was there 20 years ago, and I wrote about it in From Beirut to Jerusalem, a book by Thomas Friedman, a well-known journalist from the New York Times. It was a Lebanese Catholic militia. The Catholic militia was backed by Sharon, the great general of Israel. The reason why Sharon went to Lebanon was because the PLO was hiding in the refugee camps in Lebanon. At that time, the PLO was generally regarded as a terrorist organization, and its main base was in Jordan. The PLO was in Jordan, trying to overthrow the Jordanian government. The Jordanian government had no choice but to turn to Israel for help. Over there Syria supported the PLO and was held down by Israel. The situation in Jordan is also complicated. The Hashemite family brothers, fostered by Lawrence of Arabia, went north from the Arabian Peninsula and divided Jordan, Syria and Iraq. Syria and Iraq were coup’d by the Ba’ath party. Jordan was still a kingdom. During the First Middle East War, Palestinian Arab refugees crossed the Jordan River and mostly went to Jordan, resulting in the majority of Jordan’s population being Palestinian. The Jordanian king, Hatsumomo, was the leader of the Arab allies in the First Middle East War, and had private and secret dealings with the Israeli high command.
You see, these things come in bunches. The Beirut massacre, to start with, was the result of the Lebanese civil war. And the Lebanese civil war and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in turn, are connected. 1950s Beirut was one of the little Parises of the world, the financial and intelligence center of the Arab world, much higher than Dubai is today. Then 8 years of civil war decimated it. Again, far from it. Anyway, do you think Israel is responsible for the Holocaust? Yes, of course it is.
Twenty years ago Palestinian friends took me around that refugee camp and I saw big posters of Arafat on the walls and bullet holes. A little boy, maybe 5 or 6 years old, looked at me and started screaming. I don’t know if it was traumatizing.
Yes, trauma, that’s the last thing I want to say. My position is against ethnic antagonism, focusing on trauma, against bullying and hatred. Trauma should be dealt with to avoid greater trauma and to repair it. Everything that can get a pleasurable thrill out of a hate attack is bad.
War is a last resort, it is traumatizing, and trauma spurs people to retaliate in turn. I recently watched the British press interview the Palestinian ambassador to the UK. The reporter asked him if he wanted to condemn the massacre of civilians by Hamas. The Palestinian ambassador said, you have interviewed so many Israeli officials, why don’t you ask them if they want to condemn Israel’s massacres of Palestinian civilians. Not once did you.
However, I do not share the Ambassador’s view either. If I were a journalist I would say that it is not the Palestinians or the Israelis that we have to reprimand, but those who wantonly kill in order to vent their anger. There are massacres in Israel, but Israel is the one that has people who stand up and reflect and criticize. Israel will also make it a sought after standard to minimize the slaughter of civilians in its military strikes. This includes calling ahead, precision strikes, etc. Call it hypocrisy or pretense, the practical effect, anyway, is to reduce civilian casualties.
Is there one on the Hamas side? Not really. I don’t recognize the religious war argument, but I do think that the religious element does have a chemical reaction with hate. Slaughtering while chanting religious slogans, the perpetrators derive pleasure, satisfaction and elevation from it. That’s fucked up.
I wrote this in my circle of friends the other day:
Seven years ago I had the privilege of following an Israeli NGO on a tour of both sides of the wall, meeting several waves of people in Palestine in particular. The leader of the organization, a woman, was a descendant of the founding fathers. We went to Ramallah to meet officials, to the home of a Palestinian sage who had his picture taken with Abbas for a grab-and-go dinner, and to a rural Palestinian village under Israeli sanctions to look at solar energy projects. The Israeli border guards made it difficult for us to withhold our passports, and she went to reprimand to get them back. I asked her why she was helping Palestine so much. She said that everything she did was for Israel.
At that time I prided myself on having at least hung out in the Levant for a year or two, and having taken a class in Beirut specifically on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Honestly didn’t understand much about what they were doing. A bit too left-leaning for my taste. It’s too hard to reason, to show love, to engage in civil communication after generations of grudges.
Now I realize that they’re great and awesome. It’s the kind of fringe people, the people on both ends of the spectrum really, the people who have to be called traitors by the mainstream on both ends of the spectrum who are important. They have a fringe perspective and refuse to look at events from a holistic judgment. They are able to communicate and understand. Do not derive pleasure from hurting others.
Well, the criterion for judgment should not be race, but whether the individual within the commonwealth can be free and equal. Palestine and Israel, the hatred is hard to dispel, but they have also been tied together for a long time. For me, Israel and Hamas or Palestine are judged less by history and reality than by whether they are republics or racist or whatever collectivist communities.
The above is my point.
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