Henry Siegman
is a Jew who was born in Frankfort Germany in 1930. As a young boy he was one of the few German
Jews to make it into the United States in 1942.
He was subsequently ordained as an Orthodox Rabbi and served as a
chaplain in the Korean War where he was awarded the Bronze Star Medal and the
Purple Heart. As a Jew and a scholar,
most of his adult life has been spent tracking and evaluating the events
surrounding Israel’s foundation and evolution as an entity within the greater
Middle East. Given the recent events
associated with the US government’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of
Israel, the London Review of Books
gave him space to record his current feelings.
He is described as: “president emeritus of the US/Middle East Project
and a former senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.”
Siegman produced an article that was titled Two Terrorisms in the paper version and The Two-State Solution: An Autopsy in
the online version. Both titles are
relevant because understanding the fate of the two-state solution requires a
familiarity with the terrorist history of both the Palestinians and the
Israelis.
First some background is required. In the early part of the twentieth century,
Zionism was a mostly secular movement encouraging Jews to work towards some sort
of recognized legal presence in Palestine, a region controlled by the
British. If such a thing was to come to
pass, then the Palestinians would bear the brunt of the sacrifice. When the British wished to depart, the UN
sponsored a partition plan in 1947 that would divide the region into a Jewish-controlled
area and a Palestinian-controlled area.
This source describes the
impact.
“To address problems arising
from the presence of national minorities in each area, it suggested a land and
population transfer involving the transfer of some 225,000 Arabs living in the
envisaged Jewish state and 1,250 Jews living in a future Arab state….”
Both sides had claims to the land that they considered
nonnegotiable. If the stakes are existential
and there is no acceptable political solution, then violence soon follows in
the form of terrorism. That was the case
in 1948 and that is the case today.
Siegman provides this perspective.
“The violence to which
Palestinians have resorted in their struggle for statehood is not any different
from the measures to which Zionists resorted before and during the 1948 war.
According to Morris [Benny Morris, historian], ‘the upsurge of Arab terrorism
in October 1937 triggered a wave of Irgun bombings against Arab crowds and
buses, introducing a new dimension to the conflict.’ While in the past, Arabs
‘had sniped at cars and pedestrians and occasionally lobbed a grenade, often
killing or injuring a few bystanders or passengers’, now, ‘for the first time,
massive bombs were placed [by Irgun] in crowded Arab centres, and dozens of
people were indiscriminately murdered and maimed.’ Morris notes that ‘this
“innovation” soon found Arab imitators’.”
“During Israel’s War of
Independence, Jewish defence forces acted in similar ways to Irgun and
Palestinian terrorist groups. As Morris explained in an interview in Haaretz,
documentation declassified by the IDF shows that ‘in the months of April and
May 1948, units of the Haganah were given operational orders that stated
explicitly that they were to uproot the villagers, expel them and destroy the
villages.’ The Haganah, which became the IDF, was responsible for at least 24
deliberate massacres of unarmed civilians; the number of victims in each
operation ranged from single figures to several hundred. ‘What the new material
shows,’ according to Morris, ‘is that there were far more Israeli acts of
massacre than I had previously thought, [including] an unusually high
concentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a well in an
orderly fashion’.”
The Jews were vastly outnumbered. If they were to produce a democratic nation
to their liking, the number of resident Palestinians had to be greatly
reduced. This could be accomplished by
killing them, moving them into the equivalent of concentration camps, or simply
driving them away. Their Bible told them
that all three options were acceptable.
It is difficult to view this situation as a case of the “good”
guys versus the “bad” guys. But that is
the narrative the Israelis sold, and the US bought it.
“The point of recognising this
history is not to justify terrorism by either Israelis or Palestinians, but to
acknowledge the outrageous double standard that has been applied to the two
parties and has undermined the possibility of a peace accord. Without knowing
that history, it is difficult, if not impossible, to understand the extent to
which Israeli propaganda has succeeded in shaping a narrative about the
creation of Israel that presents the Palestinians who were brutally expelled
from their homes as the aggressors and the Jews as their victims. Without that
history, it is impossible to understand the outrage Palestinians feel over
having been portrayed as the bad guys for so long.”
After the Six-Day War of 1967, Israel had demonstrated
military dominance in the Middle East.
They could do what they wished, and what they wished was for the
Palestinians to go away. The set up “temporary”
occupations of the still contested Gaza Strip and the West Bank. They have no permanent presence in Gaza, but
they control all access by land, sea, or air.
“Nothing more profoundly
expresses the dishonesty of the dominant Israeli narrative and its perverseness
than the statement directed at the Palestinians by Israel’s former prime
minister Golda Meir: ‘We can forgive you for killing our sons. But we cannot forgive
you for making us kill yours.’ Even if Israelis don’t know about what happened
during the 1948 War of Independence, they can be in no doubt about the
malicious blockade imposed on Gaza, which, according to the UN, will make it
uninhabitable for its two million residents within two years. Almost half of
that number are children.”
If there was ever to be a two-state solution to the
conflict with the Palestinians it would have to involve ceding all or most of
the West Bank to a Palestinian state.
While US negotiators tried valiantly—and naively—to broker such a peace,
Israel was blatantly working to make such a state impossible. Israel has long been allowing Israeli
settlers to move into the West Bank and create communities. Many of these settlers are determined to
never give up their land peacefully. Their
current role, and that of the Israeli government is to make life miserable for
the Palestinians who refuse to leave. Their
access to jobs, water, and farmable land can be taken away from them at an Israeli’s
whim. Violence between the better armed and
organized settlers and the resident Palestinians is common.
The existence of the settlements means that a viable West
Bank state cannot be constructed. That
is the reason for the settlements. Even
if a liberal Israeli government were to be formed with a two-state solution in
mind, it would take a bloody civil war to make it happen. And it is not clear that the Israeli military
would even be on the government’s side.
Whenever Israel’s actions raised an international outcry,
the US was always there to provide it cover.
“The members of the US
diplomatic corps who served in the Middle East during the more than half a
century that I worked professionally on this subject were outstanding. They understood
that, given the vast disparity of power between Israel and the Palestinians,
without determined American intervention the outcome of the conflict would be
entirely on Israel’s terms. But US politicians consistently undercut its
diplomats by assuring Israel’s governments that even though the US objected to
policies that violated previous agreements, international law and democratic
norms, they would always have Israel’s back.”
“And the US has had Israel’s
back, and not only when Israel’s security was threatened; it has also scuttled
Security Council resolutions that might have changed Israeli calculations about
the costs of its permanent subjugation of the Palestinian people. America’s
assurances convinced successive governments that they could safely turn their
country into an apartheid state, a transformation that far-right governments
headed by Netanyahu have now made a reality.”
“To this day, the official
position of Likud, Israel’s ruling party for much of the past half-century, is
that it will never allow the establishment of a Palestinian state anywhere in
Palestine. The largest caucus in the Knesset is the one devoted to assuring the
establishment of a Greater Israel in all of Palestine, and, until that goal is
reached, preventing Palestinian statehood on even a square foot of Eretz
Yisrael. Likud’s official dismissal of Palestinian statehood never led the US
to challenge Israel’s qualification as a peace partner….”
The free pass Israel received from the US was due to
immense influence of Jewish advocacy groups and the large amounts of money
that could be made available for campaign contributions.
Interestingly, most US Jews that practice their religion are
in either Conservative or Reform movements.
Israel only recognizes the Orthodox version as the true religion. This leaves the US Jews in an increasingly
awkward position with respect to Israel.
You can be Jewish if you are born to a Jewish mother, but the
increasingly powerful Orthodox Rabbis would like to be able to proclaim that
only Orthodox conversions to Judaism are valid.
“I believe I am more aware
than most of the profound Jewish religious attachment to the Land of Israel. I
was raised in a deeply Zionist and religiously observant home. Moreover, I am
old enough to have experienced personally what it meant to live under the
Nazis. …Zionism was rejected by the overwhelming majority of Orthodox Jewry as
a heresy, just as completely as the Zionist movement rejected Orthodoxy as an
anachronism that held back the political and cultural modernisation of Jewish
life. No one could have imagined at the start of the 20th century how
completely Zionism would be taken over by Orthodox Jewry in the aftermath of
the Holocaust. The possibility that the government of this new Zionist state
might someday fund an organisation that seeks to restore restore the ancient priesthood and the sacrificial cult it presided over, as this
and previous Israeli governments have actually done, would have sent the
founders fleeing to the exits.”
The Orthodox religious are the most strident in
demanding that Israel must return to its “God-given borders.” They
increasingly have influence over what are considered “Jewish values.”
“Anyone who has followed the
recent flood of new legislation by Netanyahu’s government aimed at protecting
the Jewish identity of the state from encroachment by democratic norms, will
agree that these early Zionist advocates grossly underestimated the threat to
Israel’s democracy posed by the current defenders of ‘fundamental Jewish
values’. Legislation that allows Israeli Jews to bar Israeli Arab citizens from
Jewish neighbourhoods – which in Israel means virtually everywhere other than
Palestinian neighbourhoods – is one result of this new dedication to
fundamental Jewish values. Another example is the appalling treatment by the
government of migrants from African countries who have sought asylum in Israel.
Not entirely unrelated is a recent statement by Israel’s Sephardi chief rabbi,
a government official, on the kinship of black people to monkeys.”
Netanyahu has had a troubled relationship with US Jews
because they tend to wish for a peaceful solution to the Palestinian
solution. Netanyahu seems to be turning
his back on them in favor of a bigger and more powerful US and world constituency—evangelical
Christians. Many evangelicals believe
that the Bible contains the roadmap to the future. And that roadmap
indicates that the reestablishment of the Jewish nation must occur before the second
coming of the lord can take place—a highly anticipated event. The evangelicals thus provide a large number
of people who will support the territorial goals of the Israeli leadership.
An article in the New
York Times, Israel and Evangelicals: New U.S. Embassy Signals a Growing Alliance, provides background.
“Mr. Netanyahu has had rocky
relations with liberal American Jews, partly over what they see as his lack of
interest in resuming peace talks with the Palestinians, but even more over his
acquiescence to Israel’s ultra-Orthodox rabbis on contentious debates with
Reform and Conservative leaders involving conversions to Judaism and prayer at
the Western Wall. The alliance with evangelicals may free him of the need to
appease liberal Jews.”
“’He believes they’re going to
assimilate and won’t be interested in their Jewish identity,’ Anshel Pfeffer,
author of a biography of Mr. Netanyahu, said in an interview. ‘He sees the
Orthodox minority of American Jews, much more in line with his right-wing
thinking, becoming the majority of American Jews in a generation or two. And he
sees the Republicans and the Christian evangelicals as being the real base of
support for Israel in the U.S., rather than American Jews’.”
“Ron Dermer, the Israeli
ambassador to Washington and a regular participant in events there to rally evangelical
support, said that ‘devout Christians’ were now the ‘backbone’ of the United
States support for Israel. ‘It’s got to be a solid quarter of the population,
and that is maybe 10, 15, 20 times the Jewish population,’ he said in an
interview.
“Worldwide, the proportion is
even more staggering, with the number of evangelicals estimated at 600 million,
led by the boom in traditionally Catholic Latin American countries.”
Donald Trump’s support for Netanyahu’s agenda and the
ties with the evangelical community has led to a somewhat unusual source of
support for Israel. Siegman explains.
“More recently, alt-right and
neo-Nazi elements that form the most loyal members of Trump’s base have joined
this circle of supporters: they now see Israel’s embrace of a religiously
defined national Jewish identity (replacing its previous status as ‘the only
democracy in the Middle East’) as a validation of their own Christian, racist,
fascist and white supremacist ideology. White supremacists can now join with
Netanyahu in castigating Jewish critics of Israel’s xenophobic and far-right
nationalistic policies as self-hating Jews.”
The United States was once the only power that could
influence Israel’s actions. Now any
notion that we would try to apply constraints to Israel seems hopelessly naïve. Israel is still the most potent military
power in the Middle East. The only
nation that might conceivably challenge it is Iran, a country with whom Israel
seems on a collision course.
Stay tuned!
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