History is not Simple…

There are many simplistic ways of looking at the problem of Palestine and Israel.

1. According to some, Palestine belongs to the Jews, they were present in that land over 3000 years ago. OK, so their numbers declined in the Middle Ages with the Jewish diaspora spreading across Europe while Arabs became the dominant group in Palestine, but the territory still belongs to the Jews who were there first and have continued to regard it as their Promised Land through centuries in exile.

This argument only works if you ignore the stories of the Torah and the Bible that detail Moses leading the people from Egypt to the land of the Canaanites, the Hittites etc (eg Exodus ch3 v 17). If you believe your Bible, the Israelites took the land by force from the inhabitants with Joshua fighting 13 battles (remember Jericho) to defeat the indigenous peoples of Palestine. The Jews were definitely not the first inhabitants.

1. According to others, it does not matter who the first inhabitants of Palestine were. Across Europe, but especially in Germany and Eastern Europe, our antisemitism and basic human greed allowed the Holocaust to happen. After the war, our European guilt had to be assuaged.

The Jews who survived the Holocaust couldn’t go back home, because all the antisemitism that had been whipped up wouldn’t vanish immediately. Also, Jewish people would start asking for justice in the countries they returned to, justice against people and against the institutions & powerful large corporations that collaborated with the Nazis. Europe had tens of thousands of displaced Jewish people and what were we going to do with them?

The answer was simple, we exported our problem, we gave them Palestine – even though it was not ours to give away. The only complicating factor was that we then had to deceive the Arabs who were living peacefully in Palestine and pretend that we would ensure Palestinian rights were protected. Needless to say, this is something we failed to do.

1. From a different perspective it can be argued that none of the above should be central to our decision making; countries don’t have friends or believe in right and wrong, countries have interests. We should pursue our geopolitical interests in a hard-headed and realistic way.

The USA and Europe have supported Israel for decades, we needed a reliable ally in the Middle East where so much oil is located and one way to ensure this was to support Israel. We would prefer not to see so many Palestinians killed by Israel, but we certainly are not going to upset our relationship with America because of deaths in a faraway country.

History has Happened and Cannot be Undone

A more complex way of looking at Palestine is to accept that history has happened and cannot be undone. Jewish people and Palestinian people have been born in the country, neither group can be expelled and they must find a way of living together. Israel’s strategy of meeting each act of rebellion by Palestinians with overwhelming violence has been ongoing since 2005 and has been a disaster for Israel as well as for the Palestinians, with each cycle of violence creating another generation of enemies.

The logic of Israel’s current behaviour is that all Palestinians be expelled from Palestine or be killed, but this cannot happen – there is nowhere for the Palestinians to go and the West will only tolerate a limited number of killings each year. (Remember an acceptable level of violence?) By promising to keep supplying Israel with unlimited weapons the USA and Europe are dishonestly prolonging this conflict.

If the Israeli and Palestinian people are ever going to find peace, they need to negotiate with each other in the same way we did in N. Ireland before the Good Friday Agreement. This will only happen if Europe and the USA restrict the arms that we supply to Israel and force negotiations, a long overdue first step.

Arnold is a retired teacher from Belfast.