Never in the history of war and peace has the use and misuse of language so obfuscated the nature of events as with the Israeli – Palestinian conflict. By now there are 67 years of multi-layered narrative that confuse the situation which is basically an issue of population exchange characterized as a military occupation. Not only have events somewhat analogous to this conflict come and gone with much less scrutiny, but population transfers in the nation building process have resolved or nearly resolved themselves with relative ease without the interference of global P.R. battles which notoriously misappropriate the true nature of events.
Generally speaking, transfers under the watch of the Great Powers were aimed at expanding Western style democracy through the construction of nation-states. For example, the population transfers and property exchanges in the division of India and Pakistan, Balkan population exchanges in the post-Ottoman states, the relocation of Muslim inhabitants of Greece to Turkey and of Orthodox Christians in Turkey to Greece, all of which naturally involved territorial disputes, were organized to increase homogeneity and, in the end, to minimize conflict and to stabilize national boundaries. This is part of the modernization process which has made possible a world in which a United Nations, a European Union, formalized international law, and national accountability can exist, among other things that we take for granted with respect to their civilizing roles and their origins in Western history.
When it comes to the Arab-Israeli conflict, however, public relations battles have taken center stage, obscuring the democratization process with devastating consequences. When Israeli national defense is characterized as genocide, when the preservation of its national identity is called apartheid, when suicide bombings are seen as being a legitimate means of self-defense and the innocent victims of these bombings are cast as the villains, then reason is turned on its head and innocent lives are constantly under the threat of brutal violence.
There are a few basic concepts that have become common parlance when it comes to the Arab-Israeli conflict. First, there is the “Israeli occupation”. Secondly, there is the “Palestinian refugee”, and last but certainly not least, the “Palestinian right of return”. This is not to mention more marginal but equally divisive rhetorical weapons such as “genocide”, “war crimes”, and “pariah state”, all targeting Israel. Other myths include that of “stolen Arab land”, the “homeless Palestinian refugee”, and the “immigration of alien Jews who displaced a Palestinian people”. Furthermore, omissions such as the extent of Arab immigration to Israel are intentionally left out to create illusions such as that of the presence of a “native Palestinian people”. What really existed was a multiethnic expression of loosely organized peoples living under Ottoman Turkish rule. In order to properly understand the conflict as a whole, the narratives that disguise what is really happening have to be deconstructed. It has come to the point where truth and fiction are so intermingled that one cannot tell them apart. The mixing of truth and untruth has become so thorough that a de-structuring of the whole narrative is in order.
I will start with the so-called “military occupation”. First of all, let’s put everything in its proper context. One should bear in mind that the controversy surrounding British involvement in the middle east sways between two poles. In the traditional view, the British entered the middle east as advocates of Arab independence and of a national Jewish homeland. According to the popular view, British advocacy was just a facade for the aggrandizement of its Empire. After WWI, it fell to the British to partition and define loosely structured “geographic expressions” whose populations had not yet evolved into sovereign nation states. The British mandate period involved creating a middle-east that was democratic and modern. Indeed, the process of partitioning is another example of where a misleading narrative has come to demonize a specific group, in this case, the British. The British Empire has come to be understood as the cause of almost every difficulty that besets the peoples formerly under British rule. The expansion of the British empire, however, carried with it the general intention of imparting its mode of civilization to the rest of the world. Without the influence of the West in general and of the modern British state in particular, the middle-east after WWI would have likely remained in a state of pre-modern backwardness. When Napoleon arrived in Egypt in 1798, conquering it without much resistance, he found a declining civilization that has since had to contend with its Western neighbor. Swaying between Westernization and radicalization, the Muslim world has been struggling to assert itself in the face of the Great Powers. This basic pattern governing the relationship between the West and Islam is repeated in the relation between Israel and the Palestinians.
The distinction between the West and the Muslim world, and the association of Israel with the West, often go unnoticed. The West and Islam are two distinct historical entities with two different yet combining histories. Furthermore, since the United States’ recognition of Israel’s independence in 1948, Israel has come to be closely associated with the West. Israel integrated the values and institutions of Western culture and government into the fabric of its national existence, while preserving its Jewish essence, albeit at the cost of much assimilation. To the extent that Israel has become a Western phenomenon, the “Jew” has also become “Western”. Never before in history has the Jew been so closely associated with the white man. So close, in fact, that the Jew and Israel are, according to the prevailing anti-Western narrative, guilty of the same so-called crimes that the West has been charged with, which brings us back to the so-called “occupation”. One of the thematic charges brought against the West is “imperialism” which involves colonial occupation and territorial expansion, not always at the cost of the colony, as propaganda would have us believe. Israel has been characterized as the Western Imperialist and charged with the same crimes in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict. This is because both Western Imperialism and the Arab-Israeli conflict have been misunderstood, wrongly defined, and misrepresented.
A military occupation involves one national authority taking over that of an existing sovereign. The German occupation of France in WW2 is an example. Under occupation the territory is not annexed, rather, authority is transferred. After WW2, the 4th Geneva Convention established international laws for the purpose of protecting civilians in war zones and in order to return the occupied state to its former authority rather than run the risk of annexation. These laws evolved out of the response to the excesses of the axis powers and they are informed by international law theory that goes back to Hugo Grotius in modern times, and as far back as St. Augustine’s theory of Just War which comes down to us from the 4th century CE and remains the implicit philosophical groundwork for modern international law concerning war. Such philosophy is foreign to the Muslim world and its take on war and peace. Israel, on the other hand, has internalized the just war theory as part of its own process of modernization and Westernization. One would not be hard pressed, in fact, to find that St. Augustine’s moral reflections on war come from the very ideas laid down in the Torah itself.
The relation of Israel to the so-called Palestinians does not fit the definition of an occupation because there is no sovereign state that is being occupied. What we have come to call “Palestine” is the West bank and the Gaza strip. Under Ottoman rule, before and during WWI, “Palestine” (so named since the expulsion of the Jews by the Romans in 70 CE) included what is now Israel, Jordan, Gaza, and the West bank. It was split in half, one piece for the Arabs (Transjordan) and one for the Jews (Israel). Needless to say, it is not so simple as it looks on paper, but it is also not so complex as it has come to seem. When Pakistan and India were divided, Muslims in India migrated to Pakistan and Hindus in Pakistan migrated to India. This paints a neater picture than reality because it does not bear out the details of the complex process of how a nation state evolves. But the general idea is clear, and the basic point is simple. When nation states were delineated by the British, a basic plan was set in motion that was reasonably accommodated in reality. The boundaries of the nation were drawn, with population exchanges and property transfers being part of the process of streamlining the nation building process. Let us not forget that the lines for these nations were not imagined out of thin air by the British, they were refined. The forms of the modern nation states are approximations of geographic and demographic expressions that have taken shape over the course of history. The influence of the West involved modernizing and streamlining these natural expressions such that national, linguistic, political and cultural boundaries neatly matched up, enabling peoples that were formerly ruled by foreign entities to achieve national sovereignty. The final product is the modern map as we know it.
When Palestine was cut in half during the British mandate period, this streamlining process, together with the general British goal of connecting the totality of the empire from the Atlantic to the mid-Pacific by incorporating Palestine, were interrupted. Neither before nor after the war of 1948 did the Arab nations absorb the overflow of Arabs who remained in and around Israel. The same thing happened in a much more definitive way in the aftermath of the 1967 war. Upon gaining the territories called Gaza and the West bank in a successful defensive war, Israel did not annex those regions – which it could justifiably have done under the circumstances – nor did the Arab nations absorb the Arab refugees that remained there. This tactic of refusing to absorb refugees was the common tactic all along on the Arab side. If the refugees are not absorbed by their Arab brethren, then the Israelis can easily be cast as occupiers while the Arabs in limbo can be cast as “displaced homeless native refugees”. Furthermore, the idea of placing the responsibility on Israel to absorb refugees who are violently opposed to Israel’s very existence is not within the boundaries of reason by any stretch of the imagination. If the public believes the narrative that charges Israel with genocidal imperialism against a so-called native Palestinian people, then a “Palestinian nationalism” can be constructed ex post facto, so long as the public, and the so called Palestinians believe that a native Palestinian people existed as a national entity before the refugee problem. Today this myth has become a common assumption. It is taken for granted in the public sphere of debate regarding the crisis.
What is commonly referred to as the “Israeli occupation” is in fact a matter of “territorial dispute”. This is because there was no Palestinian national state to be occupied in the first place. The so called occupation is really an unresolved population exchange. The territories will remain contested until the national status of Israel is conclusively defined, and the Arabs called Palestinians are allowed to return to the lands of their brethren to become citizens. Without these appropriations the so-called “peace process” will continue with no end in sight.
