A Double Occupation: A Brief Analysis of the
Israeli/Palestinian Problem
The Hebrew Bible tells a powerful story of how the Hebrew people came to
occupy the land that became Israel. That story says that after Moses died God
commissioned Joshua to lead the people across the Jordan to take Canaan, the
land they said their god Yahweh had given them. See Joshua 1:1-11. They fought
various battles against the people who lived in the land. Eventually they
conquered and subdued these people. They then created an Israeli kingdom (or two)
in the land that had belonged to other people. Scholars may doubt that that’s
really how the Hebrews became the dominant people in that land, but that’s how
the Hebrew Bible tells their story.[1]
The Hebrew Bible presents the Israeli conquest of Canaan as a very good
thing. It has God making a promise and that promise being fulfilled. It is a
story of the creation of a homeland for a people who spoke Hebrew and
worshiped a god named Yahweh. I suppose the creation of Israel was a good
thing for the Hebrews. Whether it was a good thing for the Canaanites is a
question we shall return to anon.
In 1948 the modern state of Israel was created in the place where ancient
Israel had stood, or at least in part of that place. After World War II the
world’s powers enabled the creation of a Jewish state as a homeland for the
Jews, who had suffered so horribly in the Holocaust. Jews everywhere along with
many Christians rejoiced at the creation of Israel. Yet the new state of Israel
stood on land that had hardly been unoccupied. It was the home of a great many
Arab people. Arabs had lived on that land for many centuries by 1948. There hadn’t
been a Jewish state there for more than two millennia. Was the creation of the
Jewish state of Israel a good thing for the Arabs who lived there? That too is
a question to which we will return anon.
We know from the Bible what the Hebrew conquest of Canaan looked like to
the Israelites. What did the Hebrew conquest of Canaan look like to the
Canaanites? It must have looked like an unprovoked invasion of their land by foreigners
who had no business being there. Those foreigners attacked them, took their
land, and disparaged their religion as idolatry. They said that their god
Yahweh had given that land to them. The Canaanites must have asked when their
land had ever belonged to Yahweh so that he could give it to anyone. Their
chief god Baal certainly hadn’t given their land to foreigners who called him a
false idol. To the Canaanites the Hebrew conquest of their land was hardly a
good thing.
When the state of Israel was created in 1948 Jews took the land of and
displaced huge numbers of Palestinian Arabs. Many of those Arabs became
refugees, mostly in Jordan. Arabs in many countries condemned the creation of
Israel and even fought a war (and eventually other wars) against Israel in an
attempt to destroy it and give the land back to the Palestinian Arabs. They
failed. These displaced Arabs knew they weren’t responsible for the Holocaust
and must have wondered why they were being punished for something they didn’t
do. When the Arabs whom Israel displaced left their homes many of them took
their keys with them thinking that their displacement was temporary and that
they would return home soon. Their descendants still live in refugee camps.
They display keys as the symbol of their desire to return to the land the state
of Israel took from them. To the Palestinian Arabs the creation of the state of
Israel was an act of aggression against them by the Jews and their
international supporters. Israel has acted aggressively toward them ever since.
The history of Israel is a history of two occupations millennia apart of
the same land that each time belonged to non-Hebrew people, first the
Canaanites, then the Arabs. Jews today still claim that God gave that land to
them. The theme song of the 1960 movie Exodus says it clearly. Speaking for the
Jews the lyrics say “This land is mine, God gave this land to me.” The ancient
Canaanites certainly didn’t think that their god had given their land to
foreigners. Palestinian Arabs, most of whom are Muslims, don’t think that the
God they call Allah gave their land to the Israelis.[2]
To both ancient Canaanites and contemporary Arabs the creation of Jewish states
on their land is nothing but an act of imperialist aggression.
So what are we to make of this history of two separate occupations by Jews
of land belonging to others? The first thing we must do is recognize that the
Jewish occupations of Canaan/Palestine are settled fact. They happened. The
Romans eventually undid the first one. The second, existing one won’t be undone
as long as Israel maintains military strength and foreign alliances sufficient
to defeat any attack by their Arab neighbors or by Iran, which is not Arabic
but is an implacable foe of Israel. Many Arabs would love to defeat Israel and
take the land back. They aren’t strong enough to do it, and world powers like
the US would never let them do it. The modern state of Israel is here to stay.
We must next recognize that while the Israelite occupation of Canaan more
than three millennia ago may have been a good thing for the ancient Israelites,
the modern state of Israel has definitely been a blessing for contemporary
Jews. The cultures of Europe and the United States have been viciously
anti-Jewish for a very long time. In the High Middle Ages crusaders on their
way to fight Muslims would stop and raze Jewish villages in Europe on their way.
In 1290 King Edward I expelled all Jews from England. (In 1657 they were let
back in.) In 1492 Ferdinand and Isabella, famous for their sponsorship of
Christopher Columbus’ voyages to America, expelled all Jews from Spain who
would not convert to Christianity. The Spanish Inquisition was created to
investigate whether Jews who had converted to Christianity were still
practicing Jewish worship under a guise of Christianity. Imperial Russia had
pogroms. France had the Dreyfus Affair.
The worst Christian persecution of the Jews took place under Nazi rule.
Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, and other Nazi leaders were viciously anti-Jewish.
They used the Jews as scapegoats for Germany’s ills after World War I.[3]
Heinrich Himmler and his SS arrested Austrian Jews after the 1938 Anschluss and
introduced policies that evolved into the Holocaust, the Nazi’s “final solution”
to the nonexistent Jewish problem. The Germans murdered around six million
Jews. In the 1930s the United States turned away a great many Jews who were
fleeing the Nazis. Western culture’s history of anti-Judaism is shameful,
sinful, and something for which we must all atone.
Despite the hostility of its Arab neighbors modern Israel has been a
place of relatively safe refuge for Jews since its founding. Jews have
emigrated to Israel from all over the world. A great number of Russian and
other Jews managed to emigrate to Israel from the Soviet Union. The plight of
the Soviet Jews who were denied exit visas, called “refuseniks,” became an
international cause. The victors in World War II established Israel largely in
response to the Holocaust. Israel has given safety and hope to God’s Jewish
people ever since.
All that being said and truly meant, it is also true that what has been a
great blessing for Jews has been a bane for Palestinian Arabs. A great many of
them lost their homes, and generations of them ended up in refugee camps
outside of Israel. They’re still there. Israel had been established on certain
Palestinian land. It wasn’t enough for the Israelis. In 1967 they seized the
West Bank of the Jordan and the Gaza Strip from the Arabs. They have abandoned
the Gaza Strip but blockaded it and made it one of the most miserable places on
earth. They rule the West Bank with iron fists. They continue to usurp Arab
land by building illegal Israeli settlements on it. Palestinians nominally
control the West Bank, but they can’t do anything Israel won’t allow, and Israel
can isolate the West Bank from the rest of the world anytime it wants. Israel
has built walls supposedly for security that block Palestinian farmers off from
their land. The Arabs who live in Israel proper may have relatively comfortable
lives. On the whole however the creation of the modern state of Israel has been
nothing but bad news for the Palestinian Arabs. The second Jewish occupation of
Canaan has been no better for the people it displaced than the first one was so
many centuries ago.
So what are we to make of Israel’s two occupations of land belonging to
others? The first occupation ended nearly two thousand years ago and is largely
only of historical interest. The second occupation continues and shows no signs
of ending. The state of Israel is an established fact under international law. We
must wish for Israel security and prosperity. Israel’s existence isn’t actually
grounded in a promise God supposedly made to Hebrew patriarchs millennia ago.
It is a consequence of Christian guilt over the Holocaust and the ability of
western powers to assuage some of that guilt by giving the Jews a secure
homeland, something they hadn’t had for a very long time.
While we wish security and prosperity for Israel we must wish the same
for Palestinian Arabs. Creating those things for those people won’t be easy.
There are no simple answers to the myriad problems they face. That some of them
keep committing futile acts of violent aggression against Israel only harms
their cause. It forces the Israelis to dig in, stay intransigent, and respond
to violence with violence. A so-called two state solution seems the obvious way
to peace, but it would require both sides to do things they so far have not
been willing to do. Israel would have to let the Palestinians have Jerusalem (or
at least East Jerusalem) as the capital of their state. It would have to
withdraw all Israeli settlements from the West Bank. The Palestinians would have
to acknowledge the legitimacy of Israel, recognizing its right to exist. They
would have to stop all terrorist or military attacks on Israel and Israelis by
all Palestinian groups. Sadly, none of those things seems likely to happen
soon. Attempts have been made for decades to negotiate a two state solution to
the Israeli/Palestinian problem. We seem no closer to making that solution a
reality than we were decades ago. We can only hope and pray that both the
Israelis and the Palestinians will someday find the courage to do what must be
done for peace.
[1]
Archeological evidence suggests that the Hebrews were originally one of the
peoples of the Canaanite hill country. Over time they grew and became dominant
in that part of the world. That may be historical reality, but it’s a whole lot
less interesting than the story the Bible tells. Moreover, the story the Bible
tells is one of the foundational stories of Judaism, which makes it immensely
important even if it isn’t historically accurate.
[2] “Allah”
is a form of the Arabic word for God. Muslims worship the same God as the Jews
and Christians do. Arab Christians also call God Allah.
[3]
Nazi attacks on the Jews had their effect. In 1958 our German landlady in
Berlin, whose husband had been a Nazi, said to my parents and me that it was
too bad what happened to the Jews, but something did have to be done. It didn’t
of course, but Nazi propaganda convinced a great many people that it did.
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