Arik and Me

Oceans of ink have been spilt over the Arab-Israeli thing (and more recently, uncounted numbers of electrons have been fired through cathode-ray tubes in vain), so it is sort of irresponsible for me to add more, but I will anyway. You all know what my oldest and most strongly held political position is. For a very long time (1982-2000) my second oldest and most strongly held political position was support for the Palestinian struggle and a one-state solution to the whole Arab-Israeli thing. It seems strange now, but that’s the way it was. I was just struck very heavily at an impressionable age by the massacres in the Lebanese refugee camps, and my position was reinforced by reading the liberal Catholic press throughout the First Intifada.
When the Al-Aqsa Intifada erupted, I rapidly became confused, because the stories I was reading in the Devil Bunny City Morning Herald just didn’t make sense. Why would all of this stuff be happening now, when a final deal seemed so close? The meaningless ‘cycle of violence’ seemed, well, meaningless… I started wandering around the web looking for a more coherent narrative. The Palestinian web-sites were short on facts and long on whinging, and didn’t make any more sense than the Australian newspapers. But the narrative I found in the Jerusalem Post did make sense. Within a few weeks I found that I had been transformed from a rather vague supporter of the PLO to an enthusiastic supporter of the Zionist state. This was a little bit scary. What else did I believe in that was wrong? Would I wake up one morning and discover that Margaret Sanger was right after all? God, I hope not.

But enough personal human-interest stuff. What are my cosmically arrogant ex cathedra pronouncements for today?

Pronouncement One: The Palestinian refugee problem is first and foremost the creation of the Arab states. The leaders of the Arab nations have kept millions of people in miserable limbo for generations to score political points against the Jews. Imagine we are back at the beginning of last century, and you live in one village, and a few miles away your brother lives in another village. Both villages have had the same culture and religion for more than a thousand years, and have been part of the same Ottoman administrative unit since fifteen-hundred and something. Far away in France, somebody draws a line on a map, and your village is now in the British Mandate of Palestine, and your brother’s village is in the French Mandate of Lebanon.
Twenty-eight years later, you run away from your village because you don’t want to end up as collateral damage. And fifty-six years after that, your great-grandchildren are still denied the rights of citizens in Lebanon.
Millions of Greeks were kicked out of Asia Minor in the 1920s, and were absorbed into Greece. Millions of Germans were kicked out of Eastern Europe in the 1940s, and were absorbed into Germany. About the same number of Ukrainians were expelled from Poland in the 1940s as Arabs left Palestine. Who has heard of them? Nobody, since they were absorbed without incident into the Ukraine. The Japanese kicked out of Sakhalin were absorbed without incident into Japan. The South Asians kicked out of Uganda have been absorbed without incident into the United Kingdom. The Arab world is vastly larger than Greece or Germany, has not been devastated by a general war, and has vast resources. Its leaders did not allow the absorption of a relatively small population of people of the same religion, culture, and heritage, using them instead as a political football.

Pronouncement Two: It seems to me that the government of any democratic country faced with the situation Israel is in would react in the same way. You can allow your subjects to be blown up, but not your constituents. And again it seems to me that almost any democratic country faced with a proportional rate of civilian casualties (say, about 400 a year if it was us) would react with much more ‘bombing them back to the stone age’ than Israel has.

Pronouncement Three: The Middle East would be in far better shape today if Israel had simply annexed the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967 and given their inhabitants the same rights as other Arab citizens of Israel. Despite my conversion, a two-state solution is still rubbish. A Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza strip would be an unworkable Bantustan. In 1948 the leaders of the Yishuv accepted a U.N. partition plan that gave them a state with a 60:40 Jewish:Arab population. Why is a single state between the river and the sea with a 60:40 Jewish:Arab population so unthinkable today? Yet even the most liberal Meretz-voting commentators I read in the Israeli press are terrified of the ‘demographic time bomb’ that would lead to Jews becoming a minority in Israel/Palestine. This is doubtless due to the fact that a high proportion of the Palestinian population really do want to drive the Jews into the sea. Yet far, far larger numbers, relative to the Jewish civilian population, were murdered by Arab extremists in the years 1929-1948 than in the latest uprising. And the leaders of Israel then accepted a state with a 40% Arab population. The national myth is that during the War of Independence, that 40% was reduced to 10% because the Arabs left of their own free will. If that is true, and they were not expelled as a matter of policy, why is it so unthinkable that they ever return?