The US has been rocked in recent weeks by student protests over the war between Hamas and Israel. The striking thing about it for me is how much this has turned, in terms of public opinion.
Even my own opinion has changed, but in the other direction. When I was young, I had quite a bit of sympathy with the Palestinian cause. My views on it developed when I was old enough to not have any really good recollection of the Palestinian terrorist activities of the 1970s. The problem to me seemed clear enough. Israel had been established on British occupied territory without the clear input of all of the residents of that territory, and since then war had precluded the Arab residents from having a voice.
I don't really hold that view anymore.
Unfortunately, much of the world seems to.
"Palestine", as a political entity, has not been free, in a self-governing sense, since sometime . . . well It's hard to say if it ever was. The word itself refers to the Roman administrative province that was imposed on the Kingdom of Israel. Romes grip weakened in the 600s, with a Persian invasion taking Jerusalem in 614 and the Muslims invading and conquering all of the Levant in 634-638.
Note those words. . .Levant and conquering.
That's what the Islamic invaders did, they invaded and conquered. Islam was spread by the sword.
We'll also note that this was a long time ago.
In the Levant, which is what we're dealing with, there were multiple religious groups and Christianity and Judaism remained strong. Much of what Islam conquered were Christian lands. Islam did not spring up there from fertile soil, it was imposed, but the other religions remained.
By the 1090s the Muslim principalities of the Levant were themselves coming under attack from other Islamic forces, the net result, without getting into all of the details, were the Crusades. In 1260, in an odd event, the Mongols briefly conquered the entire region before they retreated due to a succession crisis at home. The Ottoman's conquered the entire region in 1516-1517 and ruled it, in an increasingly weak manner, until the British Mandate was imposed at the end of World War One.
At the end of the 19th Century and the beginning of the 20th Century, the Zionist movement sought to reclaim the region that had been Israel up until AD 70. The Ottomans both facilitated and opposed the movement. It was gaining strength by World War One and took on a life of its own. By World War Two (this is the 80th anniversary of the Biltmore Conference) it was becoming a mass Jewish movement of sorts, as Jews around the world reacted to the horror of the Holocaust.
At the same time, Levantines in the region became increasingly hostile to Jewish settlers, fearing what was to become. This turned violent on at least one major occasion before World War Two, causing the British to have to put a Palestinian Revolution that lasted from 1936 to 1939. That movement sought independence, but it did so in part as Levantines feared that the growing strength of Jewish settlement movements meant that they'd be displaced on their own territory.
When the British ducked out in 1948 the Arabs and Israelis went right to war with each other, resulting in the fleeing of 700,000 Levantine's from the region, half of pre-1948 Mandatory Palestine's Levantine population. That population, now enormously increased, sets up the current situation. Some fled because fleeing fighting armies is the rational thing to do. Some fled as they feared being killed by Jewish militias. Some fled as, after Israel established themselves, they were expelled.
The overall problem is that 70 to 80 years ago is a long time.
In the past 70+ years, those tragically expelled should have been productively resettled. Some were, of course, but many were not. Instead, the results of the 1948 war were rejected across the Middle East, which in turn made it worse by repeated incompetent efforts to militarily reverse the situation. The West Bank, for example, was lost in the 1968 war. Movements supporting the Levantine cause, moreover, have been attracted not only to violence, but to extremism.
At the present time, Hamas wants to expel Jews from the borders of what had been Mandatory Palestine, a region that has existed as a politically independent area for, well, ever. Hamas would impose radical Islam on the region to the detriment of not only the Jews, but to Christians, who remain in the region, and even to other Muslims.
There is, unfortunately, no reason to believe that there's any Levantine entity any less radical than Hamas.
A two-state solution for the problem is absurd. Part of the ongoing problem is that the Levantines have been kept in postage stamp sized settlements not only by the Israelis, but by the non-Levantine Arabs, who don't want to take them in. An independent Levantine state based on the West Bank would be dirt poor, radical, and a menace to the region's political stability.
And that's not what so many of them want. They want the borders of Mandatory Palestine, with its current Jewish residents expelled from the region for from life.
And that's what student protesters are actually advocating in some circumstances. Both the Atlantic and the Guardian have interviews with a narrow selection of them who are basically comfortable advocating that murderous solution. Levantine protesters in the US seem pretty comfortable with it as well, or at least not uncomfortable with noting that those they are supporting by implication are murderous rapists.
One of the uncomfortable truths of history is that wrongs of the past can't be righted, really. Nobody can go back to 70 and keep the Romans from expelling the Jews. Nobody can go to all the numerous localities where they were thereafter oppressed and murdered and keep that from happening. Germans today seem remorseful for what they did from 1932 to 1945, but that can't keep the horror from happening. The British today would not take Palestine as a mandate, but they did, and that's done. And the expulsions and fleeing of the Levantines in the late 40s has already occured.
Like so many other things that humans imagine, trying to restore a status quo ante, long after that status quo has fled, only results in new horrors. The Jewish desire for a homeland was rational. That they'd desire a portion of what had been Israel (modern Israel is smaller than Biblical Israel) was also rational, It's already happened. A solution for the plight of the Palestinian Levantines needs to be found, and frankly isn't all that difficult to work, but neither a two-state solution nor setting an army of rapist and murderous lose in Israel is a solution that's either workable or tolerable.
Nor is it rational or tolerable to put up with people protesting for it.** Students form the protesting base in any country in part, quite frankly, as a large percentage of them are essentially idle while not knowing it. As a student, I imagined what I'd do once I was out of school, with a job, and finally "free". It turned out that what I did was worked and took on the responsibilities of adult life. Freedom, in a certain sense, isn't what Janis Joplin claimed it to be, that being "nothing else to lose", but it is, in another sense, "nothing else to do".
In the 1930s, when Spain was in a violent crisis, a tiny number of people went there and fought in its civil war. I don't admire the foreign volunteers to Republican Spain, who misjudged their cause and blinded themselves to what it was really for, but at least they did more than gum up classes. Students yelling bear, ultimately, no real burden for their efforts. They're not Freedom Riders or the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.
And here, ironically, should they really have an impact, it'll be to bring to power in "Palestine" a group of murderous perverts, and to help bring to power in the US somebody whom they don't agree with on anything.
Footnotes
*Because I'm not a professional blogger, nor retired, I have a lot of posts, well over 100 in fact, that are in the hopper, some of which related to this. I note that, as there's more coming, maybe, if I ever get around to it, on the crisis in the Middle East.
**Protesting against Israeli military overreach is something else entirely. Israeli's are doing that.
This is a common feature, oddly, of protests. It's perfectly rational, for example, to have been against bombing Hanoi during the Vietnam War, but that doesn't mean you need to appear on an anti-aircraft gun belonging to a communist army. Here being opposed to Israel leveling Gaza is rational, pretending that Hamas is on the side of virtue is not.
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