Three Historical Issues at the Core of the Conflict— 

And of the Revived Peace Process

Ask any well-indoctrinated Palestinian—let alone Arafat—when “the conflict” began, and he is likely to take you back far beyond 1948, let alone 1967. The Palestinian National Covenant—now officially defunct, but still very much alive in the Fatah indoctrination system—defines the “beginning of the Zionist invasion” as either 1897 (Theodor Herzl’s First Zionist Congress in Basel) or, at best, 1917 (the Balfour Declaration).

This is not simply a question of different historical narratives, as the post-modern phrase goes. In a profound sense, the issues both sides have been fighting over, and the challenges we now face as the peace process is cautiously revived, go back to the Arab and Palestinian demand to obtain a “verdict,” even if retroactively, as to the legitimacy of key positions and the meaning of seminal events.

Three issues on which Palestinians call for a revised verdict require a close analysis in the specific context of the conflict and away from the abstract Western standards that effective advocates of the Arab cause want to apply to Israel (and to Israel alone):

·        A verdict on Zionism per se (i.e., that Herzl was wrong): Underlying the debate on the recent Naturalization Act of the Knesset (admittedly, not the most intelligently argued piece of legislation to have come out of Israel in recent years) is not a simple case of “human rights” vs. a heartless, and some say even racist, Israeli establishment. The security concerns cited as reason for barring Palestinians from naturalizing through marriage are real enough: Eleven suicide bombings were either carried out or assisted by naturalized West Bank residents. Even so, the broader rationale for the Knesset act went beyond counter-terrorist measures and touched upon Israel’s right to include demographic calculations in our definition of national security; in other words, to take measures designed to ensure that Israel remain what it was meant to be, a “vibrant Jewish state” (to quote President George Bush at Aqaba). Is the very notion of a “Jewish” state equivalent to racism? Not by any stretch. Jews are not a “race”—we come in all colors—but a people, a historic entity, very much like the “new” nations of Europe, from Greece to Estonia. Americans, as well as some modern European nations, have a different conception of national identity, but that does not mean any other version is racist or illegitimate. Again, could this have been handled more wisely? Almost certainly. But then this is not the first case in which public policy debates produced suboptimal results.

·        A verdict on the “right of return” (i.e., the War of Independence in 1948 was a Zionist crime): All too often we hear nowadays that the Palestinians are no longer seeking to return physically in any great numbers, but they do demand a symbolic recognition of the wrongs they suffered in 1948. For most Israelis (except for a few far-left activists, one of whom sent his children to the “Return” Summer Camp in the Galilee, run by a radical Arab group, which advocates the violent elimination of Israel as a state) it is not a problem to recognize that many innocent Palestinians have suffered as individuals; but a heavy layer of historical forgetfulness is required if we are to accept collective blame for 1948. A small nation of 600,000, some of them Holocaust survivors, were set upon—with exterminatory intent—by a Palestinian leadership fresh from collaborating with the Nazis. We won, they lost; are we to blame? Quite appropriately, Joschka Fischer, the German foreign minister, himself the son of refugees driven out of Hungary, recently explained that adopting the Arab demand would be akin to asserting a similar right for the Sudeten Germans and many others who lost their homes after 1945, thus throwing all of Central and Eastern Europe into chaos.

·        A verdict on the Six-Day War (i.e., the results of the 1967 “Zionist Aggression” should be totally undone): At the core of the Arab demand for a total return to the June 4, 1967, lines—which has found its way into Secretary of State Colin Powell’s argument that the Israeli fence should not be built on “Palestinian” lands—is the implicit claim that the war was an act of premeditated aggression, and thus Israel is not entitled to any claims as a result. This is not the case, and the point should be made loud and clear precisely at this delicate passage. If the UN had wanted to call 1967 an aggression and to indict Israel under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter, it could have done so (as it did in the case of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait). It did not; instead, it invited the sides to negotiate—implicitly, under Chapter 6, suggesting “The Pacific Settlement of Disputes”—a peace involving an Israeli withdrawal from “territories” (NOT “the” territories) occupied in the 1967 conflict, to “secure and recognized borders.” Any honest reading of the text—and the circumstances—would identify the subtext, namely, the need to put an end to the realities of the pre-1967 era, when Israel’s borders were neither recognized nor defensible.