I appreciate Leon Cohen’s courtesy in drawing my attention to his review (“States of Denial, Solutions of Blood,” Sept. 30) of my book “The One-State Solution” and also his suggestion to readers that it is worth reading. I’m also grateful, if abashed, for his pointing out my typo regarding the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. On other points, however, I take objection.
Cohen reviewed my book with another one about the one-state solution, “Sharing the Land of Canaan” by Mazin Qumsiyeh. Qumsiyeh can certainly defend his own work, but I’ll offer one comment.
Qumsiyeh makes the point that, demographically, Jews today represent not only ancient family descent but also centuries of conversion to Judaism, well-documented in Jewish chronicles. Yet Cohen finds ominous this “appeal to genetic fantasies.”
So why did Qumsiyeh focus on this point? Because Israel’s defenders often claim that the land of Israel is the literal homeland of all modern Jews, from which they were unjustly expelled by the Romans.
All Jews, therefore, have a right to return to this homeland, because they are the land’s original, indigenous people. They even have the right to displace its present residents (the Muslim and Christian Palestinians), who supposedly wandered in at some later era and cannot possibly have as strong a claim to it.
But if Jews were not the first indigenous people in the land and their ancestors may never have lived there, what becomes of this claim? Ironically, Muslim and Christian Palestinian peasants may more truly be the biological descendents of biblical Jews, for Islam arrived as a conversion movement and not as a mass immigration. Certainly, expelling a population whose ancestral memory in the land dates at least 13 centuries, if not millennia, loses its moral authority.
A different take
Does this old history really matter? It shouldn’t. Today, Israel is a modern nation-state with a heavily Jewish character and millions of Jews feel strongly about its survival and welfare. Any sensible effort to create peace must respect this reality.
Hence I object to Cohen’s accusation that I fail to do so. Several times, I address the horrific violence meted out on Jews by Christian Europe. I also discuss the Holocaust first among the reasons people give for a Jewish state, and discuss anti-Semitism, regarding both Jewish statehood and a one-state solution, at length in chapters five and six.
I do have a different take on what this history signifies for a stable peace in Israel-Palestine, with which readers may well disagree. But I submit that I can’t be accused of not “understanding” the question.
Similarly, I have a different interpretation of Arab-Muslim hostility and racism about Jews. Certainly anti-Jewish sentiment is now lively in the Arab and Muslim worlds (just as anti-Arab racism is lively among too many Jews).
Jewish life in Muslim regions through the past 13 centuries was certainly an uneven experience, as Jews built culturally and intellectually vibrant societies in Egypt, Baghdad, Syria, and other centers while enduring the dhimmi and milet systems and other disadvantages. No one likes second-class treatment.
But it’s significant that Jews living in Arab and Muslim states were notably uninterested in the Zionist movement through its early decades, preferring to stay in their own ancient communities. Jewish mass migration from Arab countries to Palestine did not crest until the 1950s, after Israel was founded, the Palestinians were expelled, and ethnic tension swept the region.
I fully agree that this devastation to the great and ancient Jewish communities in the Arab world is one of the great hurts inflicted during this conflict, and that it must be addressed in any stable resolution.
But it is historically inaccurate to say, as Cohen does, that “Israel exists because of the persecution, discrimination and contempt for Jews and Judaism that have existed in the Arab/Muslim world for centuries, as much as because of the horrors in Christian Europe.” Let us respect the views and choices of Jews who lived in those regions and knew those conditions intimately.
Some of Cohen’s shorter accusations do lay him open to a suggestion that he read a little more deeply. For instance, the idea that the Six-Day War was a purely defensive war by Israel is a staple of Israeli official historiography.
But as the “new historians” like Avi Shlaim have documented, the documentary record proves that leaders like Moshe Dayan and Menachem Begin believed that Israel sought and initiated the Six-Day War, even as David Ben Gurion was clear that Israel needed that war to expand its borders. Certainly they did not believe it was forced on Israel by “fevered genocidal rhetoric.” As facing this history is vital to fresh thinking on the conflict, reading these courageous and principled Jewish historians is essential.
Cohen also denounces me for neglecting the history of the Law and Return and dismissing it as racist. I do respectfully discuss the history of this law and even list “Sustain the Law of Return for Jews” as the first of my ideas toward a stable one-state solution (page 222).
The “racism” in the Law of Return relates not to its effect on Jews but to its effect on Palestinians, who certainly came, or whose families came, from the territory of Israel and who are not allowed back to their homeland even when they also face persecution or threat.
Moreover, in practice the Law of Return has almost never operated to give shelter to threatened Jews but as a recruitment mechanism for aliyah, pursued by the Israeli government on the open agenda of sustaining an overwhelming Jewish majority in the country. Palestinians, who are deliberately replaced by that policy, are justified in finding it discriminatory.
I do observe that, as a body, Israeli law privileges Jewishness in Israel in ways that discriminate and cause conflict, as biased ethnic policies do anywhere. And herein lies the rub.
“Jewish state” is a precious idea for many people. But sustaining Israel’s Jewishness requires second-class citizenship for non-Jews and the complete exclusion of Arabs caught by history in the political netherland of the West Bank.
This practice contradicts a value that most Jews value as strongly: Israel’s democratic character. And this conundrum requires everyone to focus on just what “Jewish state” means.
In my book, I ask whether Israel can be the “Jewish national home” and yet become truly democratic by treating all the people of the land equally. That vision is the “one-state solution” I propose we discuss, which early passionate Zionists like Martin Buber and Judah Magnes also pursued.
Many today believe it impossible, sometimes on grounds that such a state could not be a successful democracy. But if Israel’s defenders wish to say that Arabs, by virtue of some essential quality (cultural? religious? genetic?), cannot help build such a state, then they would gravely insult Israel’s Arab citizens, who are fully as dedicated to its democracy as Jewish citizens. And that would indeed be racist.
Virginia Tilley, Ph.D., is associate professor of political science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, N.Y.; and currently Senior Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Policy Studies in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Op-ed editor Leon Cohen replies: Prof. Virginia Tilley’s critique of my review actually supports my case. The following should be sufficient to show why:
• If the Muslim and Christian Palestinians believe themselves to be descendants of the original inhabitants of the land, then why do they consider themselves to be Arabs — i.e., members of the ethnic group that came from the Arabian peninsula in the seventh and eighth centuries?
Why did Palestinian claims of descent from ancient inhabitants of the land — along with denial of Jewish ancient inhabitation of the land — not arise until decades after Israel’s creation?
• Scholar Bat Ye’or is a Jewish woman born and raised in Egypt, who therefore lived under Arab/Muslim rule and “knew those conditions intimately.”
In her book “The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians Under Islam,” she states (pages 146-150), that before Israel’s founding, the Jews in Arab/Muslim lands didn’t become openly active, organized Zionists or attempt to go to Palestine because they were too oppressed and intimidated. They feared rightly that they would have provoked ferocious reactions from the Muslim governments and populace if they had tried.
Some have claimed that with Israel’s creation the Arab/Muslim world was being penalized for Europe’s crimes against the Jews. As Bat Ye’or and others have shown, Arab/Muslim countries, cultures and peoples, including the Arabs of Palestine, have plenty of their own crimes and Judeophobia for which to answer, which do help justify Israel’s existence as a Jewish state.
• In his book “The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World,” Israeli “new historian” Avi Shlaim wrote (pages 241-42): “Arab observers, in particular, were inclined to believe that Israel deliberately provoked the Six-Day War in order to fulfill its long-standing territorial ambitions. This view is without foundation. [Italics mine.] The Six-Day War was a defensive war. It was launched by Israel to safeguard its security, not to expand its territory.”
As for David Ben-Gurion, he was a contradictory and complex man who changed his policies and beliefs throughout his career. Nevertheless, in May and early June 1967 he advised Israel’s government against going to war; and after the war he said Israel should return most of the captured territories, keeping only Jerusalem and the Golan Heights (see the biography “Ben-Gurion: Prophet of Fire,” by Dan Kurzman).
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