The Endless Debate Over Israel and Palestine

Henry Srebrnik,  [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
 

“Dispossessed but Defiant: Indigenous Struggles from Around the World” is an international exhibition composed of over 120 photos, on display at the Gallery at the Guild in Charlottetown until March 28. 

The photos deal with the experiences of what the national organizers, Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East, call three indigenous groups: Canada’s Indigenous peoples, Palestinians, and Black South Africans. The photos speak to “the determined resistance to the invasion and occupation of their lands by each of the indigenous groups.”

The organizers of the exhibition, which is travelling across Canada, were clever to include Palestinians with the other two examples, without mentioning, of course, that white Europeans never lived in, or had any claim to, North America or South Africa, unlike Jews in the case of today’s Israel. 

Indeed, the land that became known as Palestine was itself conquered by Arab armies in the seventh century, after most of its Jewish inhabitants had been killed or exiled by Roman forces a few hundred years earlier. 

This had followed an unsuccessful Jewish struggle for freedom from Roman imperialism – though some Jews continued to live in the land as a sometimes persecuted minority, under Arab and later Turkish rule, over the centuries.

Because of their religion, those Jews in the diaspora never forgot their attachment to their homeland.

There is of course no parallel in this to the European conquests in the Americas or Africa, whose aboriginal inhabitants were dispossessed of their territories by new arrivals with absolutely no historical or religious rights, or previous connection, to these – they were armed conquerors whom the native peoples had never even seen or knew about.

But I doubt this little history lesson will change anyone’s mind.

Apropos of this, I was recently asked to comment on an article by an academic who claims that Canadian journalists ignore the “root causes” of the Israel-Palestine conflict, and to offer a rebuttal. Tempting as this would be, no response would likely have any effect on someone with an anti-Israel bias.

We all know the so-called truism that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” By the same token, one man’s propaganda is another man’s “narrative.” We now live in a world of relativism, where even facts don’t usually change people’s minds about major political issues.

When it comes to issues such as Israel, the Palestinians, and the Middle East, we indeed live in a world of duelling narratives. The author seemed to think he has stumbled upon some new “evidence” of Zionist “perfidy,” such that the Jewish state was by its very nature born in the “original sin” of ethnic cleansing, Palestinian dispossession, and so forth.

The article quoted well-known authors—all notable “anti-Zionists,” for what that’s worth—such as Norman Finkelstein, Ilan Pappé, and John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt. 

The last two writers, in their book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, come close to asserting that Jews -- that is, the influential pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee -- are mainly responsible for much of American foreign policy towards the Middle East.

None of this is news. These people have had their views broadcast and published over various media outlets for years and years. In fact Israeli historians and authors (including Pappé) have themselves documented all of these “revelations.” Any decent university course on Middle Eastern politics includes their work.

Their many, many opponents (whom the writer presumably considers illegitimate “pro-Zionists”) have also had their say. He didn’t consider that other side.

Of course, almost all states have a founding in violence toward, or affecting the dispossession of, another people. This includes our own. To paraphrase Honoré de Balzac: “Behind every great state lies a great crime.” 

Should we therefore dismantle Canada and the United States? Jews have more of a claim to what is now Israel, having originated there, than do European settlers to the Americas. So to accuse Israel as illegitimate or in some way precluded from being a democracy on this ground is ridiculous.

A quick Google search, or a trip to a library, will result in the discovery of thousands of articles and books on both sides of the issue, not only the “facts” proving that Arabs were dispossessed in the 1948 war. 

His piece reads as though his “evidence” actually informs his view of Israel. My own contribution would make not a whit of difference to that author’s position, as his doesn’t to mine.

There’s no doubt, though, that his point of view is on the ascent. Blame it on the zeitgeist.