Dilan Esper: In other words, what one can say is that in ret­ro­spect, this was a huge mis­take by the Pales­tini­ans. But I don’t think you can say that it was unrea­son­able at the time. The fact is the entire way that Israel was cre­ated surely looked extremely unjust to a Pales­tin­ian.

It may not have been unreasonable. Let’s even grant that it was reasonable. Or perhaps what any thinking person would do. It doesn’t really matter. The question is not whether their conduct was negligent but whether they should be held accountable for their conduct. They had a choice, and they chose war. They should be held accountable for that choice.

(By the way, that also dis­tin­guishes this sit­u­a­tion from India / Pak­istan– in that instance, while the Indi­ans and the Pak­ista­nis had many dif­fer­ences, they also had a com­mon enemy in the British and were will­ing to accept quite a few com­pro­mises on both sides in order to drive the British out. Here the Arab gov­ern­ments were offer­ing the Pales­tini­ans a one-state solu­tion if they won the war. That was not on the table for Pak­ista­nis and Indians.)

There are many other differences. The British were trying to find a way out, there, unlike the Jews, who were trying to establish a country. Gandhi considered it one of his biggest failings that he couldn’t keep the country united, so it was not a foregone conclusion that the two would separate – that’s a real distinguishing characteristic from the Israeli/Arab situation. Gandhi tried a one-state solution, but there was too much tension. The transfer and partition, while horrible, created a relatively stable situation between the two countries.

Dilan Esper: In other words, when we start get­ting into claims about how sig­nif­i­cant the Holy Land is for Jews, you have to under­stand that they are out of bounds.

Here, you’re arguing against yourself. Neither Yankev nor I have invoked your sky fairy regarding Israel’s right to the land. There may indeed be other people who do invoke the sky fairy. I think there’s a sky fairy basis, but I choose not to argue on that basis for exactly the reasons you enumerated – I don’t think it’s convincing to anyone who doesn’t believe in the sky fairy. So I agree with you on the point that it’s not a good argument – and you’ll note, I haven’t made it.

Dilan Esper: Yankev and Ariel both argue that the ambigu­ous sta­tus of the West Bank makes Israel a log­i­cal claimant for the land. This is false– as I said, there isn’t a sin­gle valid legal doc­u­ment (and again, the Bible don’t count) that says that Israel is enti­tled to the West Bank.

You’re misconstruing my/our argument. We don’t argue that Israel is “entitled” but rather that Israel has the *best title* to the land. It’s a subtle but important difference. If you’d like, you could view it as Israel holding it in trust for the benefit of a peaceful entity yet to be determined. That’s more accurate than saying that the territories are occupied. If they are occupied, who is the occupier occupying? There’s no predecessor state with a claim to be had.

Dilan Esper: You really can’t have a per­ma­nent sys­tem of pass laws and sep­a­rate roads and Jews who get to be cit­i­zens of Israel and Arabs who have no rights on the West Bank.

You’re putting the cart before the horse. Those pass laws, checkpoints, and separate roads did not spring up, whole, because Jews are just mean and nasty people. They did not spring up because Jews wanted to keep the Arabs down. They sprang up as a reaction to the Palestinian choice to go to war in 2000.

I appreciate that it seems like apartheid to separate Jews and Palestinians. Again, though, I think it’s a matter of accountability. The Palestinian chose war, so the Israelis tried to make it the least impactful on their people possible. Over a longer term, some people may misguidedly argue that it’s apartheid but I don’t remember the black South Africans donning suicide bombs and exploding among children.

I agree with you that the West Bank would be a demographic albatross if Israel annexed it, and it’s a moral one if they don’t. I think most Israelis understand that and would gladly be rid of it if they weren’t convinced, with good reason, that passing control to the Palestinians would just propel the West Bank down the same road as Gaza.

Yankev, I don’t like the term “apartheid” either, for similar reasons (apartheid was a racist system, and the Israelis are NOT racists and indeed afford a great deal of rights to their Arab citizens). But I am telling you that this is where it comes from. You really can’t have a permanent system of pass laws and separate roads and Jews who get to be citizens of Israel and Arabs who have no rights on the West Bank. That cannot sustain itself, and it certainly is going to look like apartheid to a lot of people.

The way I would put it is it’s a system that is going to subject Israel to a lot of legitimate criticism, and is going to get compared to apartheid. And therefore whatever the final outcome of the Arab-Israeli conflict is going to be, it can’t be that.

I know a lot of Israel’s sup­port­ers hate the term “apartheid”, but when it is used by legit­i­mate peo­ple (not anti-semites), this is where it comes from. Because that’s basi­cally what life was like in South Africa– if you were white, you had full cit­i­zen­ship and full rights, but if you were black, you only had a lim­ited set of rights tied to your Ban­tus­tan and you were sub­jected to a series of “pass laws” if you tried to ven­ture into white parts of the country.

Dilan, I don’t have time to respond to this right now but your analogy to aparheidt is so flawed as to the nature, source, scope and reason for the restrictions, and the term itself is so emotionally loaded (which is why it is so favored by those who seek a violent end to Israel) that it hinders rather than aids any meaningful analysis of the situation. I can’t speak for Ariel, but that is one reason that yes, I hate the term as misapplied to Israel or the situation in the territories.

But it is wrong. We are talk­ing about the West Bank, which (1) was given to Jor­dan any­way in 1948,

Wrong. Go back and look at the partition plan of 1947. The UN set that land aside for a Palestinian state in 1947. Transjordan (now Jordan) invaded illegally invaded it and illegally annexed it.

indeed, the Pales­tin­ian strat­egy could have worked– the Arabs could have won the war and won a state for the Pales­tini­ans,

What? If they had NOT launched a war, the “Palestinians” ( a name that Arabs did not apply to themselves until well after 1948) would have had a state immediateluy. Then as now, the goal of the war was not to gain a state for the Palestinians but to deny one, of whatever size and with whatever borders, to the Jews.

Yankev and Ariel both argue that the ambiguous status of the West Bank makes Israel a logical claimant for the land. This is false– as I said, there isn’t a single valid legal document (and again, the Bible don’t count) that says that Israel is entitled to the West Bank.

But even if it were true, it still gets you back to the annexation question. If the West Bank belongs to Israel, Israel can annex it, as it did with Jerusalem based on a similar claim. Israel doesn’t want to annex it, and as it happens, I don’t want Israel to annex it either. It would mean the end of Jewish Israel.

And as I said, Israel, unlike Ariel and Yankev, is careful to NEVER claim that the West Bank is its territory, precisely because they don’t want to annex it.

But in what universe is “don’t annex, just colonize, and ONLY give the Jewish colonizers any rights of citizenship while withholding those same rights from Arabs who already lived there” a permissible solution? Even if we conceded Israel’s right to colonize the West Bank, doesn’t it still have an obligation to treat everyone who lives there the same way and not give special status to one group based on its ethnic background while subjecting the other group to oppression?

I know a lot of Israel’s supporters hate the term “apartheid”, but when it is used by legitimate people (not anti-semites), this is where it comes from. Because that’s basically what life was like in South Africa– if you were white, you had full citizenship and full rights, but if you were black, you only had a limited set of rights tied to your Bantustan and you were subjected to a series of “pass laws” if you tried to venture into white parts of the country.

In other words, Israel’s claim to the West Bank, even if accepted, can’t lead to the conclusion that Israel gets to create a two-tiered society there where Jews are full citizens and Arabs have few rights.

Yankev, you are confusing occupation and colonization. The occupation is clearly legal under 242 and the general law of war. (The League of Nations Mandate is another matter, as it did not provide any binding language as to how Palestine would be divided and therefore cannot be construed as definitive on the question of the West Bank.)

But you aren’t allowed to colonize occupied territory, for obvious reasons. Israel could annex the West Bank and colonize it to its heart’s content, but it can’t refuse to annex it while colonizing it and granting rights only to the Jews living in the colonies, which is what it is doing.

There was a mandate to establish a Jewish homeland, without prejudice to the rights of the indigenous population. Britain ceded well over 50% of that mandate to establish what became Transjordan.

This is the “Jordan is the Palestinian state” argument. But it is wrong. We are talking about the West Bank, which (1) was given to Jordan anyway in 1948, and (2) had and has Palestinians living on it who are not represented by the Jordanian government. In other words, the question is whether West Bank Palestinians get a state, not whether Jordanians get one. And that was left open by the British and the League of Nations.

Ariel, the point about sky fairies and invisible men in the sky is that it is not a basis for a claim that Israel is entitled to land. You will notice that what I said is that God isn’t in the land grant business.

To clarify, what I mean is that God, if She exists, cannot be a basis for determining who is entitled to live where. And the reason is that nobody who worships a different God, or no God, or the same God but who doesn’t believe She made the land grant, is required to obey that. The entirely proper response of an Arab Muslim (or anyone else) to a Jewish claim that God granted the Holy Land to the Jews is “we don’t give a **** what you believe your God did”.

In other words, when we start getting into claims about how significant the Holy Land is for Jews, you have to understand that they are out of bounds. And “sky fairie” sort of makes that point cleanly– you wouldn’t, for instance, accept that a group of believers in astrology are entitled to live on land just because some ancient astrological text provided that the stars were aligned a certain way and this meant that this land belonged to them. You wouldn’t accept that we have to give all the land back to Native Americans because their religious traditions provided that the gods gave them the land.

In other words, things that nobody knows even exist, whether they be sky fairies or God, have no place in determining the issues surrounding a Middle Eastern peace agreement. That doesn’t mean that observant Jews shouldn’t take their religion seriously. They just have to understand that nonbelievers have no obligation to respect any claims made about land therein.

This is too reductive, even though I do agree with the ultimate conclusion (which is that the Palestinians blew it in 1948).

It’s very hard to immediately agree to a solution that involves a bunch of your people either giving up their homes or living as a minority likely to face discrimination in someone else’s ethnicly-identified state. And this was made even harder by the fact that the Arab governments, for their own reasons, offered a lot of support for a war against Israel. And, indeed, the Palestinian strategy could have worked– the Arabs could have won the war and won a state for the Palestinians. This strategy has worked before for other peoples who have taken the gamble.

In other words, what one can say is that in retrospect, this was a huge mistake by the Palestinians. But I don’t think you can say that it was unreasonable at the time. The fact is the entire way that Israel was created surely looked extremely unjust to a Palestinian. (By the way, that also distinguishes this situation from India / Pakistan– in that instance, while the Indians and the Pakistanis had many differences, they also had a common enemy in the British and were willing to accept quite a few compromises on both sides in order to drive the British out. Here the Arab governments were offering the Palestinians a one-state solution if they won the war. That was not on the table for Pakistanis and Indians.)

I agree that it’s basically a shoot the messenger tactic. I was trying to point out that it’s not true as a factual matter as well.

(which is not likely to be any time soon, given continuing attitudes of the Arabs both within and outside of the former Palestine mandate)

And exactly what legal document (the Bible doesn’t count) gave Judea to the Israelis?

The League of Nations Mandate. And UN Sec. Council Resolution 242 says that Israel does not have to withdraw from a single cm sq. of the captured lands until there is a comprehensive peace treaty with internationally recognized borders. I think we can agree that hasn’t happened yet. Until then, Israel is under no legal duty to withdraw. When it does happen (which, given continuing attitudes of the Arabs both within and outside of the former Palestine mandate), Israel is obligated to withdraw from whatever portion of the captured lands the peace settlement calls for, and is entitled to retain the rest. This, according to the Britsh and American diplomats who negotiated 242, is precisely why the resolution says that Israel will withdraw from “lands” rather than “the lands”; the definite article was deliberately omitted because of the tacit recognition that the borders would not be the same as the 1949 armistice lines.

Look, by mentioning the irrelevancy of Yehuda, you gave the game away, Yankev.

Why, because I used the accepted historic geographic name that appeared on maps of the area consistently through the Jordanian invasion of 1948?

There was a British mandate to nonspecifically divide the territory into Arab and Jewish states.

There was a mandate to establish a Jewish homeland, without prejudice to the rights of the indigenous population. Britain ceded well over 50% of that mandate to establish what became Transjordan. Yehuda was in the portion that was left.

I answered this. Kinmen and Matsu are certainly disputed territories between China and Taiwan, but that doesn’t give the US (not a party to the dispute) a right to colonize them.
Israel never had any right to the West Bank. The whole strategy is to hope that if you mention “Judea and Samaria” enough times, the fact that Israel was never given the West Bank will fade into the background.

Israel’s right is at least equal to that of Jordan, the last state to claim jurisdiction over the area, and which, as Ariel has pointed out, has abandoned jurisdiction over the area.

Incidentally, it’s not just the Israeli right wing that has characterizes the territories as disputed. Even left wing former Israeli Supreme Court Justices have called them disputed, as have American State Department officials. While it’s great fun to describe this as a fantasy of the Israeli right, there are other folks who’ve held it.

Ariel, calling a position that of “the Israeli right” has no more to do with the Israeli right than calling something “Likkud” has to do with the position of the Likkud party, or “Neocon” has to do with the neoconservative movement. The terms “settler”, or “religious fanatic” or “Religious right”, “Religious setterl” or “ultra-Orthodox” are often thrown about in similar fashion. Or for that matter, “fascist”, “socialist”, “Nazi”, “racist” or “apartheidt”. During the Contract with America years, “liberal” was used in the same way. It is a rather transparent attempt to discredit a position in advance, as if to say that simply by identifying the position with the boogey man buzz word du jour, one has proven that the position is unworthy of serious consideration.

yankee: If the Palestinian territories are not “occupied,” what are they? If they are part of Israel, Israel is an apartheid state. If they’re not part of Israel, what could they be if not “occupied”?

Are you Humpty Dumpty, so words mean whatever you say they mean, and it must be “occupied” or “apartheid”? You should read and try to follow the responses of Ariel and yankev to Dilan Espar Dilan is under the misapprehension that before June ’67, the West Bank “belonged” to what had only been Transjordan (one side of the Jordan River) before ’48, when it seized and annexed what had been cis-Jordan (the other side of the Jordan River). Anyway, in your view did Jordan “occupy” the West Bank, territory to which it had no legal claim any other country recognized, though Britain later gave a nod of approval? And in your view did Egypt “occupy” Gaza? Or, the Jordanians and Egyptians weren’t “occupiers,” but Israel is? (“Apartheid” is no more than a baseless canard.)

Dilan Esper: More generally, though, I don’t understand this form of argument. Oppression is oppression. The fact that Arab governments do a lot of things that are very oppressive is not a license for Israel to do something oppressive. The person who is oppressed isn’t going to say “well, it’s justified that I suffer because after all, the Arab governments are worse than Israel”.

The argument was not intended to be a tu quoque, as you have implied it was. Rather, it was intended to point out the soft bigotry of low expectations – we can’t possibly be expected to hold the Arabs to such a standard, because, in your words, “Israel is better than that.” Arabs are human beings too and I think it’s insulting to them to think that they could not treat people with equal and appropriate respect. In fact, I’d suspect that part of the reason they act in the way they do is that no one expects them to act differently. We have to respect “cultural differences,” and all.

I would not ask the conquered Arab to say hey, my lot is better than their lot would be, if the shoe were on the other foot. Rather, I expect us to be able to ask legitimate questions regarding (1) why our expectations of the parties are different; (2) whether the difference in these expectations is problematic; and (3) if it is not problematic, and we really do believe that the Arabs are savages (or a de minimis version thereof), how we can expect the Israelis to make peace with them.

But we don’t have that peaceful Middle East. We have a Middle East where we have to separate Jews and Arabs. And that means that having Jews live in Hebron is an obstacle to peace.

I think that you’re right that we do have to separate the Jews and Arabs. Where we disagree is where the lines should be. I believe we agree that the Arabs are not the peaceful, happy folks we would like them to be.

You think that the proper response to that is for the Israelis to retreat and give up some land, including the settlements, which you say are illegal. I’m assuming that you believe that the Arabs will be mollified by that peace offering and will learn to live in peace as a result of that. There would be no reason for the Israelis to give up the settlements otherwise, right? Perhaps you might argue that the Israelis would have the psychological benefit of complying with your view of international law, but other than that, there would be no interest for them, is that right?

Here’s the problem with this idea, though. The Arabs are not the peaceful, happy folks we would like them to be. They won’t be appeased by this withdrawal, as they demonstrated in the withdrawal from Lebanon. In Osama’s words, roughly, people see a weak and a strong horse, and they prefer the strong horse. If the Arabs see retreat, they’ll smell blood, and they’ll go forward, not relax.

Let’s say I’m wrong, though, and maybe the Arabs will actually make peace this time. Having seen the withdrawals from Lebanon and Gaza, if you were an Israeli, would you be willing to be on that? This is why I believe that ultimately, some of the settlements are going to become part of Israel. Probably not all, maybe not many, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Israel retained Ariel and the surroundings, and Jerusalem and the surroundings.

My view on the likelihood of Arab interest in peace is probably somewhat like your view on the existence of God. Perhaps we can call it the peace fairy? Or the invisible piece of peace in the sky? More on this later.

The territories are not disputed. That is a lie told by the Israeli right wing. Israel does not claim and cannot claim these territories belong to it, so there is no “dispute”. They belonged to Jordan, Israel occupied them, and annexed Jerusalem. Israel was entitled to annex the rest of the territories too and did not.

Even if you were right at one point regarding Jordan – and I don’t believe you were – Jordan foreswore its claims to the territories in the peace agreement with Israel. If disputed territories offends you, perhaps we can call them unclaimed. The name doesn’t matter, so much as that they do not fit the definition of occupied territories.

Incidentally, it’s not just the Israeli right wing that has characterizes the territories as disputed. Even left wing former Israeli Supreme Court Justices have called them disputed, as have American State Department officials. While it’s great fun to describe this as a fantasy of the Israeli right, there are other folks who’ve held it.

Ariel, I am saying that Jews that were MOVED IN in a deliberate policy to appropriate Arab land can be moved BACK OUT by an Israeli government as part of a peace agreement. That is not the same thing as kicking Arabs out of land that they have lived in for generations. It is also not the same thing as Arab states kicking Jews out of land that they have lived in for generations. These settlers were political pawns in the first place. Moving them back on the chessboard is not a “population transfer” in the noxious sense that some folks propose.

Fair enough, I understand what you’re saying and I apologize.

We disagree on the facts, but I see the difference you’re drawing. Here’s why I disagree – some of the settlements are more or less immediately post-1967, so at most many of the Arabs there have on generation on the Jews. While it may be that some of them have been there for longer, it’s not true for the vast majority of them. The migrants went there because of economic opportunities that were being created. I don’t see that as vastly different from being political pawns in that it was others’ actions that led them to be there, not that they had been there for a long time.

This is slightly true, but it also makes no sense. There is certainly a strong case for a MILITARY presence in the Jordan Valley. But unless you are Saddam Hussein and like the idea of “human shields”, it’s utterly stupid to put CIVILIANS in harm’s way.

Of course I don’t like the idea of human shields. There are multiple issues here, which we may have conflated. One of them is stopping a tank army from the east. Another is making Israel’s narrowest point less narrow. A final one is keeping the terrorists as separated from the rest as possible. The settlements can help certainly for the middle one, but by doing so also help for the others. It’s not as cold-blooded, or Saddamite as you make it out to be.

And exactly what legal document (the Bible doesn’t count) gave Judea to the Israelis?

The results of the 1967 war gave Israel better title to the land than any other country. The Jordanian cession of their rights made Israel’s title better than any other country’s. By analogy to domestic real property law, your title just needs to be better than anyone else who might challenge it for you to win a trespass action.

Finally, I’d also like to make a point about sky fairies and invisible men in the sky. You’ve been pretty good about calling me out when I’ve gone over the line by asking you questions about transfer. I think that these are similar gratuitous insults that don’t advance the discussion. As ridiculous as you may find it that people believe in invisible men and sky fairies, to some people, that’s an important part of their identity. Ridiculing people’s beliefs may feel good, but it’s insulting and nasty.

That’s not true at all, Leo. Members of all of those groups have sought their homes back or compensation.

The difference between seeking compensation for the homes and seeking the homes themselves is definitive, and the Palestinians are the only ones seeking the homes on a meaningful scale.

But to the extent it is true, it’s because unlike the Pakistanis or Indians or the Jews who were driven out of Arab countries, the Palestinians didn’t get a state.

I agree, and my point was that’s because the Palestinians, alone among the four, refused the state that was available. Unlike, say, the Pakistanis, who also had major territorial grievances, but accepted what they considered a flawed state to continue the fight another day, the Palestinians took an absolutist position. They pushed all their chips to the middle of the table, gambling they’d break Israel, without any apparent regard for what would happen if they themselves were broken.

Look, Leo, we’ve been through this before. If you were a Palestinian driven from your home in 1948, you would hate Israel too.

as I’ve always said.

The lack of empathy of many supporters of Israel for Palestinian suffering is shocking and contemptible.

It’s the behavior of certain people on both sides who apparently lack empathy that’s shocking and contemptible. The lack of empathy itself, while regrettable, isn’t. Empathy is hard. If it wasn’t, peace would be easy. That said, I think there’s something about the empathy question that ties back to the OP, but I don’t have time to articulate it now. If I have a minute later on I’ll come back and finish the thought.

And exactly what legal document (the Bible doesn’t count) gave Judea to the Israelis?

Look, by mentioning the irrelevancy of Yehuda, you gave the game away, Yankev. There isn’t an invisible man in the sky who gave the West Bank to Israel. Sorry, there just isn’t.

There was a British mandate to nonspecifically divide the territory into Arab and Jewish states, and an imperfect UN implementation of that mandate which put the West Bank in the hands of Jordan. Israel never had a legal right to the West Bank, again, unless one believes in sky fairies making land grants.

It is therefore false to say that the territory is that of another state, never having been under the lawful jurisdiction of any country since the end of Britain’s mandate.

I answered this. Kinmen and Matsu are certainly disputed territories between China and Taiwan, but that doesn’t give the US (not a party to the dispute) a right to colonize them.

Israel never had any right to the West Bank. The whole strategy is to hope that if you mention “Judea and Samaria” enough times, the fact that Israel was never given the West Bank will fade into the background.

At any rate, if you REALLY believe that the West Bank belongs to Israel, Israel should annex it. I DON’T believe that for a second. But the logic of the position militates towards a one-state solution, which is precisely why ISRAEL never characterizes the West Bank as a part of Israel.

But you are still characterizing the Israeli peace offers as more generous than they were.

That is a lie told by the Arabs and their extreme left wing supporters in the West.

The territories are not disputed. That is a lie told by the Israeli right wing. Israel does not claim and cannot claim these territories belong to it, so there is no “dispute”. They belonged to Jordan,

This is a lie told by the Arabs and their supporters. The territories did not belong to Jordan. They were a part of the Ottoman Empire that the League of Nations entrusted to Britain with the mandate to create a Jewish state. In 1947, the UN allocated this part of the mandate for establishment of an additional Arab state. In 1948, when Britain withdrew from its mandate, Israel declared independence and Transjordan — which had already been created out of part of the mandate — invaded, along with the Egypt, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. When the armistice was enacted in 1949, a part of the geographic area historically known as Yehuda (Judea, in Latin) was in Transjordanian hands, although it had been set aside by the UN resolution as part of a proposed Palestinian state. Now that it held land on both sides of the Jordan River, Transjordan changed its name to Jordan. Jordan began referring to the area as its West Bank, in part to keep up the myth that Jews were alien to the area. Jordan then annexed the West Bank, but the annexation was not recognized as lawful by Western countries or AFAIK by the UN. It is therefore false to say that the territory is that of another state, never having been under the lawful jurisdiction of any country since the end of Britain’s mandate. There are American lawyers who are expert in international law who will tell you the same thing. This is not, as you like to think, a lie cooked up by the nefarious Israeli Right.

No. And you know what? The human rights records of most Arab countries are apalling. Israel is better than that. And it should be.

More generally, though, I don’t understand this form of argument. Oppression is oppression. The fact that Arab governments do a lot of things that are very oppressive is not a license for Israel to do something oppressive. The person who is oppressed isn’t going to say “well, it’s justified that I suffer because after all, the Arab governments are worse than Israel”.

You’ve also evaded the question quite carefully. When the Arabs conquered Hebron in 1929, killing the Jews therein, you said that’s it, game over, for the Jewish presence there.

That’s not what I said. If the Middle East were more peaceful, there certainly could be a Jewish presence in Hebron, just as we could move more Palestinians back into the homes they lost in Israel in 1948.

But we don’t have that peaceful Middle East. We have a Middle East where we have to separate Jews and Arabs. And that means that having Jews live in Hebron is an obstacle to peace.

Now, you could still construct a peace that included Jews living in Hebron. But you would need to have negotiations and Israel would have to give up something in exchange, and the more Hebrons you permit, the more the Palestinian state becomes noncontiguous and difficult to sustain.

Not asking in bad faith or to start a flame war. International law does not prohibit colonizing disputed territories.

The territories are not disputed. That is a lie told by the Israeli right wing. Israel does not claim and cannot claim these territories belong to it, so there is no “dispute”. They belonged to Jordan, Israel occupied them, and annexed Jerusalem. Israel was entitled to annex the rest of the territories too and did not.

Since Israel decided not to annex the rest of the territories, it is an occupying power. There is no international law classification for territories that are “disputed” but where the sovereign makes no actual sovereign claim over them. Accordingly, since Israel decided not to annex the territories, it can’t settle them.

This is actually clear as day, everyone knows it, and the Israeli right wing arguments to the contrary are in complete bad faith and are just a made up position to justify illegality. They are the equivalent of the Bush torture memos.

None of these tools indicate that if you don’t make peace soon, the peace deal you will get will be worse than otherwise.

But you don’t get to violate international law and do that. You see, Israel could also say “if you don’t make peace now, we will cut off the testicles of your children one by one”. That would make any peace deal in the future worse than one now. But it would also be illegal.

There isn’t an exception to the rules against colonization for colonization projects designed to collectively punish people for terrorism.

You made this comment in reply to my comment about there being no reason to think that Jews could not live among Palestinians, if there was a peace deal. You said that would not be possible, because they need to be separated. I gathered, from the context of our discussion, that you meant that Jews should be moved, because you’ve been critical of the right wing Israelis who advocate transfer of Arabs.

Ariel, I am saying that Jews that were MOVED IN in a deliberate policy to appropriate Arab land can be moved BACK OUT by an Israeli government as part of a peace agreement. That is not the same thing as kicking Arabs out of land that they have lived in for generations. It is also not the same thing as Arab states kicking Jews out of land that they have lived in for generations. These settlers were political pawns in the first place. Moving them back on the chessboard is not a “population transfer” in the noxious sense that some folks propose.

That’s the distinction you’re trying to make, and I’m not quite sure I understand it. Is it that if your country is willing to transfer its own people, that makes it ok? So when the Bosnians transferred some of their own people, mostly to consolidate their lines, that was not transfer?

Here’s a simple way of thinking about it. The Serbs were trying to transfer Bosnian Muslims out of Bosnia. That was ethnic cleansing. However, if the Serbs, at the end of the conflict, transfered the Serbs that THEY HAD TRANSFERRED INTO BOSNIA FOR THE EXPRESS PURPOSE OF PUTTING FACTS ON THE GROUND back out of Bosnia, that’s not the same thing. If you think it is, you are a hopeless apologist for the Israeli right.

There’s also one major difference between the Israelis and the Palestinians: this is our ancestral homeland.

Ariel, (1) that doesn’t matter– I live on land that is the “ancestral homeland” of Native Americans, and that doesn’t give them any rights to get the land back now. People don’t get to live where their ancestors lived 2,000 years ago. (2) It’s worth noting that whoever the Israelites were thousands of years ago, they were very different people from the modern day Jewish / Israeli community, with a very different culture and customs. Indeed, there are many, many descendants of those people who are NOT Jews. We speak too freely about “Jews” (or any group) as if the group now is exactly the same as the group then. It isn’t. Time changes everything and everyone. (3) The land is also the ancestral homeland of many Palestinians. Arab Muslims have lived on Israel and the West Bank for hundreds of years, just like Jews.

From your keyboard to God’s metaphorical ears. I don’t believe that you’re right, about it being irreversible. With Hezb’Allah on the north, Hamas on the south, and, eventually, a PA state on the east, the Israelis will be in tough straits, even discounting the Iranians and Syrians. I don’t think 1948 is irreversible at all – I think it’s only a matter of time. But here’s the key point – to the extent we can put off that vile day, I think we should. And that means a strong Israel, ready to defend itself against the various enemies it has, and will have.

I don’t think that there is really an existential threat to Israel, which is a rich country with nuclear weapons. But I totally agree that Israel should be strong and has every right to defend itself against those who would seek to reverse 1948.

Many of the vilified settlements were constructed to cover key routes into Israel, to make it harder for conventional forces or terrorists to come into Israel. That’s exactly why they’re so hated by the Palestinians, and the people for whom they are proxies.

This is slightly true, but it also makes no sense. There is certainly a strong case for a MILITARY presence in the Jordan Valley. But unless you are Saddam Hussein and like the idea of “human shields”, it’s utterly stupid to put CIVILIANS in harm’s way.

After a war of aggression launched by Germany, the victorious Allies occupied Germany until it was completely pacified and a new government installed there. Likewise, after a war of aggression launched by Japan, the victorious United States occupied Japan until it was completely pacified and a new government installed there. Those were clearly “occupations” by any definition, the conquering forces having no colorable territorial claims to assert.

Neuro, I don’t doubt the legality of the OCCUPATION. But you aren’t allowed to COLONIZE occupied territories unless you annex them, and we didn’t, either in Japan or Germany.

How could Israel, though, similarly “occupy” land (”Palestine”) which never in the course of history existed as anything remotely resembling a sovereignty; which has to this day no agreed upon borders; which had been part of the undivided Ottoman Empire under the rule of non-Arabs for hundreds of years until three decades before when the Ottoman Empire came to an end and the British took control of the territory; and which for the previous 19 years the Jordanians ruled without much protest by the inhabitants or other countries, though only a couple recognized what amounted to Jordanian annexation of the West Bank (and Egyptian control of Gaza)?

The reason it is an occupation is that it was clear that the territories DID NOT belong to Israel. The fact that there are disputes as to who they did belong to is irrelevant. By your logic, if the US invaded the Kiril Islands or Kinmen and Matsu, we would not be an occupying power.

Among how many Arabs? Oh, the horror of Arabs having to tolerate Jews living amongst them. More to the point, the Arabs would have received land in pre-1967 Israel as part of their state, equal to the amount of land that those 200,000 Jews were living on. The point remains that any time the Arabs have been offered the choice of a state next to a Jewish state or continuing their war to exterminate the Jewish state, they have chosen the latter.

Again, Yankev, nobody disputes that the Palestinians have been stupid. But you are still characterizing the Israeli peace offers as more generous than they were.

I believe the Barak plan left nearly 200,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank.

Among how many Arabs? Oh, the horror of Arabs having to tolerate Jews living amongst them. More to the point, the Arabs would have received land in pre-1967 Israel as part of their state, equal to the amount of land that those 200,000 Jews were living on. The point remains that any time the Arabs have been offered the choice of a state next to a Jewish state or continuing their war to exterminate the Jewish state, they have chosen the latter.

Dilan Esper: What international law was violated?I think you are asking this question in bad faith or to start a flame war about international law. Suffice to say, international law does prohibit colonizing occupied territories.

After a war of aggression launched by Germany, the victorious Allies occupied Germany until it was completely pacified and a new government installed there. Likewise, after a war of aggression launched by Japan, the victorious United States occupied Japan until it was completely pacified and a new government installed there. Those were clearly “occupations” by any definition, the conquering forces having no colorable territorial claims to assert.

How could Israel, though, similarly “occupy” land (“Palestine”) which never in the course of history existed as anything remotely resembling a sovereignty; which has to this day no agreed upon borders; which had been part of the undivided Ottoman Empire under the rule of non-Arabs for hundreds of years until three decades before when the Ottoman Empire came to an end and the British took control of the territory; and which for the previous 19 years the Jordanians ruled without much protest by the inhabitants or other countries, though only a couple recognized what amounted to Jordanian annexation of the West Bank (and Egyptian control of Gaza)? Did Jordan, which only 25 years earlier was itself created de novo out of a contiguous piece of the former Ottoman Empire by the British, who established a hereditary monarchy, parachuting in someone to their own liking to rule there as a king, come to have a claim superior to Israel’s in ’48 or at any other time over the West Bank? Did League of Nations, the United Nations, or anyone else ever allow that Jordan might have some claim to territory beyond its established and uncontested borders? (BTW, when Jordan made everything they held at the conclusion of the ’48 war judenrein, including parts of Jerusalem and other places that Jews had long inhabited, were they “decolonizing” ccupied territory?

Rather than accuse your interlocuters of either bad faith or seeking to start a flame war over international law, how about addressing yourself to who was/is an “occupier”? And tell us, if you will, where you believe Israel’s borders should be, whether the truce line after the Arab armies were defeated in ’48 (pre-’67 border or so-called Green Line), what the Israelis conquered after defeating the Arab armies again in ’67, or where, and why you think your choice is the right one. (Ricardo alluded to “the internationally accepted borders of Israel,” but didn’t specify where exactly he thought those were, and I’m sure I don’t know because I don’t think the borders have ever been “internationally accepted,” least of all by those who have refused Israel’s right to exist.)

Dilan Esper: It’s that Israel has not, in fact, taken the West Bank as a prize of conquest, nor can it. Because that would require giving rights to West Bank residents, which could destroy the Jewish character of Israel.

Suppose the Arabs were successful in conquering Israel. Would they give rights to the Jewish citizens, er, subjects of the new regime? What about Israeli conquest makes it necessary to give rights to the residents?

You’ve also evaded the question quite carefully. When the Arabs conquered Hebron in 1929, killing the Jews therein, you said that’s it, game over, for the Jewish presence there. They didn’t give rights to any Jews there. They either killed them or forced them to flee. This meets your approval. Would a similar Israeli action meet your approval? Or, again, is it ok for the Arabs, but not the Israelis?

No, they didn’t look as permanent as those in the West Bank.

I’ll grant that they didn’t look as permanent as the current structures. But I wouldn’t grant that they weren’t thought of as permanently as the current settlements *at that time*.

Plus, the West Bank is religiously important to some Israelis, which the Palestinians can reasonably infer will make it very difficult for settlements to be removed.

Sinai is too. You may have heard about that whole mountain, 10C, wandering in the desert thing. That’s where it happened.

Finally, we have a record of years of peace talks and even peace-minded Israeli governments have continued to build settlements and have never really offered to dismantle them even as part of a final status agreement. So the Palestinians certainly have every right to see West Bank settlements as more than negotiating tools.

Sinai, Gaza show that it can be done. Barak, as mentioned above by Yankev, showed that it could be done. Unlike some other areas, I think this is a question of fact.

What international law was violated?I think you are asking this question in bad faith or to start a flame war about international law. Suffice to say, international law does prohibit colonizing occupied territories.

Not asking in bad faith or to start a flame war. International law does not prohibit colonizing disputed territories. To have them be occupied, you’d have to identify the party which is being occupied – there was no predecessor state that occupied them that maintains any claim to them. The Jordanians and Egyptians have both forsworn their interests in the relevant lands.

How are settlements the Israelis’ “one tool”? You have attacks on Hamas leaders. Targeted assassinations. Reoccupation. Cutting off aid and supplies to territories controlled by Hamas. Reprisals by Israel’s allies against Hamas’ international sponsors.There’s plenty of tools in the Israeli toolkit.

None of these tools indicate that if you don’t make peace soon, the peace deal you will get will be worse than otherwise. All of them are band-aids, temporary fixes.

This is an argument the transfer advocates make as well. Unlike them, you are only willing to transfer Jews.What the ****? This is the most disgusting accusation you could ever lob at someone. I am not in the ethnic cleansing business, Ariel. I am not Hitler or Milosevic. You need to withdraw this offensive accusation immediately. I am not proposing that we “transfer” Jews.

In the comment I replied to here, you said that Jews and Arabs need to be separated. There are three ways this can be accomplished:
(1) Transfer Jews
(2) Transfer Arabs
(3) Transfer some Jews and some Arabs

There really are no other possibilities.

You made this comment in reply to my comment about there being no reason to think that Jews could not live among Palestinians, if there was a peace deal. You said that would not be possible, because they need to be separated. I gathered, from the context of our discussion, that you meant that Jews should be moved, because you’ve been critical of the right wing Israelis who advocate transfer of Arabs. I may have read this wrong. If so, please let me know how, and I’d be happy to apologize.

I am saying that the Israeli government is going to have to give up territory if it wants to get peace, and that as part of that process, it will need to dismantle settlements. When your OWN government dismantles the settlements that it allowed you to create in the first place as part of its policy, you are not being ethnically cleansed.

Do you mind explaining to me the truth of this statement? It’s not self-evident to me that:
(1) If gov’t A transfers people A, it’s not ethnic cleansing
(2) If gov’t B transfers people A, it is ethnic cleansing

That’s the distinction you’re trying to make, and I’m not quite sure I understand it. Is it that if your country is willing to transfer its own people, that makes it ok? So when the Bosnians transferred some of their own people, mostly to consolidate their lines, that was not transfer?

I’ll note that I’m using the word “transfer” and not “ethnic cleansing” precisely to be less offensive. I think that there can be relatively peaceable transfers, like the transfer of Jews out of Gaza.

Really, we can’t have civil discussions about the Middle East when conservative supporters of Israel lob this sort of garbage at anyone who dares to criticize Israel’s settlement policy. Until you learn the difference between ethnic cleansing and the peace process, you are hopeless.

Part of the problem I have with the peace process is precisely that: everyone assumes that the end state will involve dismantling Israeli settlements, because the Palestinians cannot be trusted to live with Jews among them. If that’s really true, what peace is at the end of the tunnel? It’s a fundamental contradiction in the “process.”

The Palestinians and their sponsors made some really stupid decisions. But you also need to know that the claim that Israel shouldn’t have been created in 1948 on land populated by Arabs was quite strong.

There’s a kernel of a reasonable argument here. But then they went to war – and when you lose wars, you may lose territory. Tough noogies.

I don’t think if the international community came in and declared a Palestinian state in Tel Aviv and the Jewish Israelis said “we don’t accept it” and went to war, that you would be saying that the Israelis had to accept it.

You’re right. I would not accept it. But if Israel went to war over it, and lost, then, while I would hope such a thing would never happen, it would be what it is. Any future return to Israel by the Jews would have to wait.

There’s also one major difference between the Israelis and the Palestinians: this is our ancestral homeland. To juice up the number of Palestinians, the UNRWA has to define them as any person living in Mandatory Palestine for as little as two years, and all of their descendants. No other refugee population in the world is defined as loosely. It’s precisely because many Arabs were recent migrants to the territory now known as Israel, coming because of the opportunities the industrious early Zionists were introducing, that the definition of Palestinians is so broad. Palestinians don’t even speak the same dialect of Arabic, that’s how dissimilar they are from each other.

And I still don’t think you would say it even if the Jewish Israelis lost the war and were driven out of the territory.The fact of the matter is, 1948 happened and is irreversible.

From your keyboard to God’s metaphorical ears. I don’t believe that you’re right, about it being irreversible. With Hezb’Allah on the north, Hamas on the south, and, eventually, a PA state on the east, the Israelis will be in tough straits, even discounting the Iranians and Syrians. I don’t think 1948 is irreversible at all – I think it’s only a matter of time. But here’s the key point – to the extent we can put off that vile day, I think we should. And that means a strong Israel, ready to defend itself against the various enemies it has, and will have.

Many of the vilified settlements were constructed to cover key routes into Israel, to make it harder for conventional forces or terrorists to come into Israel. That’s exactly why they’re so hated by the Palestinians, and the people for whom they are proxies. Israel is 9 miles wide at its narrowest point, the place where a tank army could cut the country in two. The settlement of Ariel, and surrounding settlements, is there precisely to make that harder. That’s the other purpose of the settlements. And that’s why Israel can’t give up the settlements unless there is going to be peace. But any situation in which the Arabs would reject the settlements staying would also suggest non-peaceful intentions. That’s a bit of a Catch-22. In sum, we’re agreed, I believe, on the point that Israel will not give up all of the settlements, under any circumstances, even if we disagree about whether that is desirable.

That’s not true at all, Leo. Members of all of those groups have sought their homes back or compensation. But to the extent it is true, it’s because unlike the Pakistanis or Indians or the Jews who were driven out of Arab countries, the Palestinians didn’t get a state.

Look, Leo, we’ve been through this before. If you were a Palestinian driven from your home in 1948, you would hate Israel too. The lack of empathy of many supporters of Israel for Palestinian suffering is shocking and contemptible.

This isn’t really correct. I believe the Barak plan left nearly 200,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank.

The international community gave India a state? Lol.

The international community created an ethnically-identified state in a place where a lot of people of a different ethnicity were living. It was, in fact, very necessary to create that state as an insurance policy against anti-semitism. But it was created on top of people who were already living there. And then that state proceeded to drive a number of those people into exile, while others left voluntarily. [...] The fact of the matter is, 1948 happened and is irreversible. But that doesn’t mean the Palestinians didn’t get a very raw deal.

Right around the same time another former British colony was ethnically/religiously partitioned into India and Pakistan. That partition created 12.5 to 15 million refugees who fled/abandoned/were driven from their homes. All those people got a raw deal, as did the 800,000 – 1,000,0000 Jews who fled/abandoned/were driven from their homes in the countries that surround Israel. Of those four groups that the international community gave states which exiled some and to which other exiles fled, only one continues to demand the right to return to their original homes. Is that because the Palestinians were the only ones who got a raw deal, or because they were the only ones unwilling to accept the existence of their enemies’ state, even at the cost of rejecting their own?

Finally, we have a record of years of peace talks and even peace-minded Israeli governments have continued to build settlements and have never really offered to dismantle them even as part of a final status agreement.

You are mistaken, sir. Ehud Barak offered exactly that, with the exception of a miniscule number of “settlements” (in the US, we call them suburbs) contiguous or nearly so to Jerusalem or to other parts of pre-1967 Israel, for which the Arabs would be given an at least equivalent area in pre-1967 Israel, contiguous to the land occupied illegally from 1948 to 1967 by Egypt, Jordan or Syria, as the case may be. He even threw in the Old City of Jerusalem. This was exactly the type of border adjustment contemplated by UNSC Resolution 242. Arafat responded by launching the second intifada.

Not at all. It’s that Israel has not, in fact, taken the West Bank as a prize of conquest, nor can it. Because that would require giving rights to West Bank residents, which could destroy the Jewish character of Israel. I, by the way, do not think Israel should do this– the one state solution can’t work. But because Israel has explictly NOT decided to just make the West Bank a part of Israel, the question becomes how is Israel going to give the West Bank to the Arabs.

The other thing about the taking of the West Bank is that it is much more proximate. It didn’t happen nearly as long ago as those other things you mention. Indeed, this principle works both ways– Arabs who want to reverse 1948 are just as unrealistic as Jews who want to control biblical Israel.

The settlements in Sinai looked very permanent as well. They were still uprooted.

No, they didn’t look as permanent as those in the West Bank. Have you seriously seen the infrastructure that Israel has built there? And the separation barriers? And the highways? Plus, the West Bank is religiously important to some Israelis, which the Palestinians can reasonably infer will make it very difficult for settlements to be removed. Finally, we have a record of years of peace talks and even peace-minded Israeli governments have continued to build settlements and have never really offered to dismantle them even as part of a final status agreement. So the Palestinians certainly have every right to see West Bank settlements as more than negotiating tools.

What international law was violated?

I think you are asking this question in bad faith or to start a flame war about international law. Suffice to say, international law does prohibit colonizing occupied territories.

In the olden days, it would probably mean bombing their population centers, see, e.g., Tokyo in WWII. Nowadays, we don’t do that – but if you want to take away Israel’s one tool to try to pressure the Palestinians to negotiate, what incentive will they ever have to negotiate?

How are settlements the Israelis’ “one tool”? You have attacks on Hamas leaders. Targeted assassinations. Reoccupation. Cutting off aid and supplies to territories controlled by Hamas. Reprisals by Israel’s allies against Hamas’ international sponsors.

There’s plenty of tools in the Israeli toolkit.

This is an argument the transfer advocates make as well. Unlike them, you are only willing to transfer Jews.

What the ****? This is the most disgusting accusation you could ever lob at someone. I am not in the ethnic cleansing business, Ariel. I am not Hitler or Milosevic. You need to withdraw this offensive accusation immediately. I am not proposing that we “transfer” Jews. I am saying that the Israeli government is going to have to give up territory if it wants to get peace, and that as part of that process, it will need to dismantle settlements. When your OWN government dismantles the settlements that it allowed you to create in the first place as part of its policy, you are not being ethnically cleansed.

Really, we can’t have civil discussions about the Middle East when conservative supporters of Israel lob this sort of garbage at anyone who dares to criticize Israel’s settlement policy. Until you learn the difference between ethnic cleansing and the peace process, you are hopeless.

Fair enough. But here’s the thing – said political and diplomatic processes are not heavily skewed against them. They refused a state in 1948, choosing war to drive the Jews into the sea, when their land would be much bigger and better than what the Jews would get. In 1967, in response to their loss, they issued the Three No’s – no peace, no recognition, no negotiation. End result: no state.

The Palestinians and their sponsors made some really stupid decisions. But you also need to know that the claim that Israel shouldn’t have been created in 1948 on land populated by Arabs was quite strong. This is the classic “we didn’t land on Plymouth Rock, Plymouth Rock landed on us” problem. The international community created an ethnically-identified state in a place where a lot of people of a different ethnicity were living. It was, in fact, very necessary to create that state as an insurance policy against anti-semitism. But it was created on top of people who were already living there. And then that state proceeded to drive a number of those people into exile, while others left voluntarily.

I don’t think if the international community came in and declared a Palestinian state in Tel Aviv and the Jewish Israelis said “we don’t accept it” and went to war, that you would be saying that the Israelis had to accept it. And I still don’t think you would say it even if the Jewish Israelis lost the war and were driven out of the territory.

The fact of the matter is, 1948 happened and is irreversible. But that doesn’t mean the Palestinians didn’t get a very raw deal. The international community, for its own purposes, declared someone else’s state on their land. I suspect that most people would support going to war under those circumstances.