There are sound, practical, rational, liberal reasons for wanting
to find a stable settlement to the Palestinian question, but “justice” is not
among them. There certainly was no justice for the Arabs who lived in that area
when the British arbitrarily designated their land as a new homeland for the
Jewish People in the 1917 Balfour Declaration, but then there was no justice
for the Jews in the European Holocaust or the Russian pogroms or the expulsion
of the Jews from Spain in 1492 or in the many other atrocities that forced the Jews
to look for a new homeland in the first place. Nor is there any justice in the
way the Arab nations of the Middle East have for decades cynically milked the Palestinian
plight for their own political purposes, but offered no real effective relief.
The Jews (with British connivance) took the land from the largely-Muslim Arabs in Palestine, but in fact the Muslim Arabs in turn, under Saladin, took that
land themselves from the Christian Crusaders, who in turn had taken it from the
Muslim Seljuk Empire, who had taken it from the Christian Roman Empire (or rather the Eastern
half of what remained of the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire). The Romans, of course, originally took it
from the Jews, who in turn had taken it from (the history this far back gets a
little blurred and uncertain) …. and on and on and on. (see, for example this animated map of the territory through history)
This is the same problem with the occasional liberal guilt-driven
moves to give the land back to the Native Americans. Here in the Southwest we
would have to give states like New Mexico and Arizona and California back to
the Mexicans, from whom we took them by force of arms. But the Mexicans in turn
by the same logic would have to pass them back to the indigenous people from
whom the proto-Mexicans, the Spaniards, first took them, again by military
conquest. Would this finally be justice? No, because almost every indigenous American
tribe lived on lands they had themselves taken by force from other tribes, and
so on back through history.
A realistic look at world history shows that peoples
throughout the globe have always had expansionist cultures taking over other people’s
lands. And despite the persistent Western liberal myth that we are more “civilized”
these days, the history of the past century (Germany’s two attempts to expand
by war, Stalin’s communist empire, Japan’s attempt to create a Southeast Asian
empire) and even today’s current events in Russia (The Ukraine and Crimea, Moldova,
Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan) or China (the conquest of Tibet) or the Middle
East (Saddam’s attempt to invade Iran and then Kuwait, the rise of ISIS) shows
that this is an unrealistic dream.
There are good, humane, practical reasons for trying to end
the endless suffering of the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank and living
in the camps in places like Jordan, and for that matter the endless terrorist attacks
on Jews in Israel and around the world, but the appeal for “Justice” is not one
of them. History has been unkind to both
the Palestinians and the Jews (and practically everyone else's ancestors as
well, if one goes back far enough), and there is nothing anyone in the present can
do to remedy that. What is needed is a realistic plan, starting from where
things are today, to find a reasonable settlement.
This is not easy. There is
a powerful Israeli faction that hankers to “take back” all of the ancient
Kingdom of Israel in the name of "justice", and continues to advance that cause by building settlement on Palestinian lands.There is an even more powerful Palestinian faction
that hankers, again in the name of "justice", to exterminate the Jews entirely, or at least drive them entirely
from the Holy Lands, and attempts to advance that cause with suicide bombers and
random rocket fire. Both will have to come to terms with reality to find a practical
accommodation. And part of coming to
terms with reality is giving up the “justice” argument and looking for more
pragmatic approaches
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