After 75 years of failure, one would imagine that a people would learn what works and what doesn’t, both from their own experience, as well as the experience of others.
“What is unusual about the #Palestinian cause starts from the observation that many of those other nations built states on parts of historic homelands out of the ruins of collapsed multi-national, multi-linguistic, multi-confessional empires, and the #Palestinians have not”
“The principal grievance of the #Palestinian cause, one revealed in those rejections of sovereignty and by rhetoric spanning generations, is not the absence of a desired nation-state but the existence of another one” #Israel
What is that predicament? It is defined by five dire properties:
#Palestinian predicament is the direct or indirect outcome of three #Arab-#Israeli wars, each about a generation apart. These are the wars that started in 1947, 1967, and 2000. Each war was a complex event with vast, unforeseen, and contested consequences for a host of actors, but the consequences for the Palestinian people were uniquely catastrophic: the first brought #displacement, the second brought #occupation, the third brought #fragmentation.
“It has been clear to me since about 2020 that a fourth war would probably soon be added to them; and clear that, as before, the shape such a war would take would not resemble the others; and clear that, as before, the result for the #Palestinian people and the Palestinian cause would be catastrophic.”
#WarOfndependence that began in 1947 was first a #civilWar between #Arabs and #Jews in #Palestine, and then a multi-state war… from at least five sovereign countries—#Egypt, #Transjordan, #Syria, #Iraq, and #Israel—as well as small contingents from others. It was a war fought village by village and town by town, and it resulted in massive population displacements on both sides.
No Jews remained anywhere in parts of Palestine that fell under #Arab control
The #ethnicSorting was most pronounced in the center of the land [where] more land was conquered by the #Arab Legion than by #IDF.
This territory included many sites with religious and symbolic importance to both sides.
It became known then as the #WestBank and it sits on a smaller patch of land that what had been allocated to a future #Palestinian Arab state in the rejected #UN#partitionProposal that preceded the war.
With few exceptions, the few places in central #Israel today with a significant Arab population were not actually conquered by the #IDF in the war; they were largely territories that were held by the invading #Iraqi army and that were ceded to Israel in the #armistice.
For the #Arabs, the defeat in this war was and remains a searing trauma.
Not only had the goal that had united the Arabs in 1948—preventing the establishment of a Jewish state in the heart of the #Arab#MiddleEast—been thwarted, but hundreds of thousands of Arabs living in #Palestine had been displaced by war.
In time, their #displacement became the enduring image of that defeat and humiliation.
The war in 1967 was a 3-front war fought by 4 different armies belonging to #Egypt, #Jordan, #Syria, and #israel.
But it wasn’t those conquests that upended the #Palestinian situation. Rather it was the conquest of the #Gaza Strip from #Egypt and #WestBank from #Jordan that put millions of Palestinian #Arabs under #Israeli rule.
The #Palestinians went from being a people defined by their dispossession at the hands of a hated enemy across a sealed border to being a people defined by their dispossession at the hands of a hated enemy that now also ruled them as an occupier.
Unlike the larger #Arab trauma of defeat, which was mostly bookended in time by the end of actual combat, for Palestinians, this remains a continuous trauma right up into the present.
A generation after 1967, the #SecondIntifada involved no armies on distant fronts. There was a campaign of #terrorist attacks against #Israeli civilians… together with a campaign of #suicideBombings in Israeli cities.
In the #WestBank it looked less like either a #civilWar or a conventional war and more like an #asymmetricWar or a #counterinsurgency campaign by an occupying army that took years to settle down into a victory on the Israeli side.
These 3 wars are as different in form as any wars could be. Yet in several crucial ways they are quite similar.
For one, all 3 of these wars were preceded by months of excitement in the #Arab world & heated rhetoric that was simultaneously righteous & violent.
Righteous in that the cause of attacking #Jews was held to be an absolute good and a moral exigency infused with theological overtones. Violent in that the rhetoric was often openly #eliminationist
This pattern was set in motion by the first of the wars. The vote by the #UN General Assembly in 1947 to partition #BritishPalestine into two states, one #Jewish and one #Arab, set off an explosion of violence against local Jewish communities almost immediately in #Palestine itself.
If there were doubts about the justice of the cause being fought for—preventing the establishment of a Jewish state—there is little record for that.
If there were doubts about the morality of the methods employed—sieges that blocked food & water and attacks on Jewish civilians of all ages wherever they could be found in cities, towns, and villages—there is no record of that.
If there were doubts not even about the morality but about the wisdom of a total war against the new Jewish state—concern, for example, that the Arab side might lose and end up worse off as a result—there is little record of that too
What’s astonishing is that a war that was embarked on so willingly, with so much unanimity, and with so much excitement could be later remembered as a story of pure #victimhood 🔥🔥🔥
Yet before the war was even fully over, Constantin #Zureiq published a passionate #lament of the #Arab failure to defeat #Israel, The Meaning of the Disaster [#Nakba], giving birth to the word that would be used from as a shorthand for the traumatic #Arab defeat in that war.
As time passed, memories of that defeat evolved and the #Nakba became not an #Arab event but a #Palestinian one, and not a humiliating defeat—“seven Arab states declare war on #Zionism in #Palestine [and] stop impotent before it” is how it is described on the first page of #Zureiq’s book—but rather the story of shame and #forcedDisplacement.
The word itself came into popular usage in the West only around after the 50th anniversary of that war as a description of that #displacement and not of a war at all—a tale of unjust #suffering and #colonial affliction laced with transparent #HolocaustEnvy 🔥🔥🔥, which is its unspoken appeal for the Westerners who use it
The weeks leading up to the 1967 war were, in the #Arab world, likewise a time of public displays of #ecstasy. The hour of “#revenge” was nigh, and the excitement was expressed in both mass public spectacles and elite opinion.
The #Egyptian president Gamal Abdel #Nasser promised an elated crowd the week before the war broke out that “our basic objective will be to destroy #Israel.
Of course, the promise of #revenge was not realized, and the expectant longing was not satisfied. The #Arabs were quickly routed, and almost all of the #Jews survived.
Then, however, despite the eagerness to fight, the incitement to war, and the euphoria at the prospect, this defeat was reconceived 🔥 not simply as a story of loss but once again into a story of #victimhood.
In the #KhartoumResolution rejecting any accommodation with #Israel that was agreed on by the #ArabLeague less than 3 months later, the war is referred to unironically as the #Israeli “aggression of June 5.”
As with the 1st #Arab-#Israeli war, memories expanded and hardened with time, and the mythology of the defeat came to assume much larger dimensions than the size of the war or the actual defeat itself.
Major anniversaries of the #SixDayWar were largely marked in the Arab world as “the beginning of the #occupation.”
Minimal reckoning with Arabs’ own failures was with military errors and not with the overall goal of exacting revenge and eliminating #Israel.
In the 2000 #CampDavid peace negotiations… #Arafat’s refusal to accept a #Palestinian state on all of the #Gaza Strip and nearly all of the #WestBank was indeed tragic and misguided
What is striking about #Arafat’s refusal to accept the deal offered at #CampDavid—a state on all of #Gaza and 90+% of #WestBank, including a capital in #EastJerusalem—and his subsequent turn to #violent confrontation is just how popular it was and remains🔥
There was not anywhere within #Palestinian politics a minority camp that opposed this move, that warned against the possible consequences, that organized #protests and galvanized #opposition parties
As happened 30 and 50 years before, in the months after #CampDavid and well into the #SecondIntifada, the rhetoric was as militant as ever, and triumphalist too.
Less-moderate voices hoped that violence could replicate #Hezbollah’s success in forcing a full #Israeli withdrawal from #Lebanon without Israel receiving anything in return
#Palestinians had, for the first time, an elected government, a representative assembly, passports, stamps, an international airport, an armed police force, and other trappings of what was in every sense a state in the making 👀
What happened instead was a wave of Palestinian violence… with the goals of eliminating Israel over freedom—that has been the preference of generations of #Palestinian leaders.
A people on the cusp of liberation instead suffered war deaths and the moral rot caused by the veneration of suicide and murder.
3 generations. 3 different wars. 3 different modes of combat. All 3 times, the wars were preceded by grandiloquent pronouncements and popular excitement as well as broad intellectual support. And all 3 times, as soon as or even before defeat appeared, the excitement and frenzy were excised from collective memory, so that the event came to be remembered as a case of pure cruelty by the hand of the Israeli other. That’s the #PalestinianPredicament in a nutshell
In each of the 3 wars, the #Palestinian cause was taken up in a larger global struggle 👀 : first, #WorldWarII, then the #ColdWar, then the #jihadist war against free societies.
#Palestine has served as an excellent rallying cry for OTHERS who only fight [#inTheirName].
Decades after 1948, #Soviet propaganda would cast #Israel’s birth as a venture in #imperialism. But as the historian Jeffrey Herf’s 2022 book Israel’s Moment shows, it was #imperialists in Western governments who were most hostile to #Zionism, and anti-imperialists both in the Western left and #Communists and #socialists in both East and West who were most sympathetic.
If there is a bedrock principle of #conflictMediation it is that mediation seeks to arrive at a solution that is better for BOTH sides than what either side could hope to get from open confrontation.
This is true for warring states, for a divorcing couple, for labor and management, and for any other situation with competing claims and a possibility of forceful arbitration
If one side of a conflict rejects a compromise, initiates a violent confrontation, and is defeated , no mediator of sound mind offers that side better terms next time around.
The reasons are obvious. It creates a new incentive for the losing side to keep rejecting compromise while removing the biggest disincentive from the table, namely that the move from mediation to arbitration or open confrontation carries the strong risk that the rejecting side will lose
It also, for that matter, further disincentivizes the stronger side from seriously engaging in any kind of mediation to begin with, because mere entry into negotiations could lead to a diminishment in what it gets out of a deal. 🔥 🔥 🔥
And herein lies the explanation for those accusing [#Israel of #politicalTheater and in never being serious about negotiations and settlement]
The common and deeper meaning to all was that #Israel’s enemies needed to be protected from the consequences of THEIR defeat in the wars THEY initiated and LOST.
A global diplomatic edifice that keeps the #Palestinians in a permanent holding pattern of misery stemming from defeated #Arab war efforts, where the Palestinians themselves weren’t even always the central actors in the descent to war or the principal combatants who lost them, is unlike anything the international community has attempted in other conflicts.
The #Arab-#Israeli conflict isn’t a normal conflict, and the cause of Arab #Palestine still isn’t a normal cause of national liberation.
The fundamental fact of this conflict, that one side believes the other’s #existence is a metaphysical crime for which a just resolution can only be #elimination, means that standard diplomatic practice is much harder to apply at best, and gets scrambled, inverted, and abused at worst 🔥🔥🔥
Compare with #US, which has barred #Israel’s FULL-SCALE invasion of #Rafah.
Putin says Russia is prepared to negotiate over Ukraine, just like #Hamas says it’s prepared to negotiate with Israel.
#China claims to be neutral but backs Russian position that it was provoked into attacking Ukraine by the West, despite Putin’s public avowals of his #RevanchistDreams
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