Three Wars or Four?

I think I will start by apologizing for my previous comments about Norman that contributed to the note. They were based on an unrepresentative sample of his writing (I’d never heard of him before encountering his blog).

There’s a proposal floating around involving voluntary transfer, backed by some in Saudi Arabia.
I could have misread it, but that’s what I thought.
Notably absent from these preliminary talks are the Palestinians themselves.

Henry says that Walzer’s analysis is “more useful”, while Morris’ “isn’t very helpful”. But I can’t for the life of me figure out what on earth he means by that, other than that he personally likes Walzer’s better than Morris’, and therefore prefers to believe it. As for myself, I prefer to judge such analytical frameworks by how well they match historical facts.

And the problem with both of them is that they compare strains of thought that arose to prominence at completely different times. The rejectionist, eliminationist view of Israel, and the idea of defending pre-1967 Israel, both became dominant in their respective constituencies around the time of Israel’s founding–that is, in the period preceding 1948. The anti-occupation view of Palestinian nationalism became popular soon after Israel’s capture of the occupied territories in 1967. The expansionist settlement movement rose to prominence in the late 1970’s, following the 1973 war and the ascent of the Likud party to power. And the Islam-vs.-the-West view of the conflict only won a significant following in the 1980’s, particularly around the beginning of the Intifada of 1987.

Given this historical ordering, it’s hard to view the three “levels” of the Palestinian conflict as particularly related, as Morris does. Nor does Walzer’s mutually reinforcing structure make much sense, given that Palestinian rejectionism is so much older than the settlement movement.

(Of course, all of these ideas can be said to have intellectual antecedents–possibly going back a century or more. But if we are interested in the political relationships among them, then presumably we have to consider their political trajectories, not their theoretical roots.)

I believe a more historically faithful analysis of these conflicts would recognize the two oldest positions–Palestinian absolute rejectionism and Israeli defense of 1948 Israel–as the consistent cores of both sides’ worldviews. The former has transiently linked itself with various allied ideologies, from pan-Arabism to Marxist Third-World liberationism to radical Islam, without deviating substantially from its essential program–the elimination of Israel and its replacement with an Arab-dominated state. The latter has also held steady as Israel’s core majority political stance for half a century, challenged–though not dethroned–only briefly (roughly between the 1973 war and the 1987 Intifada) by an alternate, nationalist/expansionist movement.

Thus we stand today almost exactly where we stood in 1948, except that Israel has replaced Jordan and Egypt as the occupiers of the Palestinians, and grown enormously in wealth, power, population and moral and historical (if not internationally recognized) legitimacy. The Palestinians, in contrast, appear, tragically, to have made virtually no net economic, political or cultural progress in fifty-six years. And so the conflict continues.

Actually, I agree that “the whole ‘who started it’ mess” is generally counterproductive. In fact, I didn’t touch on “the chronological origins of the problem” at all–merely at the chronological origins of the participants’ various views of it. I’d have thought that in identifying relationships–particularly relationships of causation or influence–among those views, not flagrantly ignoring chronology would be sensible.

As for “bringing this bloody mess to the least bad end”, conceptual frameworks that are at odds with observed reality tend not to lead to successful solutions. One might, for example, adopt a plan of action that has the effect of exacerbating a conflict, mistakenly expecting (based on a faulty framework) the opposite effect.

But surely this is all motherhood–no? Is there seriously a constituency out there in Crooked Timberland for embracing views of world affairs that are patently at odds with the historical record, on the grounds that they are more “useful” or “helpful” for some political purpose? Need I really remind anyone where such thinking can lead?

Dan – the reasons why I think Walzer’s approach is to be preferred to Morris’s isn’t because of its end-results (although certainly I find Walzer a more congenial intellectual companion in a variety of ways). As I say, it’s because he’s trying to deal with complexity in an intelligent fashion rather than resorting to easy simplifications. To say that Palestinians hate Israel because they are jihadists, and jihadists hate Western values, gets at a little of the truth. But only a little – the conflict between Israeli settlers and Palestinians comes down more often than not to quarrels over land and water rights. Different values complicate matters – but they’re not the root of the conflict. Ergo, I think that Morris is make unjustifiable simplifications, that would probably lead to bad policy. Walzer, in contrast, provides what seems to me to be a useful way of disentangling a set of different conflicts, and approaches to conflict that often get entangled. You may not agree with his conclusions – but his breakdown of the problem identifies cleavages that aren’t there in Morris’s over-simple view of the world, nor in the policy prescriptions of many Likudniks inside and outside Israel.

As for your historical analysis – it would seem to me to rest on a rather dubious intellectual premise – that the ‘oldest’ positions are necessarily the best reflections of the two sides’ core beliefs. I don’t know of any very good reason why this should be so, and indeed the vast majority of the research that has been done on ethnic mobilization etc would suggest that identities and political positions are rather more malleable over time than your argument would suggest. Not only that – but it seems to me to fail to capture the complex arguments that are taking place on both sides – neither is a monolith.

Here, Morris’s intention is plain. He’s arguing that the specific level of the conflict that the media has focused on is the Palestinian ‘liberation struggle.’ But in fact, this struggle is only one battleground in a greater war – between jihadist Islam and the West. For the jihadists:

Israel represents the embodiment of all the values it abhors – democracy and freedom, openness, tolerance and pluralism, individualism and secularism, criticality (including the value of expressing self-criticism, which is absent from their culture), women’s rights, liberalism and progress, sexual freedom – while the proponents of jihad aspire to return to the days in which the sword of Islam ruled from India to the Atlantic Ocean and minorities quaked under its shadow.

Israel is hated by the Palestinian jihadists precisely because it’s a bastion of Western civilized values.

There are two points that occur to me here: Morris picks up on an important aspect of how some of the modern jihadist outfits operate using a particular form of transnational terror – one analyst described it as a KFC style franchise rather than a sovereign state power or politically centralised organisation, the analogy being that just as a KFC franchise succeeds by enticing customers through efficient service and with products that their competitors have yet to provide, so too Al Qaeda seem to function by providing a product (an Islamist fundamentalist ideology combined with cell-based terrorism) to meet ‘customer demand’ through technological efficiency (training programmes that allow its ’employees’ to perform one or more specific tasks in the ‘production process’) and forward thinking (transforming previously fictionalised scenarios into actual events). Like a TNC when circumstances sour on the ground making a specific location unattractive (i.e. an anti-terrorist clampdown) al-Qaeda just moves its ground operations to more welcoming sites. Among which one can number not only Afghanistan, Sudan and parts of the ME but also Germany, Britain, Canada and the US. As some observers like Cynthia Weber have noted this allows it to exploit the processes of exchange that function in today’s globalising world and recognising that penetration is a reflexive double movement – as penetrating global markets and removing obstacles to flows of people, capital and goods enables a mobile network of connections of cash and carriers, accessible from just about anywhere but locatable almost exclusively as mere nodal network points. Politically this kind of trans-national network picks onto local or regional conflicts like the Israeli-Palestinian one or the Kashmiri irredentist sub-nationalist claims which it taps into and exploits for its own purposes which don’t always overlap with the local/regionalist aspects of the conflicts, the latter in turn being subsumed into some sort of globalist-jihadist paradigm. The point that sort of passes Morris by and which some scholars of religious fundamentalism like Achin Vanaik have made; is that this kind of jihadist discourse is very much a derived one from the modernisation project so beloved of hyper-globalisers or as more fashionable theorists like Zizek have put it, it is less a case of McWorld Vs. Jihad that McJihad. And rather than being the negation of democracy, liberalism, individualism etc. these movements are in many ways their dark/more unpalatable side. While it is important not to overplay this comparison, I think at least it moves away from the essentialist readings where any resistance or violence is simply directed at state-actors like Israel or “the West” because of what they stand for, as opposed to what they have done/are doing; a focus on these supposed representational values serves I think to distract from what is actually happening on the ground.

Secondly, as I am sure many others have/will point out; what Palestinian/Arab jihadists hate about Israel may be all of the above things; but this is not what most Palestinians or most Arabs dislike about Israel; and this ties in more with the relations between Israel and the Arabs, the Palestinians specifically. The latter have had resistance to Israel as a constant running theme – nothing else really has remained as steady and whatever ideology best articulated this sentiment was enthusiastically taken up. When it was pan-Arab nationalism, most Palestinians fully backed this form of Arab nationalism, when it was various forms of Soviet sponsored secular-leftist nationalist groups, this stream found favour with large swathes of the population and now with the turn towards radical Islamism this is being viewed as the most likely vehicle to carry their nationalist aspirations. There is again a slight evasion here by Morris, as it is relatively easy to sound a defence of civilisational values against a nihilistic jihadism but much harder to do when faced with a Janus-faced but quite classical territorial-centred nationalist movement. One can” help feeling that the former makes a more comfortable ideological opponent for many of a liberal persuasion than the latter, whose demands are much more disconcerting.

The first is a Palestinian war to destroy the state of Israel. The second is a Palestinian war to create an independent state alongside Israel, ending the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. The third is an Israeli war for the security of Israel within the 1967 borders. The fourth is an Israeli war for Greater Israel, for the settlements and the occupied territories.

Walzer thus proposes that “the partisans of wars two and three must defeat the partisans of wars one and four.”

This is a more interesting schema; what Walzer is really positing is a rough outline of the political spectrum in the conflict with the first war representing the Palestinian Extremists, the second Palestinian Moderates, the third Israeli moderates and the fourth Israeli extremists. Understandably, Walzer from an admirable, though contestable moderate Zionist position, argues that moderates on both sides should join hands to defeat the extremists and settle for an honourable and viable peaceful settlement. This would involve a compromise from maximalist positions on both sides of the divide; I would take a different tack from you though and probe not the links between the respective extremists (important though these are) but rather the links between the moderates and extremists within each camp and that between moderates from opposing camps. The failure of past efforts to reach a settlement in the IP conflict can largely be seen as either the inability of the moderates (such as they are) on either side to either rein in their respective extremists or credibly be seen to do so by the opposing moderates; or a communication problem/lack of trust by opposing moderates that the Other really are committed to a moderate agenda. Most attempts to explain past breakdowns in talks/understandings can be seen through this prism; though of course advocates of different sides will take very different interpretations of who is more responsible for doing what. To my mind, infinitely more troubling is the ambiguous relationship that extremists-moderates have within both nationalist camps and the slide from one agenda to another as well as the complicity that the latter have with the former both at an ideological and at a material level. Enough has been said on the Israeli-Zionist side of this equation; the problem here is not lack of analysis or evidence but rather one of acceptance and being willing to acknowledge such a problem exists; but the Palestinians have their problems too, for a group whose members have been fond of quoting Fanon in their favour, they seem to have omitted his warning of how even national-liberationist movements carry the seeds of racist-chauvinism within them and how when in power they need to be careful that these do not bear fruit. Rather alarmingly this warning has not been much heeded and one can wonder whether it might already not be too late for large sections of the Palestinian Nationalist movement.

the settler movement is the functional equivalent of the terrorist organizations. I hasten to add that it is not the moral equivalent. The settlers are not murderers, even if there are a small number of terrorists among them. But the message of settler activity to the Palestinians is very much like the message of terrorism to the Israelis: we want you to leave (some groups on the Israeli right, including groups represented in Sharon’s government, openly support a policy of “transfer”), or we want you to accept a radically subordinate position in your own country. The settlers’ aim is Greater Israel, and the achievement of that aim would mean that there could not be a Palestinian state. It is in this sense only that they are like the terrorists: they want the whole thing.

Actually, I find this portrayal rather disturbing, I don’t know about the number of actual terrorists amongst the settlers but a significant number of these communities have instigated incidents with local Palestinian populations and many have armed members. I don’t want to enter into a huge (and probably fruitless debate) about the true nature of the settler community or what is going on in the settlements; but I think Walzer’s description is here very euphemistic and rosy to say the least; some actions like the shooting of Palestinian civilians, reluctance of Israeli authorities to investigate them and the mass uprooting of olive orchards is less than reassuring. To return to the point outlined earlier though, what is most alarming is probably the degree which there has occasionally been complicity between this more extremists strand of nationalism and its moderate component; one doesn’t need to go to the sympathy extended in various guises by the Israeli govt and pleas for clemency towards the arrested members of the ‘Jewish Underground’ in the early 1980s for this; the settlement plan and intensity has a long history and acceleration even under moderate govts committed to peace (e.g. the post 1993 Rabin admin). Which goes back to again the rather deceptive relationship extremist and moderate elements within nationalism share.

Now Morris’s and Walzer’s ultimate policy prescriptions aren’t entirely dissimilar from each other (Walzer goes a lot further than Morris in advocating unilateral Israeli overtures towards peace, but Morris is clearly interested in a two-state solution that would be fairer than that proposed by the current Israeli government)

Rather unsurprising, both are moderate Zionists, the only major difference being that Walzer is still something of an optimist while Morris is a pessimist. Neither however, will challenge central assumptions within the Zionist consensus on nationalist issues.

Walzer, in contrast uses the framework of different wars not to oversimplify, but to try to grapple with complexity; to show how the Israel-Palestine conflict involves a set of different struggles that are enmeshed with each other, and to try to disentangle them. If you want to get at the problem, it seems to me that Walzer’s style of analysis is much the better bet.

I agree to a degree; Walzer starts off by identifying the constituents in a more precise fashion; I just think that he doesn’t carry on exploring all the links to their end conclusions. But then again, I am coming from a position that stands very much outside the consensus Walzer is part of, so I don’t expect him to do so.

More pertinently, it shows how talk of mass expulsions is not only odious but remarkably unhelpful – it’s likely to radicalize the Arab population within Israel, as well as stiffening the nerves of the rejectionists among the Palestinians.

Yes, apart from anything else the “Jordan is Palestine” refrain is less than helpful; given what happened last time there was a sizeable forced migration of Palestinians into Jordan.

but any efforts to turn this into a Norman Geras slagfest will be ruthlessly expunged. While you may not agree with him, he’s been fighting the good fight for the last several decades, and deserves respect.

I am not sure how to respond to this. I suppose I should say that I have read and am aware of Geras’s work in the past and have generally been admiring of it. I also come from a much younger generation that hasn’t as yet had to sacrifice much in the struggle; I have, however been privileged enough to observe many from older generations who have also fought the good fight at very high personal and professional cost, many of them have adhered to positions that diverge in some key ways to those expressed by Geras in the present and I feel that I would be doing their memory a disservice if I didn’t make clear my objections to their views (mistaken though they may be) being cast as somehow racist or characterised by a particular prejudice. However, in the interest of avoiding giving any offence please feel free to expunge any or all of this comment that is judged to be so.

Dan – I could get into a long debate here about the relationship between theory and empirical accuracy – suffice it to say that there’s a lot more to the difference between Morris’s and Walzer’s theory than you acknowledge (it ain’t a difference between four and three – it’s a fundamental difference in kind of approach). And it ain’t just aesthetics – good theories are theories that tell us unexpected things about the world, that allow us to understand previously murky phenomena by disentangling their causes. Framing the dispute as between accuracy and aesthetics just isn’t helpful – and it doesn’t make for good social science. And here, I still contend that Walzer’s theory does a very good job. Maybe it’s a difference in our readings of history – but I don’t buy the argument that the Israeli state has always wanted a non-expansionist solution; seems to me that there has always been a tension between the desires to have secure borders for a smaller Israel, and the desire to expand to Israel’s Biblical borders.

Henry–I don’t deny that good theories have a lot more to them than mere accordance with fact. But you’ll agree, I hope, that they have at least that–do they not? What has bothered me about the discussion so far is not that it has risen above mere wrangling over historical fact, but rather that (apart from my comments) it seems to have treated fact as something quite superfluous to the topic at hand.

But now you have introduced an historical claim which, while somewhat vague, seems tailor-made for a discussion healthily rooted in fact. So perhaps I can nudge you in that direction.

You claim that “there has always been a tension between the desires to have secure borders for a smaller Israel, and the desire to expand to Israel’s Biblical borders.” Now I freely concede that as a philosophical premise, that’s true. But as a matter of history, I assert–based on facts I have already touched on, and others I can invoke later, as needed–that the latter desire only found the weakest political expression in Israel before 1967, and was decidedly a minority position even afterwards. (Moreover, I claim it is, if not quite a fringe position today, at least one of minimal influence.)

But your reading of the historical record is apparently different, and I am open to persuasion. Could you perhaps cite some relevant history–not the writings of Jabotinsky, but rather the acts and words of Israeli politicians and statesmen in positions of power–that casts a different light on the past and present state of Israeli politics?

(We can get to the other problems with Walzer’s framework later….)

As for the Palestinians, support for accommodation with Israel enjoyed only a brief, ambiguous heyday during the nineties, and has otherwise been virtually silent in Palestinian political thought and action before and since.

This seems the core of Dan’s argument with Walzer. If the share of Palestinian rejectionists is so significantly greater than that of Palestinians who either accept Israel or can be persuaded to accept Israel, then one of the wars in Walzer’s framework doesn’t exist, and its balance falls apart. If, as a practical matter, there are only Palestinian rejectionists, then Israeli accommodationists have no counterpart on the other side and are engaged in a futile exercise.

This proposition – there are so few Palestinians willing to accept a two-state solution that they don’t count – should be empirically checkable. If it’s true, then Walzer’s approach has a problem. If it’s not, then Dan’s assertions about ‘core’ beliefs may be true as a point of historical interest, but have been overtaken by events.

Doug–there are several organizations that publish polls of Palestinian opinion. One is the Jerusalem Media and Communication Centre; another is the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research. The results have been fairly consistent over the period since the Oslo accord: despite fairly solid support for generalities like “negotiations” and a “two-state solution”, there is consistent strong majority opposition to compromising on territory, giving up the “right of return” of Palestinian refugees to Israel, or even fully ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict following an agreement. (And I’m not even touching here on opinions regarding, for example, suicide bombings.)

Judging by the answers given to the questions about Palestinian leadership, the polls appear to be untainted by intimidation. They may, of course, be biased in other ways, and I encourage readers to examine and judge them for themselves.