The Uncomfortable Also-truth of Colonialism — A Response to Martin Kramer
The idea that our effort to create a Jewish state was a colonial enterprise has been a bone of contention for us since Zionism’s inception. Last October in Mosaic, Professor Martin Kramer argued that the Balfour Declaration “can’t possibly be called a ‘classic colonial document.’” His discussion provided us with persuasive lines of argument useful to discredit the assertion that Zionism is colonialism. As a Zionist, I am grateful. But as a neuroscientist interested in group behavior and its effects on our perception, I grow increasingly concerned at our reliance on “insufficient history” to draw conclusions about Our Conflict. Perhaps our strategic interests are at this point best served by an openness to the Arab historical narrative?
--
“We scorned them” — Former Mossad Chief, Zvi Zamir
Let’s Talk About Palestinians — For OUR sake, Not Theirs
We have existed with Palestinian Arabs in unresolvable conflict for over a century. Bloodier at times, colder at others, we appear to have “won.” The Knesset, Hebrew University and US Embassy all call Jerusalem home. The Abraham Accords have brought formal recognition from the UAE, Bahrain and Sudan — perhaps Saudi is next. US domestic support for Israel remains strong and more than 600,000 people have planted roots in Judea and Samaria, creating a dense network of commitment to making geulat adama a convincing fact on the ground. Israel’s economy is robust, having grown an average of 3.5% per year for the past decade with low unemployment and a business culture admired by many. Israel’s military is similarly positioned as the 20th strongest in the world, on par with countries like Canada and Australia, and is one of the most technologically advanced defense forces in the world. They have lost, we have won, let’s move on — Palestinians no longer deserve legitimacy, a voice, a future. Why even speak of Palestinians and their history?
Because the future of Our Conflict has not been written; its future will matter to our children and options for that future will be constrained by our understanding of what has been.
Regardless of how we feel about speaking of the Palestinians, our current position of overwhelming strength offers no paths toward a genuine solution. Further, our current situation has vulnerabilities that are simply not talked about in good Jewish company. We do not like to talk about our active effort to displace the long-resident Arabs of East Jerusalem, only to dream about our unified capitol city. We do not like to speak of settler violence in Judea and Samaria against Arabs, we would rather discuss Palestinian intransigence to peace. However, the entire world outside of Israel sees these as a contravention of international law — and not just the hypocritical side of this law. Young Jews and Christians of the West are increasingly appreciating the history of Zionism within a larger context, informing their future political behavior. As one young evangelical put it: “The New Testament, I think, would be in favor of human rights.” Muslim immigration continues apace in North America and Western Europe, shifting the personal perspectives from which national policies emerge.
You might be tempted to argue that even if Western political perspectives are changing, it is also true that relations between the Arab world and Israel have improved to the point of fatally undermining the political position of the Palestinian Arabs. Palestinian Arabs can in no way prevent a reclamation of East Jerusalem. Changing Western political perspectives will not happen fast or deep enough to alter our future reclamation of Judea and Samaria. Behind the wall and our managerial talent we can safely wait for the eventual collapse of the politically hobbled Palestinians.
However, the Palestinian Arab issue is not about politics, it is about people. Some one-and-a-half million Palestinian refugees remain displaced in an Arab world unwilling to integrate them. Another 5 million sit in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, about which Moshe Dayan said in 1956:
Why should we declare their burning hatred for us? For eight years they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we have been transforming the lands and the villages, where they and their fathers dwelt, into our estate… we are a generation that settles the land and without the steel helmet and the cannon’s maw, we will not be able to plant a tree and build a home. Let us not be deterred from seeing the loathing that is inflaming and filling the lives of the hundreds of thousands of Arabs who live around us.
Dayan delivered these words in a eulogy for Roi Rotberg in Nahal Oz, and they are uncomfortable to read. On a flight to Tel Aviv in 2018 to provide pro bono pediatric neurosurgical services in Gaza, I sat next to a lone soldier from Seattle in her last few months of service. She was a bit surprised to hear about my mission work in the disputed territories but, after assuring her that I am a Zionist Jew with a Ukrainian and Baghdadi Jewish background, we began to explore the uncomfortable world of the Palestinian Arab. As we deplaned, I asked if she had ever read Moshe Dayan’s eulogy — she had not. A short read, I pulled it up on my phone and gave it to her; she began to cry and said “many people feel this way, but no one talks about it.” For the most part we really do not like to talk about Palestinians.
So, we remove them from our thoughts using appealing arguments to divert our attention from the long way we need to go to create a stable situation with the Palestinians. We convince ourselves that they aren’t really a people: “It was not as if there was a Palestinian people in Palestine.” Why don’t the Arab countries integrate them — if even the other Arabs will not take them, why should we care about their fate? They are intransigent peacer-haters , “when the Arabs love their children more than they hate us” there will be peace, why do they not love their children more? These tropes have transcended minchag and taken on the force of halacha: to argue against them is to argue against a deeply seated truth in Jewish culture. To argue against them is to argue that there is such a thing as Palestinian legitimacy. Palestinian legitimacy! Sounds funny, even seditious; for many in the Jewish community Palestinian illegitimacy is an objective Truth. I will not argue in favor of Palestinian legitimacy — whether you emerge from this essay believing that Palestinians are no more legitimate than when you started is not a concern of mine. The Jewish Community has plenty of room for all kinds of perspectives and this is, I believe, one of our great strengths. What I will argue is that believing Palestinian illegitimacy to be an objective Truth, which any informed person of good-intent must conclude given equal access to the historical record, is a strategic liability of growing proportion.
I do not aim to alarm our community nor to stoke the fires of insecurity and fear that have attended our people for some 2,000 years of diaspora. I do want to ask a question about how we think about and understand Our Conflict. Professor Martin Kramer is an esteemed and influential member of our community. I deeply respect and admire his life’s work; his thought and dedication have been a gift to our people. When Professor Kramer writes about the Balfour Declaration his words will sink deeply into our understanding, shaping perspectives on Our Conflict that thousands of Jews will share. In Was the Balfour Declaration a Colonial Document? (hereafter WtB) Professor Kramer attempts to put our minds at ease with the demonstrated Truth that the Balfour Declaration was not a colonial document and that “those who invoke the Balfour Declaration as proof for [colonialism] display either their ignorance of the declaration’s nature or a deliberate and malicious distortion of both its form and its content.” Those of us who read and find compelling Prof Kramer’s arguments should come away with a stronger sense that Zionism was not a settler-colonial effort.
That Professor Kramer should labor to factually and unambiguously absolve us of the charge of colonialism is understandable and many in our community will be grateful. On its centennial the Balfour Declaration (hereafter BD) received extensive coverage. Avi Shlaim not only called the BD “a classic colonial document” he appeared in multiple high-profile venues, calling on the British government “to openly apologise to the Palestinian people for issuing the Balfour Declaration.” Haaretz ran a series of articles focusing on the BDs toxic and racist destructiveness to both Jew and Arab and its continuing distraction from the reality on the ground. The Arab press was unsurprisingly critical of the BD, focusing on Avi Shlaim and the New Historians’ views. In The Palestine Chronicle, Ramzy Baroud wrote that “neither Balfour nor all of Britain’s foreign secretaries since then, have managed to break the will of the Palestinian nation.” The Cairo Review of Global Affairs dedicated an entire issue to the BD in which Khalil Shikaki noted that as of June 2017 “an overwhelming majority of Palestinians (87 percent) and Israeli Jews (77 percent)” felt the other side was untrustworthy. Mosaic also dedicated an issue, in which Professor Kramer stated that “[t]he poetic simplicity of the Balfour Declaration resides in its presumption that a home for the Jews in their land needs no justification.” Going even farther, the Jerusalem Post published an opinion piece with the subtitle “‘Anti-Balfour’ activity must principally be seen as part of a global campaign to delegitimize Israel’s very foundations.” In Foreign Affairs, Jonathan Schneer provided a sobering assessment of the BD’s legacy: “so much deceit and betrayal could not but lead to trouble — and so they have, as a hundred years of Middle Eastern history testifies.”
Such a live issue requires thought and weighty opinion for the Jewish community to navigate together — and this social cohesion is not an exercise in ‘duelling narratives,’ it is a critically important function for any social group. Yuval Harari points out “planet Earth was conquered by Homo sapiens rather than by chimpanzees or elephants, because we are the only mammals that can cooperate in very large numbers. And large-scale cooperation depends on believing common stories.” No wonder then that centenary attention to the BD would generate a great deal of commentary. For us to act together, we must believe together and this is something that Professor Kramer has labored and served our community to provide. Since 2017, he has written extensively on the BD appearing in multiple forums to give us what we clearly — myself included — yearn for: an air-tight refutation of the charge that Zionism was also settler-colonialism. Although Professor Kramer asserts in WtB that “Zionism… as a species of settler-colonialism… is another issue” from his discussion about the BD, it is clear Professor Kramer is trying to give us the rhetorical and historical tools needed to dismantle this particular bit of the “political campaign to depict Zionism itself as a species of settler-colonialism.” But we need to pause and assess Professor Kramer’s historical argument despite our desire for rhetorical armament, and not out of “fairness” to the Palestinians and not out of concern for some idealistic humanitarian concerns.
We need to stop and assess his narration because it ignores available, verifiable and material information that would lead a reasonable reader to different conclusions. His exclusion of information is not surprising: Harari’s point about common stories does not go far enough. Neuroscience is making very clear that human cooperation depends on believing common stories and that belief in these these stories create different truths for different groups of people. These truths not only involve the best and right ways of acting for a given group of people but also encode an associated bias against other groups and their ways of acting. Further, these stories appear to systematically bias our understanding of the world around us in ways that occur even before we are conscious of the information. I take no issue with Professor Kramer’s aims or perspective; I applaud them. However, I find myself increasingly concerned by the strategic liability imposed by what groups choose not to see in their history as well as by the effects this bias has on how we behave in the world. Our actions arise from how we understand our world and it is increasingly clear that who we are, where we are from and who we hang out with have profound consequences on how we act. This phenomenon is true across all social groups: shared perspective shapes shared understanding, informing actions and consequences.
Dartmouth, Princeton and Perspective
A shared group perspective can yield beautiful results — think of the ancient Israelites’ taking of Canaan, the IDF or Hebrew University. Group perspective can also yield negative results — think 1973 or the abduction of sephardi children in Israel to be raised by Ashkenazim in the 1950s. The power of group-think lies in it’s ability to connect people today with both each other and the good ideas of the past, as Darwin noted:
‘Now, if some one man in a tribe, more sagacious than the others, invented a new snare or weapon, or other means of attack or defense, the plainest self-interest, without the assistance of much reasoning power, would prompt the other members to imitate him; and all would thus profit.’
But there is also liability — group-think can set frames of mind which cloud our understanding of current events. As Brigadier General Moni Chorev (IDF) put it in his 1996 analysis of the Yom Kippur War:
The basic problem is the persistence of that inevitable and indispensable set of conception that guides the analyst in selecting and interpreting the information. Psychologists have found that people’s theories, beliefs and images have an extraordinary persistence despite a wide range of evidence, that should invalidate or at least change them. In general, people are apt to resist a change in their beliefs and they may too quickly reject discrepant information
This gets to the core of my concern with Professor Kramer’s recent article: the information he marshalls to prove his points appear to be compromised by his deep devotion to our cause. This devotion is necessary and laudable as no group survives without this kind of advocacy. But there is liability as well: Professor Kramer has framed an argument that that appears to selectively exclude available, material and verifiable historical context — engaging in an exercise of what might be called “insufficient history.” In doing so he runs the risk of creating a liability of information which sets the Jewish Community up for strategic errors that I increasingly fear will undermine our future peace and security. Insufficient history is very hard to identify — there is no Geiger counter or oscilloscope for insufficiency — but is nonetheless important to identify before strategic liability becomes a consequential reality. This is a different debate than one about straight relativism or “competing narratives,” where nothing is true except perspective. To illustrate, let’s take a look at a football game.
On 23 November 1951, Dartmouth faced Princeton in a highly-anticipated football game. The game was rough and many cried foul — how they called foul bears some examination. The college papers reported what appeared to be different games. The Princeton Alumni Weekly wrote “…there was undeniable evidence that the losers’ tactics were the result of an actual style of play, and reports on other games they have played this season substantiate this.” The Dartmouth wrote “the game was rough and did get a bit out of hand… Yet most of the roughing penalties were called against Princeton while Dartmouth received more of the illegal-use-of-the-hands variety.” Intrigued by this press coverage, the heads of the respective psychology departments, Albert Hatsdorf at Dartmouth and Hadley Cantril at Princeton decided to investigate. They asked undergraduates at each institution to watch the entire football game and comment on the number and severity of all fouls committed. Separately, each study participant was asked how familiar they were with football and its rules and there were no significant differences. Their findings were reported in 1953 in what has become a classic of the social science literature.
Nearly all the Princeton students felt the game was “rough and dirty”; the vast majority thought that Dartmouth had started the rough play. They saw the Dartmouth team make more than twice as many fouls as their own team. Furthermore, they felt that Dartmouth fouls were two to one “flagrant” while Princeton fouls were three to one “mild.”
Dartmouth students also saw the game as rough — but nearly half as “rough and fair” with the next-largest group seeing the game as “clean and fair.” While many Dartmouth students felt their own team was to blame for the roughness, a few felt that Princeton started it and a large majority felt both sides were to blame. When watching the game, Dartmouth students saw an equal number of fouls with a one to one ratio of flagrant to mild fouls on the Dartmouth side compared to one flagrant to two mild for the Princeton team.
The authors concluded:
…it is inaccurate and misleading to say that different people have different “attitudes” concerning the same “thing.” For the “thing” simply is not the same for different people whether the “thing” is a football game, a presidential candidate, Communism, or spinach. We do not simply “react to” a happening or to some impingement from the environment in a determined way… We behave according to what we bring to the occasion, and what each of us brings to the occasion is more or less unique.
Hastorf and Cantril argued that their evidence showed that
…there is no such “thing” as a “game” existing “out there” in its own right which people merely “observe.” The “game” “exists” for a person and is experienced by him only in so far as certain happenings have significances in terms of his purpose. Out of all the occurrences going on in the environment, a person selects those that have some significance for him from his own egocentric position in the total matrix.
But this assertion would be much like the following graphic — there was no game, only perspective:
Asserting that there is no such thing as a ‘game’ outside our individual perceptions is likely an overstatement. Another possible conclusion: there was an objective game event but our personal perceptual relationship to it can vary significantly depending on our background and experiences.
Hatsdorf and Cantril’s famous study did not describe a fleeting phenomenon. Subsequent decades of neuroscience have repetitively, and from a number of different angles, confirmed the surprising cultural variability of our perceptual relationship with objective Truth. For culture to matter differentially in how we see the world we would be reasonable to expect that: a) culture shapes brains differently; b) different shapes give rise to different perceptions; and, c) different shapes and perception give rise to different behaviors. This is exactly what has emerged in our literature.
Several decades of social science research have consistently found that the Chinese tend to understand themselves in terms of relationship while Westerners are much more self-referential. To explore this difference in understanding, Zhu et al asked Chinese and Westerners to first describe themselves and then describe their mothers while lying in a functional MRI (fMRI). Both Chinese and Westerners used the same part of their brain when describing themselves, the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), an area strongly associated with mental activities in which the self is referenced. When describing their mothers, Westerners used only their anterior cingulate cortex (aCC) while Chinese used both MOFC and aCC. The aCC is a region of the brain that is strongly associated with decision making in the context of social interactions. The authors concluded that
Our findings suggest that Chinese individuals use MPFC to represent both the self and the mother whereas Westerners use MPFC to represent exclusively the self, providing neuroimaging evidence that culture shapes the functional anatomy of self-representation.
This phenomenon has been found in more that just one study. In a meta-analysis of 35 similar studies from 2014, Han et al concluded that “cultural differences in social and non-social processes are mediated by distinct neural networks.” A recent textbook on the topic summarizes this recent research
The last two decades have seen the emergence of a body of work in the social and cultural neurosciences that is beginning to illuminate the ways in which the nervous system reconfigures itself, in response to diverse sociocultural contexts and lifeworlds, through ongoing dynamic processes of adaptation, plasticity, and learning. This innovative work has benefited from major advances in brain imaging, genomics, and other biotechnologies that are contributing to new ways of studying and thinking about human minds, brains, and cultures. Older brain-centric views are giving way to more integrative pictures, in which the cultural world shapes and reshapes our neural circuitry even as our brains cooperate to produce the social world.
Our brains are shaped by culture; but does this mean our perceptions are likewise affected by culture?
Yes; to some extent we know this from our everyday experience. Some of us believe Jesus is our savior, others that the Buddha represents the capacity of humans to reach the divine and others that there is no god. Pascal Molenberghs et al explored this more rigorously. His research group took individuals, each given a 30 minute ‘orientation’ to either a blue or red team, who then watched a series of paired videos in which a red or blue hand moved from rest to press a button on cue. Participants were asked to judge the “winner” of this contest, with each pair of videos being variable in which team won and by how much time. Molenberghs found that individuals were systematically more likely to judge their team the winner. Additionally, these systematic perceptual biases appear to take place before reaching our conscious thought. Thus, the Molenburghs study suggests that by the time you are aware of some perceptions, they have already been biased in favor of your group. This makes perceptual bias somewhat resistant to conscious attempts to create “fairness” or “objectivity:” if the perceptions you receive into conscious thought are already biased in favor of your group on what basis might you reasonably question your fairness? On the contrary, we often question others’ fairness based on deep confidence in our own perceptions — an underlying dynamic for conflict.
In another experiment, Xiao et al looked at how national identity can shape our perceptions of physical distance. Undergraduate students were asked questions about how strongly they identified as American (are you the type to be OK burning an American flag or the type to have one hanging in front of your house?) and how strongly they perceived Mexican immigrants to be a threat. They were then asked to estimate the distance in a straight line from New York City to Mexico City, Mexico (actual distance = 2,086 miles), Los Angeles, USA (actual distance = 2,443 miles and part of the USA)), and Vancouver, Canada (actual distance = 2,425 miles and not in the US but neutral from an immigration perspective).
This graphic summarizes their results — people with stronger American identities and higher perceived threat from Mexican immigration estimated the distance between New York city and Mexico City to be statistically significantly shorter; no such relationship was found for estimations of distance to Vancouver or LA. As with the literature of functional brain anatomy, the neuroscience literature on cultural differences in perception are similarly robust. It seems our brains are shaped by culture and that these shapes can lead us to different perceptions both of ourselves and others — but does that mean we might treat each other differently based on these facts?
Again our experience tells us this is so — you might easily volunteer for an army that protects your aunt and uncle but are far less likely to do so for a Spaniard you had never met. Several recent papers have shown that cultural affiliations affect how we not only perceive but feel about ‘the other.’ In 2013, researchers from the Brain and Creativity Institute at USC reported on differences in functional activity between witnessing likable versus hateful people in pain. In this fMRI study, Caucasian Jewish male participants viewed videos of (1) disliked, hateful, anti-Semitic individuals, and (2) liked, non-hateful, tolerant individuals in pain. Unsurprisingly, brain activation was significantly different when viewing pain in those unliked versus liked and study subjects reports feeling much less sympathetic for the anti-Semites. In a similar study, Fourie et al found that all study participants showed significant in-group biases in the activation of areas of brain dealing with physical pain, estimations of others’ state of mind and social shame. Black participants’ brains reacted with heightened moral indignation to own-race suffering, whereas White participants reacted with heightened shame to Black suffering. Different cultures, different different brain shapes, different perceptions and different understandings of the other.
If perception and behavior are influenced by cultural background, what is our obligation to this biological fact? Simply to recognize it and strategize accordingly; too often issues of perspective are lost in the cantankerous relationship between the Political Right and the Political Left which is a shame. The Right would say that there are universal standards and that all must accept them — thus our history of redemption and re-establishment is Truth and must be accepted by the Palestinians. The Left would say that all is relative and so the accusation of settler-colonialism is True and we must accept this. This apparent paradox is distracting and false; just like there was in fact a football game as well as Dartmouth and Princeton perspective, there is an ever-present mix of Truth and truth and there are consequences to both. Despite our political differences we can all agree that our best future will come from recognizing high-quality information and using it to make the best possible decisions for our children’s future. It is only in our beliefs for how to achieve this that we differ, though this generates a considerable amount of conflict.
Often, when conflicts of perspective arise, we are quick to denigrate the perspective of the other side. The Princeton/Dartmouth game is further illustrative in this regard: we would be hard-pressed to show that students from either institution are uneducated, unintelligent, uninformed, or uninsightful. Rather, the opposite. But educated, intelligent, informed and insightful people can always be “perceptually biased.” Professor Kramer has given us an well-educated and well-informed piece on the Balfour Declaration that will, for many, provide a comfortable sense of the illegitimacy of seeing Zionism as a settler-colonial effort. My worry is that this results not from contextually honest information but rather from a shared (Jewish) perceptual bias that allows us to draw comfortable conclusions that are not warranted by a “reasonably wider” appreciation of freely available information. Remaining blind to perceptual bias — thereby allowing ourselves to reach strongly felt conclusions based on true but contextually misleading assertions — sounds like a strategic liability to me.
How might we understand Professor Kramer’s assertions about the BD differently if we kick open this door of perceptual bias — not even hard, just a little?
Re-Contextualized Information
Professor Kramer begins by asking “was the Balfour Declaration really… a ‘a classic colonial document?’” His answer is an emphatic “no,” justified across three dimensions of the Declaration: it’s form, it’s sponsorship and its substance.
“In its form,” states Professor Kramer “… the Balfour Declaration can’t possibly be called a ‘classic colonial document.’” To demonstrate this, he compares the BD to Sykes-Picot, Hussein-McMahon and “other so-called ‘treaties’ signed in the 18th and 19th centuries with princely states in India and with Native American nations.” All these treaties had the following characteristics: they were kept secret; used “native language” to create translational ambiguity; used no maps, just vague geographic language; and, were negotiated by a local colonial functionary, not a central high governmental officer. “This, then, was a ‘classic colonial document,’ of the sort concluded time and again by every European empire,” concludes Professor Kramer. But it is difficult to assess this comparison because he provides no basis on which to judge. While his expertise and scholarship might in fact allow for these conclusions about classic colonial documents, unless we have some sense of how these documents have been vetted in a rigorous analytical manner allowing comparison, it is hard to know. There is also some reason for doubt: according to the US Government Archives, most US treaties with Native Americans were public, written in English and required formal ratification by the US Senate. While some were secret, these were less common and were not put into force. Of note, a brief review of the Native American Treaties published online by the Avalon Project indicates that most of these treaties were addressed to the relevant Native American Nation (eg Chocktaw, Cherokee, etc) rather than just a “foreign government, or to a client chieftain.” Additionally, Hussein-McMahon was championed and formally approved by Lord Kitchener (then Secretary of State for War) and Sykes-Picot by the British War Committee, signed in the presence of Paul Cambon, Ambassador of France in London, and Sir Edward Gray, Secretary of State at the Foreign Office. In neither secrecy, language, nor level of British approval does the BD appear much different from several other referenced treaties.
Regardless of form, the BD — openly and in English — committed Britain to the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” despite, as Mr Yusuf al-Khalidi pointed out in 1899, “the reality… that Palestine is, at present, an integral part of the Ottoman Empire, and, what is worse, is inhabited by other than Israelites.” Lest we dismiss this observation as the bitterness of a Palestinian Arab who lost the contest, consider Israel Zangwill and Asher Ginsberg. Often considered the originator of the phrase “Palestine is a country without a people; the Jews are a people without a country,” Israel Zangwill was an active member of the World Zionist Organization (WZO) when he wrote those words in the New Liberal Review in 1901. However, by 1904, Mr Zangwill delivered the following in a speech to a New York audience:
There is, however, a difficulty from which the Zionist dares not avert his eyes, though he rarely likes to face it. Palestine proper has already its inhabitants. The pashalik of Jerusalem is already twice as thickly populated as the United States, having fifty-two souls to every square mile, and not 25 percent of them Jews; so we must be prepared either to drive out by the sword the tribes in possession as our forefathers did, or to grapple with the problem of a large alien population, mostly Mohammedan” (p 92)
In response, the WZO branded him a traitor and he left that organization to found the Jewish Territorial Organization. He was not the only Jewish observer of this fact on the ground: Asher Ginsberg noted in 1891 that Palestine was occupied, “if the time comes that our people’s life in Eretz Yisrael will develop to a point where we are taking their place, either slightly or significantly, the natives are not going to just step aside so easily.” The BD commited the British Empire “use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of” a Jewish national home even though there were people there and they did not want this to happen — a thing made clear in multiple commission reports emanating from the Holy Land during this time. In what way does being written in English and publicly announced change the nature of a document which promised a land inhabited by others to those not yet arrived?
Perhaps, Professor Kramer next posits, the establishment of the Jewish state was an exercise in facilitated self-determination rather than sponsored colonialism? He points out that the British Empire was not capable of providing the sponsorship for a colonial endeavor and, because the BD won the endorsement of the Allies, it thus represented not a colonial will-to-impose but instead an international endorsement. The endorsement of the Allies demonstrates the BD was driven not by desire for colonial sponsorship but was rather an anticipation of “the postwar world of national self-determination and international legitimacy.”
That the British Empire was in decline is beyond doubt. Eviscerated by the First World War, 700,000 Britons had perished and many thousands more had been gravely wounded. Thirty one percent of the 1913 graduating classes of Oxford and Cambridge had perished, decimating the elite. British Empire debt went from ￡650 million in 1914 to ￡7.4 billion in 1919￡(37 billion in today’s currency). WWI fundamentally altered British society and certainly informed Chamberlain’s attitude towards Hitler and war — appeasement was far better than the horrors of WWI. But this does not at all make true the assertion that the British were not capable of both the commitment and capability to provide the sponsorship necessary to implement a settler-colonial policy in Palestine.
Far from it: British commitment to some territorial control in the Middle East was driven by both the Suez canal as well as the steady supply of petrol that the increasingly mechanized Empire required. The Suez was the “economic jugular” of the British Empire and the relevant Israeli Knesset website states “Britain was aiming to conquer Eretz Yisrael during the war [WWI] in order to guarantee its control over the northern Suez Canal.” Even after the independence of India and the establishment of the state of Israel, the British would ally themselves with the French and Israelis in an attempt to maintain control over this vital resource in 1956. Eretz Yisrael was also an advantageous place from which to better control the supply of petrol that was beginning to form the economic life-blood of the West. Haifa is an ideal port and would be the terminus of the Kirkuk-Haifa oil pipeline by 1934, the planning for which began in the early 1920's.
Interest is not capacity, however: had British imperial decline rendered them unable to impose a Jewish state, as Professor Kramer asserts? “Britain was in no position to issue a unilateral commitment with regard to Palestine or any other Ottoman territory,” he states. This is simply untrue — British power on multiple levels ensured Jewish ascendancy within Mandatory Palestine. Palestinian Arab desire to join an independent Arab world had clearly and consistently been recorded in the King-Crane Commission Report, but this was ignored. Mandate rule began in 1920 when Herbert Samuel, a Jewish Zionist, was sworn in as High Commissioner of Palestine and filled many positions of the Mandate government with Zionists. Jewish Agency land purchases were most often conducted with rich effendi, displacing the many fellahin who had made their living on the land for centuries but had passed their titles of ownership to the effendi in order to avoid Ottoman taxes and conscription. The removal of the fellahin often fell to British police forces — Chaim Weizmann wrote of this transaction “there is a fundamental difference in quality between Jew and native,” Palestine’s Arabs “appreciated only force.”
While British force, both political and physical, created the architecture for the establishment of the Jewish state in Mandatory Palestine it was the Arab Revolt from 1936–9 that reveals the depth of commitment and capacity of the British Empire to the establishment of the Jewish state. The British put-down of the Arab Revolt involved two full military divisions and 25,000 troops and was the largest British military investment during the interwar period. Not only was direct British force brought to bear, but indirect: Captain Orde Wingate helped train Jewish Special Night Squads and the British army established and trained the forces which would become the Palmach in 1941. As Matthew Hughes describes in his 2009 review of the Revolt:
The law was (re)constructed to provide a veneer of legal respectability to actions carried out by servicemen operating in the field against Arab rebels, allowing for reprisals and punitive actions against Palestinian civilians, targeted by the British in their offensive against rebels who were often hard to defeat in open battle. Lawlessness was the law. Servicemen were guided by a legal system that meant that they could accept the premises of their government that allowed for brutal actions, and they could do so with all the energy of good bureaucrats obeying orders… the British repression of the revolt was brutal and included torture and atrocities.
The British put-down of the Revolt cost the lives of some 10% of the adult Palestinian Arab male population and was a deciding factor in the weak resistance posed to Jewish forces in 1948. The British — despite an uncontestable and well-documented decline in imperial power — had not only the will but the means to enforce the establishment of a Jewish state against the super-majority Arab population in Palestine, and in fact did just that.
If the British had interest and capacity to impose colonial sponsorship, it is still the case the the BD received the endorsements of Italy, France and the US. In this way “the Balfour Declaration had morphed” from a classical colonial document “into [an] Allied declaration, and no one could contradict him [Balfour].” It is worth noting that — much like the BD — the Sykes-Picot Agreement also had French, Italian and Russian agreement and would go on in 1920 to win ratification with a mandate from the League of Nations at the San Remo Conference. It is a bit unclear then how allied endorsement distinguishes the BD in this context, but Professor Kramer asserts that this multi-lateralism “anticipated the postwar world of national self-determination and international legitimacy.” Far from sponsoring a settler-colonial effort, the BD thus shines as an example of multinational support for Zionist self-determination: the allies worked together to provide us a home. It is not colonial sponsorship, Professor Kramer asserts, but a desire of the Allies to foster Jewish self-determination that motivated the BD.
This may very well be true of the US — President Wilson appears to have been motived to support the BD to foster the return of the Jewish people to their homeland. Rabbi Stephen Wise records President Wilson saying “to think that I, the son of the manse, should be able to help restore the Holy Land to its people.” We also know that President Wilson strongly opposed colonialism, delivering his Fourteen Points speech on January 8, 1918. “A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims,’ he stated, “based upon a strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable government whose title is to be determined.” To this, Georges Clemenceau (then Prime Minister of France) is reported to have retorted “The good Lord had only ten” — a strong indication of how the French felt about self-determination. However, other than noting that the Allies gave formal approval of the BD, nowhere does the historical record suggest that this arose primarily from a European desire to foster self-determination for the Jewish people. Rather, the historical record demonstrates that European territorial interests over areas of the Ottoman Empire were the significant considerations.
The overarching European motivations for their Middle East territorial policy appears to have been two-fold: a desire to assert control over strategic portions of that region and a desire to manifest policy that would lure “World Jewry” to the side of the Britain and her allies. For many years, the European powers had endeavored to leave much of the Ottoman Empire intact to further their overall strategic interests — while simultaneously peeling off territories as advantage dictated. In the six years prior to 1914 the Ottomans had lost nearly all of their European possessions: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania — in fact, everything except a slice of eastern Thrace. Meanwhile Italy had seized Libya and Rhodes in 1912 and Greece had annexed Crete. As WWI began, it was increasingly clear that the Ottoman Empire was “the sick man of Europe,” and “the powers that were not sick, and those that were less sick (Austria-Hungary), and the smaller, newer nations,” writes Mr Jonathan Schneer “that felt themselves in the springtime of youth (Serbia and Romania) — gathered around the sickbed and licked their chops or considered snatching a morsel then and there.” Italy herself was lured to join England, France and Russia in return for land: the Treaty of London in 1915 promised Italy territories on the northwest Adriatic coast in return for Italian commitments to join WWI within a month against Germany. France, too, required assurances of what areas of the Middle East would fall under their control — thus the Sykes-Picot Agreement.
While some lip-service was given in Sykes-Picot to Britain and France being “ready to recognise and protect an independent Arab state,” the French were deadly serious about their territorial ambitions. When Syrian Arabs (who understood that they had been promised independence by the British in the McMahon–Hussein Correspondence), established an “independent Arab constitutional government with authority over all Syria” in March 1920, French power was challenged. The resulting Franco-Syrian War ended on July 25, 1920 with a crushing defeat of the Arab government by 70,000 French forces. The victorious general, Henri Gouraud is reported to have stated “Awake, Saladin. We have returned. My presence here consecrates the victory of the Cross over the Crescent.” The French President Alexandre Millerand declared that Syria would be held by France “the whole of it, and forever.” Nevertheless Arab nationalist unrest in Syria and Lebanon persisted for the duration of French rule. Even if the French were deadly serious about maintaining control of their colonies in the Middle East, why support the BD?
“Cold self-interest, if fuzzily conceived, explains the new French concern with Zionism” states Jonathan Schneer. The French certainly desired control of Palestine: François Georges-Picot wrote in early 1917 that “ninety five per cent of the French people strongly favoured the annexation of Palestine by France.” However, Palestine had been taken by British military might and diplomacy and the French knew their military position at this point could not counter this advantage. Additionally, the Zionist community in France was poorly organized and could not advocate for French control of Palestine — Sokolow himself considered the French Zionists to be no more than a poor ‘minyan.’ Additionally, the French realized that solid European control of key portions of the Middle East would facilitate what control they could have and so worked with the British to advance these ends. The crucial backdrop to this entire game of diplomatic chess was the same in France as it was in England: both felt insecure about their ability to prevail in the War and had been well-convinced by Weizmann and Sokolow that “the power and the unity of Jewry” was required to win it — especially by swaying the opinions of Russian Jews to keep Russia on the side of England and France. Far from a genuine interest in facilitating Jewish self-determination, French approval of the BD was based on a recognition of military disadvantage, a desire for Middle East territory and the power of the “World Jewry” narrative.
The BD itself emerged, as Danny Gutwein reports in his recent review on the BD:
as part of the struggle taking place in the course of the First World War between two rival factions in the British government on the question of the future of the Ottoman Empire: the “radical” faction that strove to dismantle the Ottoman Empire, partition it, and extend the British imperial hold on the Middle East, and the “reformist” faction that opposed this.
When Lloyd George assumed control of the British government in December 1916, the radical faction took control. Rather than out of a desire to foster Jewish self-determination, “support of Zionism was… supposed to assist the radicals in circumventing the opposition of US President Woodrow Wilson to partition of the Ottoman Empire.” The British recognized the importance of maintaining a protectorate in Palestine, but since President Wilson recognized the right of the various “small nations” in Europe to self-determination, “the radicals felt that they would be able to overcome his opposition to their imperialist policy by disguising it as support for the establishment of Jewish, Arab, and Armenian nation-states under the aegis of the Entente Powers.” When Turkey joined the the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires in 1914, the Baron de Rothschild recognized the opportunity in which “the partition of the Empire was likely to be on any war-aims agenda.” He advocated that Zionist leaders in England join the ranks of the radicals, who felt that a Jewish state would be an effective means of partitioning Palestine and allowing British rule. Weizmann clearly saw this opportunity as one in line with Zionist interests, writing in a letter to Charles P Scott (then editor of the Manchester Guardian) that:
One has to assume, that, at least, for the next 25 years we may not have any wars. Great Britain would therefore only have to protect the country from incursions of Arabs, and for this purpose a Militia could be organised from the Colonists; in fact one of the immigration laws could be that preference is given to people who have passed military service, and it would be a fairly easy matter for the Jews to entertain and equip an efficient force, which, under British leader- ship, would be sufficiently strong to keep in check any raiders on Palestinian soil. We would, of course, pay for it… If we are given a chance to develop under British auspices we would become a well organised community after 25 years, which could hold its own, not only against the Nomadic tribes round Palestine, but even against a European invader.
Britain wanted to control Palestine — reasons described above — and we were insightful enough to see an opportunity to return to our ancestral home when it presented itself.
Much in the same military position as the French, Italy also desired territorial gain but had no capacity to effect this in a practical manner in Palestine. But it was not military issues which motivated Mark Sykes’ efforts to obtain Italian approval for the BD, it was instead competition between France and Italy for influence amongst the Catholics of the Levant. While France had suspended diplomatic ties with the Vatican in 1904 over a conflict between church and state power, Italian importance to the global Catholic community was never in doubt and the Quai d'Orsay desired confirmation that Italy and the Vatican would view Zionist demands favourably before moving forward. Mayir Vereté succinctly summarizes: approval from Italy and the Vatican “would gain Britain an important ally against France… and, in return for this, Italy could depend on England to encourage Italian, at the expense of French influence on the Catholic institutions in Palestine and with regard to the Holy Places in general.” Noting Italian and Vatican support for the BD certainly can be seen a part of a multilateral affirmation of Jewish self-determination, however a closer look at interwar European diplomacy makes this a less tenable assertion.
In a “‘classic colonial document,’ a charter is a contract: the colonial power holds exclusive rights by conquest, which it cedes or leases to the grantee in the form of concessions. Because the BD “isn’t a concession to shareholders or colonists” says Professor Kramer, we can conclude that “[i]t is an acknowledgment that the Jewish people constitute a nation, and thus deserve an equal place among the family of nations in its own homeland.” I believe this too. Zionism was an effective and impressively coordinated response to the existential threat faced by world Jewry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Hundreds of pogroms swept Eastern Europe in the 19th century, motivating Zionism’s infancy and early growth. Religious assimilation and anti-Zionism were no match for it’s robust solutions to the “Jewish Problem” in the face of the horrors of World War II. We were treated to a spectacular example of how anti-Semitism was not a counter-cultural current but rather an ambient worldwide norm when all but one of the 32 countries meeting in Evian-les-Bains, France, refused to increase immigration quotas to allow Europe's Jews to escape the impending disaster. When the Holocaust threw this virulent norm into bright relief, we were pushed over the finish line to a Jewish state. There is no historical doubt that an urgent need for survival was the raison d’etre for Zionism — and that we deserve an equal place and that we deserve a homeland.
However, sound definitions of colonialism do not make distinctions between colonial power and colonial settlement. The Oxford Languages website defines colonialism as the policy or practice of acquiring full or partial political control over another country, occupying it with settlers, and exploiting it economically. Unimportant is the division of power and settler: whether those exercising power also settle the land or, through use of power, allow others to settle. Also unimportant are motivations for this exercise of power — whether survival or desire for more resources or a sincere belief that one’s culture is superior, it does not matter. These are important points to consider if one desires to explore whether or not Zionism can fairly be seen as a settler-colonial effort.
The idea that the Zionist effort to create a Jewish state was also a colonial enterprise has been a bone of contention for us since its inception. In an 1899 plea to Theodor Herzl (with Rabbi Zadok Kahn acting as intermediary) to abandon the idea of Zionism, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi wrote:
I am able to speak to you in full knowledge of the facts. We consider ourselves Arabs and Turks, as guardians of places holy to three religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. So how can the Zionist leaders imagine that they will be able to tear these holy places from two other religions constituting an immense majority? What material forces do Jews, who number at most 10 million, possess to impose their wishes upon 390 million Christians and 300 million Muslims? The Jews certainly possess capital and intelligence. But however strong the force of money in this world, not everything can suddenly be bought for millions. To attain a goal like that which Zionism must offer, will require other, more formidable means, those of cannons and armour. (Letter in French obtained from Rashid Khalidi, translation my own)
Arab understanding of Zionism has consistently framed it as a colonial effort. But this framing did not arise solely within Arab thought: Zionists themselves used language that leaves the reader wondering about the intent of the Zionist effort. Herzl wrote in his diary in 1895:
We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our own country. The property owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly (pp 88–9)
Similarly, Jabotinsky wrote in his famous Iron Wall essay:
My readers have a general idea of the history of colonisation in other countries. I suggest that they consider all the precedents with which they are acquainted, and see whether there is one solitary instance of any colonisation being carried on with the consent of the native population. There is no such precedent. The native populations, civilised or uncivilised, have always stubbornly resisted the colonists, irrespective of whether they were civilised or savage. And it made no difference whatever whether the colonists behaved decently or not.
Regardless of the Arab perspective or the language of Zionist writers — of which this is but a small sample — the idea that Zionism might also have been a colonial-settler effort is one that is deeply offensive to the Jewish community. Early in my own education on the Israeli / Palestinian conflict I once used the word “colonialism” in a conversation with my mother, she did not talk to me for several weeks. In my own heart, even while trying to address the issue of insufficient history here, my truth of Zionism is redemption and the promise of an optimistic future, not settler-colonialism. Then why write a long article discussing the historical evidence for Zionism as colonialism?
Insufficient History and Restricted Alternatives — Strategic Liabilities
Because far more than just our understanding generates the historical currents and consequences shaping our future. You and I can be certain of our belief in Zionism as redemption for our people, but acting as if this is a Truth requiring all other understandings to be False does not seem justifiable. Rather, our Zionist truth meaningfully reflects our experience of the history in a world where others live different truths arising from their lived experiences. If historical currents have important consequences and we wish to navigate them with maximum possible benefit, due diligence demands an openness to the lived experiences of those who play an intimate role in creating our shared currents. And we need to be very clear on this: an understanding of Zionism as settler-colonialism compels many of good faith around the world and evidence of this abounds — international responses to the recent violence in Israel/Palestine should leave no doubt of this. Maintaining that it is only our understanding of Zionism that is True forces us into strategic liability, two specific ways are most obvious to me.
It is an empiric Truth that we often ignore information that runs contrary to our cherished truths. This is called “confirmation bias” and it is an ambient facet of human behavior. Despite its ubiquity, I would ask a simple question: under what circumstances is it advantageous to limit the information material to a decision of consequence? Imagine a proposed business merger in which you actively block the inclusion of information about the debt of the company to be acquired. Imagine a long-planned trip in which maps are not consulted and planned lodging is not confirmed. But when it comes to Our Conflict, we do this without even realizing it. In his well-regarded book A History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time, Howard Sachar covers our history from the early 1800’s until 1956 with total of 1122 references. Of these, only 34 appear to be from Arab authors or covering the topic from an Arab-centric perspective even though our national resurrection was in great part a story of their resistance. We also do this explicitly, for example: ‘the nakba.’ Long taboo, the legal structures forbidding Jewish discourse about the Palestinian experience of 1948 began to be formalized in the late 1970’s with a High Court decision to ban a documentary film called The Struggle over the Land. In 2009, the Israeli government ordered the word “nakba” removed from an Arab children’s’ textbook. In 2011, the “Nakba law” was passed, empowering the minister of Finance to reduce monetary support for any institution that supports marking Yom Ha’atzmaut as a day of mourning in any way. The Nakba bill originally proposed to criminalize any organized remembrance of the Nakba with a three-year prison sentence. So effective have these social pressures been that my Tel Aviv University undergraduate and law school educated cousin had not heard the term “nakba” until the mid-2000’s, when he was in his 50's.
One of the clearest examples of the stark risks of confirmation bias comes from our own history. By September 1973, Israel had detailed and reliable information about Egyptian military strength and plans — “few intelligence agencies in history have ever had so much valuable information about an enemy before battle.” King Hussein had visited late that month with a well-informed warning that war with Syria and Egypt was imminent. A highly placed source within the Egyptian government had warned the same in April and again in August after Saudi officials had ensured Egypt that there would be an oil embargo against the US if they re-supplied israel during a war. The CIA delivered further information indicating imminent war on September 30th — they were told not to worry. On October 1, the Egyptians began a large military exercise on the Suez Canal and throughout September the Syrians greatly increased their military presence along the Golan. As a final straw — still missed — the Soviets began to evacuate their personnel from both Egypt and Syria on October 5. Sadly, even late on October 5, General Eli Zeira (then head of the Directorate of Military Intelligence) told Moshe Dayan “I don’t think we are going to war.”
We certainly know what happened just after 2p on October 6 — why were we so off-guard? In a recent analysis of the issue, Bruce Reidel, a Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Center for Middle East Policy with a long career in the CIA prior to that, summed it up thusly:
The Israeli intelligence community and the Israeli policy community had created a small and intimate feedback loop in which their common assumptions about the enemy were never challenged. Dayan, a military hero of epic proportions, shared the fundamental assumption that the Arabs were incompetent with his intelligence advisers. Since the prime minister relied on her generals entirely on military issues, she shared it as well.
Group-think disastrously negated the value of multiple independent sources of information running contrary to deeply felt truths. Israel is by no means the only country to have done this — this is the unavoidable downside of sharing a common story and occurs anywhere human groups cooperate closely. This does not mean it cannot be recognized and dealt with.
The allure of Professor Kramer’s assertions about the BD to the Jewish ear are undeniable, but venturing just a bit outside the Jewish narrative allows us to see significant historical insufficiency at play. I do not review this history to convince the reader that Zionism is colonialism nor am I asserting that there is not room for legitimate debate about this topic (for more on this, consider reading Colonialism and the Jews). Cultures appreciate and make sense of their history in different ways and ours is no less robust than anyone else’s. I do believe this represents an important example of how group-think can disrupt the clear-eyed evaluation of conflict required to resolve it. As with the Dartmouth and Princeton students, all groups of people build stories to facilitate cooperation. But this has a necessary down side: we systematically bias ourselves against other groups. In a recent review of the neurological underpinning of empathy and morality, Jean Decety writes:
There is broad consensus that empathy is a fundamental component of our social and emotional lives. Indeed, empathy has a vital role in social interaction, from bonding between mother and child, to understanding others’ feelings and subjective psychological states. Empathy-related processes are thought to motivate prosocial behavior (e.g., sharing, comforting, and helping) and caring for others, to inhibit aggression, and to provide the foundation for care-based morality.
However, empathy is not always a direct avenue to moral behavior, and this may come as a surprise to the reader. Indeed, at times, empathy can interfere with morality by introducing partiality, for instance by favoring in-group members.
Fundamentally, the cognitive mechanisms that bind us together also foster a exclusion of the other. Within our own community we develop a deep affinity for our truths and because they are so widely and deeply held they convincingly take on the appearance of Truth — this helps to knit groups of people tightly together.
When contending with others’ communal truths we often exhibit a
tendency to assess aspects of other cultures in terms of one’s own culture, and thus in social science research to apply in a biased and improper fashion the standards and values of one’s own culture in the study and analysis of other cultures. Such bias is often caused by an implicit or explicit belief in the superiority of one’s own culture.
This is not an accident; happenstance of birth exerts a profound influence on our we perceive things to be because perception itself arises from how our complex, supple and very plastic brains are structured. For most of human history we have understood perception as something that arises from the “bottom-up:” external experiences impinge on our nervous system and are carried forward to be processed and understood in a way that is the same for everyone. Think of how often someone says “that’s just common sense.” But even as far back as 1953, we began to hypothesize that perhaps things were not so straightforward. To extend their above quoted observation:
From this point of view it is inaccurate and misleading to say that different people have different “attitudes” concerning the same “thing.” For the “thing” simply is not the same for different people whether the “thing” is a football game, a presidential candidate, Communism, or spinach. We do not simply “react to” a happening or to some impingement from the environment in a determined way (except in behavior that has become reflexive or habitual). We behave according to what we bring to the occasion, and what each of us brings to the occasion is more or less unique. And except for these significances which we bring to the occasion, the happenings around us would be meaningless occurrences, would be “inconsequential.” (bold my own)
The effects of our cultural backgrounds on our perception does cheapen our personal experience of intersubjective truth — I am not trying to argue that it does not matter if we are Jewish or Christian or Muslim. Experientially, it deeply matters to us personally and collectively. The question is not
It is worth noting that we focus on, even go to war over, the differences in content (Mohammad versus Jesus versus Moses) rather than recognizing the profound similarities of consequence: coordinated action around a common story, faith in something beyond ourselves and the tendency to see certain kinds of truth as Truth. When we consider the tunnels created by the Bar Kokhbas to gain advantage over the Romans during the revolt, we marvel at the ingenuity of our ancestors to fight for a cause we believe in. When Hamas builds tunnels to gain advantage over us, we see them as violent terrorists without remorse. I am not trying to convince you that we should see Hamas as heroes. What advantage, though, do we derive in our conflict by pretending they are not as we are: doing what they feel is necessary, with what they have available, to defend and protect what they see as communal truth? It seems to me that this more honest assessment simply allows for a clearer assessment of what is at stake, in turn allowing for better strategy to counter their efforts to inflict harm.
When we treat our understanding of Zionism as Truth we also limit our options for constructively engaging others with a different truth. My group identity is Zionist Jew, when Professor Kramer writes that the “presumption that a home for the Jews in their land needs no justification,” I, too, believe that. But if we really wish for an end to Our Conflict we perhaps need to grow more sensitive to the idea that the available information — genuine and high-quality information — does not compel “any reasonable person” to believe that there is one Truth here. I hope to convince you that applying a standard of “True or False” is inappropriate here, perhaps even destructive. When it comes to how people understand themselves in a complex world full of culture, selective history and group-based perspective, we must develop a better sense of how multiple truths exist in order to better navigate the conflicts that arise when these perspectives conflict. Just because we believe that Zionism is not settler-colonialism with all our hearts does not mean it is inherently False to see it just that. Put another way: learning to respect truths others live with, truths based on available, verifiable and material information, does not mean we have to part with our own.
It does provide a wider array of options for dealing with those who act from different truths. Believing our understanding to be True imposes significant restrictions on how we approach others to solve conflict: since their understanding is objectively false, their view arises either from ignorance or from malice. If we assume ignorance, our interactions never require us to look past the limits of our own stories and our explanations often appear condescending. If we assume malice, our interactions can cast the other as anti-Semitic. This latter is malicious in two regards. First, mischaracterization of the other as anti-Semitic often prevents us from understanding their motivations more deeply, depriving us of high-quality information to make best strategy. Second, it degrades our ability to identify and respond to real anti-Semitism. Here, the Movement for Black Lives is instructive.
For many American Jews, our relationship with the Black-American community is one of cooperation and common cause. Jews were intimately involved in the civil rights movement and Black America has a deep ties with the story of Exodus. It came as a surprise for many in our community when in 2016 the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL)stated in it’s political platform that Israel was an “apartheid state” and the the US was “complicit in the genocide taking place against the Palestinian people.” This should not have been as much of a surprise: the rift between Black and Jewish America began soon after the Six-Day War and has gained momentum ever since. In May of 2021, the M4BL tweeted the following:
Black Lives Matter stands in solidarity with Palestinians. We are a movement committed to ending settler colonialism in all forms and will continue to advocate for Palestinian liberation. (always have. And always will be). #freepalestine
If we believe that this can be none other than a lie, a Falsehood, then either M4BL is ignorant or anti-Semitic. If we take a moment and accept that the M4BL perspective on Zionism might be neither, what might we see? I did not say we must believe that Zionism is settler-colonialism, only that for a moment we take a look at this belief without assuming ignorance nor anti-Semitism.
First, we can see that there might be legitimate reasons for common cause. “When I see them, I see us” begins a video released by activist groups in 2015. “Every 28 hours a black life is stolen by police or vigilantes in the US. Every two hours a Palestinian child was killed in Israel’s attack on Gaza last summer.” As Jews in Israel and the US, we do not have current reason to fear the police nor do we currently face a legal structure that discriminates against us. Is it really so unreasonable for Black Americans and Palestinians to identify with each other over this shared reality? We might be tempted to say that since we have had reason to fear the police and have faced discrimination for so long that we can reasonably disqualify this line of reasoning — that this does not constitute a legitimate reason for Black Americans and Palestinians to identify with each other. Perhaps; but we do not get to dictate the appropriateness of what others’ decide about their identification. What we can do is respond thoughtfully to those who in fact see common cause. Here is another question: if the Jewish Community decides to brand M4BL either ignorant or anti-Semitic, will that alter their course? Will we somehow compel them to see our Truth by accusing them of either? Perhaps honoring their perspective offers a better path forward than accusations of ignorance or anti-Semitism.
Second, we can see that many Black Americans of good conscience have been moved to action by the Palestinian cause, including Lauryn Hill, Danny Glover, Alice Walker, Angela Davis, Dr. Cornel West , Harry Belafonte, and several black NFL players. We can certainly try to dismiss them as either ignorant or anti-Semitic, but as with the Dartmouth and Princeton students, this seems like a weak accusation. They are certainly not uneducated, or uninformed, but maybe they are anti-Semitic? Perhaps. But I would argue M4BL identification with Black Americans does not, ipso facto, make them anti-Semitic. Plenty of others have taken up the Palestinian cause — in fact, 500 Democratic staffer who worked to get Biden elected sent an official letter to Biden, stating:
We joined your campaign to pursue a vision of a nation that believes that every person’s life and fundamental rights are valued. We remain committed to that vision, and implore you to take action to ensure that Palestinians and Israelis are able to live in peace and security. Returning to the status quo is untenable, it deprives Palestinians of peace, security and self determination.
Several outlets have reported on the groundswell of support for the Palestinian cause. Time magazine reported that “the taboo of the Palestinian cause is being shattered.” The Forward opined that
the growth in these handful of pro-Palestinian pages comes amid other shifts in the public discourse on the conflict, and could be a particularly significant indicator for young people who use social media as a major source of news and civic engagement.
Step back for a moment — for many readers, this may provoke unchecked indignation. What possible difference to Truth can it make regardless of how many step up to defend lies? I have no comment on this, only a question: will accusing these people of ignorance or anti-Semitism help? Does that constitute good strategy? The import of this issue to our future is abundantly clear, we can all agree that our best strategy must be brought to bear for the sake of our children’s future. Are accusations of ignorance and anti-Semitism really the best we got? Even Jewish groups have sprung up in support of Palestinian rights — they must be anti-Semitic, too, right? In fact, this has come up: when Peter Beinart dared say that “If Palestinians have no right to return to their homeland, neither do we” he was summarily booted from Orthodox Jewish events and Mike Pompeo accused him of anti-Semitism. This is an historical current that we must be address, how shall we do so?
I have argued that the inability to fruitfully distinguish truth from Truth puts us at a distinct disadvantage, creating both an unnecessary information deficit as well as limiting the creation of strategic alternatives in consideration of best strategy. The Jewish Community faces crucial decisions about how best to manage our children’s future — we all agree on the weight of this task. Where we disagree is on what constitutes best strategy, and I assert that continuing to insist on the Truth of our history at the cost of respect to the many others and truths we live with here with seems a poor guide to this best strategy. At least since Pinchas has zealotry for the people of Israel earned deep admiration — “Pinchas son of Eleazar, son of Aaron the priest, has turned My anger away from the Israelites by being zealous with My zeal in their midst so that I did not put an end to them in My zeal” (Num25:11). Similarly, Bar Kokhba currently enjoys a good reputation as a zealot; arising as a Nasi during a time of rabbinic institutional weakness, and digging tunnels to gain the surprising upper hand over the Roman occupiers, I feel him as a hero — but is it really his story that has fostered his Jewish future, and our present? Or was it instead the rabbis patient restructuring of Judaism and their tireless efforts in creating the talmud that we have to thank?
If I had a crystal ball, then I would be at the track and I would have purchased AIPAC by now, so we would not be having this conversation. I do not claim to be correct — for all I really know, zealotry might absolutely be the best strategy. If the bullets start flying, I will be on the next plane to Israel to either point a gun and shoot, or operate on those who do. However, confirmation bias and its ethnocentric and neuroscientific unpinnings point not at something especially anti-semitic or ignorant but rather general and knowable — and influential. The history itself, when opened to the voices of those who were involved, seems to speak of more than one truth here. Is it that hard to imagine that in our zeal to save ourselves we would have removed any barrier to success that presented itself? Or so hard to imagine that we might not have spent much time contemplating those who lost out so we could survive? Not so hard to believe — when 83% of radiologists missed the gorilla in the upper right corner of the chest CT above. Believe what you like, I am here to invite you to engage a wider perspective on Our Conflict. Take in all the available high-quality information, be wary of regarding those who disagree with you with ethnocentric patterns of thought. Even if you think we need to take Judea and Samaria, this will benefit you.
