While I didn't really dig the original post, due to its anthropology just-so-stories quality and the strained explanation of why Palestinian society is the shitshow that it is, I notice that every Arab/Arabized society is either a shitshow or one bad election/regime change away from becoming one. Algeria is a great example-the post-independence settling of accounts and the war with GIA/GSPC were as bad or worse as anything that happened with the Palestinians. Syria, Libya, Iraq all went through the same thing, and will go through it again at the drop of a pin.
The claim that the Palestinians have unique social pathologies due to Zionist occupation and statelessness, and that before this, they were these beaceful beoble just herding their little sheebs, making cardamom coffee and settling all disbutes with a beautiful indigenous sulha singalong doesn't hold any water.
You can compare them to the Jews, who went through 2000 years of statelessness, then a decade-long insurrection with notes of civil war and some very ugly episodes, but who after the War of Independence more or less settled down to more or less peaceful coexistence.
Yes yes yes love the thesis that what would work is an authoritarian total state taking over first Gaza and ruling effectively for ten years and then maybe you could gradually off-ramp it onto a native Palestinian institution once the state was sufficiently entrenched.
However I think Sisera would agree. Unfortunately to impose such a thing would require the total psychological defeat of the Palestinian people, not just within Palestine but internationally. Thanks to their legendary summud, the war was lost and Hamas still rule Gaza. And there is no Palestinian national movement stepping forward to say “this has gone too far we simply must be normal.” This can be done internally and doesn’t require a state to do it - it could have been built up from Oslo, there was plenty of intl support. What explains the decision not to and the descent into corruption and then more violence?
No more like 50-70 year authoritarian competent rule, as much as my family has beef with the guy Hassan II actually did well in setting up Morocco for success despite his brutality.
I dont think defeat is necessary just withdrawal of Israel from West Bank/Gaza occupation but they wont because they justly understand that probably the next government is just preparing for attack again.
There are no real institutions and the current internal equilibrium is broken. The people who would sue for peace and build a correct state are constantly undermined by Israelis, Palestinians and Arabs as a whole for traitors. The institution problem is also partly an Israeli issue because it is not in the interest of Israel to have a palestinian state under any form near them.
The Zionist project is about recovering the whole of the holy land for a Jewish state and you have an increasing amount of lunatics which makes you closer ideologically to Palestinians as time goes on.
You don't need their psychological defeat. Ataturk didn't psychologically destroy rural Anatolia before female education. He just sent the army and said, "Send girls to school or I will take your land."
But Ataturk had some legitimacy like winning the Turkish War of Independence. Any Palestinian state simply must deliver results, like stopping settlements. Then they can implement social reform after showing the Palestinians that they can keep the Israeli leviathan at bay.
'Honor is the currency of social trust in the absence of institutions.' How you define institutions? I was 'brought up' with the Northian definition of institutions as rules of the game, so to me, honour is itself a kind of institution. Do you mean formal institutions here? Or by institutions, do you mean (certain kinds of) organisations?
Good point, it is true honor is an institution of itself. I probably never stated it (will correct it later) but I meant formal institutions in the Webberian sense, i.e police, bureaucracy and other forms of impersonal authority.
I think aside from being formal institutions their difference with honor institution is in centrality vs decentrality.
Institutions are impersonal. Honor is deeply personal.
The whole point of institutions is that the office acts according to predefined rules and procedures, not according to the individual desires, whims, or loyalties of the office-holder. Honor is not an institution; it is a competing social mechanism.
It can be seen as a form of distributed form of institution (vs centralized and impersonal), because the rules are rather standard despite the application being from “great men”.
Okay, so it does seem like you include organisations. I would never call the police or bureaucracy 'institutions', though they are certainly structured by institutions.
You mention 1948 a couple of times. My understanding (incorrect or incomplete maybe) has always been that the Zionists accepted the UN partition plan but that the surrounding Arab states, who were the powers negotiated with on behalf of the Palestinian population, rejected it, believing they could by military force eject the Zionists completely. If that is the case, and if the repeated efforts of said states in that year and over the next 25 years to eject the Zionists by military force failed (which they did), and if the solution to the present situation has always been the establishment of a Leviathan state as you suggest (convincingly), then don't the surrounding Arab states -- Egypt, Jordan, Syria -- bear the ultimate responsibility for the plight of today's Palestinians? Could they not have established such a Leviathan state in 1948 or at any time thereafter, one that, as a true state, would have actual borders resistant to serial re-drawing by expansion of Israeli settlements? Why didn't/hasn't a neighboring Arab state taken/take responsibility for the Palestinians? They were used to Ottoman rule, so presumably would have been (maybe not anymore) able to accept a state created and maintained by another, recognized power.
Your Hobbesian analysis is, as I said, a convincing one, and so I am really curious to understand why powers that could have established such a state failed to do so.
Also, you don't really get into the role that Islam has played in the clan-state dynamic you describe. How much independent force does Islam have in directing the hopes, expectations and actions of the clan-centered population?
The thing is that no Arab correctly believed that the Israeli state would stop at their 1948 borders, and that this was just step 0 of achieving the objective of taking the whole land (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1937_Ben-Gurion_letter).
In this I think Palestinians were right in this idea, but completely retarded in everything else.
As Laura Creighton said, there is a lot of hagiography about 1948 from both sides so I dont know who to trust ultimately.
> don't the surrounding Arab states -- Egypt, Jordan, Syria -- bear the ultimate responsibility for the plight of today's Palestinians?
Yeah, but they got their karmic answer. Palestinians are a key factor in triggering the Lebanese civil war, they tried to overthrow the Jordanian king and during the Saddam invasion, Palestinian refugees in Kuwait sided with Saddam which embittered Kuwaitis. Palestinians are also not accepted into other societies because being very fair, not all Arab countries are the same, it would be like moving from England to America, or from Scottland to Australia. Yes, there is some commonality and language but its a whole different culture.
Another argument is there is no true Leviathan available, as all the countries mentioned are on shaky ground relative to their own peaceful population, let alone to rule over (understandably given their situation) radicalized Palestinians.
> so I am really curious to understand why powers that could have established such a state failed to do so.
It's because competency and good statemanship is a very rare finding in the Arab world. Society is unruly, colonialism left most Arab countries in a shit place, and Islamic thought and religion constrains the field of manouver.
> Also, you don't really get into the role that Islam has played in the clan-state dynamic you describe. How much independent force does Islam have in directing the hopes, expectations and actions of the clan-centered population?
Controversial opinion but Islam is not really that important, it is used as a justification but it could also be used as a justification to break the clans and become a single unified ummah under Allah. Ironically fundamentalists actually argue for this, they want to dissolve all differentiations other than Muslim to create a harmonious, homogenous society of believers. And this would be a very good precondition for a strong Leviathan.
I know some of this. The surrounding Arab states are engaged in a intense rivalry for being the pre-eminent state in the middle-east. Taking responsibility for the detested Palestinians - and everybody detests the Palestinians, who are a constant reminder of a humiliating defeat and badly behaved as well - doesn't help with this project, and as the Jordanians found out, you could even risk losing your country. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_September There are people in Gaza who would dearly love to be ruled by Egypt. The Egyptians aren't keen.
I don't know who to believe about 1948, because there is an awful lot of revisionist history going around. There is near constant myth-making by people who want to control the narrative in some way. All places and all times get some of this, but this region and time gets more than most. But the lack of effective government in the region and unrest and rebellions is a recurring theme from the Ottoman times too. Everybody seems to talk about how hard it is to rule there.
Palestine 1936 by Oren Kessler is an interesting read (unrelated to the movie with a similar name). He dug through a lot of primary sources including those in Arabic and Hebrew to sort out what was going on among the various sides in the British Mandate, and the changing British line on what they would support. There's definitely an air of tragedy around some of the Palestinian Arab aspirations, even if it's often the result of them sabotaging each other.
Maybe it's impossible to overcome the "stick with your team" mindset, but I find it pretty rich to lay the blame for the Nakba at the feet of Zionists, when the surrounding Arab nations promised that they would (and failed to) "take care of things" for the Palestinians when the UN partition plan had granted them a state of their own for the first time ever.
If in 1948 they had accepted partition and gone on to demonstrate state capacity (at least to the degree that Jordan has), this could be a very different discussion, but instead they snatched defeat from the jaws of victory and have repeatedly done so ever since. Arafat notoriously walked away from an offer of statehood in 2000, and his erstwhile populace responded with suicide bombings.
Hamas did have control of Gaza and a monopoly on violence provided they didn't attack Israel. That didn't work either. So I'm not convinced that land is the missing piece.
I didnt get into details blaming but the original cause of the whole conflict is Zionism, take away Zionism and the whole conflict doesnt exist.
Nakba is a direct result of both Zionism and incompetency from the Arab states.
The partition plan was just a temporary ceasefire not a complete plan, eventually demographic pressures and ideological elements would have pushed (like they do today) for expansion across historical Judea and Samaria.
This settled, Palestinian political leadership can be ranked as top 3 most retarded polities in history so while the Palestinian people has my sympathy, they dont have my understanding. The organisation and structure doesnt allow for peaceniks to take power only for the most radical elements to take place, and for them to also fuck up other arab countries.
You forgot that I said both monopoly of violence and attacking the clan structure, Hamas used violence to further its own political ambitions and kept the clan system intact, aside from this they were also not a free state but blockaded by both Egypt/Israel
"Stateless peoples maintain maximalist narratives" -- not necessarily, see: the Jews.
Institutions can exist without a state apparatus. As was the case in pre-state Israel, where the institutions were built over 50 years prior to 1948.
I agree that an authoritarian Leviathan State is necessary to suppress Palestinian belligerence. However the State would have to be capable of conceding that Israel exists and stop making war. To the extent the PA has been capable of this, it loses legitimacy with its own people. The alternatives for Leviathan States to control Palestinians being Israel or perhaps Egypt/Jordan.
I think this explains why more Palestinian autonomy -- the West Bank after 1994 Oslo and Gaza after 2005 -- brought more violence, not less. Israeli occupation and control was better at suppressing violence than the vacuum of power resulting from withdrawal.
Sharaf, I think. In reading about the politics of Palestine that I keep finding that over time, people's gratitude wanes as if it is a humiliation to be grateful to anybody. Outsiders, foreigners yes -- but insiders too, even relatives.
I knew nothing about Arab culture and when I google Ird and Sharaf, the Wikipedia page for "Honor codes of the Bedouin" comes up. Is there a particular reason why these are not designated as Arab more broadly? (Also, there isn't that much on wiki, are you going to write more on this?)
It is a tell that you don’t put 1948 in the context of flight from the military activity of the armies of Arab states who initiated the circumstances in which the Nakhba took place, and that you are silent on the role of the actual Nazi, Amin al’Hussaini, in radicalizing the disoriented refugees by an ideological process that is neither honor nor Leviathan. Ideological capture is a well known phenomenon, and matches the post-1948 behavior and mentality of Palestinians to a T. You ought at least to have mentioned it, if only to argue against it.
Especially the fact that you realize that the real guilty party here are European powers. Most don’t know that Europe did not make an effort to absorb displaced European Jews after ww2. Most went to the US or Palestine. France (under occupation) sent her Jews to the camps, and today many French call those that ended up in Israel “colonizers”.
I mean yeah, we can keep blaming the French too, Herzl was triggered by the Dreyfus affair to start Zionism as an organized political movement. France also received a lot of Jews from the colonies, which is why they have the highest number of Jews in Europe (also highest number of Muslims, which can only end well)
I was under the impression that the Dreyfus affair being the impetus for Herzl to believe assimilation was a lost cause and Jews had to have their own state is a bit of a myth:
"Il est clair que son inquiétude au sujet de l'antisémitisme, qui remonte au debut des années 1880, fut renforcée, mais pas suscitée par l'Affaire Dreyfus"
That is indeed true, Herzl was already thinking about Zionism and it was independently being thought elsewhere (Moshe Hess/Eastern Europe) so there is a phenomenon of intellectual convergence.
That said, the Dreyfus affair catalyzed or crystallized the idea on Herzl that jewish assimilation was not possible, even if he was thinking about the question for longer before the event. If it wasn’t the Dreyfus affair another anti-semitic event would have catalyzed him.
Not many displaced Jews could get into the USA. Harry Truman tried–in vain–to convince Congress to lift the immigration quotas for them. The UK tried to stop displaced Jews from illegally immigrating to Palestine, but didn't go as far as opening its doors (and the doors of its imperial possessions) to Jews.
While I didn't really dig the original post, due to its anthropology just-so-stories quality and the strained explanation of why Palestinian society is the shitshow that it is, I notice that every Arab/Arabized society is either a shitshow or one bad election/regime change away from becoming one. Algeria is a great example-the post-independence settling of accounts and the war with GIA/GSPC were as bad or worse as anything that happened with the Palestinians. Syria, Libya, Iraq all went through the same thing, and will go through it again at the drop of a pin.
The claim that the Palestinians have unique social pathologies due to Zionist occupation and statelessness, and that before this, they were these beaceful beoble just herding their little sheebs, making cardamom coffee and settling all disbutes with a beautiful indigenous sulha singalong doesn't hold any water.
You can compare them to the Jews, who went through 2000 years of statelessness, then a decade-long insurrection with notes of civil war and some very ugly episodes, but who after the War of Independence more or less settled down to more or less peaceful coexistence.
FWIW, the canonical Sisera Slayer in Tanakh (Ya'el) was a woman, but with pseudonyms you don't really know
Yes yes yes love the thesis that what would work is an authoritarian total state taking over first Gaza and ruling effectively for ten years and then maybe you could gradually off-ramp it onto a native Palestinian institution once the state was sufficiently entrenched.
However I think Sisera would agree. Unfortunately to impose such a thing would require the total psychological defeat of the Palestinian people, not just within Palestine but internationally. Thanks to their legendary summud, the war was lost and Hamas still rule Gaza. And there is no Palestinian national movement stepping forward to say “this has gone too far we simply must be normal.” This can be done internally and doesn’t require a state to do it - it could have been built up from Oslo, there was plenty of intl support. What explains the decision not to and the descent into corruption and then more violence?
No more like 50-70 year authoritarian competent rule, as much as my family has beef with the guy Hassan II actually did well in setting up Morocco for success despite his brutality.
I dont think defeat is necessary just withdrawal of Israel from West Bank/Gaza occupation but they wont because they justly understand that probably the next government is just preparing for attack again.
There are no real institutions and the current internal equilibrium is broken. The people who would sue for peace and build a correct state are constantly undermined by Israelis, Palestinians and Arabs as a whole for traitors. The institution problem is also partly an Israeli issue because it is not in the interest of Israel to have a palestinian state under any form near them.
The Zionist project is about recovering the whole of the holy land for a Jewish state and you have an increasing amount of lunatics which makes you closer ideologically to Palestinians as time goes on.
You don't need their psychological defeat. Ataturk didn't psychologically destroy rural Anatolia before female education. He just sent the army and said, "Send girls to school or I will take your land."
But Ataturk had some legitimacy like winning the Turkish War of Independence. Any Palestinian state simply must deliver results, like stopping settlements. Then they can implement social reform after showing the Palestinians that they can keep the Israeli leviathan at bay.
Ataturk and LKY is the proof God loves some peoples more than others
The French did something very similar with the Catholic Church and the inventaire, which was not so different as it seems at first glance.
Jim crow was northern import and the inevitable result of forcing state authority on the south not some return to the old order
Reconstruction was not complete and Jim Crow was the result, the Northerners pussied out from complete Leviathan control
we the white north didn't want full racial equality we only escalated the sectional conflict do to southern stubbornness on the kansas issue
Very interesting.
'Honor is the currency of social trust in the absence of institutions.' How you define institutions? I was 'brought up' with the Northian definition of institutions as rules of the game, so to me, honour is itself a kind of institution. Do you mean formal institutions here? Or by institutions, do you mean (certain kinds of) organisations?
Good point, it is true honor is an institution of itself. I probably never stated it (will correct it later) but I meant formal institutions in the Webberian sense, i.e police, bureaucracy and other forms of impersonal authority.
I think aside from being formal institutions their difference with honor institution is in centrality vs decentrality.
Institutions are impersonal. Honor is deeply personal.
The whole point of institutions is that the office acts according to predefined rules and procedures, not according to the individual desires, whims, or loyalties of the office-holder. Honor is not an institution; it is a competing social mechanism.
It can be seen as a form of distributed form of institution (vs centralized and impersonal), because the rules are rather standard despite the application being from “great men”.
Okay, so it does seem like you include organisations. I would never call the police or bureaucracy 'institutions', though they are certainly structured by institutions.
You mention 1948 a couple of times. My understanding (incorrect or incomplete maybe) has always been that the Zionists accepted the UN partition plan but that the surrounding Arab states, who were the powers negotiated with on behalf of the Palestinian population, rejected it, believing they could by military force eject the Zionists completely. If that is the case, and if the repeated efforts of said states in that year and over the next 25 years to eject the Zionists by military force failed (which they did), and if the solution to the present situation has always been the establishment of a Leviathan state as you suggest (convincingly), then don't the surrounding Arab states -- Egypt, Jordan, Syria -- bear the ultimate responsibility for the plight of today's Palestinians? Could they not have established such a Leviathan state in 1948 or at any time thereafter, one that, as a true state, would have actual borders resistant to serial re-drawing by expansion of Israeli settlements? Why didn't/hasn't a neighboring Arab state taken/take responsibility for the Palestinians? They were used to Ottoman rule, so presumably would have been (maybe not anymore) able to accept a state created and maintained by another, recognized power.
Your Hobbesian analysis is, as I said, a convincing one, and so I am really curious to understand why powers that could have established such a state failed to do so.
Also, you don't really get into the role that Islam has played in the clan-state dynamic you describe. How much independent force does Islam have in directing the hopes, expectations and actions of the clan-centered population?
The thing is that no Arab correctly believed that the Israeli state would stop at their 1948 borders, and that this was just step 0 of achieving the objective of taking the whole land (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1937_Ben-Gurion_letter).
In this I think Palestinians were right in this idea, but completely retarded in everything else.
As Laura Creighton said, there is a lot of hagiography about 1948 from both sides so I dont know who to trust ultimately.
> don't the surrounding Arab states -- Egypt, Jordan, Syria -- bear the ultimate responsibility for the plight of today's Palestinians?
Yeah, but they got their karmic answer. Palestinians are a key factor in triggering the Lebanese civil war, they tried to overthrow the Jordanian king and during the Saddam invasion, Palestinian refugees in Kuwait sided with Saddam which embittered Kuwaitis. Palestinians are also not accepted into other societies because being very fair, not all Arab countries are the same, it would be like moving from England to America, or from Scottland to Australia. Yes, there is some commonality and language but its a whole different culture.
Another argument is there is no true Leviathan available, as all the countries mentioned are on shaky ground relative to their own peaceful population, let alone to rule over (understandably given their situation) radicalized Palestinians.
> so I am really curious to understand why powers that could have established such a state failed to do so.
It's because competency and good statemanship is a very rare finding in the Arab world. Society is unruly, colonialism left most Arab countries in a shit place, and Islamic thought and religion constrains the field of manouver.
> Also, you don't really get into the role that Islam has played in the clan-state dynamic you describe. How much independent force does Islam have in directing the hopes, expectations and actions of the clan-centered population?
Controversial opinion but Islam is not really that important, it is used as a justification but it could also be used as a justification to break the clans and become a single unified ummah under Allah. Ironically fundamentalists actually argue for this, they want to dissolve all differentiations other than Muslim to create a harmonious, homogenous society of believers. And this would be a very good precondition for a strong Leviathan.
I know some of this. The surrounding Arab states are engaged in a intense rivalry for being the pre-eminent state in the middle-east. Taking responsibility for the detested Palestinians - and everybody detests the Palestinians, who are a constant reminder of a humiliating defeat and badly behaved as well - doesn't help with this project, and as the Jordanians found out, you could even risk losing your country. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_September There are people in Gaza who would dearly love to be ruled by Egypt. The Egyptians aren't keen.
Thanks. I had no idea the Palestinians were detested by their Arab neighbors. Was that true in 1948? Or, say, in 1908 (i.e., under Ottoman rule)?
I don't know who to believe about 1948, because there is an awful lot of revisionist history going around. There is near constant myth-making by people who want to control the narrative in some way. All places and all times get some of this, but this region and time gets more than most. But the lack of effective government in the region and unrest and rebellions is a recurring theme from the Ottoman times too. Everybody seems to talk about how hard it is to rule there.
Palestine 1936 by Oren Kessler is an interesting read (unrelated to the movie with a similar name). He dug through a lot of primary sources including those in Arabic and Hebrew to sort out what was going on among the various sides in the British Mandate, and the changing British line on what they would support. There's definitely an air of tragedy around some of the Palestinian Arab aspirations, even if it's often the result of them sabotaging each other.
Maybe it's impossible to overcome the "stick with your team" mindset, but I find it pretty rich to lay the blame for the Nakba at the feet of Zionists, when the surrounding Arab nations promised that they would (and failed to) "take care of things" for the Palestinians when the UN partition plan had granted them a state of their own for the first time ever.
If in 1948 they had accepted partition and gone on to demonstrate state capacity (at least to the degree that Jordan has), this could be a very different discussion, but instead they snatched defeat from the jaws of victory and have repeatedly done so ever since. Arafat notoriously walked away from an offer of statehood in 2000, and his erstwhile populace responded with suicide bombings.
Hamas did have control of Gaza and a monopoly on violence provided they didn't attack Israel. That didn't work either. So I'm not convinced that land is the missing piece.
I didnt get into details blaming but the original cause of the whole conflict is Zionism, take away Zionism and the whole conflict doesnt exist.
Nakba is a direct result of both Zionism and incompetency from the Arab states.
The partition plan was just a temporary ceasefire not a complete plan, eventually demographic pressures and ideological elements would have pushed (like they do today) for expansion across historical Judea and Samaria.
This settled, Palestinian political leadership can be ranked as top 3 most retarded polities in history so while the Palestinian people has my sympathy, they dont have my understanding. The organisation and structure doesnt allow for peaceniks to take power only for the most radical elements to take place, and for them to also fuck up other arab countries.
You forgot that I said both monopoly of violence and attacking the clan structure, Hamas used violence to further its own political ambitions and kept the clan system intact, aside from this they were also not a free state but blockaded by both Egypt/Israel
Great discussion. A few thoughts:
"Stateless peoples maintain maximalist narratives" -- not necessarily, see: the Jews.
Institutions can exist without a state apparatus. As was the case in pre-state Israel, where the institutions were built over 50 years prior to 1948.
I agree that an authoritarian Leviathan State is necessary to suppress Palestinian belligerence. However the State would have to be capable of conceding that Israel exists and stop making war. To the extent the PA has been capable of this, it loses legitimacy with its own people. The alternatives for Leviathan States to control Palestinians being Israel or perhaps Egypt/Jordan.
I think this explains why more Palestinian autonomy -- the West Bank after 1994 Oslo and Gaza after 2005 -- brought more violence, not less. Israeli occupation and control was better at suppressing violence than the vacuum of power resulting from withdrawal.
How does "gratitude" work? Does it always come with a helping of humiliation on the side? or just when you do it wrong?
I dont get the context of this comment, is it relating to honor or sharaf ?
Sharaf, I think. In reading about the politics of Palestine that I keep finding that over time, people's gratitude wanes as if it is a humiliation to be grateful to anybody. Outsiders, foreigners yes -- but insiders too, even relatives.
I really liked your analysis of Sisera Slayer! Showed me thing I missed about it.
So I thought I would try to check up on you the same way you did to Sisera Slayer
How violent was Palestinian Society prior to 1914? (Before British occupation/Mandate)
Well, turns out, pretty violent!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qays%E2%80%93Yaman_rivalry
"In the eighteenth century, the hinterland of Nablus suffered from civil strife"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1757_Hajj_caravan_raid
"An estimated 20,000 pilgrims were either killed or died of hunger or thirst as a result of the raid."
"Although Bedouin raids on the Hajj caravan were fairly common, the 1757 raid represented the peak of such attacks"
I can keep looking, but seems the Area was extremely violent under Ottoman rule, so lack of State isn't what caused it.
I knew nothing about Arab culture and when I google Ird and Sharaf, the Wikipedia page for "Honor codes of the Bedouin" comes up. Is there a particular reason why these are not designated as Arab more broadly? (Also, there isn't that much on wiki, are you going to write more on this?)
It is a tell that you don’t put 1948 in the context of flight from the military activity of the armies of Arab states who initiated the circumstances in which the Nakhba took place, and that you are silent on the role of the actual Nazi, Amin al’Hussaini, in radicalizing the disoriented refugees by an ideological process that is neither honor nor Leviathan. Ideological capture is a well known phenomenon, and matches the post-1948 behavior and mentality of Palestinians to a T. You ought at least to have mentioned it, if only to argue against it.
Very interesting. Thank you.
Especially the fact that you realize that the real guilty party here are European powers. Most don’t know that Europe did not make an effort to absorb displaced European Jews after ww2. Most went to the US or Palestine. France (under occupation) sent her Jews to the camps, and today many French call those that ended up in Israel “colonizers”.
I mean yeah, we can keep blaming the French too, Herzl was triggered by the Dreyfus affair to start Zionism as an organized political movement. France also received a lot of Jews from the colonies, which is why they have the highest number of Jews in Europe (also highest number of Muslims, which can only end well)
I was under the impression that the Dreyfus affair being the impetus for Herzl to believe assimilation was a lost cause and Jews had to have their own state is a bit of a myth:
https://www.persee.fr/doc/austr_0396-4590_2003_num_57_1_4256
"Il est clair que son inquiétude au sujet de l'antisémitisme, qui remonte au debut des années 1880, fut renforcée, mais pas suscitée par l'Affaire Dreyfus"
That is indeed true, Herzl was already thinking about Zionism and it was independently being thought elsewhere (Moshe Hess/Eastern Europe) so there is a phenomenon of intellectual convergence.
That said, the Dreyfus affair catalyzed or crystallized the idea on Herzl that jewish assimilation was not possible, even if he was thinking about the question for longer before the event. If it wasn’t the Dreyfus affair another anti-semitic event would have catalyzed him.
Merci pour le lien persée!
Not many displaced Jews could get into the USA. Harry Truman tried–in vain–to convince Congress to lift the immigration quotas for them. The UK tried to stop displaced Jews from illegally immigrating to Palestine, but didn't go as far as opening its doors (and the doors of its imperial possessions) to Jews.