August 2, 2014,
Dear Dr. Weizmann,
When I wrote to you eight years ago, it was to explain why I believed that the UN's 1947 decision to partition Palestine -- in which you played no small part -- was unwise and unjust, and why the "one-state" solution you fought so strenuously against should have prevailed. Since then, nothing has happened in Israel or Palestine to make me reconsider. This weekend, Israeli jets are bombing Gaza, and Hamas rockets are streaking into Israel. Palestinians shriek, "Lift the seige!" Israelis shriek, "Abandon your demand for the right to return, and recognize our right to exist as a Jewish state!" Israeli Jews and the Palestinians are still at war.
August 15, 2006
Dear Dr. Weizmann,
When I wrote to you eight years ago, it was to explain why I believed that the UN's 1947 decision to partition Palestine -- in which you played no small part -- was unwise and unjust, and why the "one-state" solution you fought so strenuously against should have prevailed. Since then, nothing has happened in Israel or Palestine to make me reconsider. This weekend, Israeli jets are bombing Gaza, and Hamas rockets are streaking into Israel. Palestinians shriek, "Lift the seige!" Israelis shriek, "Abandon your demand for the right to return, and recognize our right to exist as a Jewish state!" Israeli Jews and the Palestinians are still at war.
August 15, 2006
Dear Dr. Weizmann,
You were 23 in 1897 when the rabbis of Vienna, enthused by the first Zionist Congress and Theodor Herzl's new book Der Judenstaat (the Jewish State), sent two of their own on a fact-finding mission to Palestine. Do you remember the cable they sent back? "The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man." [1]
Fifty years later, you played an important role in persuading the international community to annul the marriage and give birth to a new, Jewish state in Palestine. Much has happened in Palestine since you left us in 1952, which I would like to tell you about. Then I would like to ask you some hard questions.
History
The state of Israel came into being as a consequence of the UN General Assembly's Partition Resolution (Resolution 181) which was passed in November 1947. At the time, Palestine had approximately 1,200,000 Arab and 600,000 Jewish inhabitants.[2] Almost all of the Arabs had been born in Palestine and were descendents of people who had been living there continuously throughout recorded history, including the history recorded in the books of the Old Testament. The book of Genesis describes the arrival of Israelite tribes in Palestine from Iraq and their settlement among (but not dominion over) the indigenous Canaanite tribes in the 20th or 19th century BC. Within 200 years the Israelites had removed themselves to Egypt. The sixth book of Joshua describes their return to Canaan between 1400 and 1200 BC, and their systematic destruction of Canaanite peoples and settlements.
This conquest was incomplete, and for the next 1200 years the Israelites vied with the Canaanites for control over various portions of Palestine. The Romans expelled most of the Jewish (Israelite) population from Palestine following their last uprising in 66 AD. In 1917, shortly before Britain replaced the Ottomans as the imperial ruler of Palestine and issued the Balfour Declaration establishing a national home for Jews, the population ratio was ten Arabs (Canaanites) to one Jew (Israelite). By 1947, the Jewish population of Palestine consisted mostly of Europeans who had immigrated to Palestine after 1890. Few of their ancestors had lived in Palestine since 66 A.D.
The Partition Resolution granted sovereignty over 55% of the land [3], containing 500,000 Jews and 400,000 Arabs[4], to the Jewish state of Israel. Jewish sovereignty meant Jewish control over immigration, guaranteeing that Jews would always be in the majority in Israel. The Arab state, comprising 45% of the land, would include 700,000 Arabsand 10,000 Jew. Separately, an international condominium was to be established for Jerusalem, whose population of approximately 200,000 consisted of Jews and Arabs in roughly equal numbers, along with a significant Christian population.
Your Moral Algebra
The argument with which you won the day during the General Assembly’s 1947 debate was put forward in your testimony before the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry in the spring of 1946. You told the Committee that partition of Palestine was "the lesser injustice."[5] The “greater injustice” in your moral algebra was not the shoah itself -- the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jewish race -- but the suffering of 250,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors then living in refugee camps in Germany and central Europe.
The UN debate was not, however, a yes-or-no decision on the partition plan that had been recommended by the majority members of the UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), but rather an either-or choice between partition and an alternative proposal for the future government of Palestine -- put forward by the UNSCOP minority members -- for a single, "bi-national" state in which all Jewish and Arab residents would be citizens. Under this proposal, the Arab and Jewish communities would have powers of local self-government, but a central federal government would be responsible for national defence, foreign relations, immigration, currency, federal taxation, water and waterways, transport and communications.[6]
This "single-state" solution for Palestine was not necssarily a solution for the 250,000 Holocaust refugees in Europe. How immigration policy would have been decided in a bi-national state was not clear, so there was no guarantee that European Jews would be allowed to emigrate to Palestine in numbers that would reverse the Arab majority.
When it came to the vote, America’s President Truman seems to have accepted your moral algebra, against pressure from US oil executives and the advice of his State Department, but mindful of Jewish voters and campaign contributors.[7] Joseph Stalin’s support for partition was equally firm, but founded on a different calculus. Partition would certainly weaken the British position in the Middle East, and possibly even provide a Soviet client state in the region.[8] (Many would also say that an American client state is what Truman had in mind for the new state of Israel.) With both Truman and Stalin in support, a UN General Assembly vote for partition was assured.
The War of Independence
The infant state of Israel faced two immediate difficulties: the Palestinian Arabs and the neighbouring Arab states were implacably hostile to its existence; and the Jewish state as defined in the Partition Resolution was militarily indefensible. The choice for David Ben Gurion, the first Israeli prime minister, was whether to bargain with the Arabs, giving away as little as possible but as much as necessary of what the UN had granted in order to win Arab acceptance of Israel’s right to exist; or whether to seize by force not only the land granted to Israel in the Partition Resolution, but also as much of the land that had been granted to the Arab state as was necessary to defend the Jewish state against its enemies.[9]
Ben Gurion quickly decided for war. When the final cease fire came after 14 months of hostilities with the armies of Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Iraq and Egypt, Israel’s army had increased the portion of Palestine under Israel’s control from 55% to 79%[10], thereby achieving Ben Gurion’s objective of a militarily defensible state. Six thousand Palestinian Jews, 1% of the population, died in the struggle.
Israeli attacks on Arab villages, towns and cities were a necessary part of the strategy. By the end of the war, over 700,000 Palestinian Arabs had fled homes in what was now Israel. These refugees were living in camps in the 21% of Palestine that was not Israel, and in the neighbouring Arab states. In December 1948, the General Assembly passed Resolution 194(III) resolving that the refugees should be allowed to return home.
Land and People for Peace
The UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine (UNCCP) tried throughout 1949-50 to broker a bargain in which Israel would withdraw to the Partition Resolution borders, allow the Palestinian Arab refugees to return home, and accept the international condominium status for Jerusalem specified in the Resolution. On the other side, the bargain would have required the five Arab states to accept the Partition Resolution and to sign peace treaties with Israel.
None of the six governments involved had much of an incentive to do this deal. Ben Gurion believed Israel was more secure inside defensible borders without peace treaties than inside indefensible borders with peace treaties. Nor was he interested in taking back a hostile Arab population that could make it difficult to maintain a Jewish majority in Israel. He told the UNCCP that the maximum number of refugees Israel allow back into what was now Israel was 100,000, and this only in the context of a comprehensive peace agreement with the five Arab neighbours.[11]
On their side, the five Arab governments refused to meet directly with any Israeli official, or to begin discussion of the terms on which they would accept the Partition Resolution until Israel had first agreed to comply Resolution 194 (III)’s call for the refugees to be allowed to return home. [12]
The resulting stalemate suited the Arab governments, since making peace with Israel could only cause trouble at home, and since the Palestinians – confined to their camps – could not cause much trouble for any of them. (As it turned out, both the Lebanese government and the King of Jordon were wrong about this, but that is another story.) The stalemate suited all parties except the one not represented in the process -- the refugees.
Fifty-six years later, Palestinian Arabs are still living in the camps, surrounded by two new generations of refugees. Egypt and Jordan have signed peace treaties with Israel without extracting any Israeli concession on return of refugees. Lebanon and Syria remain in a state of cold war with Israel, which occasional flare-ups. The Israeli Defense Forces now occupy the 21% of Palestine that is not claimed by Israel, which is also home to 250,000 Israeli "settlers" who have been given permission by the Israeli government to make their homes in the portion of Palestine that is still in principle not a a part of Israel. The settlers and the IDF clash repeatedly with the Arab militias, and IDF reprisals against civilians (e.g. bulldozing homes in the villages or neighbourhoods of suicide bombers after the fact) have become increasingly common. Inside Israel, the Arab militias have made suicide bombings in cafes and bus-stations the central feature of their political and military strategy, and have recently taken to firing rockets from Gaza at neighbouring towns and villages in Israel.
In this summer of 2006, full-scale hostilities have taken place on two fronts. The IDF pounded Lebanon from the air and sent thousands of troops across the border. Hezbollah has rained rockets on towns and cities throughout the north of Israel. The IDF has pounded the camps and towns in the Gaza strip from the air and with ground forces, while Hamas and other militias fire rockets at neighbouring towns in Israel. So far this summer, the IDF has killed 200 Palestinians in Gaza, many of them militia members, and around five times that number of Lebanese civilians. Hezbollah's rockets have killed 43 Israeli civilians, and 116 IDF troops have died in action.
I regret to inform you, Dr. Weizmann, that fifty-nine years after the Partition Resolution, Palestine is still at war.
Some Hard Questions
The Right to Exist and the Right of Self-Defence
My first question for you is about the moral algebra by which you asserted the right of Jewish sovereignty in Palestine. It seems to me that your argument went something like this: since A has inflicted X on B, it is right for A and B to inflict Y on C provided that Y is less than X.
I don't understand this. On what common scale of measurement for X and Y could you, Harry Truman or any delegate to the UN General Assembly compare the magnitude of two injustices -- the suffering of Europe’s Holocaust survivors on the one hand, and the disenfranchisement of two-thirds of Palestine’s population in order to grant sovereignty over 55% of the land to a colony of European immigrants on the other -- and find one injustice to be greater than the other? It seems to me that no such scale common scale exists, that partition was not a lesser injustice, but merely another injustice. The suffering of the Jewish people at the hands of Europe was infinite, but that suffering could not create a right of Jewish sovereignty in Palestine. The bride was married to another man. The marriage could not be annulled by the heartbreak, even the infinite heartbreak, of another suitor.
My next question is about Israel's legal right to exist. The UN's authority to establish a Jewish state in Palestine may not be debatable as a matter of international law, but surely we should ask whether Israel retains any legal rights under the Partition Resolution, having rejected its obligations under the Resolution on such key provisions as borders, the status of Jerusalem, and the citizenship rights of Palestinian Arabs. (Israel’s 1952 Nationality Law meant that the right of citizenship in the 79% of Palestine controlled by Israel only applied to Palestinians who had not fled during the War of Independence.[13]) While it is true that the Arabs rejected the Partition Resolution in its entirety, I don't see why this should confirm any of Israel’s rights under the Resolution. If anything, Israel’s rejection of the parts of the Resolution it didn’t like combined with the Arabs’ rejection of all of it should mean that the Partition Resolution is a dead letter, conferring no legal rights on anyone.
On the subject of Israel's right to exist, it will upset you to hear that Iran's current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is something of a lunatic who frequently calls for Israel to be wiped off the map. Whether he is merely calling for the state of Israel to be removed from the map of the world in the same way that the land of Palestine was removed from world maps after 1947, or whether he is calling for the extermination of the Israeli people, is unclear. Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah (a Shiite militia in Lebanon) is clearer in his views on Israel's right to exist. He has called for de-partitioning Palestine, eliminating Jewish sovereignty, and replacing it with a single Palestinian state, along the lines proposed by the minority members of UNSCOP in 1947. In this respect, while Nasrallah’s organization is an “existential threat” to the state of Israel, it is not an existential threat to Israelis themselves.
The Meaning of Judaism?
I would like update you on the evolution of Israel's security strategy since Ben Gurion decided in 1947 that the best (and only) defence was a good offence. When the War of Independence was won, Ben Gurion favoured defensible borders and few Arabs inside Israel over peace treaties that would require compromise on borders or refugees. Since then, although peace treaties were signed with Jordan and Egypt, and the Sinai was returned to Egypt, Ben Gurion's principles remain the foundation on which Israel's national security edifice has evolved. Today, these have evolved into three guiding principals: pre-emption, deterrence, and unilateralism.
“The meaning of Judaism is this: kill your enemy before he kills you.” This was the answer given by a member of the Jewish settlement in the Arab city of Hebron to Tom Friedman, in his television documentary on the security “fence,” when Friedman asked how the settler could reconcile his Jewish faith with the use of violence to defend the settlers' position in Hebron. Targeted assassination of the leaders of hostile Arab militias has been standard Israeli practice for several years. Israel's pre-emptive air-strike against Iraq's Osirak nuclear power plant in 1981 is further illustration.
The deterrence component of the security strategy is, in essence, "ten eyes for an eye, ten teeth for a tooth." This thinking was evidenced clearly in the early days of the recent war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon when the Israeli ambassador to the USA asked rhetorically at a rally in New York City, “Will our response to Hezbollah’s attack be disproportionate?” To the cheering crowd he then proclaimed, “You bet it will!”
Collective punishment (retaliatory reprisals against civilians, which are prohibited under Articles 51 and 52 of Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions of War) has become another common feature of Israel's deterrence strategy. (Israelis deny this, while correctly pointing out that anyway the other side does it, too.) It has been common practice for the IDF to bulldoze homes in the perpetrator's village or neighborhood after a suicide bombing in Israel. During the recent hostilities in Lebanon the IDF has destroyed power-plants and factories throughout that country. Lebanese civilians, not Hezbollah, depend on electricity and things made in factories (these were not munitions plants). Israel apparently decided that if Hezbollah could not be defeated by the IDF, perhaps the civilian population would turn against Hezbollah if enough suffering were inflicted on it in retaliation for Hezbollah's initial raid. Another example is Israel's strangulation of the Palestinian economy as punishment for electing a government led by Hamas, hoping the suffering would cause the Palestinians to change their minds.
Finally, Israeli security strategy remains firmly unilateral. When the IDF withdrew from Lebanon in 1990 and from Gaza in 2005, Israel did not seek to negotiate a settlement of grievances with the Lebanese or the Palestinians. It simply withdrew. The Sharon government decided that the best (and only) way to protect Israelis against the Palestinians was to build a "security fence" (in fact a very high wall of concrete) separating Israel from Arab territory, as part of a strategy of "unilateral disengagement" from Arab Palestine. This unilateralism is very much in keeping with Ben Gurion's approach to peace with Israel's Arab neighbours: There is nothing to discuss and no-one with whom to discuss it. Leave us alone, and we will leave you alone. This is a strategy for "cold war," in which the antagonists agree not to agree with each other, not to trust each other, not to talk to each other, but not to attack each other.
Unhappily for Israel, the Arab militias will not accept cold war. They care even less than Israelis about the protections which international law demands for non-combatants. Collective punishment is the purpose of suicide attacks by Hezbollah and Hamas on Israeli cafes and bus stations, of Hamas rockets fired at southern Israeli towns from Gaza, and of most of the Hezbollah Katyusha fusillades from Lebanon into northern Israeli towns and cities. Given their weakness in conventional arms, Israel's enemies know that deterrence is not a strategy that can work for them. They do not believe that the best defence is a good offence, that they can take ten teeth for a tooth, or that they can kill their enemy before he kills them. But they do believe that their cause is just, that they die as martyrs, and that eventually they will win, whatever that may mean.
Time to de-Partition ?
In light of the Fifty-Nine Years War between Jews and Arabs in Palestine, my final question for you, Dr. Weizmann, is whether de-partition of Palestine would not now be the lesser injustice.
First consider your 1947 justification for creating Israel -- to provide a home for the 250,000 Holocaust refugees in the camps of Europe. That mission has been accomplished and today over 5 million Jews are living in Israel. De-partition would not undo this.
Next consider this: if Israel has neither any moral nor any legal right to exist as a Jewish state, then the only justification for a Jewish state is to defend Israeli Jews against hostile Palestinians. And if Palestinians are hostile only because the Jewish state exists, is not de-partition the obvious solution? If a single state in Palestine can provide the basic security guarantees to Jews that citizens of any state have the right to expect, what need is there for a sovereign Jewish state in part of Palestine?
De-partition could be implemented quite easily by passing a new UN resolution, the De-Partition Resolution (Resolution 181-A) providing as follows:
1. General Assembly Resolution 181 is hereby amended by this Resolution 181-A. Any provisions of Resolution 181 that conflict with this Resolution 181-A are hereby rescinded.
2. The boundaries of the state of Israel are hereby extended to incorporate the entire land of Palestine.
3. Israeli citizenship is hereby extended to every resident of Palestine, to everyone who was born in Palestine, and to the children of any citizen of Palestine.
4. A Constitution of the State of Israel [none exists at present] shall be drafted by the UN, and shall incorporate the following principles:
a. Every citizen of Israel has the right to vote. Israeli citizenship is guaranteed to every resident of Palestine, to everyone who was born in Palestine, and to the children of any Israeli citizen.
b. The fundamental human rights are guaranteed.
c. The system of government will be a federal one, with powers divided between the federal and communal levels in the manner prescribed in the UNSCOP minority report of 1947. The name of the state may be changed by the federal government.
d. At the federal level, an executive, a legislative, and a judicial branch will be established.
5. The Constitution will become effective when approved by 50% of those voting in a referendum. Until the Constitution becomes effective, the UN has discretion to suspend the application of any law of the state of Israel.
6. Once the Constitution becomes effective, it can only be amended with the approval of the UN General Assembly.
7. Once the Constitution becomes effective, the "highest court of the land" shall be a special court whose justices shall be appointed by the UN General Assembly.
Bad Reasons Why A Single State Would Not Be a Good Idea
If you still think de-partition would be a bad idea, I would like to know why. But please don't give me any of the following bad reasons.
1. De-partition would reward the terror of Hamas and Hezbollah, and would appease the assertiveness of Iran.
Perhaps. But if de-partition would be the wise and just way for the international community to remedy the problematic situation it created in 1947, it doesn't become a bad idea simply because it terrorists want it to happen. If Al Quaeda hijacks an airplane and announces it is going to execute passengers one at a time until I stop beating my wife, would it be wise or just for me to keep beating my wife so as to avoid rewarding terror? The behaviour of individuals, nations and the International Community must be judged by its own lights, not by whether it satisfies terrorist demands.
2. It would be naive to expect de-partition miraculously to dissolve the hatred of Jews, the west and modernism that is so deeply ingrained in the Arab psyche, especially on the jihadist fringe.
Perhaps, but it would be cynical to believe that nothing would change. Even Bernard Lewis, whose theory of "what went wrong" attributes most of Arab antagonism to a collective neurosis, admits that Israel also has something to do with it. In any event, if I am deceived and the hijackers go ahead and start executing passengers, should I continue beating my wife?
3. De-partition would be as unjust to Israelis today as partition was to the Arabs in 1947 -- merely another injustice.
Partition in 1949 disenfranchised 67% of the population from 55% of the land. De-partition today would not disenfranchise anyone. Jews would merely lose majority status, but with the protections of a Constitution written and guaranteed by the International Community. Jews could be Jews anywhere they choose in Palestine. They could send their children to Jewish schools, run or work for Jewish companies, publish Jewish newspapers, eat Jewish food, observe Jewish holidays, worship in Jewish temples and be buried in Jewish cemeteries.
4. De-partition is a backwards-looking solution. You can't change history. The Arabs need to put the past behind them, get over their grievances about the past, and move on.
It would be nice for Israel if the Palestinian Arabs could see things this way. But they can't and there is no reason why they should. There is no statute of limitations on the injustice of the Holocaust, and neither is there any on the injustice of the Partition Resolution.
5. De-partition would lead to communal conflict between Jews and Arabs within the single state.
There has been continuous, violent, communal conflict between Jews and Arabs in Palestine throughout the 59 years since partition. This violence is at the same time more organized and more anarchic (since there is no higher authority to mediate it) than should be expected in a single state in which the ethnic conflicts would be localized and personalized, and mediated by the international community when necessary.
Dan Badger
London
August 15, 2006
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Bibliography
Sachar, Howard M: A History of Israel From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time, 2nd Edition, 2001
Shlaim, Avi: The Iron Wall, 2001
United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine (UNCCP): General Progress Report and Supplementary Report, 23 October, 1950
United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP): Recommendations to the General Assembly, A/364, 3 September 1947
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Notes:
1. Schlaim, p. 3
2. Unless otherwise noted, population figures throughout are taken or interpolated from Sachar and from http://www.israelipalestinianprocon.org/populationpalestine.html#chart1
3. Sachar, p. 292
4, UNSCOP, Recommendations (II), Part II
5. Sachar, p. 262
6. UNSCOP, Recommendations (III)
7. Sachar, pp. 288-291
8. Sachar, p. 286
9. Schlaim, pp. 30-31
10. Schlaim, p. 47
11. UNCCP, Chapter III, paragraph 20
12. UNCCP Chapter I, paragraph 3
13. Sachar, p. 384
