Paradox on paradox — don’t expect solutions here either

Israel at 60

I have just been watching George Bush’s address to the Israeli Presidential Conference Facing Tomorrow 2008, having heard snatches of it on the radio overnight. There was little substance in what he said, and I listened to it right through three times.

More substantial is A Somber Anniversary by Avi Shlaim.

Israelis approach the sixtieth anniversary of the establishment of their state in a subdued and somber mood. Israeli society is deeply divided, and there is no consensus on how to mark the milestone. On the one hand, Israel can boast some stunning successes: a democratic polity with universal suffrage; a highly developed, some might say overdeveloped, multiparty system; an independent judiciary; a vibrant cultural scene; progressive educational and health services; a high standard of living; and a per capita GDP almost the size of Britain’s.

The ingathering of the exiles has worked. Israel’s population has reached 7,241,000, nearly ten times what it was in 1948. Forty-one percent of the world’s Jews live in the Jewish state, speaking the Hebrew language that was confined to liturgy when Zionism was born at the end of the nineteenth century. In its central aim of providing the scattered Jews with a haven, instilling in them a sense of nationhood and forging a modern nation-state, Zionism has been a brilliant success. And these achievements are all the more remarkable against the background of appalling tragedy: the extermination of 6 million Jews by the Nazis during World War II…

The moral case for the establishment of an independent Jewish state was strong, especially in the aftermath of the Holocaust. The case for a Jewish state was also bolstered by the international norm of self-determination for national groups. Based on this norm, the UN partition resolution of November 29, 1947, provided a charter of international legitimacy for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. However, there is no denying that the establishment of the State of Israel involved a massive injustice to the Palestinians. Sixty years on, Israel still has not arrived at a reckoning of its sins against the Palestinians, a recognition that it owes the Palestinians a debt that must at some point be repaid.

The conflict with the Palestinians, and with the Arab world at large, has cast a very long shadow over Israel’s life. For the first forty-five years of the state’s existence, Israel’s leaders were unwilling to discuss the right of the Palestinians to national self-determination. In 1969 Prime Minister Golda Meir adopted an extreme position–hardly an uncommon one at the time–in denying that a Palestinian people existed at all. But the dilemma had been there all along, and the early Zionists were well aware of it, even if they seldom talked about it. The dilemma, in a nutshell, was that the Jewish aspiration to sovereignty in Palestine could not be reconciled with the Palestinian people’s natural right to sovereignty over the same country. This was the “hidden question” that Zionist teacher Yitzhak Epstein addressed in an article in 1907. It was not long before the hidden question was transformed into an open and deeply contentious issue…

During the past forty-one years Israel has tried every conceivable method of ending the conflict with the Palestinians except the obvious one: ending the occupation. The occupation has to end, not simply because the Palestinians deserve no less but in order to preserve the values for which the State of Israel was created. In any case, whether Israelis like it or not, an independent Palestinian state is inevitable in the long run–when the game is no longer worth the candle. The moral, political and psychological cost of the occupation cannot be sustained indefinitely. Just as Israel withdrew under duress from southern Lebanon in 2000 and from Gaza in 2005, so, eventually, will it be compelled to relinquish all but a tiny fraction of the West Bank.

To its credit, the Israeli public has never been as implacably opposed to an independent Palestinian state as the politicians of the right. The question now is whether Israel will give the Palestinians a chance to build that state or strive endlessly to frustrate it. That is the real test of statesmanship as Israel enters its seventh decade. At the time of writing there is precious little evidence to suggest that Israel’s leaders are willing to rise to the challenge. They appear united in their determination to preserve Israel’s military and economic control over the West Bank. Yet there is some ground for optimism. The Palestinians learned from their own mistakes: they put rejectionism behind them, moderated their program and opted for a two-state solution. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that the Israelis will one day learn from their mistakes and elect leaders who recognize the need for a genuine two-state solution. Nations, like individuals, are capable of acting rationally–after they have exhausted all the alternatives.

See also Israeli History at 60 by Carlin Romano.

…Conventional Israeli history held that Palestinians fled their homes in 1948 because their leaders ordered them to do so, confident they’d return once the five Arab countries that attacked Israel on its first day crushed the new state. But in that book, Morris attributed the flight of the Palestinians — called al-naqba, or “the catastrophe,” by Arabs — to a mixture of causes. Some fled under direct attack. Some left in panic because they feared an attack. And some followed orders from Palestinian authorities. Morris also shook up standard Israeli history by declaring that Israelis, and not only Palestinians, committed massacres. (In a 2004 revised edition, he maintained those general views.)

In The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, Morris resisted the allegation that Jewish leaders before 1948 approved an official policy of “transfer,” or expulsion, that prompted the flight of more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs, some 60 percent of Palestine’s pre-war population. In a much-cited line, Morris stated that “the Palestinian refugee problem was born of war, not by design, Jewish or Arab.” Morris also stressed that Palestinian flight ultimately resulted from the war launched in 1947 by Palestinians themselves, followed on May 15, 1948, by the attack on Israel by Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Transjordan. But few paid attention to that observation.

Israelis on the right denounced Morris as an “Israel hater,” while Palestinians thought he didn’t go far enough. The Palestinian anthropologist Sharif Kanaana, of Birzeit University, wrote that Morris’s view was “more dangerous than the previous line of Israeli propaganda” because it was “more sophisticated.”…

In a 2002 piece in The Guardian, Morris admitted that his thinking about whether Palestinians want peace had “radically changed” as a result of the second intifada. While most Israelis no longer seek a “Greater Israel,” he wrote, Palestinians cling to their dream of a “Greater Palestine” that requires Israel’s elimination. Those views seem to have made him less critical, at least in interviews, of Israeli behavior in 1948…

Even before his political views began to evolve, Morris found himself catching fire from both right and left. From the right, Efraim Karsh, a professor of Mediterranean studies at King’s College London and author of Fabricating Israeli History: The “New Historians” (1997), claimed that Morris “systematically falsifies evidence” in his work. Morris initially dismissed Karsh’s attacks as “a melange of distortions, half-truths, and plain lies,” but defended himself with greater specificity down the line.

From the left, the younger new historian Ilan Pappé, author most recently of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006), engaged him in vituperative exchanges. Reviewing Pappé’s A History of Modern Palestine (2004) for The New Republic, Morris recalled that they’d once walked together “in uneasy companionship.” He then charged that Pappé’s “appalling book” included “errors of a quantity and a quality that are not found in serious historiography.” The reason was that Pappé “consciously wrote history with an eye to serving political ends,” intent on “blackening the Zionists and whitening the Palestinians.”

The contretemps illustrates the treacherous landscape in which both men work…

In 1948, by contrast, Morris broadens the context in which the war should be judged, both psychologically and geographically. Ben-Gurion, he writes, “failed fully to appreciate the depth of the Arabs’ abhorrence of the Zionist-Jewish presence in Palestine … an abhorrence anchored in centuries of Islamic Judeophobia with deep religious and historical roots. The Jewish rejection of the Prophet Muhammad is embedded in the Qur’an and is etched in the psyche of those brought up on its suras.” Morris contends that the “1948 war, from the Arabs’ perspective, was a war of religion as much as, if not more than, a nationalist war over territory.”

That doesn’t reduce Morris’s admirable willingness to state facts as he sees them and apportion blame to both sides. “In truth,” he writes of the 1948 war, “the Jews committed far more atrocities than the Arabs and killed far more civilians and POW’s in deliberate acts of brutality.” On the other hand, “Zionist expulsionist thinking” was “at least in part a response to expulsionist, or murderous, thinking and behavior by Arabs and European Christians.”…

In his thoughtful, just-published A History of Histories, John Burrows, a professor of European thought at the University of Oxford, praises the community spirit among Clio’s devotees, first expressed by Polybius, who believed “that if he died before he completed his history, another historian would carry the subject on.”

Doubtless some peer would do the same for a departed Israeli historian. It’s equally clear that others would cheer the fact that the biased, manipulative so-and-so was gone. The past, historians say, is another country. Israeli history is another galaxy.

Romano teaches philosophy and media theory at the University of Pennsylvania.

See also Israel and the Palestinian territories (The Guardian UK.)

Einstein’s paradoxes

Albert Einstein famously rejected the offer of the presidency of Israel. About Einstein this writer, not Israel-friendly admittedly, was however right enough in 2003: 

Einstein is one of my favorite twentieth-century characters. He was remarkable, and I don’t mean only for his profound contributions to our understanding of the physical world. He was someone who drove authoritarians like J. Edgar Hoover mad. He was one of those rare souls, like George Orwell, who despite mistakes and flaws, consciously worked to direct his actions, and redirect them after missteps, by principles of decency, humanity, and rational thought. He never subscribed to menacing slogans like “My country, right or wrong” or “You’re either with us or against us.” Quite the opposite, he knew any country was capable of being wrong at times and did not deserve blind allegiance when it was.

Einstein’s was one of the most important names lent to the cause of Zionism. His name and visits and letters raised a great deal of money towards establishing universities and resettling European Jews suffering under violent anti-Semitism long before the founding of Israel.

But even in a cause so dear to his heart, Einstein never stopped thinking for himself. He not only opposed the establishment of a formal Israeli state–he was after all a great internationalist–but he always advocated treating the Arabic people of Palestine with generosity and understanding…

Einstein’s position on religion has been claimed in support by both theists and their adversaries. Just what that position was has emerged recently in that letter recently publicised in The Guardian: Childish superstition: Einstein’s letter makes view of religion relatively clear. (I have seen worse puns in a headline!)

Einstein penned the letter on January 3 1954 to the philosopher Eric Gutkind who had sent him a copy of his book Choose Life: The Biblical Call to Revolt. The letter went on public sale a year later and has remained in private hands ever since.

In the letter, he states: “The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this.”

Einstein, who was Jewish and who declined an offer to be the state of Israel’s second president, also rejected the idea that the Jews are God’s favoured people.

“For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything ‘chosen’ about them.”…

In his later years he referred to a “cosmic religious feeling” that permeated and sustained his scientific work. In 1954, a year before his death, he spoke of wishing to “experience the universe as a single cosmic whole”. He was also fond of using religious flourishes, in 1926 declaring that “He [God] does not throw dice” when referring to randomness thrown up by quantum theory.

His position on God has been widely misrepresented by people on both sides of the atheism/religion divide but he always resisted easy stereotyping on the subject.

“Like other great scientists he does not fit the boxes in which popular polemicists like to pigeonhole him,” said Brooke. “It is clear for example that he had respect for the religious values enshrined within Judaic and Christian traditions … but what he understood by religion was something far more subtle than what is usually meant by the word in popular discussion.”

Despite his categorical rejection of conventional religion, Brooke said that Einstein became angry when his views were appropriated by evangelists for atheism. He was offended by their lack of humility and once wrote. “The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.”

There is a follow-up by Andrew Brown in Comment is Free.

…Einstein did flay in this letter almost everything that Gutkind believed in. The claim that Jews were special seemed to him absurd; the civilised interpretation of the Bible, an artificial distortion of the text; even the claim the humans have free will had been exposed by Spinoza. But he didn’t regard these theological views as fundamental. He didn’t really think they interfered with the “striving to make life beautiful and noble,” and he meant those words. And it seems to me that if he really believed that a devout Jew – or any kind of devout believer – really shared his striving to make life beautiful and noble, he had not merely rid himself of religious belief. He had rid himself of belief in atheism too. This is a lack of faith really worth having.

I really do think I understand what Brown is saying there, and believe (?) it is probably a very fair account of Einstein’s position. Paradoxical, in short. But conservative or orthodox people of the Abrahamic faiths have too rarely tolerated paradox and uncertainty, and the same may be said of many atheists. The comments on Brown’s article provide plenty of examples.