I’m not sure what we do when partisans of one side dismiss the legitimacy of the other side out of hand.
Most observers who believe that creation of a Jewish state in Palestine resulted in the unfair dispossession of Palestinians tend to accept the proposition that Palestinians have the right to use violence in pursuit of a homeland. While these observers may not believe that HAMAS is an ideal or even an effective steward of Palestinian interests, they tend to take a dark view of Israeli security operations since, in their opinion, the most-legitimate option for Tel Aviv would be either to (A) eliminate settlements and retire to the Green Line, or (B) declare an end to the Jewish state and seek instead a unitary Israel. In other words, Israel’s is the Original Sin, and the Palestinians’ behavior, while regrettable, is at least partially defensible. It is for Israel, not the Palestinians, to make the meaningful sacrifices to achieve a viable peace.
According to this point-of-view, violence, including suicide bombing and attacks on Israeli population centers, is a legitimate form of resistance against colonial occupation by a people in duress (the Palestinians). By that same logic, HAMAS can almost never be “at fault” for starting another round of hostilities because it is, in fact, a representative of the aggrieved party. Indeed, HAMAS, while awful, is merely the inevitable cancer that Israel brought about through years of chain smoking (occupation and settlement-building). Israel’s steady march rightward and taste for settlement-building vindicate the view that it is a settler state in the mold of apartheid-era South Africa and Rhodesia.
This apologetic view of HAMAS also tends to downplay the group’s anti-Semitic rhetoric as entirely the result of misplaced grievance over the loss of land and dignity, not a genuine desire to kill Jews arising from some mass cultural, religious, or historical defect. The idea is that, were Israel more accommodating, there would be less outage, and therefore less tendency to vilify a whole people.
Most observers who favor Israel regard the Palestinians as an unfortunate minority that lost rightful claim to their land during a war fought for utterly cynical reasons by faithless neighbors who have proven to be equally as guilty of neglect of the Palestinian plight as Israel itself. Israel’s post-1948 conquest of territory is either valid on the face of it (because might makes right in a bad world), or because that territory was acquired through inherently self-legitimizing wars of self-defense. Britain, not Israel, was the original transgressor, but it is hardly productive to rehash such an old and difficult problem. We must accede to reality, and the reality is that Israel, like every other nation-state in the world today, has an ugly past in which some people were winners, and others losers. The Palestinians are therefore a sympathetic party, but are held to blame for failing, as a people, to accommodate the harsh reality in which they live. If they do not vote into office politicians willing to make the bitter concessions that history and fickle friends have forced on them, then they will pay the price, which is war.
This perspective takes each skirmish and subsequent escalation on its own merits. Here, HAMAS is to blame because immediate hostilities can be traced back to the murder of three Israeli teenagers. Whereas some claim that the murders were carried out by a splinter group not loyal to the original HAMAS, this view discounts that defense, either because guilt-by-association is an inherent hazard of terrorism, or because HAMAS’s claim to sovereignty makes it implicitly guilty of all violence carried out in the name of Palestinians even when it cannot enforce its own monopoly on violence. (This is a view of juridical legitimacy carried over from the Treaty of Westphalia in 1848, which contended that a prince who is accorded sovereignty must restrain his subjects from independently making war on his neighbors.) For persons who feel this way, Israel’s increasingly right-wing political tilt and settlement-building are rarely considered, let alone mentioned, and are, at best, regrettable.
Of course, no matter whose side you come down on, the better question is, “Okay, well how do we get out of this?” If you can’t accept the answer, “By swallowing a bitter pill,” then repeated rounds of mutual bombardment are all we’ll ever get until the Palestinians figure out how to defeat the Iron Dome or succeed in driving world opinion to the point that Israel is as much a pariah as South Africa. The only “out” for Israel is to devise a strategy that effectively amounts to nation-building in the Occupied Territories – one that may eventually lead to the conclusion that a two-state solution is functionally impossible given the natural geography of the region.
What we have here is essentially a frozen conflict in which the battle lines never seem to change. It’s as if the police (Israel) continually raid the same crack house (Occupied Territories) every week, seize all the guns, but never make any meaningful progress because they don’t have a community policing strategy. Meanwhile, the municipality itself (global community) is slowly coming to believe that drug sales and violence (terrorism) are a manifestation of social inequality and police brutality, not a reflection of the inherent values of one particular neighborhood (Palestinians). Israel has spent all of its money on a SWAT team without making very meaningful strides in the area of providing education and jobs. The Palestinians, meanwhile, have decided that, the police being what they are, there can be no hope of friendly, mutually enriching relationships. Therefore, drug dealers are tolerable neighbors – at least they’ve got guns to keep the police away.
For now, the Wall and the Iron Dome have together drastically reduced Israel’s inclination to compromise. Indeed, the Israeli right grows stronger by the day, leading to a measurable increase in the construction of settlements and the perpetuation of an occupation that stokes violent grievance. What are the Palestinian Territories but an economically inviable prison in which the only glorious and fruitful occupation is armed struggle?
