Why is the Israel-Palestine Conflict So Intractable? Part A

It's about mutually illegible narratives of "right" and "might" rooted in settler-colonialism on the one hand & national liberation on the other

Introduction

Below is an essay I wrote in late 2016, in the waning days of the Obama administration. I lightly updated it in early 2017, with tiny edits since. My next post will include an update on it, address criticisms (put your own in the comments!) of it, and deepen various points.

Here’s some more background and context:

This essay has a very specific purpose. It is aimed at explaining why the Israel-Palestine conflict is so intractable and at reckoning with the implications of that diagnosis for resolving the conflict. I wrote the essay for myself, to clarify matters to myself. Yet whenever the Israel-Palestine flares up, I share it with friends and colleagues. And they have widely found it to be insightful. Why did I never publish it? For four main reasons:

1. I am not an international relations or Israel-Palestine scholar and it would require heavy investment to gain academic credibility as either type of scholar given my CV. There are strong norms among academics about “staying in your lane,” and they are well-founded in the first instance. But there is also a big cost to deferring too much to these norms. This is why interdisciplinarity is often promoted and why much productive insight often comes from “intellectual arbitrage.” In any case, there is no point being a sociologist if one does not use sociology (and social science generally; much of what I use here is standard game theory) to reckon with social dynamics that profoundly affect you and your loved-ones. That’s why I wrote this. (NB. I have a lot of unpublished work written for similar reasons; any good social scientist does. How sad would it be if we practiced our craft solely to add lines on our CVs?)

2. Given the highly politicized nature of the topic, the road to publication for this essay has always seemed fraught. Never was this clearer than in the aftermath of petitions by my fellow sociologists that were distributed widely when Israel’s counterattack heated up in mid October (see here). Dismayed as I was by the simplicity and moral blindness of many of my fellow sociologists (and the silence of many other sociologists), I worked very hard to try and arrange some kind of forum where sociologists could discuss the issues. At this juncture, it seems I have failed. Moreover, whereas I have often been able to publish pieces in sociology journals that would not be accepted in other, relevant social science disciplines (e.g., anything my coauthors and I have published on financial markets like this), even that seems impossible in the case of an article about Israel-Palestine.

3. Since writing this essay, I have been of the mind that neither deeper appreciation for this conflict’s root causes nor the identification of fixes that require great moral courage and political risk is of much use in the political climate that has prevailed in Israel, Palestine, or the United States since 2017. Indeed, if in 2017, it seemed impossible to get Israeli Jewish and Palestinian Arab leaders to reckon with, accept, and even defer to each other’s narratives (or to get US and other global leaders to appreciate the need to make this happen), it seems more impossible than impossible today.

4. I simply have not had the time to develop the essay in a way that would meet scholarly standards, or even journalistic ones (no offense to journalists; I have great respect for many journalists, and I have little respect for many social science colleagues; but we academics do have stricter referencing standards). In particular, the essay doesn’t cite any past work; and indeed, there is a lot of very good, relevant research and writing. I just don’t have the time to mention all that work though (including a lot of great work I know I still need to read!), and this war hasn’t given me more time for that; to the contrary. Indeed, not only has this war diverted me from completing the book I’m writing on the invention and subsequent diffusion of the seven-day week, I am not even able to fully focus on the war and related matters given how I’ve been pulled into crisis management in my university. So I deeply and profusely apologize for the lack of referencing to relevant work. (I’ll try to add a partial reference list to Part B; please also feel free to add suggestions in the comments).

OK, so why am I posting the essay now? Well, since the Hamas massacre of October 7th, I’ve shared the essay with many colleagues and they have uniformly told me (with some useful feedback) that the essay is insightful. Such responses— for which I am grateful— are always the best indicators for me that I have something useful to offer. And so I’m now offering the essay to you too. That’s basically it. If you find it insightful too, great. If not, sorry for wasting your time. (But at least, you’re not looking at Twitter, right? And you paid a low low price!) And if you have comments, please offer them. (I hope there are not so many that I can’t respond to all of them)

As for why I think the essay is productive, I would offer two reasons. First, it usefully shifts the focus of the conversation, away from Who is right and who is wrong? to Why is this conflict so intractable? The latter question is both more in the sociologist’s wheelhouse (we have no special expertise in ethics) and it more readily lends itself to practical solutions. While the “political hobbyists” who dominate our digital and physical public squares (not to mention the front of many classrooms) can indulge in fantasies about reversing history, responsible political leaders have to work with the world as it is and craft viable solutions through fraught coalition-building and compromise.

Another reason I think the essay is valuable right now is that it includes an implicit critique of the “settler colonialist” framework as it has been applied by many activists (including academics) to Israel-Palestine. Many such critiques have been offered since October 7th. However, the one I offer here is distinct. In particular, I argue that the settler-colonialist framework is very useful for capturing important dynamics in the history of Israel/Palestine over the past century or two, and that it’s especially important for understanding a) the way that Palestinians and their supporters around the world understand that history; and b) how and why they act today. The problem though is that they apply that framework in highly simplistic and uncritical ways (as I’ll discuss in Part B) and that (as I discuss in Part A) it’s not the only framework that captures important aspect of the events. In fact, the very opposite framework— “national liberation”— also works very well (and is the narrative most Jews fervently believe in and enact through their actions).

In Part B, I will add an update and commentary that’s informed by conversations and events over the past six years and the last month in particular. I will also try to incorporate any commentary you offer on Part A.

But even before we get to Part B, here are three final notes of context I’ve found it useful to offer when discussing the essay:

1. The essay uses the word “might” or “strength” in a way that sometimes surprises readers. In particular, what I mean (deriving from the sociology of conflict; see Roger Gould’s work on feuding in Corsica, here & here) is social power. This can be boiled down to the answer to the following questions: a) If you are threatened, how many others can you call upon to protect and fight for you? b) If you are subject to long-term oppression &/or suffering, how many others can you call upon to sustain you during that dark time? This is a distinct form of power from what we conventionally think power means— e.g., control of (even to the point of monopoly) over financial capital or the deployment of violence. I will discuss the roles of these conventional sources of power in Part B.

2. The essay undoubtedly reflects my biases, two of which I am aware and struggle to reckon with and correct for. The first is that I am an observant Jew with deep, longstanding ties to Israel. I have a bit of an unusual background, in that I have spent serious time (and have longstanding ties) with both religious and nonreligious Jews, liberal and conservative Jews, and nationalist (in the Zionist sense) and non-nationalist Jews. I am also conversant with niche-y, small communities of Jews that defy all the above. The Jewish narrative I summarize here is essentially the one I believe in; I would also argue it’s the consensus narrative. But almost any Jew I know would dispute that contention to one degree or another (or dispute the fact that the consensus is important). And of course, if one should be somewhat skeptical that I’m capable of accurately rendering the consensus Jewish narrative, one should be even more skeptical about my capacity for faithfully rendering the Palestinian narrative. I have done my best to characterize the Palestinian narrative as best as I understand it (incorporating feedback from colleagues and friends who are closer to it, but certainly not as much feedback as I would like) and present it as compellingly as possible. But of course, I can’t help but have failed to one degree or another. Note well: In both cases, the presented narratives are (to my best understanding) fully factual. But even if I’ve succeeded in that regard, it is no failsafe. A lot of mischief can be done simply by shading facts in one way or another. And indeed, a great deal of mischief is done by people on each “side” who go well beyond what can be sustained by facts (especially when raising doubt about the other side’s narrative). So: caveat lector!

3. The essay focuses largely on the heart of the conflict— Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs— but largely ignores the roles played by the larger region. In particular, it says little about the roles viz the conflict played by Sunni Arab states and societies, and it says nothing about Iran and its allies. I will address this a bit in Part B. But I would say for now that this reflects a long-term bias of mine that was on full display in 2017, as the Obama administration was fading and the Trump administration (of which I was terrified, in part for how it encouraged Israeli nationalism; see here) was aborning. In particular, those on the “left” like me have long been skeptical of attempts to solve the larger conflict between Israel and the Arab and Muslim worlds via “separate peace” deals with Arab and Muslim states. We have also tended to downplay the threat from Iran, and to be more sanguine about the prospects for democracy in the Arab and Muslim worlds. I now regard each of these tendencies of mine as being rooted in good moral instincts but dangerous wishful thinking, from a political standpoint. Especially in light of Hamas’s invasion of October 7th, the worldwide sympathy it evoked for the mass-murder, sadistic torture, and kidnapping of civilians, and the fact that Hamas is part of an Iranian-led axis that includes a powerful militia dominating two failed states to Israel’s north (i.e., Hezbollah), any practical strategy towards resolving the conflict must have both local and regional components. Indeed, I regard much left-leaning commentary after October 7th to be so willfully naïve as to be dangerous; one common denominator of this commentary (see e.g., here) is that it ignores the regional context.

Now, without further ado (!!), here’s that essay:

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The Politically Incorrect Questions That Stymie the Two State Solution

Ezra W. Zuckerman Sivan

January 22, 2017

In his valedictory address on the Israel-Palestine conflict on December 28, John Kerry was right about several important things: that large numbers of both Palestinians and Israelis express support for a two state solution in opinion polls; that the general parameters of a deal have long been in place, and that Israeli settlements make that solution less likely by preventing contiguity for a would-be Palestinian state. But he was also right that the removal of the settlements would not end the conflict, and that no progress is on the horizon given the level of “mistrust” between the two sides.

But if mistrust is the root of the problem, why is the trust level so low in this particular conflict, such that it seems intractable after so many years of conflict?   Put in terms of game theory, the question is: Why it is so hard for the two parties to credibly commit to compromise?    

The Four Questions

We can get to the problem most readily if we ponder four important if “politically incorrect” questions that Israelis and Palestinians are not asked in polls (or at least not in these particular formats):

a.     The fantasy question: If your people could have one nation-state in all of mandatory Palestine (i.e., from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean), and the other people was a small, powerless minority, would you prefer such an outcome to a two-state solution?

b.     The opponent’s fantasy question: Do you think the other people would prefer to have one nation-state in all of mandatory Palestine with the other people a small, powerless minority, to a two state solution?

c.     The question of right: Do you believe that your people’s claim to all of mandatory Palestine is more meritorious than the other people's claim?

d.     The question of might: Think of all the things that make your people a “strong nation." Does your people have these strengths in greater abundance than the other people?

Anyone who knows the conflict well knows that if forced to answer honestly, the majority on each side of the conflict would answer affirmatively to all four of these questions.  And given that, public proclamations in favor of the two-state solution breed suspicion rather than credibility.  Let’s dig deeper and see why.

The Fantasy Questions

For the first two questions, just look at the maps that each side uses in its schools: you will rarely find the ‘green line’ (1949 armistice lines) on the Israeli side and never on the Palestinian side.  In short, each side knows that both sides define their homeland as consisting of all of mandatory Palestine (at least).  They also know that the other people is not part of their national narrative except as a problem to be solved.  And even if they are aware of some on their own side who truly seem to prefer sharing the land, they suspect that this minority of doves is even smaller and weaker on the other side. 

On its own, the fact that majorities on each side answer affirmatively to these “fantasy” questions does not mean compromise is impossible.  After all, compromise by definition means that neither side gets all of what it wants.  But other conditions need to be in place as well for two parties to credibly commit to compromise.  First, it helps greatly if each side believes there is at least some merit to the other side’s position.  This lends credibility to a commitment to compromise because then each side knows that the other side can live with a deal, and it can answer various constituencies who might call it into account for violating avowed principles.  By contrast, if they are committed to the idea that the other side is morally repugnant, this makes a deal much harder to manage. 

Second, it helps greatly if each side sees the other as strong.  That way, even if it is distasteful for a side to do a deal, it may decide it must bite the bullet.  Moreover, each side’s strength lends credibility to the other side’s claim to be willing to compromise: I can believe them when they say they are giving up their fantasy because we both know that I am strong and they are yielding to that strength.  And vice versa.   

But these conditions are not in place when it comes to Israel-Palestine.  To the contrary.  Each side is largely (and willfully) ignorant of the other’s national narrative, and they are especially ignorant of how the inculcation of these narratives instill in each people the sense that they are strong nations with meritorious claims.  Moreover, while each side has a surface understanding of the other’s narrative, the very features of each narrative that convince each side that their claim (to the entire land) is meritorious and that their nation is strong are precisely the features that suggest to the other side that its opponent is a weak nation with an illegitimate claim.  To see why, we need to review those national narratives, and see how they appear through the prism of the other narrative.

How the Narratives Reinforce Misconceptions of Right and Might

The Jewish conception of nationhood was forged in the aftermath of the Babylonian destruction of Solomon’s temple in 586 BCE and the subsequent exile. It centers on a yearning for renewed sovereignty (partly regained over the next few centuries but then lost again with the Roman destruction of the second temple in 70 CE and the quashing of the Bar Kochba revolt in 135) over a territory that extends over the area of Jewish settlement described in the Hebrew Bible, which is roughly coincident with mandatory Palestine.  But ever since the Babylonian exile (with foreshadowing in the biblical Exodus from Egypt) and especially after the destruction of the second temple, Jewish national identity has not required sovereignty over, or even significant settlement in, the land to sustain itself. What sustained Jewish nationhood--  perhaps especially after the rabbinic revolution that reorganized religious practice around the synagogue and house of study and away from the sacrificial service in the now-destroyed temple-- were social regulations that made Jews a separate ethnicity wherever they resided, as well as shared linguistic, cultural and religious traditions. Impressively, this strategy provided Jews with the wherewithal to survive two thousand years with no political power; and, more recently, an attempted genocide that slaughtered a third of the Jewish people and turned another third into refugees.  Almost no Jew on the planet today lives within fifty miles of where his or her great-grandparents lived.  But beyond survival across the globe, the sense of nationhood and common linguistic and cultural heritage cultivated over the millennia provided the basis for the Zionist movement’s ingathering of many of those refugees into a vibrant modern nation-state in its ancient homeland. 

By contrast, the Palestinian conception of nationhood is rooted in the connection between a people and the land upon which they lived and developed a shared language and culture for centuries leading up to the decline of empires and the onset of the doctrine of self-determination and the nation-state. That national identity is defined by the somewhat arbitrary consequences of imperial border decisions made during WWI (which were in turn loosely based on imperial demarcations going back thousands of years), but these borders acquired significance since they set the parameters for a people—who previously had local, tribal self-conceptions and broad religious ones (anchored in their proximity to the holy sites of Christianity and Islam)-- to join together in a common struggle against foreigners who wished to impose alien languages and culture on the land.  Just as there were no Americans until colonists banded together to wage a common struggle against Britain, it is natural that there were no Palestinians until—over the course of the twentieth century-- the Christian and Muslim Arabs living within the boundaries of mandatory Palestine (and those exiled from it by wars with Israel) coalesced around a struggle for self-determination against the British Empire, the Zionist Movement, and Israel. 

Given these two national narratives, it becomes clear why each side answers the question of right in the affirmative.  For Jews, this is a land that was taken from them, and Arabs’ numeric majority through the early twentieth century stemmed merely from the past military strength of Babylonian, Hellenistic, Roman, Muslim and Christian conquerors, each of which limited Jewish power and settlement.  But might does not make right.  It is notable that this claim earns support from the fact that the world’s largest and most influential religion—Christianity—itself has a major investment in the Jewish national narrative, at least through the lifetime of Jesus and his followers.  Given his Southern Baptist upbringing, Bill Clinton could not believe his ears when Yasir Arafat insisted to him that there had never been a temple in Jerusalem.  The temple is featured in the New Testament after all.  Palestinians lose tremendous credibility in such corners when they insist that there is no Jewish history on the land: the menorah on the Arch of Titus in the Rome puts the lie to that.  Such denial of history seems to reflect some degree of insecurity among Palestinians in their contention that the Jews have no claim to the land.

But the Palestinians have no shortage of sympathizers who are convinced that right is on their side, and it is the Zionists who confuse might with right.  Sympathy for the Palestinian narrative emerges from the fact that this narrative resonates with every story of an indigenous movement throwing off a colonial yoke in a bid for self-determination. By contrast, Israel’s national narrative excites doubt and distress among those who reasonably see the doctrine of self-determination as a crucial bulwark against the specter of colonial tyranny: Whoever heard of a people reclaiming sovereignty over a land after two thousand years?  How can we even say the ‘Jews’ of today are the same people as in Roman times? If Jews can make such claims then what is to stop some group from calling themselves the Celts and claiming England? Self-determination means nothing if outsiders can come in and usurp an indigenous people’s rights!  Meanwhile, Israelis often seem insecure about these issues themselves in ways that echo the suppression of national struggles by colonial settler movements, as in South Africa and Algeria.  Recall for instance how Israel harshly put down the first Palestinian “intifada” (uprising in the West Bank and Gaza, from 1987-1991).  This was in part a response to violence, but it also included jailing people for making Palestinian flags and engaging in other purely symbolic nationalist actions.  Note also how the “post-Zionist” movement on the Israeli left largely refrains from asserting that Jews have a claim to the land based on its history. 

So each side then has good reason to think of its claim as meritorious—for each, it is a simple matter of “who was here first?”  Jews confidently assert that they were first—because they maintain we should start with the first moments of history that matter today (the Second Temple period, from which both rabbinic Judaism and Christianity spring).  And Palestinians assert that they were first—because they say we should start with the peoples that lived on a given land at the onset of the idea of the nation-state.  Each side generally expresses confidence in its position, but it seems that each side also has a sense that good arguments can be made for the other side.  And perhaps this is because there is some awareness that the whole idea of a “nation” having special rights to a land, with minorities necessarily consigned to second-class status from the standpoint of culture and symbolism, is a mixed bag from a moral standpoint.  So perhaps the affirmative answers to the question of right can be overcome on the way to a compromise.  That is, perhaps both sides can come to recognize that there is merit on both sides.

But now let’s turn to the question of might, and consider how each national narrative causes the other side to misperceive the other as weak.  For their part, Israelis see Palestinians as weak both because they do not seem to form a coherent nation and because their leadership has tended to make self-defeating decisions rather than the pragmatic ones that were key to Israel’s success. The first issue is that their claim to nationhood is based solely on the experience of tribal clans who happened to live in the same territory defined by imperial powers.  In the Jewish conception, this is a flimsy basis for nationhood.  The essential argument is as follows: A relatively small majority of Arabs may have been living on the land, but this is just a consequence of the fact that Jews had been exiled from their land.  Moreover, Palestinians did not have national consciousness till very recently (especially compared with Jews), and many of them still do not.  And given that the distinction between Palestinians and neighboring Arab nations is relatively arbitrary, (and they are split among different subgroups—Gazans, West Bankers, Israeli Arabs, East Bankers, and refugees throughout the Arab world and beyond) they do not seem to form a coherent, distinctive collectivity. It seems that if we push them hard enough, they will give up on their pretensions to national identity and assume a more general Arab or Muslim identity, joining with us as a minority with no national aspirations or with other Arab states.  After all, so many were willing to pick up and leave during the war of independence, and the West Bankers were happy as Jordanians from 1948 to 1967.  That’s because they could just as easily live in a neighboring Arab state and identify with it.  Their commitment to being Palestinians is weak!

This is compounded by the second source of apparent Palestinian weakness, the charge that their leadership (in the words of the late Israeli statesman Abba Eban) “never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”  In particular, Israelis lambaste the Palestinian leadership for failing to take up the opportunity afforded 1947 partition plan, which would have created a Palestinian state.  They think the reason is straightforward and ominous: that Arabs generally cannot tolerate a Jewish state, and that if the Arabs had won the war, Jews would have been massacred wholesale.  What’s more, since the Palestinians did not have a coherent national identity or a strong leadership, the suspicion is that the Arab states participating in the war would have carved up the territory and there would never have been an independent Palestine.  The proof, they say, is that between 1948 and 1967, Jordan ruled over the West Bank (as well as the Old City of Jerusalem, which was supposed to have been an international city) and Palestinians did not assert national rights. 

But a deeper understanding of the Palestinian national narrative puts a different spin on these charges.  First, while it is true that there was no coherent Palestinian national identity prior to the British mandate, and it was still aborning in 1948, it certainly became coherent by the time of the first Intifada.  As noted, it is perfectly natural for a national identity to emerge through struggle with a colonial and/or rival power.  Were we to eliminate as nations all peoples whose national consciousness emerged in this fashion, we would have very few left.  Meanwhile, Palestinian rejection of the partition plan is unsurprising once one recognizes that the Zionists (quite reasonably) saw themselves as gaining something while the Palestinians (quite reasonably) saw themselves as losing something.  One of the great insights of psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky is that people tend to be conservative when faced with the prospect of a gain and they tend to act recklessly when faced with the prospect of a loss.  For the Zionist leadership, accepting the partition plan meant locking in a gain—with the possibility of gaining even more should they win the expected war.  In the case of the Palestinians, they were staring at a great loss.  The problem was social as much as it was psychological: there would now be thousands of Palestinians who would have to define their land as part of a Jewish state rather than an Arab one.  How would they account for this loss to one another and to the Arab world more generally?

And note now how what appears to be a Jewish strength—the pragmatic decision to accept the partition plan, looks like weakness to Palestinians.  Whereas Palestinians define themselves in terms of their connection to mandatory Palestine, the Jewish connection to the land seems more tenuous.  The essential argument is as follows: The vast majority of Jews are recent arrivals in the land.  And Jews—including many Israelis— are successful in many western countries.  They seem to fit in well there in part because they are really a religion rather than a nation, and so they identify with the nations in which they live.  Nations, after all, emerge in a particular territory based on the shared culture of the people who live there.  So it seems that if we push them hard enough (by causing human suffering and by causing Israel to be branded as an apartheid state), they will give up and go back to the West where they came from.  Their commitment to the land is weak and they can’t take the heat!  I mean, the founder of Zionism was willing to consider resettling Jews in Uganda!  This is why they were willing to give up so much of the land in 1947, and it’s also why they were willing to pull out of Sinai, southern Lebanon, and Gaza!

The Jewish response to this is that they grasped at the partition plan since it was their only chance, especially in view of the need to resettle Jewish refugees of the Holocaust.  Moreover, Jews (apart from a tiny minority) were generally untroubled by returning the aforementioned territories because they were never part of the historic land of Israel. Also, while some Jews (the Reform movement, in particular) have seen themselves in purely religious terms, the term religion is in fact foreign to Jewish culture (as is “Judaism”), which generally conceives of Jewish peoplehood as an amalgam of ethnicity and religion. Finally, Jews understood that those territories were needed temporarily as security buffers.  But viewed through the prism of the Palestinian narrative, such explanations seem dubious and instead seem to reflect the weakness of the Jewish connection to the land they have colonized. 

The Temple Mount as Microcosm

To sharpen the above points, consider how the Temple Mount/Haram Al-Sharif and the Holocaust stand as microcosms of the ways the two narratives cause each side to misunderstand the other’s claims and strength. 

Ponder an amazing fact: Even though the Temple has formed the focus of Jewish yearning for two thousand years, Israel has not removed Al Aqsa mosque from the Temple Mount and replaced it with a third temple.  This must be mystifying to anyone who does not know Judaism well, and especially to the Palestinians and their sympathizers given how the Palestinian narrative makes them suspicious of the Zionist narrative.  The key thing to appreciate is that even the vast majority of religious Jews do not want to build a third temple at the moment.  This is because a central doctrine of the rabbinic revolution that remade Judaism in the wake of the destruction of the temple is that the temple cannot be rebuilt until the messiah comes.  Moreover, perhaps the most influential rabbi since Moses—Moses Maimonides (1135-1204)—famously argued that the sacrificial service had been superseded by synagogue prayer.  This issue has never been resolved, and there is no religious hierarchy by which to resolve it.  Paradoxically then, the presence of a mosque on temple mount is something of a blessing for Jews—it keeps them from having to face a major crisis.  Indeed, given how much difficulty Israel has in handling such minor issues of the rights of women at the Western Wall, one can only imagine the bitter fighting that would ensue were Israel forced to confront the question of how to build and run a temple.   Here’s the paradox: while Jews generally insist on the centrality of the Temple to their past and to their future, and this leads the Israeli government to insist on sovereignty over Temple Mount and rights of access for Jews, they nonetheless prefer the status quo since synagogue prayer remains the center of the Jewish religion as it has been since the rabbinic revolution.  From the standpoint of the Jewish religion, a sovereign Jewish state has changed little.  

But from the Palestinians’ standpoint, the Israeli approach to Haram el Sharif is hypocritical and infuriating. Israel claims it is the most sacred site of Judaism.  But it doesn’t act like it is so important! Perhaps it is just as fictional as the larger Jewish claim to the land. But these fictions have been very dangerous to us—the Jews tend to act aggressively in order to cover their insecurity!  So why should we believe them when they say they will maintain the status quo?  The fear that Israel might make a move on Al Aqsa led to the second intifada in 2000 and was an impetus for the wave of stabbing attacks in 2015.  Overall, the contestation over Temple Mount/Haram-Al-Sharif reinforces the Palestinian sense that Israel threatens them with its fantasies but is ultimately disconnected from the land, and this makes it weak.  The only thing that really seems to preserve the status quo is a show of deadly force.

The Holocaust as Microcosm

The Holocaust also serves to undermine mutual appreciation of right and might due to the way it gets refracted through the two narratives.  From the Jewish point of view, the failure of the Western powers to prevent the Holocaust reinforced the merit of the Zionist argument that Jews need a state of their own.  And it seems quite likely that were it not for the Holocaust, the United Nations would not have approved the creation of a Jewish state.  However, the Jewish view is that the Holocaust merely clinched the argument for a Jewish state for a reluctant world.  In fact, however, the argument was already strong prior to the Holocaust. 

From the Palestinian point of view, this all seems highly dubious.  If the Jewish claim were so strong prior the Holocaust, why does the Holocaust seem to come up all the time?  This suggests their claim is weak!  After all, this argument certainly does not provide a basis for locating the Jewish state in Palestine—if the Germans are responsible, the Jewish state should be in Europe!  More generally, reliance on the Holocaust as the basis for the Jewish claim reinforces the sense that the Jewish claim to the land is flimsy.  And of course another source of infuriation for the Palestinians is the Jewish attempt to assert the moral high ground as being the world’s greatest victims. 

Implications for Compromise

So despite what they may say publicly, each people (a) prefers to have the whole land; (b) suspects the other would prefer to have the whole land; (c) thinks it has a stronger claim to the entire land; and (d) perceives the other side as weak. 

In this context, it is unsurprising that public statements supporting compromise seem like cheap talk to the other side.  Think about it.  Imagine you traveled the planet and you came across a situation where two groups dispute a piece of territory.  And imagine that each group’s private answers to the four questions were in the affirmative.  It is obvious what you would expect: unending conflict due to the inability to make a credible commitment to compromise.  Any move towards compromise looks either like a lie or weakness to the other side. 

The developments of the past month suggest that the world has still not grasped how difficult the problem is to solve.  UN Security Council resolution 2334 certainly does not help.  The resolution is right to identify Israeli settlements in the West Bank as a problem but it does not evince an appreciation that the root of the conflict centers on competing meritorious claims to the entire land.  Moreover, it stokes Israeli fears by describing the Old City of Jerusalem—which was to be internationalized under the 1947 partition plan rather than part of either the Jewish or Palestinian state—as part of “Occupied Palestine.” This hints at a potential change in the legal status quo. If there is any territory that neither side is unwilling to compromise on, it is the Old City, and especially the Temple Mount/Haram-al-Sharif.  The Obama Administration knew this very well, so it is mystifying that they let this through.  It is also worth bearing in mind that Jews were barred access to the Old City from 1949 to 1967, and that the Jordanians allowed Jewish holy sites to be desecrated.  Israel can reasonably claim it has been a good steward of the holy sites of all three religions, and Israelis have good reasons to be terrified of the prospect that the UN has shifted its position.  Kerry said in his valedictory speech that nothing had changed, but then why did the resolution pass with that problematic language?

On the other hand, there was a positive change in Kerry’s speech, one that reflects a significant achievement of Netanyahu’s – the recognition that there can be no final agreement unless the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state.  Despite what Kerry said in his speech, this is not in fact the traditional American position, and it certainly is a departure from Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech, in which he stoked Israeli fears by rooting Israel’s right to exist in the Holocaust.  In this context, the shift in American posture (undoubtedly to be affirmed by the Trump Administration) is a productive shift because it begins to address the tensions over the question of right: Each nation does in fact have a meritorious claim to the entire land, and each side needs to clearly recognize this.  What is unclear is who has a more meritorious claim, and this will never be clear because there is simply no independent moral basis to adjudicate the rival claims of “we were here first.”  Who can say who has more rights to a land—a people who lived on the land for hundreds of years, or one that had been exiled form it thousands of years before?  The tragedy is that both claims are meritorious.  And until the parties and the rest of the world recognize that it is possible for two nations to have “equally” meritorious claims to the same land, the impasse cannot be broken.

Breaking the Impasse

What would it mean to break the impasse?  Imagine the following fantasy:

The leadership of each nation, represented by broad leadership teams with democratic mandates and strong nationalist credentials, stands together in Jerusalem in front of their peoples and the world and issue a joint declaration of mutual recognition.  This declaration of mutual recognition involves a clear, unambiguous recognition of the merit of the other nation’s claim to the entire land.  The Palestinian leader describes the land as the historic Jewish homeland, one from which Jews were exiled many years ago and where the temple was the center of Jewish life.  The Jewish leader describes the land as the homeland of a Palestinian Arab nation, one that has distinctive traditions and connections to the land and which suffered from imperialism and from a struggle with another nation claiming the same land.  The leaders from each nation must be able to articulate why the other nation’s claim is meritorious and that only God can say which claim is more meritorious.  And they must each also say that since (a) each recognizes the merit of the other’s claim to the entire land, but (b) the entire land cannot be the nation-state of two nations at once, a pragmatic two-state solution must be forged.  Under this solution, members of each nation will have certain rights in the entire land but sovereignty will be split into a Jewish state and a Palestinian state. Finally, these declarations must be backed by concrete actions that are costly for each side to take and which are consistent with their intent to sacrifice in the name of a pragmatic compromise.   

Unfortunately, it does not seem like there is leadership on either side today that is capable of taking such a joint initiative.  On the Palestinian side, leadership is divided between an undemocratic and corrupt governing clique on the West Bank and a Hamas government in Gaza that openly seeks the destruction of the Jewish state.  Meanwhile, any deal must gain the support of Palestinian refugees and others living throughout the world, and it is not clear how they can gain proper representation.  Moreover, having been told for two generations that they deserve to return to their homes in what is now Israel, they have everything to lose from a deal and little to gain. 

And the problem in Israel is that the settlements undermine the credibility of Israel’s claims to be willing to compromise.  Indeed, whether or not Kerry is right that the settler movement (which is uninterested in compromise on terms that Palestinians would ever accept) is driving Israeli policy, Israelis need to understand why it appears that way to Palestinians and the rest of the world.  Especially given Israelis’ affirmative private answers to the four questions, it is hard to believe that settlements would ever removed.  After all, the West Bank is within the historic land of Israel.  More generally, never in the history of the nation-state has such a state willingly given up territory it regards as part of its national patrimony. The rest of the world senses that this makes the settlements a major bone in the neck of compromise, even if some Israelis genuinely do not believe this. 

Given these challenges, it is also hard to be sanguine about the possibility that the Trump Administration will make any progress.  There is nothing about Trump, or his son-in-law Jared Kushner (whose only apparent qualification for being tapped to address the Israel-Palestine conflict is that he is Jewish) that suggests that they understand what is at the root of the problem or what is needed to solve it.  What is needed from any third-party mediator is to recognize that fundamentally, each side is meritorious and strong, and that the problem is getting each other to realize this and to acknowledge it openly.  This is a very subtle and delicate truth to embrace, and these are not adjectives that attach themselves easily to Trump or his associates.

A more basic worry is that like many “right-wing” supporters of Israel (see e.g., Moshe Yaalon’s recent essay “How to Build Middle East Peace”), the Trump team seems to believe that since the Palestinians are at fault for rejecting the Jewish connection to the land, and since there can be no resolution under those conditions, this is the root of the problem.  In fact, this is a basic mistake in logic.  The fact that one party to a relationship is to blame does not mean that the other party is not also to blame.  If a complicated dance between two partners is executed well, we can conclude that both partners were up to the task: It takes two to tango.  But it only takes one bad partner to ruin a dance.  And if both dancers are bad, one can be sure that each side will say that only the other was to blame.

So it would be foolish to expect progress anytime soon.  In the long run, however, it would be helpful to be clearer about what is at the root of the problem and what it would take to eliminate it.  In order to be realistic, it will help to get in touch with the fantasies that drive the conflict, and the fantasy—sketched above-- that could help to end it.

It would also be helpful if the rest of the world developed appropriate expectations for this conflict.  Resolution cannot come from pretending that the root of the problem is the need to withdraw to the 1949 armistice lines.  Rather, the root of the problem is the need to grapple with two national narratives that are each compelling in their own terms, but whose very principles deny the other.  It would also help if the world were to recognize that the fundamental impossibility of saying who is right reflects a larger problem with the nation-state itself.  After all, the very same issues recur throughout the world in different forms.  And so, if the nation-state system is to be taken forward in a way that minimizes conflict (and no alternative to this system is in the offing), we will need to learn to grapple with the problem each of the two ideas embraced so strongly by the two sides of this conflict—(a) that “nations” have certain rights that other groups of humans do not have; and (b) that the people who happen to have been living on a land at a particular point in time have rights that nonresidents do not have—are reasonable principles to a point, but are problematic if taken too far.  In the end, adulthood is about grappling with competing principles that are not fully reconcilable, and learning to live with them.  It is time for us to be honest about that and to grow up.  Tragically, there are no honest grown-ups anywhere in sight.