They won’t like hearing it, but the loudest supporters of both sides of the Israel/Palestine conflict are misguided. The struggle is not an existential clash of civilizations, competing nationalisms or religious fundamentalism vs. liberal democracy. Even comparative devastation — horrific, albeit asymmetrical, what some have called a competitive “Olympics of suffering” — is not the key issue.
At the risk of being unduly reductive, this struggle is one of territory; literally, the soil — the soil of homeland, not just dirt. From the perspective of 30,000 feet and 3,000 years of history, no one has an exclusive claim to the Holy Land.
Since the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea was at the crossroads of empires, it has always been a strife-torn neighborhood. Stripped of current incendiary rhetoric, the historical conflict is a turf battle over real estate. The Book of Deuteronomy says the struggle began when formerly enslaved Hebrews led by Joshua arrived from Egypt and fought the Canaanites.
Formal, prior nationhood is often cited as a contemporary claim. But each tribe in the land — Jews and pagans — had their petty kings and dynasties that rose and fell, both before and after Israelites arrived.
In following millennia, the contested land was never an empty “land without a people.” There were indigenous Israelites, Judeans, Idumeans, Samaritans, Phoenicians, Philistines, etc. Each tribe made divine claims to the land. All built temples and shrines and made sacrifices.
The Israelites believed the Hebrew God gave the land to them, building two temples to establish their title. Thus, West Bank settlers today claim the Torah is their divine “deed.” This mirrors Osama bin Laden’s resurfaced claim that Allah willed the land to Muslims, who built the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa to cement their claim.
Jews ruled parts of the land for more than 1,000 years. Then, after the Greek and Roman periods, the Arabs and later Ottoman Muslims ruled it for 1,300 years. Two failed revolts against Rome, the Muslim conquest and the Crusades reduced but never erased Jewish presence in Israel.
With Zionism’s late-19th-century emergence, Jewish “pioneers” began trickling in from Eastern Europe, often buying land from absentee Ottoman landowners. Jewish philanthropists like the Montefiores and Rothschilds financed some purchases. Understandably, by the early 20th century, fear of displacement kindled Palestinian nationalism, anti-Jewish ethnic strife and anti-colonialism — sometimes violently.
Yet, on reflection, the issue is not superior divine claim or historical tenure. Absent an equitable territorial-sharing consensus or prospect, the issue has become one of military might.
The Palestinian relationship with Nazi Germany explains some of the Jewish animus. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who had incited the 1929 antisemitic Hebron massacre and the 1936 Arab Revolt, visited Berlin during World War II and supported Hitler. Palestinians did not build Nazi gas chambers, but they partially paid the price for them in the 1948 war, battling Jewish concentration camp survivors wanting a haven.
The 1948 Israeli/Arab fighting saw massacres on both sides (trading atrocities is unhelpful here). Jews drove hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes and villages; more were displaced after the Six Day War. After these wars, the leaders of Muslim-majority nations expelled Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews from their age-old homes in North African and Middle Eastern countries. These homeless Jews also sought refuge in Israel.
The answer seems to be a shared land agreement. Sadly, a definitive territorial settlement now appears politically impossible for both sides.
For a workable two-state solution, the West Bank portion of any Palestinian state would have to roughly comprise the pre-1967 Green Line division, including East Jerusalem. Most of the hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers (and voters) on this territory, some now engaged in a murderous terror campaign against their Palestinian neighbors, would have to leave — a nonstarter for any elected Israeli government.
For the Palestinians, any two-state territorial agreement would have to be recognized and final. It could not be an irredentist “first stage” in reclaiming all the pre-1948 Mandatory Palestine, “from the river to the sea.” Militant Palestinian nationalists would reject this. Internecine struggle with moderates, perhaps a civil war, could follow. The Palestinian Authority is now widely acknowledged as sclerotic, corrupt and incompetent. Who would manage this strife?
The next stage in such an imagined solution requires a complete revisioning of region governance. Clearly, no constituency for either concession presently exists.
So where does that leave Jews and Muslims in the United States? Will we be driven into crude tribalism, forced to root for our respective “sides” as spectators, or in the streets or on campuses, with most Jews supporting Israel and most Muslim and Arab-Americans supporting the Palestinian cause? Each without acknowledging the other’s pain and loss, except perfunctorily, in passing, while making our argument?
Or can we convince more strident American voices on each side to lower the rhetoric and advocate for a more even-handed approach to an eventual territorial settlement?
Ultimately, we need a resolution involving peaceful land sharing. The cost of failure is incalculable, and success would mean a lasting peace for Israel.
With a comprehensive settlement, even now-desolate Gaza has viable economic potential as part of a Palestinian state. Some fertile, richly cultivated acreage exists there. A major infrastructure effort, including new high-rise public housing and sewage treatments plants, could provide much-needed jobs, eventually closing refugee camps.
Gaza once had luxury beachfront hotels. Beachfront building and rebuilding could create a viable tourist industry. Even the surviving, vaunted Hamas tunnels could become tourist attractions, like those in Cu Chi in Vietnam.
Gaza doesn’t have to be “an open-air prison.” Although it could take decades, Palestinian brain power, with adequate outside help, could turn Gaza into a Mediterranean Singapore.
Mark I. Pinsky is a journalist and the author of seven nonfiction books, including “A Jew Among the Evangelicals: A Guide for the Perplexed.”