Against History

As the violence grinds on in Gaza, attention has inevitably turned to the wider context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For Israel's defenders, the desire to place Hamas's attack in its historic setting is an insult to the memory of the victims. This refusal to historicize has ironically been prominent among some historians. You might expect this from those who make a good living writing for the Tory press, but it has been salutary to see such impeccable liberal grandees as Simon Schama, who was famously scathing about the "rhetorical adrenaline" of the French Revolution, riding the wave of hysteria. One reason for the hyperbole is that any broadening of the discourse immediately reveals the asymmetry of the historic relationship. It also reveals the bankruptcy of the official position of the US and other Western states, obliged to back to the hilt an Israeli government that they despise and a two-state "solution" that has been revealed as nothing more than a fig-leaf for the continuing ethnic cleansing of the West Bank and now Gaza. This has raised the rhetorical stakes, requiring the "war" to be presented in Manichean terms and the murder of Palestinian civilians to be marginalised by quibbling about whose ordinance did what damage and whether casualty numbers are trustworthy.

It has also resulted in liberals dismissing the history of the conflict with what amounts to "It's complicated", insisting that the struggle between indigenous and colonist cannot be resolved because no people has a better claim to a land than another so we might as well accept the status quo. But the very idea that indigenous and colonist are distinct, like the idea that these categories map neatly onto "racial groups", is nonsense. The complexity of history is in the makeup of peoples. In contrast, states are cleanly delineated because they are legal fictions: a line drawn on a map. The problem arises when states claim to be congruent with an ethnicity, either because this demotes some citizens to a second class status or because it prompts attempts to expand the borders. Ukraine offers a good example of both. The fall of Yanukovych after the pro-Western Euromaidan protests led to an upsurge of Ukrainian nationalism and consequently the disaffection of the pro-Russian east of the country. That in turn provided the pretext for the Russian annexation of Crimea and later the full-scale invasion and annexation of the east.

What genetics shows us is that ethnicity is a cultural identification, not an intrinsic biological reality, and one that reflects the tides of history. Consider, for example, the genetic overlap between Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews. To talk of Palestinian Muslims as Arabs is actually a little misleading. While the Arab conquest of the 7th century did result in some migration out of the Arabian peninsula to Palestine, it also resulted in the conversion to Islam of many indigenous Jews and Samaritans (and indeed of Christians who had previously converted from Judaism). That is a common pattern. Most conquests in history have involved a political takeover by an elite stratum (e.g. the Norman conquest of England or the later Ottoman conquest of Palestine), with the people (particularly the lower orders) changing little at the time. The reason for this was the mobility of warrior castes relative to sedentary agriculturalists in the pre-capitalist era. Such conquests could lead to new trading relationships that stimulated immigration, while foreign military garrisons could also be absorbed into the population (as was the case in the Roman Empire), but changes in the ethnic makeup of conquered territories tended to be gradual and rarely planned, driven mostly by religious conversion, cultural assimilation and career self-interest. 

In contrast, conquest by genocide and settlement by planned mass immigration, as occured in the United States, is the historical exception, despite its scale and impact being such that it affected two continents - America and Australasia - and made significant inroads into a third - Southern Africa. It's worth noting here that the Spanish and Portuguese of the early-16th century considered the indigneous population of Latin America as a resource to be exploited in the search for precious metals, hence the early concern with laws governing that exploitation and the conversion of the population to Catholicism. By the mid-17th century, English and French colonists in North America saw the land itself, and its flora and fauna, as the resource and the natives as an impediment to access and exploitation. This change reflected the emergence of agrarian capitalism, first in England, and the development of a race-based ideology of land improvement and natural ownership, as theorised by John Locke. There are echoes of Locke's idea that ownership arises from mixing labour with the soil in the conventional history of Israel's land improvement after centuries of supposed waste and mismanagement by the Arabs (see this example of that narrative from 1960).

Outside of the Americas and Australasia, colonial societies in which settlers outnumbered the indigenous were rare and of very limited scope (the plantations of Ulster were in some respects dry-runs for the colonies of North America). This was because of the practical difficulty of carrying out an effective genocide or mass expulsion of the indigenous on a wider scale when that population had not been severely reduced by disease, as occured in the Americas, and where it already practised sedentary agriculture. In this respect Israel is a historical oddity because it is clearly emulating an American model of colonial settlement and (if only at the rheorical extremes) advocating a genocide of the indigenous population in an area marked by centuries of ethnic diversity and cohabitation, not to mention densely-populated cities and neighbouring states that not only have no intention of accommodating.more refugees but earnestly hope for the day when the existing post-1948 diaspora of the Palestinians can return home.

Ireland is a useful lens through which to view Israel as it experienced both colonial models: the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy in the South (an elite stratum whose imposed agrarian capitalism led to famine in the 1840s) and the Ulster Plantation in the North (an aggressive settler society). The former was dismantled by a national revolution, triggered by a bloody insurrection in 1916, which followed a century of intermittent murders and bombings. That in turn led to a furious war of independence between British and Irish forces that saw war crimes committed by both sides. The creation of the Northern Ireland state was not simply a defensive reflex to protect the Protestant settlers of the six counties, as the deliberate drawing of the border to maximise the territory while ensuring a permanent Unionist majority at Stormont showed. This was a continuation of the rationale of plantation. In the event, demography - the changing makeup of the population and its reflection in elections - has put that domination into question, with the result that the main unionist party is now refusing to allow the Stormont government to function.

The conflict in Northern Ireland after partition was clearly rooted in religion, culture and the deliberate political exclusion of one community by the other, and not in any nonsense such as "race". As such, it has obvious parallels with Israel (that the communities in the North so easily map their sympathies to pro-Israel and pro-Palestine should make this obvious, as should the behaviour of the Irish Catholic diaspora in Glasgow). It is also commonly understood that the final resolution of the conflict must be political: that neither community is going to disappear, either by exile or absorption, so there can be no zero-sum outcome. Power-sharing may currently be in abeyance, but it is clearly the only avenue available after the failure of both the exclusionary Protestant state and the nationalist armed struggle. There is a widespread expectation that this resolution will ultimately entail a unitary state, hence the provision in the Good Friday Agreement for a plebiscite on a united Ireland (the "border poll"). 

What the latest round of killing has made clear is that the Western defenders of Israel do not accept that the same is true for Palestine - i.e. that the only realistic way forward that isn't a zero-sum outcome is a single state solution and that formal power-sharing must be part of that state's constitution. This explains why some are sympathetic to the Israeli claim that the Palestinian people are a modern invention without any historic right to self-determination while paradoxically insisting that the two-state solution, which presumes an equivalent claim to self-determination and thus statehood, remains a viable goal. The wide reporting of Netanyahu's comment that Israel must promote Hamas in order to keep the Palestinians politically divided, so enabling the progressive annexation of land in the West Bank by new settlements, has surely removed the scales from even these people's eyes, so the conclusion has to be that they share the Israeli government's desire for the Palestinian people to simply disappear.