[BRIEF NOTE] A Lack of Bilateral Symmetry
Aug. 19th, 2004 04:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldBrowsing news.google.ca today, I came across the Jerusalem Post article "Hebron's Jews mark 1929 massacre":
The article goes on to present, without comments and often implicitly, a multi-part thesis:
Now, this thesis can be criticized on multiple grounds. Just for starters:
What's particularly interesting about this brief article is the underlying assumption that the 1929 tragedy is singular, and unreciprocated on the Palestinian side. I'd be surprised if the Jerusalem Post ever carried an article that, for instance, equated the destruction of Hebron's Jewish minority in 1929 with (say) the flight and consequent ethnic cleansing of Haifa's Palestinian majority population during the War of Israeli Independence in 1948. Certainly it would never write an article describing in approving tones how Arabs unconnected to the pre-1948 Palestinian community would want to restore the pre-1948 order of things, whether the people living there wanted this or not.
There's nothing wrong with this, actually. Israel's only a mildly divergent example of a European country of settlement, of note in that like Algeria, Zimbabwe, and South Africa, and unlike North America, Australasia, or the Southern Cone, its native population wasn't inadvertantly decimated by Old World epidemic diseases, and can draw upon broader support for its desire to overturn the imposed settler state. Allowing the return of the descendants of those displaced in 1948 would be unduly disruptive, both for what it would do to the people already living in Haifa and for wider relations between Jews and Arabs in all of Mandatory Palestine. I do not see any reason to suspect that a binational entity of any kind can avoid a rapid descent into bloody civil warfare on the model of Lebanon in the 1980s save with possession of abundant weapons of mass destruction.
What impresses me most about this article is two of its implicit assumptions:
This convenient lack of bilateral symmetry, of course, is common to both sides of the Israeli/Palestinian dispute. More, much more, on both sides, later this week or early next.
Some 1,000 people gathered in Hebron on Thursday afternoon at a ceremony commemorating 75 years since the 1929 Hebron massacre. Sixty-seven Jews were killed and 70 wounded in the surprise attack by Arabs.
Knesset Speaker Ruby Rivlin gave a moving speech in which he referred both to the victims then and to the recent victims of Arab terror in that community.
"It has been 75 years since the massacre, and yet the voices of our brothers still call out to us from the holy earth, our beloved earth of the field of Machpela, which was bought from the Hittites and paid for with silver. This is the earth that has buried Adam and Eve, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, and Jacob and Leah, and has been witness to the treachery and murder of the Ishmaelites."
The article goes on to present, without comments and often implicitly, a multi-part thesis:
- That the Hebron Jewish community established in 1967 carries on, in any meaningful sense, continuity with the Hebron Jewish community destroyed in 1929.
- That the destruction of the Hebron Jewish community in 1929 indicates something about the character of Arabs that has transcended the historical ruptures of the 20th century, perhaps much longer (as hinted by the reference to Ishmaelites).
- That the continued existence of the Hebron Jewish community, as it's now constituted, is critical for the survival of Israel.
Now, this thesis can be criticized on multiple grounds. Just for starters:
- There's little connection between the traditional Jewish community destroyed in the pogrom of 1929 in Mandatory Palestine and the fundamentalist Jewish community set up in 1967 in the middle of Hebron after the city's conquest by Israel, apart from the fact that they're both Jewish and they're both in Hebron.
- The destruction of the Jewish community of Hebron in 1929, and the hostility to the second community established after the Seven Days War, doesn't indicate an abiding hatred of Jews so much as it does a fairly typical history of hostility between indigenous populations and settler communities in any of Europe's overseas lands of settlement, complicated by the ongoing connection of Jews to Mandatory Palestine as a minority. Cf. southern Africa and Algeria.
- If you think that Israel should become a Middle Eastern version of apartheid-era South Africa, then no criticism of the third point will matter to you.
What's particularly interesting about this brief article is the underlying assumption that the 1929 tragedy is singular, and unreciprocated on the Palestinian side. I'd be surprised if the Jerusalem Post ever carried an article that, for instance, equated the destruction of Hebron's Jewish minority in 1929 with (say) the flight and consequent ethnic cleansing of Haifa's Palestinian majority population during the War of Israeli Independence in 1948. Certainly it would never write an article describing in approving tones how Arabs unconnected to the pre-1948 Palestinian community would want to restore the pre-1948 order of things, whether the people living there wanted this or not.
There's nothing wrong with this, actually. Israel's only a mildly divergent example of a European country of settlement, of note in that like Algeria, Zimbabwe, and South Africa, and unlike North America, Australasia, or the Southern Cone, its native population wasn't inadvertantly decimated by Old World epidemic diseases, and can draw upon broader support for its desire to overturn the imposed settler state. Allowing the return of the descendants of those displaced in 1948 would be unduly disruptive, both for what it would do to the people already living in Haifa and for wider relations between Jews and Arabs in all of Mandatory Palestine. I do not see any reason to suspect that a binational entity of any kind can avoid a rapid descent into bloody civil warfare on the model of Lebanon in the 1980s save with possession of abundant weapons of mass destruction.
What impresses me most about this article is two of its implicit assumptions:
- That there is no symmetrical relationship between 1929 Hebron and 1948 Haifa, or what happened afterwards.
- That the outcome of 1967 Hebron (as opposed to 2xxx Haifa) is a matter of significant import not only to Jews uninvested in the settlement project, but to anyone who has any sympathetic feelings towards Israel at all.
This convenient lack of bilateral symmetry, of course, is common to both sides of the Israeli/Palestinian dispute. More, much more, on both sides, later this week or early next.
