In the two decades after the end of the Second World War dozens of new states came into being in Africa, the Middle East and Asia as the old colonial powers lost the will and means to keep their empires intact. Another wave of state creation occurred after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. Yet this week the opinion columns of the world’s papers are devoting a degree of attention to the 60th anniversary of the foundation of Israel that they certainly won’t be doing for the 60th anniversary of Ireland declaring itself a republic in 1949 or of Indonesia achieving independence from the Netherlands the same year.
So why, 60 years after its foundation does Israel still command so much attention? On the face of it, the answer seems easy; Israel was founded against the wishes of a large percentage of the inhabitants of what is now its national territory, many of its first citizens had been born elsewhere, it was not recognized by any of its neighbours, has fought a series of wars during the course of its existence and has for many years occupied territories conquered from its neighbours. And lurking behind these undeniable facts there’s the ever more commonly expressed feeling that Israel’s foundation involved a unique injustice, the triumph of the nationalism of the Jews over the nationalism of the Palestinians and the theft of their land and that its continued existence is, therefore, uniquely illegitimate. When comparable events elsewhere are examined, however, it becomes clear that there is nothing unique about either the circumstances of Israel’s birth or its history.
In the first place, there was no original sin and nothing artificial about Israel’s foundation; the violence and what we would now call ethnic cleansing that accompanied it were not in any qualitative sense different from those that accompanied the foundation of many other post-colonial states. To give just one example, the foundation of India and Pakistan in 1947 was accompanied by massive loss of life and huge population exchanges, they subsequently fought two major wars and continue to confront each other, eyeball to nuclear eyeball, over Kashmir. No one seems to consider that this calls the legitimacy of either one into question. On a more general level, there are many existing states that were founded against the wishes of some part of their original population and if we are to regard those states founded with a large number of immigrants or their descendants in their population and without any consideration being given to the wishes of the indigenous population as somehow illegitimate then Israel is only going to be one on a very long list.
The hostility of neighbouring states to Israel’s existence, uncommonly strong in the first 30 years of the half of the life of the state, has since waned greatly with full peace agreements implemented with Egypt and Jordan and de facto recognition and warming relations with a number of Gulf states, especially Qatar. Even in the case of the Palestinians it’s easy to forget the degree of progress that has been made; from a position barely 20 years of effectively denying Palestinian national rights, Israel signed the Oslo Agreement, recognised the PLO, uprooted its settlements in Gaza and today continues to negotiate with the President of the Palestinian Authority.
Again, a look at comparable cases suggests that it can often take a very long time for all the problems created by the foundation of a new state to be resolved and there’s nothing very unusual in this respect about Israel. An obvious example is Ireland, which achieved partial independence in 1922 and became a republic in 1949. The violent consequences of its liberation from Britain have, however, only exhausted themselves in the last few years.
The issue of the occupation of the territories seized from Egypt, Jordan and Syria in the Six Day War of 1967 is one that seems to particularly exercise Israel’s critics. Once more, it’s easy to forget the progress that has been made. Israel uprooted its settlements and handed the Sinai Peninsula back to Egypt in the context of the peace agreement with that country and although some still talk of the occupation of Gaza continuing, it’s undeniable that Israel removed all its citizens and infrastructure in 2005. In the north a deal was very nearly reached with Syria to return the Golan Heights in 2000 and since then there have been repeated stories in the press about back channel negotiations sketching out an agreement to give the Syrians back their land in return for a comprehensive peace deal, an agreement that would be fleshed out and signed whenever the parties judge it to be in their interest to do so. The question of the West Bank and the settlement of Israelis there is the one where, apart from the closing of four settlements in the north of the disputed territory in 2005, almost no progress has been made and where it’s most urgently needed. As full a withdrawal from the West Bank as is necessary to reach a deal with the Palestinian Authority and allow for the foundation of a Palestinian state is as necessary for the preservation of democracy in Israel as it is for the Palestinians to enjoy the full use of their national rights.
And, once more, Israel is far from being the only country in the world that has engaged in long term military occupation of neighbouring territories conquered in war. Morocco’s occupation of Western Sahara and the continuing Turkish occupation and colonisation of a third of the national territory of Cyprus - now a member state of the European Union - spring immediately to mind. Curiously, these and other examples of illegal occupations haven’t led to their perpetrators being heaped with opprobrium the way Israel has.
So we now come back to the original question, why does Israel continue to arouse such passions in some many places, 60 years after its birth? I would speculate that it’s because a lot of people who have no problem at all with the nationalism of the Irish, the Uzbeks or the Tamils seem to be made, at best, uncomfortable by the nationalism of the Jews. Not by their own or anybody else’s, just that of the Jews. It seems to stick in their craws that the Jews have their own state. They are happy for Jews to be doctors, lawyers, shrinks and bankers but for them to have their own state, elect corrupt and ignorant politicians, defend themselves and commit the occasional atrocity, just like the great majority of other nation states at some point in their history, doesn’t seem to be acceptable.
And yet, despite the hostility of so many, Israel at 60 thrives. It has absorbed huge numbers of immigrants from the Middle East and farther afield (indeed it has recently become a magnet for Sudanese refugees), it has enviable indices of human development, contributed a huge amount to science and maintained the only liberal democracy – imperfect, like all others - in the Middle East and all this in a context where it has constantly had to defend itself from attacks designed to be mortal. It therefore deserves the warmest possible congratulations on its 60th birthday and it’s to be hoped that Palestinians will soon be accepting congratulations for the foundation of their own state too.
A shortened version of the text above appears in today’s Buenos Aires Herald.
