

This Land is Whose Land?


If I were Jewish, I would want there to be a Jewish homeland. The Holocaust alone would be enough. Any other pogrom would be enough. Consider the violence against Jews which took place in Romania in 1941. Among other forms of violence, 200 Jews were subjected to the inhumane experience of being taken to a slaughterhouse, put on a conveyor belt, and killed in the way food animals are. The idea of a defined, defensible state would give me comfort, whether I chose to live there or not.

None of this justifies what is happening in the Middle East today. None of this addresses whether the modern state of Israel was created in the best place, or whether the creators could have predicted trouble from the start. The borders of Israel were determined primarily by the British after WWI.

The world has found no good way to determine what lands belong to which people. Look at the problems in Africa caused by Western nation making. Look at Macedonia. Does it belong to Greece, Bulgaria, Turkey, itself? How are these decisions made? Who gets to make them? Someone is always quick to jump up to point out that some of the world’s disputes have been going on for millennia, and that nobody can sort them out now. Perhaps. What I think we need, though, is fewer people taking sides, and more working on figuring out a just way to solve the disputes.

Now let’s look at the State of Israel. It is roughly 8,000 square miles, or roughly the size of New Hampshire or Vermont.. More than half of the area is desert. The population is about 7.3 million. Over 4.5 million of these immigrated since the formation of the state. The population density in Israel is about 300 per square mile. The land governed by the Palestinian Authority has a population density of 550 per square mile.

What were the British thinking? How can the region sustain the numbers is has now, let alone a population increase of close to 2% a year? How can there be peace when millions of people have been added to an area lacking the resources for the ones it had? England considered Madagascar as an alternative location, an idea first proposed in 1885 and periodically, even by the Nazis for a brief time. I doubt that Madagascar would have worked, since that island’s resources were depleted by colonialism, but was there no other location for Israel?

How could anyone have expected peace in the Middle East? When will we learn that political determinations made from outside a group are seldom likely to gain favor, especially when it is to the detriment of that group? When will we as a country stop leaping to take sides and work to find peaceful solutions which will take the needs of both sides into account?

Anita McKay

3 Responses

  1. Linda Muralidharan says:

    Anita has raised many critical points. However, the history of Zionism and the creation of the modern state known as Israel is very, very complicated and cannot be fully described much less analyzed in a few paragraphs.

    Each of us will make some contribution to getting the story straight. First, it was not just the British or the Nazis who thought of other locations for a Jewish state. Early Zionists were not so religious in zeal and did not consider the historical Palestine to be a critical location. They considered a number of locations on the African continent, for example.

    Next, there is now historical record of some of the things the British were thinking. They were certainly focused on the European Jewish tradition and they considered Europeans racially and culturally superior to Asians. Thus even the usually avowed anti-Semites among them (speaking of policial leaders) wanted a Jewish state in the Palestinian location to be a buffer against the heathen Asian hordes. That is one of their motivations for so often doing in the Arabs whom they had promised a state of their own along with the Jewish state or at least they promised equal treatment within one nation for both cultural/religious groups.

    Fast forward for the moment. I did attend the lecture last Sunday by Yael Dayan, Israeli legislator and peace activist and daughter of Moshe Dayan. She is 100% against the occupation. She is 100% for a two state solution. Her ideal is an ethnically/culturally Jewish state that has a secular government.

    I suspect her view is influenced by both being the daughter of such a famous Isreali leader and by wanting to be politically effective in achieving justice. Therefore she claims that Israel did just about everything right up until 1967. (There are many reasons to dispute this, but I will not do so here.)

    She says that since then Israel has chosen self-destructive policies that bode ill for the future. She says that unless the governement accepts a fair and equitable two state solution there cannot be any kind of peace. She said it will be gruelingly brutal when the settlers are removed from locations that must be returned to Palestinians. Ans she says she believes that will be done because she is optimistic that people will wake up to reality. She says it is now up to the American government to use its power to make Israel do the right thing. She didn’t go quite so far as the Israel journalist from the West Bank who spoke the previous week. That person said present policies are Israeli suicide policies. However, using different words, Yael Dayan took the same essential position.

  2. Billy The Kidd says:

    7.3 million Jews in Israel, how many Jews are there in America???

  3. Mickie Lynn says:

    This is a potentially explosive topic as we’ve seen during comments on other articles on this blog. I agree with Anita and Linda that the method of creation of Israel on land already long occupied by Palestinians provides one of the roots of the current conflict.

    It seems that right now there is certainly not a threshold reached in terms of each side recognizing their interdependence or even being ready to hear the story or narrative of the other side. The phony emphasis on “peace talks” while the US government looks away as more and more settlements are built on Palestinian land and the occupation and strangulation of the Gaza strip continues does nothing to bring about reconciliation or even “co-existence.

    Somehow we need to bring about a way for the Israeli Jews and the Palestinians to work together to seek genuine reconciliation and to make a plan for peace. We need to address the issues of asymetrical power and resources and those of ethical and humane treatment of other people. Having Benjamin Netanyau talk and talk while continuing the mistreatment of Palestinians does nothing to advance the cause of peace or the possibility of a two state solution or even a one state solution where all citizens have equal rights.

    Comment #2: What was the meaning or intent of your question about the Jewish population in the United States? I won’t even try to guess but am curious about what you had in mind and how it might contribute to this discussion.