A New Jersey high school student found herself in a social media storm on Wednesday after she live-tweeted and apparently secretly recorded a trip to her principal’s office.
She said administrators warned her that her comments about Israel and a fellow student on Twitter might have violated a state law against bullying.
The student, Bethany Koval, a 16-year-old Israeli Jew, said she had been reprimanded by administrators at Fair Lawn High School in Bergen County for a tweet that contained a string of expletives directed at Israel and expressed happiness that a pro-Israel classmate had unfollowed her Twitter account.
Read the whole thing for a fuller account of the story. Here’s a January 7 story from the Bergen Record, and here’s a January 8 story from the same place. Muftah reproduces some of the tweets involved. (Unfortunately, Koval’s Twitter feed is no longer operating in the public domain.) Fair Lawn, by the way, is just a few towns west of Lodi, where I teach.
Setting aside whatever narrowly legalistic insanities may reside within the various “anti-bullying” statutes, this is not a morally complex matter. A high school student tweets her political views about Israel. Some of what she says contains profanity. Some is sympathetic to, or appeasing of, Hamas. Some of her peers don’t like what she says. She gets some verbal flak from some of them. One “unfollows” her Twitter account. She doesn’t reveal the “unfollower’s” name in public, but reveals it to someone privately.
For the record, I regard what’s depicted in the video as free speech, and reject the idea that it involves (or should be regarded as involving) “incitement” in any legally actionable sense. Let them dance.
Fernando Teson’s opening gambit on a discussion of the two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine dispute:
Almost everyone has by now accepted the two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.
I wasn’t aware of that. Evidence, please?
While we wait for Teson’s response, feel free to read the Wikipedia entry on the One-state Solution at your leisure. It doesn’t seem to cohere with his claim.
If the wait is long enough, you can also read through Reason Papers’s 2012 symposium on Sari Nusseibeh’s version of the one state solution from his book, What Is a Palestinian State Worth?(Note: The RP link goes to a long PDF that requires lots of scrolling down. You can also access the symposium this way, if you find it more convenient.)
As PoT readers know, I spent two months in Palestine this summer teaching at Al Quds University. My experience doesn’t cohere with Teson’s off-the-cuff claim any more than the Wikipedia entry does. And don’t make me haul out back issues of the Journal of Palestine Studies, please. Because you know what will happen if I do?
Postscript, 10 pm: I wonder whether Professor Teson could explain in mathematical terms how majorities of 63% of Israelis and 53% of Palestinians amount to “almost everyone.” Do 37% of Israelis and 47% of Palestinians = no one? Feel free, Professor, to use scratch paper and show your work.
Oh wait, too far to the right for you, huh? Well, then, let’s make a left turn. Wrong part of the left? You could always talk to the nice folks at Dissent. They were “rethinking” things five years ago.
While we’re turning left, why not talk to some Arabs along the way? Like this one.
By coincidence, last month I spent a weekend “conferencing” with Izzeldine Abouelaish, founder of Daughters for Life and author of I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor’s Journey. Izzeldine, whose daughters and niece were killed in 2009 by Israeli rocket fire in Gaza, is one of those supposedly mythical Palestinians committed to peace despite having endured trauma at Israeli hands. More on Izzeldine’s book once I finish it; for now, I just couldn’t resist mentioning the coincidence of “two-doctors-from-Gaza-with-messages-of-hope-amidst-trauma.”
Mention Gaza to the average American news junkie, and the immediate association is “Hamas” and “Islamist fanaticism.” Not that those things don’t exist, but there are more things in Palestine than are dreamt up by such stereotypes, and I’d like to think that events like the PACC talk and like Izzeldine’s book and foundation will eventually break the reflexive associations of “Palestinian” with “wild-eyed religious psychopath” and replace them with something more respectful of reality. The audacity of hope, to borrow a phrase.
When you live in the West Bank, you get hyper-sensitive about license plates: yellow plates are Israeli, green plates are Palestinian; yellow plates can go anywhere in Israel or the West Bank (except, in theory, to parts of Area A); green plates are confined to designated parts of the West Bank (e.g., places reserved for the military or Israeli settlers).
I just saw a car on the main street of Eizariyah here in the West Bank (Area B) with Virginia license plates.
How is that possible? And for legal purposes, would it count as a yellow or a green plate?
I have no idea how to answer the first question, but here’s a guess at the second: if license plates follow passports, I’m guessing a Virginia license plate counts as yellow. As an American passport holder with a valid visa, I can go places in the West Bank that Palestinians can’t, including Israeli settlements and militarized zones designated off-limits to Palestinians (e.g., H2 in Hebron). If Virginia plates are treated as equivalent to an American passport (plus visa), the same would be true of them.
My speculation here rests, of course, on the debatable assumption that the presence of the car with the Virginia license plate is legal–an assumption confounded by the fact that the town of Eizariyah is effectively a Lockean State of Nature without laws or law enforcement of any discernible sort. The only “exception” to that rule is the presence of an Israeli military base on the outskirts of town, between Eizariyah and the settlement of Ma’ale Adumim. But it’s not really an exception at all: the Israeli military presence serves as militarized backdrop to life here; it isn’t here for purposes of everyday policing, much less to deal with traffic violations. It’s mostly here to intimidate Eizariyah and environs, and protect Ma’ale Adumim.
That said, unless someone bought a car here and just randomly stuck a Virginia license plate on it (odd but possible), to get it here, the owner would have to ship the car from Virginia to a border crossing controlled by the State of Israel. I can see why someone might want to do that; what I can’t see is why the State of Israel would allow it.
That’s not the sort of Virginia plate I saw, but it does raise the question: if you can drive a car with Virginia plates in the West Bank, how about one with a plate like that? Granted, the State of Virginia has ordered that car owners with Stars and Bars license plates trade them in within about three months (120 days since the original ruling). But that still leaves time to ship one’s car here and drive it around for a few months as a test case. I’d love to see how that works, if only I could be around for it.
I’ve been away from the blog for awhile, partly because I’ve been traveling a lot, and partly because I’m at work on a presentation I’m giving this week at AQU’s Centre for Jerusalem Studies on American attitudes toward the Palestinian narrative. It’s called “Turning Up the Volume: Why Americans Have Trouble Hearing the Palestinian Narrative.”
The basic idea is this: Americans have trouble hearing the Palestinian narrative because given the way Palestinians make their case, every argument in defense of Palestinian rights can, by disputing certain factual premises, be re-cast as an argument that either proves Palestinian aggression against Jews, or proves a false Palestinian accusation of aggression by Jews.
For instance, if Jewish settlement activity is based on theft of Palestinian land, then of course, settlements are a matter of Jewish aggression against Palestinians. But if settlement activity is simply a matter of voluntary Jewish purchase of voluntarily-sold Palestinian property, then Palestinian opposition to Jewish settlement seems like a form of xenophobia, hysteria, or racism. The factual issues–theft or purchase?–often seem undecidable from several thousand miles’ distance. For that reason, some Americans simply lapse into agnosticism about the rights and wrongs of the conflict. But others insist on having a view despite the apparent inaccessibility of the relevant facts, going by what they regard as the most plausible moral hypothesis. For contingent historical reasons, Americans tend to find Zionist-Israeli claims more plausible than Palestinian ones.
The “contingent historical reasons” have to do with the rhetoric and strategies of the moderate wing of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement (i.e., the wing led by Martin Luther King, Jr.) For better or worse, American moral sensibilities about racial matters are structured by the history and moral assumptions of the King-led camp of the Civil Rights Movement. Given those sensibilities, any political argument bearing a fundamental similarity to the (moderate) camp of the Civil Rights Movement has an edge over any argument that doesn’t.
Now, the King-led camp of the Civil Rights Movement was integrationist rather than segregationist or separatist in its strategies and basic assumptions: it argued that blacks should actively strive to integrate into white society; it rejected both the white segregationist argument in favor of “separate but equal” barriers to integration, and the black separationist argument in favor of a separate nation for blacks. As it happens, Zionist-Israeli arguments tend to sound integrationist to American ears; meanwhile, the Palestinian narrative sounds either segregationist or separatist. Since Americans shy away from segregation or separatism, they opt for the Zionist-Israeli narrative.
For an example of my thesis, consider this 2009 story from The New York Timesabout the establishment (with conspicuous American support) of the Jewish settlement of Nof Zion within the Palestinian neighborhood of Jabl Muqabber in East Jerusalem. As it happens, I visited Jabl Muqabber/Nof Zion a few days ago; the Palestinian guide I was with took great offense at the presence of the settlers of Nof Zion, and called the settlement’s existence a “provocation.” Here’s how the Times describes it:
Nof Zion, a private Jewish project, is in Jebel Mukaber, a Palestinian Arab neighborhood of East Jerusalem, in territory Israel captured from Jordan in the 1967 war. Israel claims sovereignty over all Jerusalem; the Palestinians demand the eastern part as the capital of a future state.
Even within Israel, the idea of Jews moving into predominantly Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem stirs heated debate. Two well-known Israeli families refused City Hall’s offer to name the street leading to Nof Zion for their deceased relatives, according to the local Jerusalem press.
But illustrating the complexity of the Jerusalem conundrum, others argue that Jews, Christians and Muslims should be able to live wherever they like. Not allowing Jews to live in certain neighborhoods of the city “is segregation,” said Mr. Hikind, a Democrat who represents several heavily Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn.
With new tensions surfacing between the Obama administration and Israel over building in contested parts of Jerusalem, the city’s character and future remain central motifs in the stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.
The cornerstone-laying ceremony at Nof Zion took place a day after the Israeli authorities moved ahead with plans for the expansion of Gilo, a Jewish residential district in south Jerusalem also on land captured in the 1967 war. The plans for 900 more housing units drew a sharp rebuke from the White House.
The first paragraph describes Nof Zion as a private project, then goes on to say that Israel claims sovereignty over all of Jerusalem, while Palestinians claim sovereignty over East Jerusalem. The implication seems to be that Nof Zion’s ownership status varies with the sovereignty of the political entity in control of the relevant part of Jerusalem; since the political status of the city is disputed, it follows that the ownership status of property claims within the city must likewise be disputed.
East Jerusalem viewed from the southwest (Haas Promenade)
But if Nof Zion is a genuinely private project on legitimately-bought land, what difference does it make who has sovereignty over Jerusalem? If Nof Zion is legitimately bought, then Nof Zion would seem to belong to its rightful owners–Nof Zion–regardless of who rules, runs, or governs the city. Of course, if it’s not on legitimately-bought land, it likewise makes no difference who has sovereignty over Jerusalem; in that case, morally speaking, Nof Zion doesn’t belong to Nof Zion at all, and ought to be given back to its rightful owners, whoever they happen to be, and whoever is in charge of the city.
In other words, sovereignty is a distraction from the relevant issue. The relevant issue is ownership, and specifically, what Robert Nozick calls “justice in transfer of holdings” (Anarchy, State, and Utopia, pp. 150-51). If the transfer of ownership to Nof Zion is morally illegitimate, then regardless of its specifically legal status, it ought to revert to its rightful owners. This would be a clear case of applying what Nozick calls “rectification of injustice in holdings” (p. 152). It seems to me that the literature on Nozick ignores cases like this, intermediate between ordinary cases of reparation for ordinary theft, and massive expropriations in the distant past.
The second paragraph tells us that the idea of Jews moving into predominantly Arab neighborhoods stirs heated debate. Why? Is it because Arabs simply don’t like Jews, or is it because Arabs fear that the apparently innocuous act of moving into the neighborhood betokens something more sinister, like a coercive take-over? While we’re at it, does the converse hold? In other words, does the idea of Arabs moving into Jewish neighborhoods stir debate? If so, what’s the upshot?
In my experience, settlers insist that Arab opposition to Jewish in-migration is simply a matter of xenophobia or racism. Meanwhile, Palestinians don’t explicitly or effectively argue that Jewish in-migration is a Trojan Horse for house demolitions or coercive territorial capture; they focus instead on the supposed “provocation” of a Jewish presence in an Arab neighborhood as such. But this appeal to “provocation” is a very weak argument, and one almost designed to offend American ears: it simply assumes without further explanation that a Jewish presence in an Arab neighborhood is a provocation, qua Jewish, without explaining what’s provocative about such a presence. It’s as though someone were to describe white peoples’ (or immigrants’) moving into a predominantly black neighborhood as a “provocation” simply because they were the “wrong” race.
In fairness to Palestinians, arguments of the “Trojan Horse” form tend to be dismissed by American audiences a priori as paranoid or anti-Semitic conspiracy theorizing, even when there is good evidence for them, and even when Americans themselves use such arguments in other contexts. So it becomes easy to see why Palestinians tend to be vague at the crucial argumentative moment. But the fact remains: the vagueness drastically weakens their argument.
Demolished Palestinian home, Ras al Amud, East Jerusalem
As for the third paragraph, is Hikind right to think that not allowing Jews to live in Jabl Muqabber is “segregation”? If so, would it then follow that not allowing Palestinians–whether of Israeli citizenship, Jerusalem residence, or West Bank/Gaza residence–to live in Jewish settlements is also segregation? He doesn’t get around to that issue here, and I doubt he ever has. If I had the money, I wouldn’t mind buying an apartment in Ma’ale Adumim. But could I? And invite my Palestinian friends over to hang out and swim in the community pool? Rest assured that there’s no community pool here in Abu Dis or in any nearby Palestinian town.
While I’m on the topic of water, I guess it’s worth adding that the aquifer under Abu Dis is under Israeli, not Palestinian control: “An estimated four-fifths of the water [in the West Bank aquifers] is used by Israel, much of it is piped back to West Bank settlements. Many West Bank Palestinians, however, must rely on wells” (Charles D. Smith, Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict: A History with Documents, 8th ed., p. 511, Map 11.4.) Does that pattern of water use involve segregation or discrimination? I think so.
Anyway, back to land: In my experience, those who defend the settlement enterprise are very reluctant to consider the possibility of Arab residence in Jewish settlements–even when they complain that Arab reluctance to allow Jewish settlements in Arab neighborhoods is “segregation.” Meanwhile, Palestinians regard the idea of applying for residence in a Jewish settlement as either a quixotic waste of time or as something akin to treason, the ethno-nationalist equivalent of a scab’s working for management during a strike. The pro-settlement claim strikes me as hypocritical; the Palestinian nationalist claim strikes me as self-defeating.*
In any case, the general point should be clear: American interpretations of the Israeli settlement enterprise are, for better or worse, steeped in assumptions drawn from the theory and practice of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. But neither side’s views map easily onto the integrationist template formulated by that movement. My point is that, rhetorically, Zionist-Israeli arguments sound–and are made to sound–as though they do. That fact accounts for why Americans find Zionist-Israeli arguments more plausible than their Palestinian counter-parts, especially when the facts that would decide a controversy are complex or difficult to access.*
A query for PoT readers, especially American ones: Just off the top of your head, do you regard the Jewish settlement enterprise as fundamentally just or as fundamentally unjust? If unjust, what’s wrong with it? If just, why is it mistakenly thought to be wrong?
Postscript: As it happens, Nof Zion is clearly visible from my side of the separation wall in Abu Dis. I’d take a photo and upload it here, but my camera lacks a telephoto lens, so I’m not sure the relevant details will come out.
*For clarity’s sake, I added a few sentences to each of these paragraphs after the initial posting.
I had my first run-in at an Israeli checkpoint yesterday, only the second pedestrian checkpoint I’ve gone through in the last six weeks.
Prior to this, most of the checkpoints I’d gone through were vehicular, and little of note had happened at them. I was held for two hours at the airport, which was an improvement on my last visit here, when I was held for five. I encountered one “flying checkpoint” on my first night here on the road between Ma’ale Adumim and Al Eizariyah, but after a ten minute wait, we were waved through. My seatmate on the 263 bus to Jerusalem was detained one morning at the Ma’ale Adumim checkpoint, but hey, I wasn’t, so the trip was basically uneventful. I was briefly accosted and questioned by a security guard for standing too long in front of the Jerusalem District Courthouse (where the Abu Khdeir trial is taking place), but after convincing him that I was harmless, he walked away, whereupon I decided to confirm his opinion by walking away myself. In an irritating sequence of events, I was falsely told one night by a police officer in the Old City that a certain walkway was closed when it wasn’t; he forced me to take a left turn that I didn’t want to take, after which I managed to get lost. But on reflection, I decided he’d done me a favor, because the hour was late, and I didn’t need to be in the Old City at that hour anyway.
And that was it. All was well even if it hadn’t quite ended well.
Yesterday, I finally had occasion to go through the Har Hazeitim checkpoint I mentioned a few weeks ago. Honestly, the only way to describe my experience there is to say that the people staffing that checkpoint around 7:30 pm on Sunday night were the most consummate assholes I’ve dealt with in a long time—and by far the biggest assholes I’ve met in Israel or Palestine in the last six weeks. If Palestinians routinely get treated at these checkpoints the way I was treated last night at Har Hazeitim, it really is no wonder that they lash out as often as they do. Anybody would, especially if they got the sense that the mistreatment would persist into the indefinite future, and that it seemed to be getting progressively worse. I’m morbidly curious what happens to one’s psyche if one goes through checkpoints like that on a regular basis, so in a spirit of inductive inquiry modeled on Mill’s Methods, I’ve decided to go through that checkpoint as often as I can over the next few weeks that I’m here, just to see what happens to me. I’ll be sure to tell you.
For now, I guess I’d describe the experience as roughly what would happen if you put a bunch of college-aged kids safely behind bomb-proof glass, then gave them the power to run a version of the Milgram Experiment every day, thousands of times a day, and then crossed the Milgram Experiment with a game of Donkey Kong in which instead of Donkey Kong, the protagonist of the game was a human being, typically a Palestinian. A real barrel of laughs. I guess it was for them, because they spent the duration of my visit to the checkpoint laughing at me.
I’ve noticed that Israeli Border Police have a certain hand gesture that I think of as the “mosquito gesture.” When they don’t want to deal with you, they wave you away with this contemptuous wave of the hand–what you or I would do to swat away a mosquito. The sign language says: “go away,” or more expansively, “go away, you piece of shit.” The next time I get that gesture, I intend to do it back. If questioned, I intend to describe it as an act of assimilation into Israeli society: I’ve seen the gesture so often that I thought I’d blend in and imitate it. Judging from the frequency with which it’s used, it must mean something like “mazel tov.” What could be nicer?
Seriously, I’m curious to see what happens. Stay tuned.
Postscript, July 16, 2015: I just discovered this great website and organization, Women Against the Occupation and for Human Rights, with individualized reports on each of the checkpoints. So many checkpoints, so little time!
Here’s Anata/Shu’afat checkpoint; the report includes a few others, like Az-Zaim, which I’ve gone through about a dozen times on this trip. It looks different nowadays than it does in the photos here.*
Here’s Abu Dis, where I’m currently living; unfortunately, the photos of the place are somewhat dated. Perhaps I should donate some of my own? I’m a little baffled by the references to Cliff Hotel from this website; I’ve heard it mentioned by locals as well.
It’s always painful to see this gem of Jerusalem architecture in its present state — smashed windows, broken walls, filth everywhere, and now surrounded by a fence. Nobody came to stop us when we crossed the gate into the settlement area. There was someone in the booth, but he didn’t bother. The signs proclaimed “forbidden, forbidden” — and “dangerous”.
I’ve lived here for six weeks, and despite looking for it, I can’t find it. The report above is from February 2014; is the hotel gone?
This report from Bethlehem took place about an hour before I happened to visit the same exact checkpoint (I visited July 10 around 9:30 am). Things were hectic but not violent while I was there, but I was only there for about fifteen or twenty minutes. I was also farther away from the checkpoint itself than those writing the report. I don’t know how they managed to get as close as they did.
Here’s reporting from Hebron, a hell-hole I’ll describe in a forthcoming post, having recently visited there (I’ve uploaded some photos of Hebron to the header).
Container Checkpoint at Wadi Nar is fast becoming my favorite checkpoint in the whole Occupied Territories. I was going to try walking through (it’s walking distance from where I live) but a friend told me that doing so was a good way to get shot, so I decided against it. It’s also a good way to get bitten, as the soldiers at that checkpoint have befriended some aggressive stray dogs, feeding them, but taking no responsibility for their (the dogs’) behavior –a good deterrent against overly curious American tourists out for a stroll. WOHR describes Container Checkpoint as “a god-forsaken checkpoint rarely visited by our shifts.” Yes and no: it’s actually about 200 yards from the rather pleasant village of Sawahirya, so it’s not that out of the way. As for “rarely visited,” it’s a hell of a walk from where I live, but I don’t mind making the trip.
*Correction, July 18, 2015: I corrected a mistake in the original version of this sentence: having now gone through the (various) Shufaat/Anata and Az Zaim checkpoints, I now realize that there are at least three different checkpoints involved here. By “Az Zaim” checkpoint,” I mean the one on Route 1 directly after Ma’ale Adumim and before the Mount Scopus campus of Hebrew University.
I’ve been traveling these last few days, and I’m off to Hebron now, so I’ll be away from the blog for a bit. Commenting and comment approvals will be slow. Hope to blog a bit on it at some point when I get back. Patience is advised.
Meanwhile, here’s some background material on Hebron from a variety of perspectives. They’re intended as background; I don’t necessarily endorse what any particular author or speaker says here.
And finally, a description of the somewhat quixotic work of TIPH, the Temporary International Presence in Hebron. Totally my kind of work, but they don’t accept job applications from Americans.
So I’ve been here for about a month now, and have another month or so to spend in the country (or these countries, or this country and a half). As I reflect on what I’ve seen and done so far, however, I can’t help feeling a sense of dissatisfaction at myself: I really need to get out more.
In the month that I’ve been here, I’ve mostly stayed in and around Abu Dis. I’ve walked all around Abu Dis and Eizariyah, and gotten a fairly good sense of the place; I’ve also taken a foray into the nearby desert between Abu Dis and Ma’ale Adumim, strolling among the Bedouin encampments in the notorious E1 zone–until I was accosted by a xenophobic sheepdog who decided that I lacked the credentials to cross his canine checkpoint. (So far, I’ve had better luck at human checkpoints.)
As I was saying, the jaunt I took was in E1–the so-called “Judean Wilderness.” When you first walk into the “desert” there, it seems uninhabited–so obviously uninhabited that you could be forgiven for thinking that you’ve come upon a land without a people. But then you look more closely, and you see the first signs of habitation, followed by the second, and the third–so that after an hour or so, you realize that what had previously seemed “uninhabited” is not just inhabited, but in some sense entirely appropriated. In fact, one of the first things I ran into when I got to the desert was…a fence preventing me from going any further into the desert, or rather, requiring me to go around it if I wanted to go anywhere at all.
Here’s one of the earliest indications of habitation. I’d been walking for a bit when I came on these shepherd’s shanties by the side of the road.
I take it that they’re just temporary shelters to keep the shepherds out of the sun (obviously, there’s no shade for miles). They own those, right? It’d be trespassing to use them without the owner’s consent, and something like theft to destroy or bulldoze them without the owner’s consent. Maybe morally, but not by law. Legally, none of this property has any valid status; it’s all illegal.
If you look to the left, there’s a big valley with a sort of shantytown nestled within and a village on the mountaintop.
The mountaintop is (just barely) on the electric grid, but the shantytown is not. So what do these people own? The clothes on their back? That plus the shanties over their heads? The mountain? That plus the valley? Does that include the roads you see and the reservoir as well? Could they legitimately say that they own all that the eye can survey? And whose eyes would those be–Israeli, PA, or Bedouin? These people are living “illegally,” as well; in fact, their whole existence is illegal.
How to conceptualize property claims of this kind is a major undertaking for which I so far lack the conceptual apparatus, the relevant information, and any fine-grained answers. The Israeli government regards these Bedouins as living “illegally” on state land in Area C (under full Israeli control), and intends to move them elsewhere to build Jewish settlements here (whether the Bedouin like it or not). The Israeli government is offering the Bedouins compensation, and has suggested (as a justification for expropriation) that the structures the Bedouins have built aren’t up to code. How you think about that turns on how you think about natural rights of property, initial appropriation and its limits, the status of a nomadic lifestyle in a modern state, the moral status of “state land,” the imperatives of economic development, and paternalistic regulation. (For defenses of the Israel point of view, see this and this, both PDFs. For the Bedouins’ own perspective, see this. Here’s more from Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine. Here’s a small portion of B’Tselem’s reporting.)
It’s a lot to think about, and part of the reason I find it hard to leave my immediate environs is that I find that those environs by themslves give me more than enough to think about–more, in fact, than I can handle. I sympathize with the plight of these Bedouins, but the status of their claims is not clear to me. After all, it’s not clear to me that if a bunch of Bedouins showed up in north Jersey, they’d be able to appropriate whole mountains and valleys of this size for their own use, exclusive of the development needs of neighboring towns or any other claims. What would happen to them if they tried is anyone’s guess (try to imagine it happening in Sussex County or in the Pine Barrens)–though a hard look at the remote origins of our Indian reservations suggests one possible answer. That’s not a moral judgment; it’s just an observation in need of a moral judgment by a mind better stocked with answers than mine.
Here’s a shot looking into the distance at the northeastern horizon.
What you see in the distance is Ma’ale Adumim, a Jewish settlement about the size of my hometown of West Orange, New Jersey (and which actually looks a lot like West Orange). The road that snakes through the picture goes to Ma’ale Adumim and by a roundabout route to Jerusalem.
So what do they own? As it happens, Ma’ale Adumim is often described as having been built on expropriated Arab land. If the settlement’s development needs encroach on this valley, whose claims, morally speaking, have prior or overriding consideration? If the Jerusalem Municipality’s Master Plan calls for the incorporation of all this “unused land” into an integrated plan for a Greater Jerusalem, what basis, moral or legal, would these stateless quasi-nomads have for disputing the claims of modern, metropolitan citizens of a functioning state? Whatever the answer, I haven’t encountered anything in the philosophical literature that deals with it in a way that does justice either to the complexity of the issues involved or the urgency of what’s at stake here. (If anyone has bibliographical recommendations, I’d love to hear them.)
We take “civilized” life for granted, and usually take for granted that the displacements it required took place in some distant and morally irrelevant past. But a look at E1 and similar places here suggests that that isn’t so. The displacements are happening now, and happening in the name of the imperatives of civilized life. One of the (many) things that gives the Arab-Israeli dispute its urgency for Americans is the way in which it re-enacts the worst (and most tragically forgotten) aspects of our own history, when we were the Israelis, and our adversaries were the Palestinians. The displacement of the Bedouins in E1 sounds uncomfortably like a 21st century version of the Trail of Tears. It sounds that way, but is it? A complex question in need of an answer that I don’t have.
Don’t worry; this happened a long time ago.*
Anyway, I started out by saying that I need to get out more, and I do. I’ve gotten a great deal out of teaching my political philosophy class–we’re currently finishing up Machiavelli’s Prince–and I was right to think that my Occupation-based approach to the classic texts of European political philosophy would pay the hermeneutical dividends I anticipated. I’ve also gotten a fairly good sense of the rhythms and details of life in my immediate vicinity, and made a couple of trips to Jerusalem and Ramallah.
But my activities all seem distressingly parochial. I’m uncomfortably reminded of a passage from Mill’s On Liberty:
In the case of any person whose judgment is really deserving of confidence, how has it become so? …Because he has felt that the only way in which a human being can approach to knowing the whole of a subject is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind.
I haven’t really done that. I’m ensconced here among Palestinians in a cocoon of Palestinian political and religious opinion. Everyone here is opposed to the occupation and to the settlements–in a fundamental way, to Israel itself.
I’ll be visiting Hebron through this tour, and spending time in a Bedouin village in the Negev on this one; though the description of the Hebron tour doesn’t say much about interacting with settlers there, I’d like to see how far I can get in the direction of interaction with them. Though I’m not totally sure I can schedule it, I’m hoping to spend a couple days re-visiting the village of Beit Umar through this program; I had an “interesting” exchange with an Israeli military patrol last time I was there, and I’m hoping that I can meet my old “comrades” in that unit once again and re-start the argument where we left it two years ago.
I’m curious what PoT readers are curious about. Any questions you think I ought to be asking, or things I ought to be looking for? Tell me.
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*”The Treaty of New Echota was ratified by a single vote…” Recall the old axiom, care of Anthony Downs, that a single vote almost never alters the outcome of an election in a politically significant way. “In a large election, the probability that an individual vote might change the election outcome is vanishingly small.” Almost, vanishingly small: sometimes the odds get even.
Postscript, July 19, 2015. Here’s a useful map depicting the places described in this post. (It’s a PDF; unfortunately, I can’t copy and paste it.) I took the long road that starts from the “b” in Abu Dis, and took it past Sawahrah as-Sharqiyah, bypassing Container Checkpoint, and doing a half-perimeter of what’s marked “the alternate site” in E1. The map indicates that all of the land I photographed, though physically inhabited by Bedouins, is within the municipal boundaries or Regional Council jurisdictional area of the surrounding Jewish settlements (either Ma’ale Adumim or Qedar). The realization of the E1 plan would require the expropriation of all of the Bedouin encampments located within the blue space on the map.
It’s an interesting question what moral justification anyone could have for doing this. Even if you argue that Bedouin appropriation of land has to be limited by some version of a Lockean Proviso, it’s unclear how the surrounding settlements could be entitled on the same grounds not only to what they currently have but to everything that the Bedouin have–despite the fact that the Bedouin are on the land, and the settlers are not. Though I haven’t read as much of it as I should, I get the impression that libertarian discussions of property are, in their current form, ill-equipped to adjudicate disputes of this sort. Likewise Lockean discussions. It’s unclear to me whether Lockean/libertarian accounts can be developed into adjudication-worthy theories, or whether they have to be junked in favor of something different, and more adequate to the task.
Postscript, July 20, 2015: This article from Reuters is exceptionally informative on the plight of the Bedouin in E1.
Postscript, July 24, 2015: Another informative article, this one on the hamlet of Susiya in the southern West Bank.
On this day in history in the year 1776 AD, fifty-six American political leaders declared war against the “coercive,” “intolerable” military occupation (about two years in length) that had been imposed on them by Great Britain. They felt pushed to the expedient of war after the failure of the boycott campaign they had initiated against their imperial overlords.
In their words:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
–Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
They’re venerated to this day for the war they started, and the (slave-owning) country they created in its wake.
Then ask yourself: does it make sense to celebrate a war fought over the bill of particulars in the U.S. Declaration of Independence while criticizing BDS as an anti-Semitic attempt to “de-legitimize” Israel? Is it really wrong to “de-legitimize” a military occupation that has lasted 48 years, that Americans are obliged to support, that the American government refuses (unlike, say, Pakistan) to sanction, and that not only shows no sign of ending, but seems to be intensifying? If we can celebrate an eight-year war begun in response to a two-year occupation, why the vilification of those non-violently resisting an occupation almost a half century in length?
Something to think about tonight under the fireworks, courtesy of an American malcontent in Palestine.
Don’t get me wrong: though British rule over the American colonies was certainly unjust, I don’t mean to suggest that I regard the Revolutionary War as justified. I don’t think it was, so I don’t think the Fourth of July ought to be a matter of celebration.
According to David Bernstein, however, my views on this subject make me “abnormal” (scroll down to the bottom of the comments in the preceding link for the whole thread).
How is celebrating the conquest of East Jerusalem=celbrating the deaths of Arabs? When you celebrate July 4th, does that mean you are celebrating the death of the British. That’s pretty much the dumbest thing you’ve said on this thread. And I’m sorry you’re not troubled by the fact that the news sources you rely on make shit up. …
I think *normal* people distinguish between celebrating a military victory, especially one when your side was attacked in a war of annihilation, and celebrating the death of innocent civilians in terrorist attacks. When you celebrate a military victory, your celebrating that your side one, not that they killed lots of kids. And Jerusalem Day celebrates Jewish control of Jerusalem, not a military victory per se.
I suppose we ought to celebrate “Jewish control of the West Bank” while we’re at it. It’s not a military occupation “per se.”
I guess that’s why, as you pass the Jewish settlement of Ma’ale Adumim and enter the Arab town of Al Azariya, the trees are festooned with Stars of David and the number “67.” The IDF wants to celebrate the fact that in 1967, they established “Jewish control” over everything you see around you, while abstracting from the fact that the control is enforced by means of tanks and machine guns “per se.” If you’d like to be the kind of moron that David Bernstein thinks you are and wants you to be, feel free to indulge in that act of amnesiac evasion. But don’t do it while celebrating the Revolutionary War.
Ask yourself instead whether war was justified in the one case, and prolonged military occupation is justified in the other. As an American, you’ve likely internalized a lifetime of propaganda intended to convince you that you owe moral allegiance to the ideals of the American Revolution, and owe a blank check to the imperatives of the Israeli Occupation. This Independence Day, do something different for a change. Consider the possibility that you don’t.
Policy of Truth 