Almost everyone seems to agree that the changing American conversation about race is changing the American conversation about Israel-Palestine. The rise of Black Lives Matter, noted The Washington Post last weekend, “has starkly changed the Israeli-Palestinian debate in the United States, shifting it for many liberals from a tangled dispute over ancient, often-confusing claims to the far more familiar turf of police brutality and racial conflict.”
What's the utility of these analogies? Do they create empathy, understanding, or progress?
My concern is these historical comparisons, however true - settler colonialism, nazi germany, jim crow - devolve into debates about history and not how to achieve rights and equality for Palestinians.
Humanizing Palestinians, showing lives under occupation in the West Bank and blockade in Gaza, will do more than imperfect analogies. No one choses to be a small child in Gaza.
"And the plight of Palestinians and Black Americans is the same in a fundamental way: Both groups live under the control of a state that denies them equal rights."
Precisely which equal rights denied to Black Americans are you referring to?
Are you seriously suggesting that Israelis are not being cast as the “White Devil” in these comparisons? That coffee klatsch meme has a white woman asking a brown woman about this conflict, who invokes “settler colonialism”. A colony has a home country, and when you ask what was the home country for these Jews, the answer is invariably Europe, so this *specific* act of “settler colonialism” is put at the feet of white people, not Han Chinese, not Hindus in India, but the exact same group that is accused of creating anti-black racism. Israel is treated as an outpost of American anti-Black racism. It’s inane, but effective, like so much of our current discourse, but you, Peter, know better.
I’ve been following your intellectual journey since the NYRB article, so I appreciate when you are open, rigorous and fair. Not dealing with the accusations against Israel (and, yes, against Jews more generally) as avatars of *white* supremacy specifically, makes this fall far short of your standards.
Your points are apt, but your critique of the analogy misses another pertinent parallel: white colonialism versus indigenous North America. Black Americans brought as slaves suffered greatly and their struggles today are indeed similar to that of Palestinians, but they never had a claim on the land taken from the Native people, who are technically sovereign but thoroughly subjugated by force, treaty, encroachment, and a policy of cultural erasure.
It would be beneficial and illuminating to consider how the relation between sovereign Indigenous nations in the Northern Americas who hold treaties with the US might add to the analysis and the analogies.
I wrote this in Matthew Yglesias's article, and will repeat myself here. I am far more comfortable expressing the things I oppose in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict than things I support.
I oppose the characterization, most frequently seen by 'woke' 'progressives' that Israel itself is somehow illegitimate. The best, and simplest, example being the meme spread across Twitter of two women discussing how Israel is a 'settler nation' colonizing Palestine.
I oppose people who condemn Israel's right to defend itself. No nation on the planet would tolerate thousands of missiles raining down on their population. The fact Israel has developed defenses against the rockets does NOT mean they do not have the further right to defend itself. Just because I wear a bullet proof vest does not mean I cannot retaliate if someone tries to kill me.
I oppose a single state solution, and Israel's continued expansion of settlements in the West Bank. Norms must be respected, and the post WWII norm is: no country can (or should) expand via military conquest. Say what you want of Israel, but even the 1947 UN Agreement which called for two states does not give Israel the right to settle the entirety of what was then Mandatory Palestine.
A two state solution is the only solution which will satisfy both sides. Israel undermining that solution is wrong, and must be stopped. I am not opposed to America changing the terms of our support if Israel continues to expand settlements in the West Bank and making a two state solution impossible. However, Palestine needs to get its' act together and come to a realistic peace agreement.
My expectations are low that this issue will ever be resolved amicably. We are trapped between an unstoppable force and an unmovable object.
When talking about or writing about hatred/dislike of Jews don't use the terms "anti-Semitism", "anti-Semitic" & "anti-Semite" anymore. They're antiquated terms. Its best to use the terms "anti-Jewish" and "anti-Jew". By using those two terms not only do you sound modern but you're also being accurate.
Non-Woke and Anti-Woke individuals aren't limited to just conservatives & right-wingers. There are non-woke/anti-woke liberals & non-woke/anti-woke left-wingers.
Are you referring to the Gazans who get their heads cracked open by Hamas when their lives arent being sacrificed? Holier than thou much? There are other people out here advocating for justice who actually see the whole picture. Join us in the world of truth.
The problem with the Black American/Palestinian analogy is this: like the sloganeering that marks our current political environment, it is dangerously simplistic, as if the only factor necessary to make it a reasonable analogy is the current (undisputed) disparity in status and power between Israeli Jews and Palestinians. For some time, the Palestinian case has been used as a license for anti-Semitism in Europe. Pairing the incidental (albeit real) suffering of the Palestinians in the struggle for power in the Middle East with the long injustice suffered by American Blacks will be understood, by those disposed to use it, as a similar license here. I get your tolerance for approximations in the use of analogy, but this goes too far. Black American experience is rooted in hundreds of years of slavery. Palestinian experience is not; nor has Palestinian politics ever produced a Martin Luther King or a doctrine of non-violence. Black Americans, on the whole, identify as Americans and seek a genuinely even-handed political order grounded in the principles of the Constitution and the Enlightenment -- "critical race theory" notwithstanding. There is not much in the visible Palestinian landscape that suggests a willingness to identify as Israeli, or even as co-countrymen of whatever you want to call the enlarged State you espouse, and there is much in the leadership -- such as the declared core principles of Hamas, the leadership elected by the residents of Gaza when they had a choice -- to indicate implacable enmity. Your vague recipe for how the single State would look seems to be a rehash of the Peel Commission's "canton" proposal of the 1930's, which was roundly rejected by the Palestinians of the day. No one in Black American history compares to the Sherif of Mecca, who readily collaborated with the Nazis in order to dominate if not exterminate the Jews. Today, it is only by comparison to the outright murderous racism of Hamas that Fatah and the other elements of West Bank leadership look somewhat reasonable. I understand your plight as an American Jew: Give or take a Hasmonean episode, we believe in the tolerant, humane, democratic fruit of the diaspora as it evolved in Europe and here as the gold standard for relations between distinct peoples. It is excruciating to watch the settlers and the soccer mobs behave as they do, and to see Netanyahu cater to the worst of the haredim in order to preserve his power. Israelis desperately need a change at the top; four inconclusive elections with a fifth in the offing indicates they are trying. Polarizing analogies and goals that don't recognize the lessons of Middle East history don't help them, the Palestinians, or us. Two States, Mr. Beinart. However threadbare the prospects look at the moment, there is no other way out.
Peter, re "One criticism they level is that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not racial since Israeli Jews—or at least the roughly fifty percent of Israeli Jews whose families emigrated from the Middle East—are not “white.” Sure, but a conflict doesn’t have to be “racial” in American terms to involve structural oppression of one group by another."
You make several good points, of course. But consider (from HRW, though unsourced):
"In international human rights law, including the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), race and racial discrimination have been broadly interpreted to include distinctions based on descent, and national or ethnic origin, among other categories."
What matters are legal definitions. And Israel’s defenders have a problem with that, too.
"International criminal law has developed two crimes against humanity for situations of systematic discrimination and repression: apartheid and persecution. Crimes against humanity stand among the most odious crimes in international law.
The international community has over the years detached the term apartheid from its original South African context, developed a universal legal prohibition against its practice, and recognized it as a crime against humanity with definitions provided in the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid (“Apartheid Convention”) and the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC).
The crime against humanity of persecution, also set out in the Rome Statute, the intentional and severe deprivation of fundamental rights on racial, ethnic, and other grounds, grew out of the post-World War II trials and constitutes one of the most serious international crimes, of the same gravity as apartheid.
The State of Palestine is a state party to both the Rome Statute and the Apartheid Convention. In February 2021, the ICC ruled that it has jurisdiction over serious international crimes committed in the entirety of the OPT, including East Jerusalem, which would include the crimes against humanity of apartheid or persecution committed in that territory. In March 2021, the ICC Office of Prosecutor announced the opening of a formal investigation into the situation in Palestine.
The term apartheid has increasingly been used in relation to Israel and the OPT, but usually in a descriptive or comparative, non-legal sense, and often to warn that the situation is heading in the wrong direction. In particular, Israeli, Palestinian, US, and European officials, prominent media commentators, and others have asserted that, if Israel’s policies and practices towards Palestinians continued along the same trajectory, the situation, at least in the West Bank, would become tantamount to apartheid.[1] Some have claimed that the current reality amounts to apartheid.[2] Few, however, have conducted a detailed legal analysis based on the international crimes of apartheid or persecution.[3]
In this report, Human Rights Watch examines the extent to which that threshold has already been crossed in certain of the areas where Israeli authorities exercise control."
re: Soloveitchik, it seems to me the question is not whether the state will be any different. The more interesting question is whether Jewish law, which was written by candlelight of thousands of years of oppression will have anything to bear, and I think the sad realization, which is perhaps worse than the self-destruction of the Jewish state, is that Jewish law offers no guidance or improvement in the administration of power over any other form of law.
"critics of the Black-Palestinian analogy argue that the conflict in Israel-Palestine, unlike the conflict in the US, is a conflict between nations."
I would contend that this is the critics' way of exoticizing the situation over there. Americans understand a "nation" as a territory, and people living in that territory who have a government that has its own passports, currency, ambassadors, military, etc. Americans certainly understand the idea of nations going to war against each other -- say, Russia vs. Ukraine, or Iran vs. Iraq, or the United States vs. Iraq for that matter. Those are "international" conflicts in every sense. There's nobody alive today who remembers when the United States was engaged in wars with the first nations in disputed areas of North America. The United States won all of those wars, and the people in the conquered nations are all United States citizens now, though they are given a few crumbs as "national" rights of their own. Now, if we look at the disputed area that constituted the former Palestine Mandate, which I'll call "Palestine" for short, it has all been under the control of the Jewish state of Israel since 1967. But that state prevents half of the Arab Palestinian people from even living anywhere in Palestine, and of those who do live in Palestine, the majority are not allowed the rights of citizenship in that one state that controls all of Palestine. Clearly a situation of oppression of one group of people by the other, but if you call it a conflict between "nations", then that would imply that it's an "international" conflict, and so you can get people to think that different standards should apply. Most Americans don't use the word "nation" for an ethnic group; other than the first nations, it's only the beyond-the-fringe White Nationalists and Black Nationalists who talk like that.
What's the utility of these analogies? Do they create empathy, understanding, or progress?
My concern is these historical comparisons, however true - settler colonialism, nazi germany, jim crow - devolve into debates about history and not how to achieve rights and equality for Palestinians.
Humanizing Palestinians, showing lives under occupation in the West Bank and blockade in Gaza, will do more than imperfect analogies. No one choses to be a small child in Gaza.
"And the plight of Palestinians and Black Americans is the same in a fundamental way: Both groups live under the control of a state that denies them equal rights."
Precisely which equal rights denied to Black Americans are you referring to?
Come. On.
Are you seriously suggesting that Israelis are not being cast as the “White Devil” in these comparisons? That coffee klatsch meme has a white woman asking a brown woman about this conflict, who invokes “settler colonialism”. A colony has a home country, and when you ask what was the home country for these Jews, the answer is invariably Europe, so this *specific* act of “settler colonialism” is put at the feet of white people, not Han Chinese, not Hindus in India, but the exact same group that is accused of creating anti-black racism. Israel is treated as an outpost of American anti-Black racism. It’s inane, but effective, like so much of our current discourse, but you, Peter, know better.
I’ve been following your intellectual journey since the NYRB article, so I appreciate when you are open, rigorous and fair. Not dealing with the accusations against Israel (and, yes, against Jews more generally) as avatars of *white* supremacy specifically, makes this fall far short of your standards.
Your points are apt, but your critique of the analogy misses another pertinent parallel: white colonialism versus indigenous North America. Black Americans brought as slaves suffered greatly and their struggles today are indeed similar to that of Palestinians, but they never had a claim on the land taken from the Native people, who are technically sovereign but thoroughly subjugated by force, treaty, encroachment, and a policy of cultural erasure.
Land matters.
It would be beneficial and illuminating to consider how the relation between sovereign Indigenous nations in the Northern Americas who hold treaties with the US might add to the analysis and the analogies.
I wrote this in Matthew Yglesias's article, and will repeat myself here. I am far more comfortable expressing the things I oppose in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict than things I support.
I oppose the characterization, most frequently seen by 'woke' 'progressives' that Israel itself is somehow illegitimate. The best, and simplest, example being the meme spread across Twitter of two women discussing how Israel is a 'settler nation' colonizing Palestine.
I oppose people who condemn Israel's right to defend itself. No nation on the planet would tolerate thousands of missiles raining down on their population. The fact Israel has developed defenses against the rockets does NOT mean they do not have the further right to defend itself. Just because I wear a bullet proof vest does not mean I cannot retaliate if someone tries to kill me.
I oppose a single state solution, and Israel's continued expansion of settlements in the West Bank. Norms must be respected, and the post WWII norm is: no country can (or should) expand via military conquest. Say what you want of Israel, but even the 1947 UN Agreement which called for two states does not give Israel the right to settle the entirety of what was then Mandatory Palestine.
A two state solution is the only solution which will satisfy both sides. Israel undermining that solution is wrong, and must be stopped. I am not opposed to America changing the terms of our support if Israel continues to expand settlements in the West Bank and making a two state solution impossible. However, Palestine needs to get its' act together and come to a realistic peace agreement.
My expectations are low that this issue will ever be resolved amicably. We are trapped between an unstoppable force and an unmovable object.
Another excellent article, Peter. Thank you for speaking truth. Mazel tov.
When talking about or writing about hatred/dislike of Jews don't use the terms "anti-Semitism", "anti-Semitic" & "anti-Semite" anymore. They're antiquated terms. Its best to use the terms "anti-Jewish" and "anti-Jew". By using those two terms not only do you sound modern but you're also being accurate.
Non-Woke and Anti-Woke individuals aren't limited to just conservatives & right-wingers. There are non-woke/anti-woke liberals & non-woke/anti-woke left-wingers.
Are you referring to the Gazans who get their heads cracked open by Hamas when their lives arent being sacrificed? Holier than thou much? There are other people out here advocating for justice who actually see the whole picture. Join us in the world of truth.
The problem with the Black American/Palestinian analogy is this: like the sloganeering that marks our current political environment, it is dangerously simplistic, as if the only factor necessary to make it a reasonable analogy is the current (undisputed) disparity in status and power between Israeli Jews and Palestinians. For some time, the Palestinian case has been used as a license for anti-Semitism in Europe. Pairing the incidental (albeit real) suffering of the Palestinians in the struggle for power in the Middle East with the long injustice suffered by American Blacks will be understood, by those disposed to use it, as a similar license here. I get your tolerance for approximations in the use of analogy, but this goes too far. Black American experience is rooted in hundreds of years of slavery. Palestinian experience is not; nor has Palestinian politics ever produced a Martin Luther King or a doctrine of non-violence. Black Americans, on the whole, identify as Americans and seek a genuinely even-handed political order grounded in the principles of the Constitution and the Enlightenment -- "critical race theory" notwithstanding. There is not much in the visible Palestinian landscape that suggests a willingness to identify as Israeli, or even as co-countrymen of whatever you want to call the enlarged State you espouse, and there is much in the leadership -- such as the declared core principles of Hamas, the leadership elected by the residents of Gaza when they had a choice -- to indicate implacable enmity. Your vague recipe for how the single State would look seems to be a rehash of the Peel Commission's "canton" proposal of the 1930's, which was roundly rejected by the Palestinians of the day. No one in Black American history compares to the Sherif of Mecca, who readily collaborated with the Nazis in order to dominate if not exterminate the Jews. Today, it is only by comparison to the outright murderous racism of Hamas that Fatah and the other elements of West Bank leadership look somewhat reasonable. I understand your plight as an American Jew: Give or take a Hasmonean episode, we believe in the tolerant, humane, democratic fruit of the diaspora as it evolved in Europe and here as the gold standard for relations between distinct peoples. It is excruciating to watch the settlers and the soccer mobs behave as they do, and to see Netanyahu cater to the worst of the haredim in order to preserve his power. Israelis desperately need a change at the top; four inconclusive elections with a fifth in the offing indicates they are trying. Polarizing analogies and goals that don't recognize the lessons of Middle East history don't help them, the Palestinians, or us. Two States, Mr. Beinart. However threadbare the prospects look at the moment, there is no other way out.
Peter, re "One criticism they level is that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not racial since Israeli Jews—or at least the roughly fifty percent of Israeli Jews whose families emigrated from the Middle East—are not “white.” Sure, but a conflict doesn’t have to be “racial” in American terms to involve structural oppression of one group by another."
You make several good points, of course. But consider (from HRW, though unsourced):
"In international human rights law, including the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), race and racial discrimination have been broadly interpreted to include distinctions based on descent, and national or ethnic origin, among other categories."
https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution
What matters are legal definitions. And Israel’s defenders have a problem with that, too.
"International criminal law has developed two crimes against humanity for situations of systematic discrimination and repression: apartheid and persecution. Crimes against humanity stand among the most odious crimes in international law.
The international community has over the years detached the term apartheid from its original South African context, developed a universal legal prohibition against its practice, and recognized it as a crime against humanity with definitions provided in the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid (“Apartheid Convention”) and the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC).
The crime against humanity of persecution, also set out in the Rome Statute, the intentional and severe deprivation of fundamental rights on racial, ethnic, and other grounds, grew out of the post-World War II trials and constitutes one of the most serious international crimes, of the same gravity as apartheid.
The State of Palestine is a state party to both the Rome Statute and the Apartheid Convention. In February 2021, the ICC ruled that it has jurisdiction over serious international crimes committed in the entirety of the OPT, including East Jerusalem, which would include the crimes against humanity of apartheid or persecution committed in that territory. In March 2021, the ICC Office of Prosecutor announced the opening of a formal investigation into the situation in Palestine.
The term apartheid has increasingly been used in relation to Israel and the OPT, but usually in a descriptive or comparative, non-legal sense, and often to warn that the situation is heading in the wrong direction. In particular, Israeli, Palestinian, US, and European officials, prominent media commentators, and others have asserted that, if Israel’s policies and practices towards Palestinians continued along the same trajectory, the situation, at least in the West Bank, would become tantamount to apartheid.[1] Some have claimed that the current reality amounts to apartheid.[2] Few, however, have conducted a detailed legal analysis based on the international crimes of apartheid or persecution.[3]
In this report, Human Rights Watch examines the extent to which that threshold has already been crossed in certain of the areas where Israeli authorities exercise control."
https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution
re: Soloveitchik, it seems to me the question is not whether the state will be any different. The more interesting question is whether Jewish law, which was written by candlelight of thousands of years of oppression will have anything to bear, and I think the sad realization, which is perhaps worse than the self-destruction of the Jewish state, is that Jewish law offers no guidance or improvement in the administration of power over any other form of law.
"critics of the Black-Palestinian analogy argue that the conflict in Israel-Palestine, unlike the conflict in the US, is a conflict between nations."
I would contend that this is the critics' way of exoticizing the situation over there. Americans understand a "nation" as a territory, and people living in that territory who have a government that has its own passports, currency, ambassadors, military, etc. Americans certainly understand the idea of nations going to war against each other -- say, Russia vs. Ukraine, or Iran vs. Iraq, or the United States vs. Iraq for that matter. Those are "international" conflicts in every sense. There's nobody alive today who remembers when the United States was engaged in wars with the first nations in disputed areas of North America. The United States won all of those wars, and the people in the conquered nations are all United States citizens now, though they are given a few crumbs as "national" rights of their own. Now, if we look at the disputed area that constituted the former Palestine Mandate, which I'll call "Palestine" for short, it has all been under the control of the Jewish state of Israel since 1967. But that state prevents half of the Arab Palestinian people from even living anywhere in Palestine, and of those who do live in Palestine, the majority are not allowed the rights of citizenship in that one state that controls all of Palestine. Clearly a situation of oppression of one group of people by the other, but if you call it a conflict between "nations", then that would imply that it's an "international" conflict, and so you can get people to think that different standards should apply. Most Americans don't use the word "nation" for an ethnic group; other than the first nations, it's only the beyond-the-fringe White Nationalists and Black Nationalists who talk like that.