...The problem in 1929 [the year of riots against Jews in Palestine] was not “the occupation,” but a refusal to accept
any Jewish state in Palestine. This refusal stands in contrast to repeated (if not always full-hearted) Jewish acceptance of a two-state solution, including the Jews’ acceptance of the Peel Commission in 1937 and the UN Partition Plan in 1947. The Arab rejection of partition then and the Hamas rejection of a Jewish state now are both rooted in the same claim that the Jewish state is a settler-colonial enterprise. But this characterization is simply false.
First, Israel is not a colony of any country, nor was it established as one. It is not like the British colonies in America and Australia, nor the Belgian or German colonies in what were the Congo and South West Africa. Jews were not sent by anyone, nor did they migrate from a single country or even a single region. In other words, they had no metropole. Moreover, they have ancestral ties to the land. It is the place from which they came, and from which they were exiled. This is not to deny that Palestinians have ties to the same land, but it is not colonization when those who are driven out of their land return to it. Those Palestinian exiles who deny this, might ask themselves whether their own claims to some part of Palestine will evaporate in time, and if so, when?
Second, a very large proportion of the Jewish Israeli population is descended from refugees. These include not only refugees from pogroms and the Shoah in Europe, but also around 650,000 Jews who fled persecution in Arab countries and Iran. Other Jewish Israelis are migrants who have moved to Israel because, for any number of reasons, that is where they prefer to be. Refugees and migrants are not colonialists. Those who reject this distinction will be forced to acknowledge that there is now a substantial Muslim colonization of Europe, America, and other Western countries. That is not a reasonable characterization, nor is it one that Palestinians’ Western supporters will be eager to defend.
So what about “the occupation” in 2023? The Gaza Strip is not occupied, and hasn’t been since
Israel unilaterally withdrew from the territory in 2005. It is true that Israel—along with Egypt—controls Gaza’s borders, but that is not the same as occupation. It is also true that the partial blockade (converted to a full siege following the October 7th massacre) has brought hardship to Gazans, but it is not a gratuitous infliction. The blockade was imposed in an attempt to control the flow of arms into Gaza, which Israelis knew Hamas would then use to attack Israel.
Israel does continue to occupy the West Bank, but responsibility for that conundrum cannot be laid solely at Israel’s door either. It takes two sides to make peace. Anybody who suggests that Israel could resolve the conflict by simply withdrawing from the West Bank should try to understand that the results of the Gaza disengagement demonstrate this to be impossible. That experience has provided a painful lesson in the dangers of vacating disputed land in the absence of (and possibly even with) a peace agreement. Since the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, that area has regularly been used as a launching ground for thousands of rockets into Israel (despite the blockade), and now for the worst massacre of Jews since the Nazis....
...But those who lay all (or almost all) of the blame for the ongoing conflict and the consequent statelessness of the Palestinians on Israel display either bad faith or naiveté. Lifting the blockade on Gaza and unilaterally withdrawing from the West Bank would amount to suicide for Israel’s Jews. The same is true of the suggestion that there could be a unified state of Jewish and Arab citizens from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Those who propose such a state need to explain which country in the region this state would most resemble. Not a single state in the Middle East rates even remotely as well as Israel still does in terms of liberal and democratic freedoms. What reason do we have for thinking that a unified Palestine would be any different, especially with antisemitic rejectionists like Hamas in the polity.
When we ask what each side of the Hamas-Israel conflict could do differently, it is much easier to say what Hamas could do. It could stop attacking Israel. If it stopped behaving like the fundamentalist, repressive, terroristic regime that it is, and used its resources for building a nascent Palestinian state, it would bring greater prosperity to its citizens, gradually ease restrictions on its borders, and demonstrate that Palestine could exist peacefully alongside Israel. But that,
of course, is not what Hamas wants.