Hamas snatched defeat from the jaws of victory
The region and history is complex, but it does not excuse Hamas.
The Middle East is complicated. It’s been complicated for a very long time. Right now - “now” meaning the better part of a century that has passed since 1948 - one of the central issues of contention is the existence and scope of the state of Israel. I meant to write about something else, but Hamas’s recent attack on Israel has focused my attention.
In the last ten years, I’ve seen a steady shift on the left away from acknowledging the uncomfortable complexity of the situation in favor of embracing simple stories about colonialism and oppression. (Polling from Gallup supports this sense, indicating a shift that is particularly pronounced among liberal Democrats.)
A sense of simple moral clarity is a comforting thing. In the last few years, I came to believe many of my peers were embracing a dangerously wrong sense of moral clarity in favor of groups like Hamas. The reactions of many academics, politicians, and political activists to Hamas’s recent attack prove my worries were grounded.
The founding of Israel
My main discussion of history will begin with 1947 because nobody alive today has any legitimate grievances related to Israel’s borders that predate 1947.
A little under 60% of the residents were Muslim.
A little over 30% of the residents were Jewish.
While they didn’t get along, both groups had a legal right to be present.
I will discuss the deeper history in more detail later for those interested or in an argumentative mood.
1947-1949: The founding of Israel and war.
In 1947, the United Nations drew up a plan for the amicable division of what was then called “Mandatory Palestine” between territories populated by what were then known as “Palestinian Jews” and “Palestinian Arabs.” This plan was based on patterns of residence, which can be seen in the land ownership map above.1
On May 14th, 1948, Palestinian Jews proclaimed the independent state of Israel, proclaiming their intention to work with the UN to implement the UN plan. On May 15th, the Arab League invaded with an army that eventually included contingents from seven Arab states. Some local Palestinian Arabs left the area in order to avoid the war; some joined in the fighting; some were forced out; some avoided the conflict.
The new state of Israel acquitted itself well in the resulting war, but it was also a partial victory for Jordan and Egypt, which expanded their territorial holdings. Jordan annexed “Cisjordan,” later known as the “West Bank,” and Egypt annexed the Gaza Strip.
Some local Arabs stayed in the new state of Israel, eventually becoming Arab citizens of Israel.2 The 1949 armistice lines set the original internationally recognized borders of Israel; any person or state that recognizes that Israel has a right to exist will recognize the 1948 borders as legitimate. This does not include Hamas; in general, anti-Israel hardliners see the state of Israel as something that should not exist.
1949-1967: Sharpening divides
For the next 18 years, Israel and its Arab neighbors both respected the 1949 borders while maintaining a hostile posture. The Gaza Strip was part of Egypt, the West Bank was part of Jordan, and Arab states steadily drove out or deported their resident Jewish minorities, which mostly took up residence in Israel as a result. As a result of these expulsions, a clear majority of Israel’s Jewish population has Middle Eastern ancestry dating back to the Ottoman era.3
Then came the Six Day War in 1967, and that changed the map in a big way. With rising tensions over the Suez Canal, Israel launched a pre-emptive attack, claiming that another Arab coalition invasion was imminent. The Arab states were caught off-guard and lost badly. Israel took not only the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, but also the Golan Heights (from Syria in the North) and the entire Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, pushing the border all the way to the Suez Canal.
In general, the international consensus after World War II has been that invasions of conquest to grab more land is a bad thing. The fact that Israel ended up with more land than the UN proposal when the Arab League attacked them didn’t bother anyone; Israel had been attacked, and the proposed borders within Mandatory Palestine had not been agreed upon by all parties when those lines were litigated by military means.
In 1967, Israel had attacked first and had seized land that was recognized internationally as belonging to Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. This was controversial, and the members of the Arab League were not the only nations to decide that Israel’s conquests were not legitimate. Moderate anti-Israel positions can usually be characterized as recognizing Israel has a right to exist, but demanding that Israel return to its 1967 borders or something very near that.4
1967-1993: Diplomacy and occupation
After a brief surge in the use of the term “Palestinian state” in the 1940s with the founding of Israel, the term essentially vanishes from Google’s n-gram corpus until the 1960s. In 1967, with the Six Day War, “Palestinian state” surged to match the popularity of “Palestinian Jews,” a phrase that one rarely hears today. Around 1973, after the Arab League was defeated a third time, usage of the term took off like a rocket.5 In 1974, the UN recognized the Palestinian Liberation Organization as the representative of the interests of Palestinians in occupied territories held by Israel.
What happened? First, when Israel won the Six Day War, they did not drive the existing residents out of the newly-acquired territories, as has happened in many other 20th-century wars.6 The new and unwilling subjects of the Israeli state formed an active organized resistance. Fatah, for example, had been founded in 1959, but it was initially a non-entity in the politics of the Middle East; it became big in 1967.
Second - to a lesser degree after 1967, and a greater degree after 1973 - it was becoming increasingly clear that while the Arab League could outnumber and outspend Israel, outfighting Israel was another question entirely. Israel bargained with Egypt for peace, returning the Sinai peninsula but not the Gaza Strip.7 Jordan retained its claim to the West Bank until 1988, a position that put it at odds with Palestinian nationalists, who now wanted an independent Palestinian state.
1993-2005: Palestinian political progress
In 1993, the first Oslo Accords were signed, creating the Palestinian Authority, an autonomous Palestinian government recognized by Israel as responsible for local governance of Palestinians. The PLO appointed an interim government in 1994, and Palestinians held elections for the first time in 1996. This was concretely a major step forward towards the formation of a Palestinian state.
While there were some ups and downs, political negotiations even advanced to the point of Israel offering proposals for a concrete and permanent two-state solution - full statehood for Palestine in exchange for peace. These offers nevertheless fell short of giving up Israel’s 1967 territorial gains and were rejected by Palestinians.
In 2005, something very unusual happened. Under the leadership of Ariel Sharon, Israel made a unilateral concession. While negotiations had stalled due to disagreements over the status of the West Bank, the fate of Gaza in any two-state solution was Palestinian. Israel evacuated its settlers from the Gaza Strip, demolished the settlements, and withdrew entirely.
2005: A free Gaza?
With one unilateral gesture of goodwill, close to half of Israel’s subject non-citizen Palestinian population now lived in a de facto independent state, one that had a Mediterranean coastline with functional ports and a land border with Egypt. Since 2005, Gaza has been governed by Palestinians.
This was a golden opportunity for the Palestinian cause. Gazans had an opportunity to create a viable independent state. They could develop the infrastructure of Gaza without needing to worry about buildings being demolished to make room for Israeli settlements; they could trade goods and services with Egypt across a border controlled by Egypt.
Gaza was free, and it would become what the Palestinians would make of it. The question was: How would Gazans react to their newfound freedom?
2006-2023: The decline of a free Gaza
In the Palestinian elections of 2006, the first held since 1996, a plurality of 44% of the vote went to Hamas, a hardline anti-Israel terrorist organization. This plurality gave Hamas a majority of seats in the legislature. Its support was generally concentrated in freshly-deoccupied Gaza.
The US, UN, Russian Federation, and EU issued a joint statement calling on the new Hamas government to recognize Israel’s existence and give up on terrorism and genocide.
Hamas refused. Terrorism and genocide was more important than earning international support for what had just become a de facto independent state.
In the meantime, a civil war ensued between Fatah (the ruling party) and Hamas. In Gaza, Hamas won the war, systematically murdering their rivals. In the West Bank, Fatah, the previous ruling party, retained control. With Hamas now in full control of an independent Gaza, Egypt and Israel limited trade and movement across their borders because Hamas refused to renounce terrorism.
Gaza had a precarious supply of food, water, and electricity, and an impoverished economy heavily dependent on foreign donations. Rather than using these donations to develop Gaza’s infrastructure and economy, improving Gaza’s food, water, and energy security, Hamas prioritized the import and manufacture of rockets with which to attack Israel.
Sugar imported as food aid, fertilizer theoretically meant to support Gaza’s critical but limited agricultural sector, and pipes for water and sewage could and would be used to build rockets locally. These rockets were unreliable and inaccurate, with many falling short and landing in Gaza itself; this caused further damage to Gaza’s infrastructure, as did Israel’s inevitable military responses to the attacks.
Instead of building up a fledgling nation-state, Hamas chose to drive Gaza into the ground in order to try to continually murder Jews.
The youth of the American left were embracing Palestine
American public opinion has, historically, been firmly in favor of Israel. Israel is a close ally of the United States and it is a functional liberal democracy with multiple viable political parties. Israelis share more values across a wide range of social issues with Americans than Americans share with Palestinians.
First, by way of demonstrating that a real shift is happening, Gallup polling shows a significant shift in opinion in favor of Palestinians over Israelis among Democrats only. The only subgroup of Americans who are more likely to explicitly say their sympathies favor Palestinians over Israelis are the younger Democrats, Millennials and Zoomers.
It is a disproportionately youthful and generally postmodern segment of the American left that is ground zero for this shift in opinion. Like a number of interesting shifts in American public opinion, the turning point is some time around 2013 - the point at which social media on smartphones became truly widespread.
YouGov’s first poll since the attacks of October 7th, 2023 shows a very sharp shift in US public opinion. Hamas’s fighters are Zoomers, too. And they were proud of their atrocities, sharing pictures and videos widely on social media during their rampage through an area that had been undisputed Israeli territory since 1948, slaughtering and abducting women, children, and elderly Israelis along with numerous American citizens.
In the face of that, it is very hard to pretend that calls for “decolonization” are anything less than calls for genocide. The DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) has been one of the most prominent American groups to respond to the attacks by condemning Israel, and are now at odds with the two politicians who did the most to promote them: Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. Both sharply condemned the attacks.
Ancient history
The reason this article did not start with ancient history is because there was nothing wrong or illegal about Jews moving to the area that became Israel. Not in the 1600s; not in the 1800s; and not in the 1900s, either. Ashkenazi Jews choosing to flee pogroms in the Russian Empire and moving to the Ottoman Empire weren’t engaged in some kind of violent conquest. Mizrahi Jews who lived around the Ottoman Empire didn’t violate any laws by doing so, either.t
Aside from localized episodes of violence, which the Jews did not initiate measurably more often than their Arab neighbors, there was no legitimate Palestinian grievance to be had until the formation of the state of Israel. There wasn’t really any existing nation of Palestine that Israel replaced, either.
“Mandatory Palestine” had been a set of lines drawn by the British on a map and kept under British administration with the intention of locating a home for Jews there. (That is to say, the British didn’t intend to rule the area indefinitely.) Jerusalem hadn’t sat at the heart of a nation since the time of the Crusades, which led to the foundation of the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
In fact, that crusader kingdom is the only well-documented non-Jewish state that could be feasibly identified as a predecessor state to the modern Israel. The area has usually been dominated by foreign empires.
Permanent human settlement in the area that is now Israel can be dated back as far as 11,000 years ago, at the site now known as Jericho. Permanent habitation in the area of Jerusalem has been traced back at least as far as 5,500 years ago. Written records start showing up a bit later, with a people known as Canaanites or Phoenicians.
Phoenician culture didn’t survive the Punic Wars; most accounts of their culture and religion come from their enemies. Scholars generally estimate that identifiably Jewish people showed up in the area around the time of the Late Bronze Age Collapse, most likely being Canaanites with a distinctive new religion and changed cultural practices.8
Most of the area that is now Israel remained under the control of one or another independent Jewish kingdom for almost half of the next thousand years, and as a Jewish client state or province for most of the rest, with one period of roughly a century when a significant fraction of the population was deported.9 At the end of this period, Jewish rebels agitating for an independent state were crushed by the Romans and then deliberately dispersed by an empire tired of rebellions.
After the Roman Empire was split, Jews were a small minority in what was a fairly cosmopolitan if not particularly prosperous area frequently visited by pilgrims and ruled by a variety of foreign empires, including but not limited to the Byzantines, Arabs, Christian crusaders, Egyptian Mamluks, and Ottomans. Arab language and culture was common in the area starting with the Arab conquest around 637 CE (about 1400 years ago).
Genetically, both Jews and Palestinians have ancient roots somewhere in the area, to the point of being closely related. Culturally and historically, Jews have a clearly older claim: Jewish culture was indigenous to the area before Arab culture, and has remained continuously identifiable. It’s even quite likely that a significant number of the ancestors of modern-day Palestinians were Jews who abandoned Jewish cultural practices at one point or another, eventually converting to Islam under Arab rule.
Note: Inaccurate or otherwise deceptive versions of this map that group together personal ownership and public lands frequently are employed in anti-Israeli rhetoric. One thing the map helps highlight is that the land was sparsely settled. Zionist settlement was not carried out on an unlimited budget and did tend to concentrate in areas where land was cheap, frequently meaning land that was currently uninhabited.
Whether or not these are “Palestinians” depends on the definition used, but many do not identify as Palestinian.
See here. Note that this puts the lie to a common line of rhetoric from anti-Israel activists who like to insist that Israelis are white Europeans.
Jerusalem is a thorny issue. Smart people willing to compromise realize Jerusalem is a thorny issue.
While the Yom Kippur War was important in establishing that Israel’s victory in the Six Day War was not a fluke, it did not change any of the boundaries.
One particularly thorough and non-controversial example: The Soviet Union completely depopulated and repopulated a former German territory now known as Kaliningrad after taking it in World War II.
The Gaza Strip was full of Palestinian nationalists, and Egypt was not so interested in trying to govern the territory anymore.
One widely-circulated book with multiple responses in the literature: The Bible Unearthed (Silbermann & Finkelstein, 2001). Genetic evidence that has entered the debate since then generally indicates that Jews share common ancestry with ancient Canaanites, including Ashkenazi Jews. The theory that Ashkenazi Jews are largely descended from Khazar converts has been thoroughly discredited by modern genetic analysis.
Exactly how thorough this was is a matter of some archeaological debate, but there is supporting evidence suggesting it really happened.