by John Ruskay, Fellowship Magazine, December 1974.

The guns are quiet today in Ismalia, silent on the Golan. The slopes of Mt. Hermon and the waters of the Gulf of Suez are being allowed a respite from the carnage that has poisoned the air. Four times in but 20 years, Israelis and Arabs have almost ritualistically continued the feud that has drenched the Sinai with flood, filled the Fertile Crescent with hatred, and soaked the energies and spirits of generations of Israelis, Palestinians, Egyptians, Syrians, and Jordanians.

Today may yet be too early to know with certainty how effective the UN cease-fires and disengagement agreements will be towards building a lasting peace in the Middle East. Although the events of the moment are both fascinating and compelling – the politics of oil, the emergence of the Palestine Liberation Organization as the major Palestinian group and the continuing mediation efforts of Secretary of State Kissinger – I suggest that we might profitably spend some time taking a few steps back and, with a bit of detachment, attempt to understand the forces that have fueled the conflict between Arabs and Jews for generations.

I have an assumption about human behavior which underlies my attempt to understand the Arab-Israel dispute. I assume that men believe that their actions are just and rational. This is not a radical assumption. It does not assume rational behavior. It only assumes that people believe that their behavior makes sense. Individuals and nations construct a world-view that provides a seemingly moral and rational basis for action. As long as continue to hear and to read that the other side is irrational, crazy, barbarians and non-human, as long as we continue to believe that those terms help us explain Arab or Israeli behavior, we are failing to understand the complexities which have sustained this conflict for half a century.

The Arab-Israeli conflict is not only a conflict between two nationalisms in one land; the Arab-Israeli conflict is not only a conflict between the armed forces of the region; the Arab-Israeli conflict is not only a conflict which is now superimposed with the Soviet-American rivalry in the region. It is also a struggle between two conflicting mythologies which provide the ideological basis from which political and military behavior evolves. I call them mythologies not because their purpose is to deceive. Rather, they are conflicting views of history, claims to the land, objectives of the opposing party, for the purpose of validating Arab and Zionist behavior. The Zionist mythology, or world view, justifies the creation of Israel. The Arab mythology sees the creation of that state as immoral, violating Arab rights, and threatening the continuation of Arab national life. Furthermore, Arab resistance to the creation of the state is seen in Arab eyes as the only legitimate response to the immorality of the creation of Israel and the threat to Arab life. Continued Arab resistance is viewed in Israeli eyes as a veritable threat to the continuation of Israel and the Jewish people.

Until we begin to consider that both Zionist and Arab mythologies are not constructions by wild men but belief systems which have evolved legitimately; until, in a sense, each of us understands the Arab and Zionist perspectives fully enough to be able to say: “If born in Cairo, I can see that I might have been proud to have been with the troops that crossed the Suez Canal two weeks ago,” or “If born in Tel Aviv, I would have taken great pride in defending the Golan” – until we are able to understand this conflict empathically from the eyes of the Arab world and the eyes of the Israeli, we do not yet understand the conflict and are not in a position to offer alternatives which can address both of the parties.

Before we examine some aspects of the conflicting mythologies in this dispute, let me make a parenthetical comment. I am well aware that Arabs and Israelis are not monolithic. All Israelis are not even Zionists. The Zionist movement has always been far from monolithic; and Israelis today display a wide spectrum of belief about Arabs and desired politics that the government should pursue. Similarly, the Arabs are far from monolithic: the very question of who is an Arab remains problematic. Are Jordanians? Are Palestinians? In fact, consideration of the Arab-Israel dispute in this country tends to oversimplify it and draw it into cowboy and Indian terms, far more readily than do many groups. We have a need to expose ourselves to the wide spectrum of views held in Israel and the Arab states on these issues.

Let us now look at these conflicting mythologies. Briefly put, the Zionist ideology draws from a view of Jewish history which concludes that Jews can only be safe in a place where Jewish sovereignty prevails. Jewish history is used to support the claim that no foreign government, or liberalism or economic prosperity can provide security for Jews against anti-Semitism. From this view of Jewish history, and the Jews’ situation in Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century, came the need to build a secure Jewish National Home in Palestine. Palestine was chosen both because of the long historic ties and religious ties Jews have maintained to the land and the continuing Jewish settlement in Palestine. The early Zionists cleared the land, drained it, and built at great cost model economic, cultural, educational, and social institutions for the growing Jewish National Home.

Zionist history sees Arab hostility to the National Home fueled by anti-Semitism and corrupt governments which wanted to divert the Arab masses from the need for economic and social development in the Arab countries. After the tragedy of the Holocaust, the just need for a Jewish state was ratified by the international community, dividing Palestine into both an Arab and Jewish state. Arab refusal to accept this UN judgment has now led to four wars while hundreds of thousands of Arab refugees have been maintained by Arab Governments to manipulate the Arab masses. This package concludes that Israeli desires for peace have been and are sincere and only await the slightest indication of interest in peace on the part of the Arab states.

When Arab and Zionist perspectives are placed side by side, one might conclude that they are describing different conflicts. In the Arab view, the creation of the state of Israel was immoral – for the following reasons:

(1) the majority of the population in Palestine in 1947 was Arab and their desires were ignored: and

(2) the creation of Israel as a Jewish State is genuinely viewed as racist.

Nations, such as the United States, France or Great Britain (or for that matter, the Arab states), have no requirement to maintain a particular religious or ethnic group as dominant; thus the requisite of maintaining the Jewish quality of Israel makes Israel a racist, and therefore immoral state. At its barest, the Arab perspective holds that the majority in Palestine was denied self-government in 1947 by the United Nations, Furthermore, Arabs genuinely believe that Zionism’s objective of bringing Jews to Israel requires Israel to be expansionist, and that the wars of 1948 and 1967 confirm this. In Arab eyes, Israel’s refusal to withdraw from the occupied areas gives further proof of Israel’s annexationist desires.

To demonstrate how difficult it is to determine “reality” in the midst of these conflicting perspectives, let us analyze a few aspects of these general perspectives.

An often heard charge is one that holds that Palestine was a barren desert, a wasteland before the state of Israel was created. The Arabs have millions of acres of other land. Only anti-Semitism among Arabs and Arab government manipulation of their people can explain the hostility to Israel’s presence on this small strip of desert.

But the Arab perspective on this “small strip of land” is quite different. Although Arab states control vast land areas, they are only able to live in a relatively small area. The availability of water is the basic fact of social and demographic life in the Middle East. The Arabs lived on the banks of rivers, near the sea, or around oases, in areas of relatively high rainfall.

The Arab people are located, for the most part, within a few miles of the Mediterranean in North Africa, in the Nile Valley, in the Tigris Euphrates River basic and in the Levant, the Fertile Crescent, that area which today comprises parts of Israel, Lebanon, Western Syria and Western and Northern Jordan. So the creation of the State of Israel was not from millions and millions of unused land in the Arab World but rather from one of four relatively small areas where 80-100,000 Arabs live.

The Zionist attitude assumes that Israel’s right to exist is beyond question. That right emanates from the Bible and from continuing Jewish communities that remained in Palestine. It was confirmed by the Balfour Declaration in 1917, and then ratified by the international community by the 1947 United Nations resolution partitioning Palestine and thereby creating the state of Israel. The creation of the state in 1947 was a reasonable and just response to the hundreds of years of persecution throughout Europe culminating in the most horrid tale in human history – the destruction of European Jewry in the death camps.

Furthermore, the extraordinary devotion of the early settlers to bringing a renaissance to the land justified the creation of a Jewish state. The taking of “this small strip of land” which had lain in waste until the Zionist movement began to develop it, an area which had never been self-governing, seemed a small compensation for the destruction of 6,000,000 Jews.

More than anything else that moved the Zionist Movement was a view of Jewish history which demanded an end to the pogrom, an end to persecution, an end to the insecurity which prevailed throughout the Diaspora. Jewish history taught that no government, no ideological movements or prosperity could provide complete security to the Jew. “Never again,” the cry of the JDL [Jewish Defense League] today, is really also the cry of the Zionist Movement. Never again the pogrom. Never again the death camps. Never again Jews being powerless. The tremendous surge to be “like all other peoples,” to finally have state power which could provide some amount of security for the Jewish people brought forth and energized the Zionist Movement.

While Jewish history regarding the creation of Israel focuses primarily on World War II, the Holocaust and the United Nations, Arab History regarding Palestine focuses on quite different events.

In the early part of the twentieth century, small groups of Arabs living the Ottoman-controlled Fertile Crescent began to emerge as a self-conscious Arab nationalist movement. The Western Powers encouraged this small movement as World War I approached and England and France hoped to support opposition groups to the Ottoman Empire, who had allied with the Germans.

The Europeans help stimulate and support the desire of Arabs to establish an independent Arab Kingdom in those areas of the Ottoman Empire inhabited by Arab-speaking majorities. The correct interpretation of the negotiations that occurred during World War I is still a subject of controversy. What is crucial is that Arabs believe that the McMahon Correspondence in 1916 between Sir Henry McMahon, acting on behalf of the British, and the Sharif of Mecca delineated what the independent Arab Kingdom was to include. The Arabs believe that except for a small area in what is now Lebanon, The Fertile Crescent (including Palestine) would be established as an independent Arab Kingdom if the Arabs successfully carried out an Arab Revolt against the Turks. The Europeans hoped that an Arab Revolt would force the Germans and Turks to divert troops from the European front to the Middle East.

After the war, Arab nationalist groups from Asia and Africa went to Versailles to redeem Wilson’s pledge of self-determination. The Arabs were to learn, as did Ho Chi Minh representing the Vietnamese, that self-determination” was for Europeans only. The colonial system was not to be dismembered. They found that the English and French had already divided up the Middle East. Syria and Lebanon were to be French; Trans-Jordan and Iraq were to be British.

At this moment of frustration and disappointment for the Arabs, the Balfour Declaration was confirmed, granting the Zionist movement the right to establish a “national homeland in Palestine for the Jewish people.” It was at this time that Arabs began to perceive the Zionist movement and the increasing Jewish presence in Palestine as extensions of British influence. The British emerged as the enemies of Arab independence, a view still held.

The Arabs claim that the indigenous population of Palestine was not consulted after World War I as to the nature of the government in Palestine; the same was true after World War II. Outside powers and organizations have continually imposed their will. In 1919, the Arab population of Palestine was 500% larger than the Jewish population, yet the right of the Zionist movement was recognized to establish a national homeland. In 1947, the Arab population was still almost twice the size of the Jewish population in Palestine, yet Midinat Yisrael, the Jewish state, became a reality.

This then, briefly and over-simplifying, no doubt, is Arab mythology regarding the creation of the state of Israel. It is this “history” that energizes the Arab claim to Palestine. Their claim does not go back to the Bible; it stems from hundreds of years of living on the land. In this view, it is based on self-determination, the belief that only the people living in a particular area have the right to determine the state; not outside powers or organizations – only the indigenous population.

While Jewish history focuses on the Second World War and the Holocaust, Arab history focuses on World War I and the continued occupation of the land. Both of these “histories” are selective; yet both are understandable.

Principles are easily used and forgotten by both groups. Arab history opposed an imposed settlement in 1947, and is now calling for the imposition of UN Resolution 242. Today Israel opposes an imposed settlement, forgetting that its very creation was the “imposed settlement” by the United Nations in 1947 that provided a legal basis for the state to exist.

We could go on and on. The existence of the refugee problems; the 1967 war and the war last year [1973]; each is perceived quite differently depending on which side of the Nile or Jordan you reside. These words are an attempt to alter the framework in which most discussions of the Arab-Israeli conflict occur. I have made somewhat greater efforts to elaborate the Arab perspective here not because I am unaware of a more elaborate Zionist perspective; I am deeply conscious of it. I have done so because, for a variety of reasons, I believe that the Arab mythology is more alien to most of us in this country. The tragedy of this ongoing conflict is that it involves two peoples, each of whom believes it has a legitimate claim to the land.

We can better understand this conflict and possibly make some small contribution to a peaceful resolution if we disavow the black and white discussions that so often dominate the debate and lend some support to those moderates who advocate a peaceful solution. Although moderates have been few, some prestigious voices have been raised throughout these past fifty years, voices seeking reconciliation, not renewed fighting, which begged for tolerance. Martine Buber said in 1946:

“Independence of one’s own must not be gained at the expense of another’s independence. Jewish settlement must oust no Arab peasant; Jewish immigration must not cause the political status of the present inhabitants to deteriorate. We need for this land as many Jews as can be absorbed, but not in order to establish a majority against a minority.”

Buber and other prestigious leaders of the Jewish community in Palestine opposed the establishment of a Jewish state, and favored reconciliations between Jew and Arab.

Cecil Hourani, a former advisor to President Bourguiba, wrote after the 1967 war: “Another consequence of our unwillingness to accept as real what we do not like is that when reality catches up with us, it is always too late. At every debacle we regret that we did not accept a situation which no longer exists. In 1948 we regretted that we had not accepted the 1947 UN plan for partition. In May, 1967, we were trying to go back to pre-Suez. Today, we would be happy to go back to things as they were before June 5. From every defeat, we reap a new regret and a new nostalgia, but never seem to learn a new lesson.”

Buber and Hourani are but two of the many voices that have sought to reconcile Arab and Jew throughout this long and bitter conflict. While their numbers have been few in both Israel and the Arab States, they have avoided seeing this conflict in black and white terms which so often set the framework for any discussion of the conflict here.

The only road to peace is one that rejects the categories of “good” and “evil” that partisans so frequently want to impose on any discussion. Only when we understand the tragedy of this conflict from both sides can we being to see behind unfolding events and make contributions, however small, to building a lasting peace so that both Arab and Jew can again live as brothers in the deserts and wadis that both heritages and destinies share.

John Ruskay wrote this article as a doctoral candidate in Middle East Politics at Columbia University. He is currently the Executive Vice President and CEO of the UJA – Federation of New York.