Ending the violence of a Civil War, Part II

At this point I will take an aside. I referred to the Palestinian-Israeli Civil War in my previous post. Before we go on to applying the principles of how to end the violence of a civil war to this particular conflict, a significant chunk of history is necessary.

Note: For the sake of convenience, I use these terms in the following manner:

Jewish: Those who follow the Jewish faith.
Palestinian: Those peoples currently or formerly residing in Palestine who practice a religion other than Judaism. (Note that this is a religious differentiation, since there is no genetic or racial difference between the two populations, due to the fact that most of the Palestinians are descendants of Jews who converted to Islam).
Palestine: The area comprising modern Israel plus the Gaza Strip plus the West Bank.
Palestinian Civil War: The conflict between Jewish and Palestinian inhabitants of Palestine.

Please disregard any other definitions of the above terms that you may have in mind.

Anyhow: During the period of Ottoman rule, the Jewish population of Palestine gradually declined until, around 1890, Jews consisted of approximately 6% of the population of Palestine. Now, this was not because of Muslim violence against Jews. The Muslim world, during the period from the Ottoman conquests to the British mandate of Palestine, was generally a peaceable place for the world's Jews. When Spain expelled their Jews, they migrated to the Muslim world and became known as the "Sephardim", for example. It was more a combination of a number of things. First, while Islamic law did not encourage or condone violence against Jews (indeed, they were explicitly tolerated as "people of the book" by Islamic law), Jews were heavily taxed, not allowed to participate in the government, and encouraged to convert to Islam. The majority of the Jewish population of Palestine converted first to Christianity, then after the Islamic conquest, to Islam by 1000AD. Secondly, the Crusaders slaughtered most of the remaining Jews in Palestine when they conquered it in 1096. The net result was that the Jewish population of Palestine fell significantly during the period 600AD to 1900AD.

Or did it? Here is the salient point: Because of conversions from Judaism to Islam, *MOST OF THE ISLAMIC POPULATION OF PALESTINE WAS GENETICALLY IDENTICAL TO THE JEWISH POPULATION*. That is, most of the Islamic population of Palestine was, in fact, converted Jews. At that point (roughly 1900), the trend of a declining Jewish population reversed significantly, due to two factors -- increased pogroms against Jews in Russia due to the instability that eventually led to the overthrow of the Tsars causing large numbers of Jews to flee, and the Zionist movement, which encouraged Jews to move back to Palestine. It was a perfect storm where these two things happened at the same time to funnel many of those Russian and Polish Jews to Palestine (Poland was largely ruled by Russia at the time and also suffered pogroms). By 1920, when the British took over from the Ottomans, the Jewish population of Palestine was probably up to around 15-20% of the population. During the runup to WWII in the 1930's, another 600,000 or so Jews managed to slip past the blockades and make it to Palestine, raising the percentage of Jews to probably around 35% of the population.

This caused frictions, because most of the land in the Ottoman Empire mandate of Transjordan was owned by absentee landlords in Istanbul. The Jewish settlers coming in from Europe were wealthier and could buy land from the absentee landlords and evict families that had been living on a particular plot of land for generations. This ran afoul of a major cultural and legal difference between European culture and Middle Eastern culture. The incoming Jewish settlers saw no problem with this because in European culture land leases are short-term affairs that are negotiable on a year-by-year basis, while the existing Palestinian inhabitants saw it as a breach of the traditional Middle Eastern landlord-tenant contract, where a landlord was supposed to stay in his proper place (i.e. far away) and a lease was actual property that could be passed on to their children and their children's children etc. This was all a relic of the feudal system that the Ottomans had imposed when they conquered Palestine from the Mamluks of Egypt.

The end result was civil war between the Jewish and Palestinian segments of the population -- who, remember, are genetically identical. There apparently was no attempt by either side to understand the cultural differences causing the conflict or to negotiate a reasonable settlement of the issue (such as, perhaps, buying out tenant rights for a sum of money in exchange for the Palestinians going away). Palestinians evicted from their land migrated to the towns and cities and hung out on the street corners where they engaged in acts of violence against Jews who happened to pass by (and against others too, most likely, but Jews decidedly felt their sting). Jews organized militias and concentrated in their own fortified villages and went on their own hunting expeditions to push Palestinians off the land in areas where they intended to buy land and set up their own villages and farms. By this time the British, who'd taken over the area after the Ottoman Empire disintegrated, were decidedly put out by all this uncouth violence and slammed the door on Jewish immigration to their Palestinian Mandate in hopes of preventing further violence. It did not work, of course. Jewish immigrants continued to filter in, if more slowly, Palestinians evicted from lands their families had worked for generations continued to take out their frustrations on the Jewish settlers who replaced them on those lands, and so it goes until complete and total civil war broke out in 1947-1948.

Yes, I call it civil war, because just as the North and South had major cultural differences that caused frictions between them that ended up with the two regions of the United States fighting a bloody civil war, so, too, did the Palestinian and Jewish inhabitants of the Palestinian Mandate have major cultural differences that led to civil war. The European values of the incoming Jewish settlers and the Middle Eastern values of the existing Palestinian inhabitants were as starkly different as the values of a Confederate slave-owner and a Northern factory owner. This caused friction, then hatred between the two factions and, eventually, war. The structure of the war was starkly different because Palestine is a tiny geographic area and both populations were intermingled in the same area, plus various outside powers invaded hoping to scoop up portions of Palestine while its occupants were busy with civil war, but civil war it was -- remember, by this time probably half the Jewish population in Palestine had been born there and many of the remainder had been there for 20 years or more (with the exception of the European concentration camp survivors who arrived in 1947-1948 after Britain was shamed by U.S. publication of British concentration camps for Jews into letting the Jews they'd imprisoned proceed to Palestine), so it was no longer a question of outsiders vs. the locals. They were *all* locals by that time.

And, as we all know, one side -- the Jewish side -- won this civil war. But the aftermath of this civil war unfolded in a much different manner from the American Civil War, probably unsurprising given the different motivations, limited geographic area, larger cultural differences between the two sides, and given the fact there was not a third people (blacks) to use as a convenient proxy for the hatred of each side for the other...

So now we go on to Part III of the series, "Ending the violence of a Civil War", where we look at the current state of the Palestinian Civil War and apply our basic principles of "how to end a civil war" to suggest what has to be done to end it.

-- Badtux the History Penguin