Daily Times

If the people of Israel want to go back to their memories of their war against the Arab nations after they had been attacked following the handover by the British in 1948, if they want to go back to the Holocaust, if they want to go back to the anti-Jewish violence — the first so-called “pogrom” in 1819 when the Jewish ghetto in Frankfurt was ransacked — or to 12th century England when began the libel that the Jews ritually murdered Christian children to mix their blood in the unleavened bread baked at Passover, then they should recall some equally important other events. What about the welcoming of the large numbers of Jews by the Muslim Turks when they were expelled from Spain in 1492? What about the long period up to the 12th century when Jews lived without being persecuted for the most part in Europe? What about the centuries up to the 20th when the good periods of toleration far outnumbered the bad years of discrimination and repression? Or, going back even further, what about Moses’s act of genocide, which God told Moses he must carry out? Moses’s army on its way to the land now called Palestine attacked its resident tribes: the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Midianites, the Amorites, the Jebusites and the Hivites, and then, on God’s instructions, Moses told his victorious generals to return to the Midianites and kill all the women and their young sons (it is all recorded at length in the Old Testament’s Book of Geneses and the Book of Numbers).

Let us interrupt this history a while and recall Shakespeare’s great work of dramatic art, The Merchant of Venice, where Shylock was treated as an unpleasant Jew (with a lovely, self-effacing daughter) who dealt mainly in shady usury. His speech to the court is one of Shakespeare’s most remembered: “Hath not a Jew eyes? / Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? / If you prick us, do we not bleed? / If you tickle us do we not laugh? / If you poison us, do we not die? / And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”

But what if we turn this around and allow a Palestinian to ask this question? Do the inhabitants of Israel regard Arab life as less human than their own? The severely skewed rate of casualties in the Gaza conflict including the killing of many, many children seems to suggest it.

Four decades have passed since Israel, in 1967, crushed a new Arab attack. It was following that that Israelis started to settle beyond the border of their state in contravention of international law, which prohibits an occupying state from transferring population into seized territory. For around two-thirds of its history Israel has been an occupying state, one that by fear has extended its settlements. The state of Israel has been free of the malignancy of occupation for only 19 years of its existence. The vast majority of the seven million Israelis do not know any other reality. The vast majority of the four million Palestinians who live under occupation similarly do not know any other reality.

How many Israelis are aware of the details of their people’s long history, or do they only know about blood libel, the Russian pogroms and the Holocaust? Probably so, for an overwhelming majority of rabbis of this and the last century have shunted the depths of history to one side. I recently went to the library and looked carefully at over 60 volumes of Hebrew history and theology. Not one mentioned the ethnic cleansing stories of Deuteronomy. Similarly, Israelis know little or nothing about the history of the Arabs and that it was their Middle East that was the cradle of western (as opposed to Indian and Chinese) civilisation, millennia before the Israelites came on the scene. Nor do they know much, if anything, about the long history of Muslim friendship towards the Hebrew people, one that the ancestors of present day US and Europe did not often offer.

If the Israelis could face up to their history and to the events from 1949 on, the world would no longer be threatened by the Israel-Palestine dispute and the madness of this conflict. The Israelis should pull back from the West Bank and offer a two state solution on the most generous of terms, turning back the clock to 1947 (which if the Arabs had been smart they should have accepted then.). Why should it be only to the so-called pre-1967 boundaries? The lion then would lie down with the lamb and swords would be beaten into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks.

The writer has been a foreign affairs columnist for the International Herald Tribune for 20 years and author of the much acclaimed new book, Conundrums of Humanity — the Big Foreign Policy Questions of Our Age. He may be contacted at jonathanpower95@gmail.com