by Omar Shahabudin McDoom
Omar Shahabudin McDoom is Associate Professor of Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics where his research interests include the comparative study of war and violence. He is also the co-editor of the Journal of Genocide Research.
Views expressed herein are my own and do not reflect those of the London School of Economics or the Journal of Genocide Research
This week’s column concludes the two-part series that started last week on the question of what distinguishes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from other modern wars. It analyzes ten characteristics of the conflict often given in explanations of why it incenses and divides so many people not directly involved in it and places them in comparative historical perspective. The first part considered the civilian death toll; asymmetry in military capability; scale of indiscriminate violence; indivisibility of the territory fought over; inconsistent denunciations of international law; and the settler-colonial character of the occupation. This week considers the final set of characteristics and offers a concluding view on the current round of violence.
7. Religious significance: Do the religious dimensions of the conflict distinguish it? As roughly 97% of Palestinians are Muslim and some 74% of Israelis are Jewish, the conflict easily lends itself to religious framing. Even more so because the land in contention is considered sacred by Jews, Muslims, and Christians alike and historic rivalries exist between the three Abrahamic faiths. Yet the framing of wars in terms of religious identities is hardly new, even in the 20th century. The frame has been invoked to characterize conflict in Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia, Myanmar, and the Sudan to give but a few recent examples.
Perhaps instead it is because the conflict involves contestation over holy sites? The Old City in occupied East Jerusalem contains the Temple Mount on which the First and Second Temples were built, and on which the Al Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock are presently located. The site then is deeply sacred to Jews and Muslims alike. Other conflicts have involved contestation over symbolically-charged sites such as the Gandzasar Monastery in Nagorno-Karabakh and the Visoki Dečani Monastery in Kosovo. But few if any involve the situation where two faiths both see the same site as sacred. The closest parallel may be the Babri Masjid, in Ayodhya, India located on the supposed birthplace of Lord Rama, whose destruction triggered nation-wide communal violence between Muslims and Hindus in 1992. However, Babri holds far less significance for the global Muslim community than Al Aqsa, considered to be the third holiest site after Mecca and Medina. Contestation then over deeply sacred land then is a distinguishing feature of the conflict. It makes it particularly inflammable and particularly intractable.
8. External “kinship” communities and international support: Is the conflict distinctive for the international support each side draws? Both Palestinians and Israeli Jews have ties to external communities many of whose members, though not all, feel ethnic or religious kinship-based solidarity with them. Israeli Jews have the Jewish diaspora while Palestinians have the wider Arab community and the even larger Muslim world from which to draw sympathy. This sympathy can translate into political advocacy and also material support, usually through the host state’s government, on behalf of each party. The global Arab population, comprising ethnically Arab citizens in the 22 states of the Arab League as well as the Arab diaspora, may number between 400 and 500 million individuals. The global Muslim population is estimated at some 1.9 billion individuals most of whom live in the world’s 49 Muslim majority countries. The potential pool of sympathizers with the Palestinian cause then is significant. The Palestinian cause was central to the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948 in which Egypt, Syria, Transjordan, Iraq, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia all participated. Since then, various Arab states have given humanitarian and development aid to the Palestinians; and several Muslim-majority states have supplied at least rhetorical diplomatic support.
The Jewish diaspora, in contrast, is considerably smaller, estimated to be between 7 and 8 million persons, of whom well over 5 million live in the United States. Notwithstanding their much smaller “kinship” community, Israeli Jews receive significant international support. Israel’s strongest supporter is the world’s most powerful nation. Since the 1967 war, initially as part of its geopolitical rivalry with the Soviet Union, the United States has provided enormous diplomatic, economic, and military assistance to Israel whom it sees as its closest ally in the region. Cumulatively, it has been the biggest beneficiary, by far, of American military aid of any country in the world. The reasons for this continued support are contested. Some argue it is because of shared values and aligned interests. Israel is seen as the only democracy in a volatile region where anti-American sentiment is high. Others argue it is down to the successful advocacy and influence of pro-Israel interest groups whose members include Jewish-Americans sympathetic to Israel. They believe the United States’ remarkable support to Israel is against its own – and also Israel’s – strategic interests. Whatever the reason, the scale of popular sympathy on the Arab street and within the Muslim world for Palestinians, and the strength of official support for Israel from the United States, are distinctive features of the conflict. They may partly account for the intensity of feeling the conflict generates.
9. Zionism and state formation: Is it the unusual manner through which the state of Israel was created that distinguishes the conflict? The quest for a modern Jewish state properly began with the Zionist movement in Europe in the late nineteenth century. As a nationalist movement, Zionism was not unique for the time. Irish nationalism, Indian nationalism, Armenian nationalism, and various African nationalisms were all emerging in the same era that also saw international recognition of the right of people to self-determination. However, Zionism was different in one important respect. While other nationalist movements sought to liberate land people had owned and occupied for hundreds of years from foreign presence, Zionists sought to bring Jews from abroad to settle in land already owned and occupied by other people for hundreds of years. The foundational Zionist document, the Basel Program of 1897, articulated the Zionist objective as to “establish a home for the Jewish people in Palestine secured under public law”. It was conspicuously silent on the status and rights of the existing Arab population. The British then endorsed the Zionist aspiration of a “Jewish homeland” in Palestine in the infamous Balfour declaration of 1917, betraying the understanding there would be independent lands for the Arabs in return for their help defeating the Ottoman army in World War I. Thirty-one years later and the Zionist vision of a state was realized and its Jewish character reflected in the 1950 Law of Return guaranteeing the right to settle in Israel to any Jew in the world who sought it. 6.9 million Jews now live in Israel. 106 years later and the Palestinian right to self-determination remains unfulfilled with some 5 million Palestinians under occupation and an estimated 5-7 million Palestinians as refugees in other countries. The different fortunes of the two peoples seem particularly stark in light of the highly improbable Zionist ambition of satisfying Jewish self-determination in land occupied by another people.
10. Historic moral responsibility: Does the conflict stand out for the extent of external involvement in the conflict’s creation? The Jewish state was achieved in no small part because of an exceptional world historical event: the Holocaust. There was enormous sympathy among Allied nations “in the light of the terrible ordeal which the Jewish people of Europe endured during the recent war”, as President Truman put it in 1946. It was likely more than simple sympathy. There may have also been a strong sense of moral responsibility among them for not having done more, and sooner, to stop the mass atrocities and genocide Hitler had perpetrated against the Jews. To Palestinians, it appeared as if the crime had been committed by the German state; but restitution was being made by them. The state of Israel had been created by taking land inhabited by one people and promising it to another people for wrongs committed by yet another people. Between Britain’s promise of a Jewish homeland, Germany’s perpetration of genocide, the Allied nations’ belated response to it, and the United States’ successful lobbying for UN Resolution 181 on which thirty-three countries ultimately voted to partition Palestine into two states, there was extensive involvement of so many of the world’s most leading liberal democracies in the creation of Israel. This involvement is a distinguishing feature of the dispute. The historic responsibility they bear for the ensuing conflict may in part account for the strength of feeling it generates up until today.
In sum, characteristics 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 do distinguish the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: (i) the longevity of the occupation; (ii) the contestation over land considered sacred to both parties; (iii) the unparalleled level of US material support for Israel; (iv) the distinctiveness of Zionism as a nationalist movement and (v) the historical moral responsibility of so many countries for the situation today are all distinctive features of the conflict. At the same time, while characteristics 1-5 are not unique to the conflict, they contribute still to its polarizing effects and intractability. Indeed, the coincidence of all ten characteristics in a single conflict is itself a remarkable thing. It should not be surprising then that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has inspired such strong feeling, among so many different people, and for such a prolonged period of time. The conflict deserves the world’s attention.
And the world’s attention the conflict now has. The scale and brutality of the killings of Israeli civilians and soldiers on October 7th by Hamas militants, and by the others who followed through the breach, shocked the world. It may be difficult for Palestinians to feel sympathy for the families of those killed and those taken hostage for they believe they have suffered in many more ways and for much longer. But empathy for the other is still needed if the path to peace is one day to be walked. And while occupation may justify – morally and legally – the right to armed resistance, it does not eliminate free will in how this force is used. It cannot excuse cruelty. It cannot justify killing children. Those are choices. And ones that should never be celebrated.
The Israeli government’s response has been more staggering still and continues. At the time I write, over 10,000 Palestinians – the majority women and children – have been killed in an aerial bombardment campaign whose intensity has few modern parallels and whose lethality is magnified by the enforced confinement of civilians within the perimeter of Gaza. They cannot flee. Some argue this action is Israel legitimately exercising its right to self-defense. Others say it as indiscriminate and disproportionate vengeance. Yet others suggest something darker still: a genocide unfolding in plain sight of the world. They point to the deliberate deprivation of the necessities of life: inadequate food, water, medicine, and fuel to sustain Gaza’s population of 2.2 million. And then to the statements made by senior Israeli political and military figures: “Human animals must be treated as such. There will be no electricity and no water, there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell” said IDF coordinator, Major-General Ghassan Alian. “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible. It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true” asserts Israeli President, Isaac Herzog. Statements like these, and others, they say are suggestive of the specific intent needed in international law to establish the claim of genocide. Such claims are highly contentious. Governments in the US, UK, France, Germany, Canada and other liberal democracies stand accused of censoring views that are critical of Israel and of equating sympathy for Palestinians with support for terrorism and with antisemitism. If true, this censorship is but one of the many ways in which the conflict affects more than just Israelis and Palestinians. It degrades the quality of democracy and civil liberties in our very own countries.
