Conclusions about Israel (or lack thereof)

The debate, as currently framed, is about the Right of Return. We have a large number of people who are in the West Bank and Gaza whose parents and grandparents lived in what is now Israel. They are barred from citizenship and have difficulty entering. So today's essay is about migration law again, and asks the moral question, what should the law be? I'll also discuss the government of the PA [Palestinian Authority].

Caveat: although a positive number of people who are not me refer to me as a `migration scholar', the following is basically an opinion piece. There's no math, just commentary on the moral defensibility of the components of both sides' arguments.

Immigration The immigration question divides into two subparts: restrictions on entry (based on security concerns) and restrictions on citizenship (based on political issues). But first, a few subtopics:

Pre-foundation arguments The territory in question had a Jewish majority when 1948 rolled aroud because of mass migration up to then, in which Jews from N Africa and Eastern Europe started moving in to what were once minority Jewish territories. The A-bias side concludes that this means that it's not really Jewish territory, and shouldn't be a Jewish state.

This is an entirely indefensible argument. The `character' of places change all the time, and to claim that the old character is inherently superior is the definition of xenophobia. E.g., California has gone from primarily Indian character to Spanish character to Anglo character to an increasingly Hispanic and Asian character. With every switch, the old stock complained about the new stock, even though the old stock was the new stock a generation or two before. Hispanics in the Southwest aren't even a new stock—they're a mix of the pre-Anglo Indian and Spanish stocks.

An immediate corrolary is that Israelis' arguments about maintaining Israel's `Jewish character' are equally indefensible [save for one caveat below]. It's a prime example of the invalidity and inconsistencies of these old stock/new stock arguments that one side insists on defending the Jewish character of the place today and ignoring the Arab character it had in the 1800s; while the other side harks over and over again to the Arab character the place had before the Jews moved in, while making catty comments about current attempts to preserve the current Jewish caracter.

So both sides make arguments about what the nation state on top of the land that is now called Israel should be, based upon calculations from basic principles. If anybody ever makes an argument of this sort, I suggest you take pains to ignore them, lest you start becoming dumber by association.

Israelis are racists. Having spent the entirety of the last column explaining that Middle Eastern Arabs are racists, I should point out that Jews are racists too. I remember my mother teaching me that the Hebrew phrase for shoddy craftsmanship literally translates to `Arab work', though she'd been in the States long enough to discuss it all from a third person perspective. The support of migration restrictions against Arabs still has roots in the same xenophobia that all the world's migration restrictions have.

Security concerns So Arabs are harassed at the border of Israel, just as they're harassed at the US border, because people think that they're going to enter the country to kill somebody. Before saying anything about this argument, it should be clear to you that the probability of this being true is significantly higher for Israel than for the USA. Although we have an example of people crossing the border with the sole intent of hurting Americans in September, 2001, it happens all the time in Israel. One side says it's every few months, and the other side says it's daily.

Given the problem of kids throwing rocks at Israelis, the simple solution is to just get rid of all the rocks in the region, perhaps replacing them with Nerf rocks. Similarly, the solution to people crossing the border and attacking Israelis is of course to just not let anybody cross the border.

Maintaining Jewish Character Unlike residents of the District of Columbia, Arab citizens of Israel can select a representative to vote for them in their congress (The Knesset). There are Arab members of the Knesset, probably elected by Arab citizens of Israel. Further, the Knesset is a favorite among political scientists because it gives minorities a lot of power: if party A is 49% of the vote and says Yes, party B is 49% of the vote and says No, and party C is 2% of the vote, then party C will decide the outcome. Things like this happen all the time in the Knesset. So Arabs do indeed have representation, and their elected representatives do from time to time call for, um, continued resistance against Israel (J-bias).

So what if the Right of Return were fully implemented, and everyone who could argue that their grandfather lived in Israel in 1947 could enter Israel and participate fully in elections? Then Israel would be democratically dissolved within an election or two, by people who unambiguously hate Jews. It's a counterfactual; we can't predict what would happen in this case, but I expect this would only open the door for the sort of persecution Jews had fled to Israel to avoid. As much as I'd like to subscribe to the Fluffy Bunny school of politics, which says that Middle Eastern Arabs will suddenly become really nice to Jews as soon as the Israeli government is dissolved and all the hate they'd learned as kids (J-bias; #3, 6, & 9 are my faves.) would evaporate, there's not much evidence that this'd happen.

Arguments for full franchise are the usual ones: border checks halt a lot of innocent people; if one is working in a country, one should have a say in governmental decisions which affects him/her; all restrictions of freedom of movement are suspect. These arguments all advocate for a liberalization of restrictions of Arabs entering Israel, and, unlike arguments about the Ottoman Empire, are valid and relevant. They're not getting much space in this essay only because there's nothing special about these arguments in the context of Israel, and I don't think they're particularly controversial [and also because I've blogged about them enough in the U.S. context].

The parts which are specific to the Israeli situation are those from the last two essays. Israel is the product of centuries of indifferent anti-Jew sentiment the world over, and is delightful because it shows that the world actually learned from history, setting up a safeguard to keep the parts of the past we don't want repeating from repeating. But with a concentration of Jews in one place, we have a concentration of hatred, and Israel is surrounded by people who avowedly do not want it to exist, many of whom would like to see the 5.1 million Jews in Israel exterminated.

To conclude this section: yes, the migration restrictions between the PA and Israel are racist, and often hurt people. They are also an attempt to balance the fact a majority of the population next door is openly hostile to the country it's visiting, and seeks its dissolution. A good migration policy would balance everything in the `arguments for full franchise' section with the knowledge that there is such a massive desire among people outside Israel to wipe it off the map, and would do so without racism.

An asshole government is still better than no government at all. This is a bit misleading: there is no such thing as no government, since if an area suddenly becomes a governmental vacuum, new governing bodies immediately get sucked into existence. Usually, we refer to these new goverments as a `mafia', but sometimes prefer other terms such as `militia' or `despot'. We in the USA spent all of grade school learning about how the government of the USA, a really good government as governments go, spontaneously formed after the Brits were ejected. We get from this that the same can easily happen elsewhere, but we have many an example where an asshole government dissolved and a benevolent government failed to spontaneously form. The expectations behind the invasion of Iraq show how deeply ingrained this particular myth is among certain segments of the USA's population, and how wrong its application can be.

Returning to the context here, the West Bank and Gaza have not had an independent government since the Ottoman Empire. Israel is the current administrator of the Palestinian Authority, whether we like that or not. For the well being of the residents of the PA, Israel should not just withdraw its forces one morning, because doing so would leave a power vacuum which will suck up assorted armed individuals to form the replacement government. [This applies to the USA in Iraq too: regardless of whether we like US troops there, if they just up and left one morning, it'd be a disaster.] Instead, Israel needs to assist in establishing a government.

`But it's not a power vacuum,' you retort, `it's got the PA.' Unfortunately, the PA is too weak a government to fend for itself. There are opposition groups, notably Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which would rather govern than the PA. The PA has no tax base, since Israel is the only frigging viable economy for a country mile. [As evidenced here.]

Ariel Sharon is an asshole. I do not think that it is the consensus opinion among Israelis that all Arabs are evil and should be killed. But I'm not so sure about what's going on in Ariel Sharon's head. Unfortunately, he's the president of the frigging country. On the other side is Yasser Arafat, also an ass, who has built his career on the dissolution of Israel. No reading between the lines here, that's what his PLO was explicitly founded on. Here's the PLO's charter, (A-bias document, J-bias source) and here's Article 19 from that charter: "The partition of Palestine in 1947 and the establishment of the state of Israel are entirely illegal[...]".

Sharon and Arafat have made a half-century career of trying to hurt each other, and now they both have a government. Sharon has the upper hand here—his government gives money to Arafat's government—and not surprisingly, Sharon has used this to try to score a final victory against his long-time nemesis. There aren't words to express my frustration.

The goals of the new government: If Israel grants a truly autonomous, democratic government to the PA, then that government will be oriented toward destroying Israel. The Oslo accord [here's a copy (A-bias source)] converted the PLO into the government of the PA; maintaining continuity between the PLO and the PA government is Mr. Arafat, who hasn't shown much of an about-face since the decades when he built a career out of fomenting hatred toward Israel.

And, as I like to think I proved in the last essay, the consensus view among the residents of the PA is that Israel should be destroyed, by diplomacy or by force.

So Israel has the responsibility of establishing a government which, when independent, will have as its core a desire to dissolve Israel, held by both its leaders and its constituents. You can see why Israel's representatives aren't so enthusiastic about the task.

Conclusion I'll stop there, without actually telling you what I think should be done (because I don't particularly know). But hopefully I've laid out the axes by which to measure events or proposals you read about in the news: there's the racism axis, wherein Jews hate Arabs; there's the preservation of the existence of Israel axis, wherein the rest of the world has shown a history of willingness to persecute Jews or to passively allow others to persecute them, and there's not all that much evidence of that disappearing; there's the Arabs lobbying for the dissolution of Israel axis, wherein Middle Eastern Arabic culture has a strong anti-Israel and anti-Jew flavor, and many (if not most) do not shy away from condoning violence toward Jews.

I remember Mr. Sally, my Analysis professor, getting extremely enthusiastic about calculating bounds on the volume of a certain sphere. See, the problem was that direct calculation was impossible, and the answer wasn't an exreme solution like zero or one, so you had to construct all sorts of ad hoc scaffolding to find boundaries somewhere in the middle. He loved it. The answer was somewhere between zero and one, and you had to grope around to find exactly where it was, and he revelled in it.

The rest of us are often not so comfortable when we don't have a boundary to lean against. We can't even assume symmetry and just split everything down the middle. In a situation where it is entirely impossible to ignore race, we Americans often get deer-in-the-headlights confused, because our quick 'n' easy response that all laws should be ethnicity-blind just don't apply. I emphatically do not care who started it, but Middle Eastern Arabs hate Jews, and that will not go away in the near future, even if we could train all Jews to stop hating Arabs (which is also not going to happen). As distasteful as considering race when writing policy may be, for Israel's leaders to ignore the fact that so many Middle Eastern Arabs hate Jews so passionately would be literally suicidal.

Many proposed changes which are aimed at a more egalitarian treatment of Arabs will score well on the minimizing racism axis, but badly on the preserving Israel axis, because there is such a strong consensus among Arabs that Israel should be destroyed. On the other hand, ideas which take care of the Arabs trying to kill Jews axis are invariably intermixed with a shift in the wrong direction on the Jews' racism toward Arabs axis. There is simply no policy which will give zero reign to Jewish racism, will ensure full security from Arab efforts to destroy Israel, and which will preserve Israel as a haven of no persecution against Jews. The optimum is somewhere in the middle; I wish I knew where.