1. Who is aboriginal to this land?

Up until fairly recent history, it was taken as a truism in the west that it is the Jews who are the only people in the world who can rightly claim to be aboriginal to the land of Israel (this is despite the bible being filled with depictions of the Israelite conquest of Knaan). The Muslims were merely the latest in a long line of conquerors.
I believe Lord Balfour’s remarks from 1920, quoted below, are very telling of the prevalent attitude:

“So far as the Arabs are concerned –I hope they will remember that it is we who have established an independent Arab sovereignty of the Hedjaz. I hope they will remember it is we who desire in Mesopotamia to prepare the way for the future of a self-governing, autonomous Arab State, and I hope that, remembering all that, they will not grudge that small notch — for it is no more than that geographically, whatever it may be historically — that small notch in what are now Arab territories being given to the people who for all these hundreds of years have been separated from it.”

That last sentence – “…territories being given to the people who for all these hundreds of years have been separated from it.” is what I refer to. Of course, the Arabs in Palestine never knew any better. Most had probably barely met a Jew before Zionism began in the late 19th century.

I believe it is this interpretation which brought about the Balfour declaration three years prior to these remarks, and it is this interpretation which stood at the basis of the the four great powers’ and League of Nation’s backing of Zionism as a solution to the Jewish problem.

It is important to note that for many (if not most) Jews, this interpretation remained unchanged during the 20th century. While the consensus in the west (particularly in Europe) may have swung in favor of the Palestinian narrative after 1967, regardless of whose claim is more just or bears more “historical truth”, it is certainly a contentious point, and a matter of interpretation.

2. Can land be legitimately captured during war?

Likely originating in the Stimson Doctrine, there was a significant shift in the way the international community regarded this question during the 20th century from the idea that it is trivially true that land can be conquered to the idea that it is absolutely forbidden.
This is a completely new notion in the history of nations, and even since this new concept emerged, it’s application was ignored many times in the international arena.
It is unclear how “natural” this idea is. All states are birthed in sin. While certainly war is itself an affront to justice, the idea that rules of justice (or “international law”) can be applied to such horror is absurd. This does not justify “land grabs” but certainly puts into perspective and historical context that this idea is not self-evident. It is new, almost untested, and has not stood up well to the test of time and the requirement of fair and even application.

Most international jurors would agree there is a distinction between “aggressive conquest” and land gained during a defensive war. While Gaza might be up for dispute (I do not think it is, personally), certainly no one twisted HK Jordan’s arm and forced them to join the 1967 war. In fact, Israel quite expressly warned them not to. Since Jordan initiated aggression against Israel, the west bank captured during this war clearly falls under the ‘defensive war’ category. While some of the land captured from Jordan was originally Jewish-owned land, or land that was to be afforded to the Jewish state in the 1947 partition plan, it is unclear to my intuition what “natural rights” people have to land owned by their grandparents and lost during war. This remains unclear regarding Arab land lost in war, even if we choose to ignore the distinction between aggressive conquest and land gained during a defensive war (as many on the left do).

3. The legitimacy of the Nation State

The Enlightenment era idea of the nation state, predicated on the right to national self-determination, has in recent times fallen out of favor in the west.
Again this is a new popular idea, as democratic Europe shifts towards the American model of pluralism, it suddenly becomes unclear why the Jews of all people require a state all of their own. This is of course demagogy, often defended by proponents of a ‘one state” solution, or those who oppose Israel’s national character. Even today, most democracies are nation-states. Many such nation states, such as Germany, Japan or Finland, have laws designed to defend the demographic nature of the nation state, or allow for preferred immigration of certain nationalities or ethnic groups.

Often antagonists would argue that the Jewish people do not represent a nation, but rather a religion, and therefore are not entitled to self-determination. This is a misunderstanding of the complex ethnoreligious taxonomy of Judaism. Suffice to say though, that even according to religious halachaic doctrine, a Jew is first and foremost someone born to a Jewish mother. Thus, even by religious terminology, Judaism is a matter of heritage, not religious belief. Just as Jews don’t get to determine for Palestinians whether they are a nationality or not, so no one else gets to determine for Jews their status as a nationality. I believe that idea lies in the core of self-definition.

4. Reverse causality of occupation and war.

This last point isn’t contentious at all, but is often overlooked. Occupation is not the cause of the current state of war between the Jews of Israel and the Arab world. On the contrary, first there was ‘illegal’ war, and then there was ‘illegal’ occupation (* as noted in section 2, the question of legality of these terms are quite abstruse), not the other way around. Clearly, the 1929 Hebron pogrom cannot be explained as a “reaction” to Jewish occupation of land in 1967. The root cause of the conflict does not lie squarely in occupation. So while I’d be the last to argue that occupation and settlement were wise or beneficiary to Israel or to the promotion of peace, it is also false to presume that they are the cause of war or the sole obstacle to peace. As Ben-Dror Yemini rightly points out, the great injustices in this conflict (which he quantifies in a body count) occurred during wars instigated by the Arab side, not during 40+ years of occupation. Quite simply, there is a complex history to this conflict, it does not begin or end with an injective “one-to-one” function between occupation and war.

To all these points I’d like to add my main point in writing this — While it is certainly a legitimate position to believe that the nation-state is an antiquated idea, or that the Palestinian’s claim to be aboriginals to this land is truer to title, one must accept that these are contentious positions, akin to opinions, and not universally held to be fact. I would like to hope that accepting the disputable nature of these core-ideas, by both parties in the conflict, will lead to a more pragmatic understanding of the need for peace. Too much is fought over in the name of ‘historic justice’, by both sides. With this understanding of the liquid nature of history, I don’t know what justice is. And yet, even without it, I still see a need for compromise and for peace, because people need to live free and safe. This is my realpolitik, and I believe it holds a truer relation to our reality than either of the competing radical narratives.

Forty years ago today, the lunar module Eagle landed on the moon, fueling the imagination of of an entire species for decades to come. Two men stepped outside the lunar module and roamed about the magnificent desolation that is the Sea of Tranquility. After two hours and thirteen minutes, they returned to the Eagle, the tailwind of history on their side.

Richard Buckminster Fuller
(July 12, 1895 – July 1, 1983)

“Dare to be naïve.“

It is my belief, that for journalism to survive as a profession, it must re-assess and embrace its core value to the post-crisis consumer. What does it mean to be a journalist today? What is journalism’s USP?

Contrary to the nay-sayers, it is categorically false that people will not pay for content on the internet. Apple’s iTunes Store is but one example for a very profitable venture based entirely on the delivery of nonphysical digital goods (i.e. content). The game is not over before it even begun. What is true though, is that people today expect to be able to manipulate and share the content they purchased in ways previously unthinkable. This usually means no DRM, but I’ll later give a slightly different example of the importance of convenience.

The value journalism can bring to its readership has changed a lot in the information age: It is no longer the case that a journalist is first on the scene of an important event; In a global village, having a journalist in every capital is no longer a significant advantage; A wide reach is no longer a logistic problem which could have formerly given newspapers an edge. It’s not a problem at all these days.

So what do we have left? What value does journalism have to give?
Well, there’s still quality writing and professionalism.

Starting with the latter, journalists have a special role in society, and particularly in democratic societies, which even grants them certain protections under the law so that they can perform this role unrestricted. Investigative journalism is and will continue to remain an important role journalism can play, one which can never seriously be challenged by amateur bloggers. Another important aspect regarding professionalism is fact-checking. One of the most fascinating side effects of the “democratization” of the vox populi brought about by blogging and web2.0 is the fundamental rift in respect for information authority. It used to be the case that the written word was considered to be of higher authoritative value than spoken word. This is so ingrained in our culture, to have drifted into the realm of contract law. This hidden assumption in our collective subconscious has, in the past, given newspapers a great deal of trust by default in the public. This trust is eroding – in part deservedly – and a new, more critical readership is being born and raised (The Wikipedia Generation, if you like).
This trust, though, can still be earned, by hard, honest-to-god, journalism.
I, for one, would be willing to pay at least the cost of a newspaper subscription if it meant I knew there were Carl Bernstein’s and Bob Woodward’s out there raking muck. But if I’m going to read bullshit sourced off wikipedia, well, just don’t expect me to pay for it. That’s what blogs are for, and to be honest, they do it better.

Regarding quality, I still believe people will pay money to read well-written pieces. Whether it be sharp political analysis or an editorial on social issues in my community, I still believe that good writers need not fear. What I do see as becoming a problem, at least locally, is finding these new writers. Too many of today’s best newspaper writers were also the best newspaper writers 20 years ago. The classic system, where one progressed from local news to the nationals has broken down, because why write for free (or spec) for a shitty local print publication with zero readership, when you can open a blog and reach thousands of like-minded individuals from the comfort of your own home. The solution to this problem is a very simple one – It’s the internets, stupid. The New York Times acted wisely when it bought and integrated the Freakonomics blog. What it didn’t do so wisely was accept the standards of convenience expected in this day and age.

The New York Times appeared to have ‘gotten’ it on one hand – here’s where we source our new content (talent) – but then refused to accept the fundamental changes in the way people expect to receive and treat content. When NYT integrated the Freakonomics blog, it cut down its RSS feed from full-text feed to a partial feed. Besides the whiplash from the devoted RSS readership, I can account for myself that all it got was my frustration and eventual abandonment of the blog. For a while I tried all sorts of workarounds to get to the full text feed. Eventually these workarounds broke and I just gave up on it and stopped reading. I’m sure this wasn’t their intent and I know they had their justifications for what they did, but this is a base misunderstanding of the expectations of the information-age readership. People expect to be able to move the content they consume from one platform to another, from device to device, and consume it as they choose. Paradoxically, I’d probably have been willing to pay (a small fee) for a full RSS feed of content that is otherwise given for free – because partial feeds just didn’t work for me back then. Today, we are in the 140 character blipping on my screen age and we’re back to clicking on the web, but the point still stands.

People will pay for content, if it is delivered through a service that is convenient, easy to use, and constraint (DRM)-free. People will pay for digital newspapers, if they believe they are getting their money’s worth, where the value-for-money values now lie in: professionalism, quality and convenience.

Afterthought:
There’s some interesting parallels between this and the ‘On-Demand’ revolution going on in some other media, but I’ll leave that thought for another time.

James Graham Ballard
(November 15, 1930 -April 19, 2009)

“Modern technology offers an endless field day to any deviant strains in our personalities.”

Patrick Joseph McGoohan
(March 19, 1928 – January 13, 2009)

“I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.“

Fallujah lies 70km west-north-west to Baghdad. In 2004, it had between 200 and 300 thousand residents. From early 2004, it was under control of Jihadist extremists related to Al-Qaeda. The city exported terrorism all around it and so was the target of a large US operation which ended, after severe pressure from the local Iraqi government, in an unofficial ceasefire. This ceasefire was used, as all ceasefires in this region are used, to arm up and deepen the attacks against coalition forces as well as tighten the Islamist’s grip over Fallujah.

On the 7th of November 2004, at dawn, the Americans officially got tired of it, and started a large scale operation which lasted till 23/12/04. Americans operated 3 divisionary battle teams whose size and number are similar to the number of forces Israel is currently employing in its current operation in Gaza, and fought against an estimated 3,000 Islamists.
Approximately two thirds of the residents of Fallujah escaped when fighting started. When the fighting ceased, the city had, according to US sources, 6,000 dead civilians, some 2-3% of the city residents, approx 85% of the total dead, in addition to 1,000 terrorists. Between 9,000-10,000 houses of the total of 50,000 houses in Fallujah were completely destroyed as welll as 26,000 houses which needed repair to some degree. Among the destroyed buildings there were 65 mosques out of a total of 200 mosques in the city, 60 schools which were used according to the Americans as weapons caches and shelter from American fire. 77 soldiers from the army, the marines task force and the 82nd airborne, some of the best of the US has, died in battle, 30 of them by the 16th day of fighting.
The operation is considered by the Americans a success and a milestone in the long war in Iraq, even though no one from Fallujah fired, even once, a rocket on an American school or kindergarten and even though American soldiers were fighting 10,000km from home and not 10,000m like IDF soldiers.

I don’t remember criticism in the world regarding Fallujah.

The IDF is fighting in Gaza against a force of some 16,000 Hamas combatants, organized in 6 divisions, trained for urban warfare and with capabilities far superior to those of the Fallujah Islamists.
According to the Palestinians, some 900 people have died from IDF fire which represent 0.0007% of the 1.4 million residents of Gaza. Most, at least two-thirds of them, are indeed combatants, and only as much as a third of them, even according to the Palestinian figures, are civilian casualties.
As far as we know, the IDF has destroyed so far 10 mosques, and even in the worst case estimates, the number of houses destroyed in Gaza is significantly lower than the number of houses destroyed in much-smaller Fallujah.

Fallujah is not an exceptional case of densely populated urban warfare.
The stories from the Casbah in Algiers of the late 50s or Grozny the capitol of Chechnya in 1999 are many times worse, but they can serve to illuminate us. They can give us some perspective: to the complexity of the warfare undertaken by the IDF today in Gaza; to the unavoidable cost civilians ultimately pay in such situations; to strengthen the claim that the IDF today is indeed a surgical precision army, under terribly complex circumstances, as professional as can be; and that the IDF or Israel do not need to justify themselves to any foreign army or society who under similar circumstances would be doing orders of magnitude worse.
Whoever peers deep into the second Fallujah battle, whose American Army’s pride rests upon, cannot help being awestruck and amazed by the IDF in Gaza, considering the proportionality involved.

There’s nothing new to the claims that the Arab parties (the only one left, Hadash, is an Arab-Jewish communist coalition) do not accept Israel as a Jewish state. It’s been tested before, and the High Court of Justice has already determined over much more significant claims of treason, that the Arab parties should be allowed to run. No doubt, they will appeal to the High Court, and will be allowed to run. It’s a technicality, but still a blow to Israeli democracy.

No Taxation without Representation

I am of the opinion that all ethnocentric parties should be disqualified. There’s something amazing and very democratic about the Israeli parliamentary system. In the coming elections, 34 parties (including the 2 Arab parties) are going to run. This is an amazing and significantly more accurate representation of the spectrum of political opinions in our fine democracy than a 2-party system.

However, Sectarian parties are also inherently anti-democratic. They bring about a common denominator which has nothing to do with political opinion, and while I can see why minorities would like to join hands to bring about greater influence, in my humble opinion the proper place for such things are ‘wings’ or lobbies within established parties.
While our democracy is healthy in that many different perspectives get parliamentary representation, it’s very ill in our parliament’s stranglehold over government, which leads to an almost ungovernable state. While there’s room for more than just two major blocs, I strongly feel our democracy would be much healthier if Jewish-Religious, Jewish Ultra-Orthodox, Sepharadic Jews and Arabs were not allowed to present a party solely based on such denominators. A person should vote for a party because he agrees with their social, political, economic etc. agenda, not because the party members belong to the same ethnic group or faith.

Just a quick recap. In the summer of 2005, Israel left the Gaza strip. In the summer of 2007, Hamas, an Islamic militant organization opposed to peace with Israel, took over the Gaza strip in a deadly coup. Israel, supported by the international quartet, set up an economic blockade on Gaza until Hamas accepts the quartet demands, which include accepting Israel’s right to exist. Once Hamas finished executing Fatah operative and set up shop in Gaza, this immediately led to rocket fire. Earlier this year, Israel and Hamas signed a six month Egyptian-brokered ceasefire agreement, where if Hamas stopped shelling Israel, Israel would ease the blockade on the the Hamas-ruled Gaza strip. This never really went to pass, as Hamas never actually stopped shelling, but merely shelled less, and so Israel never really eased pressure either. When the six month agreement ended, Israel was in favor of extending it, while Hamas stated it would not extend it further, blaming Israel. It then increased shelling dramatically.

From the New York Times:

Opening the routes to commerce was Hamas’s main goal in its cease-fire with Israel, just as ending the rocket fire was Israel’s central aim. But while rocket fire did go down drastically in the fall to 15 to 20 a month from hundreds a month, Israel said it would not permit trade to begin again because the rocket fire had not completely stopped and because Hamas continued to smuggle weapons from Egypt through desert tunnels. Hamas said this was a violation of the agreement, a sign of Israel’s real intentions and cause for further rocket fire. On Wednesday [12/24/08], some 70 rockets hit Israel over 24 hours, in a distinct increase in intensity.

The way I see it, Hamas is trying to eat the cake and keep it. It wants to be the ‘proper’ ruling authority in Gaza, but also wants to remain an irresponsible resistance movement.

Being a resistance movement which objects to Israel’s right to exists lies in the core of Hamas ideology, while controlling Gaza is the most significant accomplishment Hamas has ever had, and is a strategically important asset to them.

The fact is, it can’t have both. It just doesn’t play. Ironically, it was easier for Hamas under Fatah rule to do as they please and get away with it. If Hamas want to be the ones in charge of Gaza, then they’re responsible for Gaza, which means they’re to be held accountable for what happens in and from Gaza.
This is what being sovereign really means. Holding the monopoly for use of force from within a territory, and being held accountable for exertion of force in and from that territory.

So Hamas are at a very difficult impasse. Israel seems reluctant to actually forcefully remove them from their control of Gaza, but will no longer stand for rockets being fired from Gaza to Israel. Maintaining control of Gaza but no longer acting as a resistance movement will quickly lose Hamas’ popularity (which already isn’t too great in Gaza), but refusing to cease fire on Israel will bring Gazans to the verge of a humanitarian catastrophe and will eventually lose them popularity as well.
Their only hope is that Gaza reaches a humanitarian catastrophe sooner rather than later, when they can still blame Israel.

None of this bodes well for the people of Gaza.

The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters
and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters,
with four dead and eleven wounded.
And around these, in a larger circle
of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered
and one graveyard. But the young woman
who was buried in the city she came from,
at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers,
enlarges the circle considerably,
and the solitary man mourning her death
at the distant shores of a country far across the sea
includes the entire world in the circle.
And I won’t even mention the howl of orphans
that reaches up to the throne of God and
beyond, making
a circle with no end and no God.

(via Nitzan)