An Open Letter to Taka Yamaguchi

Note: This post in response to this article posted on the website discussing the dispute between Israelis and Palestinians.

Dear Mr. Yamaguchi,

I would like to respond to your open invitation to engage in what you correctly call “important discourse” regarding the situation faced by both Israelis and Palestinians. I apologize if you saw my article as a “personal jab” at you. My response was tailored to address the points made in your article and was not intended to personally insult you. I concerned myself with the questionable claims you made, the misrepresentation of important factual evidence with which you attempted to justify your point of view, and your knowledge of the subject. I personally believe that anyone who writes for a publication must be held accountable for the content he or she chooses to express.

For this reason, I believe a point of clarification is in order. In your latest article, you take issue with my use of the word “bent” in characterizing Palestinians’ desire to inhabit Israel. As the web editor of the Washington University Political Review, you should well know that my article was extensively edited and altered without my input or permission by the WUPR Editorial staff before it appeared in the print edition of the magazine. Many of my ideas in the article that I wrote were abbreviated, re-phrased, or cut out altogether from the version that appeared in print. In my article, I did not use the word “bent.” The WUPR editorial staff inserted this word into their printed, abridged version of my article without my consent. While your mistake in implying that this word was my own may have been an honest one, the fact that you, as the web editor, supervised the upload of the article that I wrote onto wupr.org and provide a link to it in your response call into question the innocence of your error.

In your discussion of the word “bent,” you question my assertion that four million Palestinians demand the right to return to Israel and instead delineate your belief that because of change of circumstances, fewer than four million Palestinian refugees would act upon this right. You imply in your latest response that I did not take the time to consider your argument on this issue. Let me assure you that I did. Despite your claim, your article focuses on Nabil, a Palestinian-Jordanian carpenter, who would return with “[n]o hesitation” to Israel, despite the fact that it would mean “[l]eaving behind his house, his work, and his Jordanian friends.” You do nothing to substantiate your argument that many Palestinians would not actually return. In fact, the example of Nabil seems to indicate that Palestinians would be willing to give up quite a lot in order to go back, which contradicts your position.

I found Nabil’s statements particularly concerning, because they imply that problems that cannot be worked out between Palestinians and Jews can be worked out between only Palestinians. You ask me in your second article, “Mr. Palte, how are Palestinian sovereignty and a sense of unity, of shared identity, against the principles of Human Rights?” In no way, shape, or form did I ever indicate that they were. I instead addressed the sentiment expressed in Nabil’s statements that sought the exclusion of Jews from any future in the region and correctly pointed out that this exclusion does not adhere to the UDHR’s concept of universal brotherhood. Palestinian solidarity need not necessarily come at the expense of other ethnic or religious groups. Claiming that it must clearly and directly violates the ideas behind the UDHR and undeniably stands in the way of the resolution of any of the issues facing the region today.

Your failure to recognize that the aspirations of one people do not necessarily warrant the exclusion of all others is an error you attribute to the Jewish state when you ask how a state can be both Jewish and democratic. A national religious identity does not preclude any particular political system. Costa Rica, Greece, Norway, Iceland, The United Kingdom, and Denmark are all officially Christian countries who have democratic forms of government. Pakistan and Bangladesh are both Muslim democracies. Israel’s character as a Jewish state does not threaten its nature as a democratic state. To imply otherwise singles out Judaism from other world religions and holds it to a different standard.

You do not seem to value very highly the right of every Israeli citizen to vote and be represented in the Israeli Parliament, labeling this fundamental democratic exercise as a “token gesture by the dominant Jewish establishment.” On this point, I vehemently disagree. Universal suffrage is the basis of democracy and the pinnacle of political representation to which all democratic nations aspire. Your assertion to the contrary belittles the significance and the importance of this right to any democratic nation, including Israel.

State-sponsored discrimination against any group of people in Israel does not exist. While elected political representation and equality before the law evidently do not prove this point to your personal satisfaction, perhaps the 2011 conviction of former Israeli President Moshe Katsav by an Arab-Israeli Supreme Court Justice will suffice. You may regard the conviction as another “token” example of equality along with voting in free, democratic elections, but you must admit that it does undermine your contention that an oppressive “dominant Jewish establishment” in Israel does, in fact, exist.

The existence of the 10 agorot coin that depicts “Eretz Israel” on its tails side is perhaps just as nebulous. I am not sure if you are aware, but “Eretz” in Hebrew means “land,” so your attempt to differentiate “Eretz Israel” from Israeli land is very confusing and not altogether clear. Furthermore, the coin you argue contains a map of Israel in actuality contains the image of a Hasmonean coin featuring a Menora (Jewish Candelabra) printed on it. The shape of this coin in no way resembles the land encompassed by Israel at any point in its history. Your perpetuation of this unfounded conspiracy theory does not address fact and constitutes nothing more than an asinine accusation. Even so, the territorial gains and concessions resulting from Israel’s wars are important to discuss. In the 1947 UN Partition of Palestine, the international community of nations approved both a Jewish state and an Arab state coexisting side-by-side in what once was the British colony of Palestine. Jews accepted the plan and began to construct their state, while the Arabs living in the colony and Arab nations refused to accept any Jewish state next to an Arab state in that land. The Arab nations declared war and sought to destroy Israel. In the ensuing defensive, existential war, Israel absorbed additional land that had been partitioned to the Arabs. Calling this land a sovereign state is a bit of a stretch. While an Arab right to a sovereign state had been approved in that land, the Arab world rejected that state and never accepted the legitimacy of the partition upon which it was based; although the theoretical foundations for a sovereign state had been laid, that state had never been formed in reality and the resolution upon which it rested was not accepted by those claiming to be its citizens.

In 1967, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq amassed troops along the borders of Israel, telling their people and the world that they would soon attack “to begin a battle of annihilation” (to use the words of then Syrian Defense Minister Hafez Assad) where “our basic objective will be to destroy Israel” (to quote Egyptian President Gamel Abdul Nasser). After Egypt economically isolated Israel by closing the Straits of Tiran, an action Israel had previously indicated it would interpret as an act of war, Israel launched a pre-emptive strike against the Arab armies in order to avoid the annihilation with which it had been threatened. In the resulting conflict, which only lasted six days, Israel captured the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, and the West Bank and had quadrupled in size.

You point to this gain of land and depict Israel as a conquering power threatening the legitimacy and existence of other sovereign states, but your argument ignores the events that transpired immediately after the war. After winning an improbable victory over multiple enemies seeking to destroy it, Israel immediately offered to relinquish its territorial gains in return for peace treaties with its neighbors. In response, the Arab nations (with the exception of Egypt) met in Khartoum and put in writing their desire to proceed with their existing policy of “no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it,” in Article 3 of the Khartoum Resolutions. Jordan and Egypt did, in later years, make peace with Israel, with Egypt receiving the Sinai Peninsula.

Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 in order to advance the interests of peace and give Palestinians there the right to political self-determination. In response, Palestinians democratically elected Hamas, an internationally recognized terrorist organization (that, in the words of its charter, seeks to “obliterate” Israel) to govern them in Gaza. Hamas subsequently expelled all political opposition by force and proceeded to launch rockets against Israeli civilians living in the south of the country. Since 2005, tens of thousands of these rockets have been aimed at Israeli population centers in the hopes of killing civilians.

The other areas absorbed by Israel in the Six Day War—the Golan Heights and the West Bank—remain under Israeli control. Syria continues to demand that Israel relinquish the Golan Heights even without a peace treaty. Israel has repeatedly indicated its willingness to give Syria the Golan in return for peace.

It seems to me that you believe “The Occupied Palestinian West Bank” rightfully belongs to a sovereign Palestinian state. If that is the case, then you must recognize that this land was occupied long before Israel acquired it, as it was part of Jordan before the Six Day War and part of British Palestine before that. Israel has repeatedly entered into negotiations with the Palestinian Authority to achieve Palestinian sovereignty in the West Bank despite the fact that the Palestinian National Charter does not recognize Israel’s right to exist and defines the former British colony of Palestine as an “indivisible territorial unit.” This definition does not take issue with Jewish presence only in the West Bank and Gaza, as you suggest, but rather refuses to accept any Jewish state whatsoever in the former British mandate.

While suggesting that I fail to recognize the many reasons why Palestinians left in 1948, you conveniently ignore Palestinian refusal to accept the legitimate existence of Israel as a means by which to justify your point of view that Palestinians’ vision of their own future state and desire to return to Israel does not present Israel with legitimate concerns. In my article, I made clear that the “Palestinians who left did so for a variety of reasons,” and I stand behind my claim that these reasons “were many times related to an overriding sentiment of intolerance and hatred among Arab leaders that made them feel obligated to leave.” The Haganah statistical estimates do not constitute absolute, definitive fact. I believe that the figures presented in the report represent a good faith effort to examine the situation as accurately as possible, but to accept its conclusions with absolute certainty is to deny the reality that those conducting the study did not have perfect information when doing so. They could hardly have surveyed the Palestinians who left in order to identify their exact reasons for leaving. Furthermore, I am not entirely convinced that the study accounts for a multiplicity of motivating factors for why Palestinians left. My skepticism stems partly from the fact that I could not find the study you mention anywhere online (nor is its location cited in your article) but mostly because the situation is very complicated, and, as I indicated in my original article, because those “who left did so for a number of reasons.” We both agree that one of these reasons was cultural pressure from the Arab world to leave and await a world without Israel.

I recognize as well that many Arabs did stay to help form the State of Israel. Your response to my rhetorical question of why those who left and now want to return did not stay does not at all address my query. Those who did stay and who now enjoy the full rights of Israeli citizenship are an integral part of the state. Your belief that David ben Gurion’s wartime promise of an accepting and democratic state “rings hollow” is incompatible with the reality that, as you correctly observe, 20% of Israel’s citizens are Arab. Ben Gurion’s promise was sincere and has withstood the test of time.

If time has taught us anything, it is that these issues are complicated and will not be solved by unreasonable demands or a failure to compromise. You must admit that the practical implementation of the broad requirements of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which were formulated after 1948, to the Palestinian situation is not so simple. The section that you quote refers only to “forcible transfers” and not to those individuals who left of their own volition. The excerpt in no way, shape, or form justifies the right of all Palestinians to return, and the ones it seemingly would support would be impossible to identify. The contention that the universal Palestinian right of return is mandated by international law is not one supported by a retroactive application of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Taka, I understand your sympathy for the struggles of the Palestinian people and your desire to see a future Middle East of peaceful coexistence between people of all faiths. I share with you the hope that this optimistic vision can one day come about. However, I also realize that any such future is contingent upon exploration of difficult issues and much compromise on both sides. The history of the region shows that while uncompromising demands and unilateral action accelerate violence and conflict, negotiations between even the worst enemies can create the foundations for lasting peace. Israel has repeatedly shown its ability to compromise its values, resources, and territory in exchange for credible peace. Given the chance to believe in a peaceful future alongside a Palestinian state, it will not hesitate to do so again. Palestinians have every right to achieve statehood through negotiations with Israel to live peacefully side-by-side. I have never once denied this fact. But maintaining unequivocally that Palestinians must be allowed to return to Israel while ignoring the many and complicated circumstances surrounding the issue will help neither Palestinians nor Israelis achieve the peace that we both want to see in the future.

With respect for your concerns and admiration for your unwavering passion to support those about whom you care, I thank you for initiating this most important conversation.

Sincerely,

Gideon Palte