ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN CONFLICT: WHAT'S THE IRONY WHEN COMPARED WITH
AMERICAN HISTORY----AN INDEPTH HISTORICAL ANALYSIS
BY: ALEX REDD
Senior, Political Science Dept.
University of WI-Madison
October 26, 2002
From 1820 to 1860, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and other children of
the early American Republic kept the slavery controversy under control
and preserved the Union. Why their offspring failed to do so is not
easily answered.
At 140 years' distance, neither the Southern states' determination to
secede in 1860-61 nor the Northerners' decision to bring them forcibly
back into the Union seems entirely logical. Newly elected President
Abraham Lincoln opposed any further extension of slavery but denied any
intention to disturb it where it existed. Why, therefore, should the
Southern leadership have abandoned the Union? Why, on the other hand,
should the North, which included only a minority of real abolitionists,
have tried to preserve it?
In the same way, outsiders today assume that both Israelis and
Palestinians have nothing to gain and much to lose from prolonging and
deepening their armed conflict. This supposedly logical view, however,
misses the point. Like the Civil War in 1861, the Israeli-Palestinian
struggle does not relate to the present. IT, too, is about two parties'
utterly irreconcilable ideas of the future and reflects the rise of new
generations of leaders who have no commitment to or faith in the
arrangements under which they have grown up. They are willing to risk
their future and their children's lives to try to turn their ideas into
reality. By 1860, the white Southern leadership - composed exclusively
of men far too young to have any memories of the American Revolution or
the adoption of the Constitution - believed in slavery as a positive
good, one that needed not only to be maintained, but extended - first
into the Southwest, and later into Mexico and around the Caribbean
(where it had already been abolished). (The postwar myth that states'
rights, rather than slavery, caused the war grew naturally from the bad
conscience of a defeated elite, but the secessionists themselves made
it very clear at the same time that they fought the war for the sake of
slavery.) Lincoln and the Republicans, meanwhile, argued that slavery
would die out if it could be kept roughly within its original limits,
as some of the Founding Fathers had hoped, but they also decided that
slavery threatened the expansion and survival of free labor and free
institutions.
When the South seceded, Lincoln initially defined the unrest as a test
of democratic institutions, of whether a freely elected government
could defeat a rebellion. After 18 months of indecisive conflict he
wrote the Emancipation Proclamation and turned the war into an all-out
moral crusade. No foreign intervention could have dissuaded either side
from fighting the war to the finish.
The goals of the Israelis and Palestinians are equally irreconcilable.
In 2000, former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak offered the
Palestinians now living in the West Bank and Gaza the right to manage
their own affairs - hedged by a vastly restricted but continuing
Israeli presence - but insisted that they accept this as the maximum
that they would ever receive. Ariel Sharon, the current prime minister,
who fought briefly in Israel's war of independence, might have offered
them a smaller state under similar conditions.
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who is old enough to remember the
initial Palestinian expulsion from what is now Israel and who has spent
his whole adult life dealing with its consequences, might have wanted
to accept some such deal, but the increasingly influential generation
of middle-aged Palestinians who have spent their whole lives under
foreign rule and their adulthood under Israeli occupation will not.
Whatever their ultimate goal - and for many it remains the destruction
of Israel itself - they now insist upon a complete and irrevocable
withdrawal of Israeli troops and settlements from the territory
occupied in 1967, and the right completely to control their own state.
This includes the right to readmit millions of refugees, to build their
own military power, and eventually perhaps to engage Israel in a new
conflict.
Three generations of Palestinians have now been born in exile, and the
third generation displays nearly every day its willingness to die for
its parents' ideals. The Palestinian leadership will not stop terror
until it is promised a full and irrevocable Israeli withdrawal from the
territories. There is not the slightest indication that any successor
to Arafat would be more moderate than he.
Israelis of all political persuasions now understand these goals and
are revising their own views accordingly. This is why Sharon is going
to insist - as he told New York Times columnist William Safire
recently - not merely on keeping some of the territory occupied in
1967, but on controlling the border between Palestine and Jordan.
Sharon's most likely successor is Benjamin Netanyahu, a former prime
minister who was born after the war of independence and who has shown
even less interest in the rights of the Palestinians. And a majority of
Israelis now regard the creation of an armed Palestinian authority as a
serious mistake.
Recently the Israeli historian Benny Morris - author of "Righteous
Victims," an extraordinarily evenhanded treatment of the Israeli-
Palestinian conflict in the 20th century and previously a critic of the
occupation of the West Bank - declared publicly that compromise has
become impossible. Either Palestine will become an Arab state with a
rapidly diminishing Jewish minority, he wrote, or Greater Israel will
become a Jewish state with a very small Arab minority. A recent poll
found 40 percent of Israelis surveyed favoring expulsion of the
Palestinians.
Some historians are beginning to focus upon 80-year cycles in American
and world history, and to understand how the outcome of one cycle - the
crisis that creates a new political order - ultimately creates the
basis for new conflicts that come to a head when a postwar generation
has grown up. In the United States the founding of a Republic divided
by the issue of slavery in 1788 eventually made the Civil War
inevitable. The outcome of that war, in which the North reestablished
the Union but eventually allowed the ex-Confederates to maintain white
supremacy, laid the foundation for the civil rights struggles that
began in the 1950s.
On another front, for the last 20 years a new generation of Republicans
and corporations has been waging an increasingly strident and effective
campaign against most of the achievements of Roosevelt's New Deal,
including labor unions, limits on economic inequality, and even Social
Security. In the same way, the struggle in the 1930s and '40s to create
Israel - which succeeded partly because of the Holocaust in World War
II - has created the conflict with the Palestinians.
In the last 10 years, we witnessed the disintegration of Yugoslavia,
Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union - all creations of the First World
War that had lasted 75-80 years. The next 20 years will see the
disintegration - or at least the transformation - of many of the
national and international beliefs and institutions that the Depression
and the Second World War created in the United States, Western Europe,
East Asia, and the Middle East.
The prestige the United States secured as the victor in the Second
World War and the founder of the post-1945 world order will mean very
little in a world in which no one any longer remembers those events.
The baby boom generation - which in the late 1960s first mounted an
intellectual challenge to their parents' world - will have to build a
new one to put in its place, and history does not guarantee that it
will be a better one.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not, alas, the last one of the post-
1945 era to be resolved. Instead, it is the first great conflict of a
new era that will discard many of the beliefs of the second half of the
20th century and leave behind the stable, comfortable, and equitable
world that our grandparents and parents created in which middle-aged
Americans have spent their entire lives.
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