It Is the Occupation: A Reply to David Benatar
As I write this, the Israeli bombardment of Gaza has killed more than 8,000 Palestinians, the overwhelming majority of whom are civilians. Indeed, Israel is intentionally killing civilians with massive and indiscriminate bombing, and the only reason we would doubt this is our instinctive trust in the morality of Israel’s actions, bred in the Western mind through years of thinking of Israel as an ethical state that, despite its being an alleged victim of Arab hostility, nevertheless manages to maintain its noble stance. Why would Israel intentionally kill civilians? Because it is lashing out in anger, because its pride at being the region’s strongest military force has been deeply wounded through the attack on October 7 by Hamas, and because it needs to prove that no deed shall go unpunished. Looked at this way, it is not surprising that Israel did not even try to hide its intentional killing of civilians: Israel’s military spokesman, Dan Hagari, stated that the heavy bombing of Gaza is to inflict damage, not to be accurate.
Yet the image of Israel as an ethical state is deeply ingrained in the Western mind, bred through decades of thinking of Israel as a democracy (which it is, mostly), which implies that it must be good, or at least as good as other democracies are. This is supported by Israeli propaganda (“hasbara” in Hebrew) to the effect that Israel is the victim in a sea of Arab hostiles. And all this is further supported by the rightful sympathy we have for the Jewish people because of the Holocaust. Support for Israel runs deep. It runs deep among lay people, politicians, cultural makers and trend-setters, and, of course, intellectuals.
David Benatar—one of the smartest philosophers alive, and an innovative and superb intellectual by any standard—has recently published an essay in Quillette defending Israel’s actions (“It’s Not the Occupation,” 21 October, 2023). Because of David’s intelligence and stature (I will allow myself to refer to him by his first name, since he and I know each other and have maintained an on-and-off correspondence over the years), his essay requires a response.
David rejects the idea of the occupation as the general reason that explains (not justifies) Hamas’s attack because the occupation itself must be placed, according to him, in historical context, otherwise it would “explain nothing.” He seems to argue that the reason that there is an occupation is because Palestinians have always refused a Jewish state in Palestine. He refers to the Arab riots of 1929 that killed Jews as not having been the result of an occupation because there was no occupation then. The problem, according to David, was that Arabs just did not want a Jewish state. He writes, “The problem in 1929 was not ‘the occupation,’ but a refusal to accept any Jewish state in Palestine,” a refusal that contrasts with the Jewish acceptance (admittedly half-hearted at times, according to David) of the two-state solution found in the United Nations’ Partition Plan of 1947. He then compares this Arab rejection to Hamas’s rejection of a Jewish state in 2023, in that both are “rooted in the same claim that the Jewish state is a settler-colonial enterprise,” which he claims is false because Jews were not sent to settle Palestine by any country, because they themselves came from different parts of the world, and because they had ancestral ties to the land: “it is not colonization when those who are driven out of their land return to it.” There is also the issue of those Jews who came from Arab countries and Iran: they, according to David, are refugees, and “refugees and migrants are not colonialists.”
Another reason, according to David, it is not the occupation is because the Gaza Strip is not under occupation. True, it has been under a blockade, which has brought “hardship” to Gazans, but this hardship is justified because Israel needs to control the flow of arms into Gaza. And although Israel continues to occupy the West Bank, Israel is not solely responsible for this because it “takes two sides to make peace.” The idea here seems to be that were the Palestinians willing to make peace, Israel would not be still occupying the West Bank. And to think that Israel can just unilaterally withdraw is foolish because we should learn the lessons from Israel’s disengagement from Gaza, which has proved to be fatal to Israel.
David distinguishes himself from full-fledged pro-Israelis by nodding towards some blame that Israel has in all this, which is that it should control Jewish settler vigilante violence against Palestinians, and treat Palestinians with more dignity at Israeli checkpoints. So, yes, maintain the occupation but make it more dignified. (Of course, and to be fair to him, David is writing under the assumption that the occupation is necessary, hence a dignified occupation is a necessary evil. I won’t go into whether an occupation can be dignified.)
Israel cannot lift the blockade or withdraw from the West Bank because that would be suicide for Israel’s Jews. The same is true for a one-state solution: “Not a single state in the Middle East rates even remotely as well as Israel still does in terms of liberal and democratic freedoms. What reason do we have for thinking that a unified Palestine would be any different, especially with antisemitic rejectionists like Hamas in the polity”? (David does not mention Jewish rejectionists and anti-liberal Jews.) David concludes that the burden of change falls on Hamas: “If it stopped behaving like the fundamentalist, repressive, terroristic regime that it is, and used its resources for building a nascent Palestinian state, it would bring greater prosperity to its citizens, gradually ease restrictions on its borders, and demonstrate that Palestine could exist peacefully alongside Israel. But that, of course, is not what Hamas wants.”
It is astounding what political bias and a selective reading of history can do to a great mind such as David’s (the irony here is that David himself accuses those who support the “it’s the occupation” mantra of engaging in selective choosing of historical contexts, while he does it himself—but perhaps his essay was heavily edited by Quillette for length). Here are some replies.
First, although it is true that some Palestinians in the 1929 riots killed Jews, and although this was morally wrong, they were reacting, as David knows, to the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. The issue here is whether the establishment of such a state was morally justified. From 1929 until the United Nations Partition Plan, various bodies concluded that such a state is unjust to the Palestinian inhabitants, such as Britain’s 1939 White Paper, which declared that the framers of the Mandate “in which the Balfour Declaration was embodied could not have intended that Palestine should be converted into a Jewish State against the will of the Arab population of the country.” But aside from what such bodies believed (they could have been wrong, after all), it is unclear why Palestinians should have had to divide their land with people who were almost all but outsiders to them, simply because this was the Jews’ ancestral land and because Jews were persecuted in some countries in the late 19th century (Russia especially, where one branch of Zionism was born). The crucial thing to note here is that there was virtually no Palestinian hostility to Jews settling in Palestine prior to the Balfour declaration. Indeed, the relationship between them was overall well, with many Palestinians working as laborers in various Jewish farms. The problem arose when Zionism sought to have a state in historic Palestine, reflected in the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and, even earlier, in the increasing Jewish immigration sponsored by Zionism, which was well-known to the Palestinians at the time as the movement that sought to establish a Jewish in Palestine. In this regard, and unlike the early Jewish settlements, Jewish settlements sponsored by the Jewish National Fund forbad the use of Arab labor in Zionist settlements. Thus, it is one thing to claim that the Palestinians were hostile to Jewish immigration to Palestine, and it is another to claim that they were hostile to it because it constituted the first steps toward establishing an exclusive Jewish state in Palestine, even if in only a part of historic Palestine, at a time when Jews were a small minority in the land and when the Jewish immigrants were seen as utterly foreign to the area.
No one knows how history would have changed course had Zionism not insisted on a Jewish state in Palestine and had another Jewish representative body asked for a generous immigration policy. Given the amicable relations between Arabs and Jews at the time, I suspect that a limited immigration policy would not have been rejected. As a matter of fact, Palestinian leaders agreed to the limited Jewish immigration adumbrated in the 1939 White Paper. The issue here is not the justification of a Jewish state, period, but its justification in Palestine, a territory that had had its own inhabitants (including Palestinian Jews) for centuries. A moral Zionism would not have attempted to carve out a state only for Jews in a land whose majority population was Arab, despite the hardship that Jews had been undergoing and their ancestral ties to the land. A moral Zionism would have been content to allow those Jews who had wanted to immigrate and live on the land as co-citizens to do so (in this regard, there were cultural Zionists who were against the concept of an exclusive Jewish state). Alas, the mentality at the time was to look down on Arabs and Palestinians as backward, and to downplay, if not entirely neglect, their interests. Chaim Weizmann, Lord Rothschild (a wealthy British Zionist), and many others wanted all of Palestine to be a Jewish state, and argued against the wording of the Balfour declaration of having a Jewish state in Palestine, which implied that the state would be on only part of the territory. Moreover, the concept of transferring the Arab population out of Palestine was also alive (see on this point see Nur Masalha, A Land without a People: Israel, Transfer, and the Palestinians, 1949-1996). Quotations from Zionist leaders at the time are aplenty (Chaim Weizmann: “The Arab is primitive and believes what he is told.”) European Jews were heir to this mentality, despite their own hardship at the hands of other Europeans.
Second, assuming that ancient history is accurate and that the Jews of today are descendants from the Jews of ancient times, why does David believe that if people were driven out of their land centuries ago they cannot colonize it centuries later it by taking it over from another people? What is the obstacle to being both a descendant and a colonizer? He seems to think that the fulcrum is being native to the land: that if Jews were inhabitants in the past, then by returning they cannot be colonizers.
But I am not convinced: genetic evidence, which is much stronger than any biblical history or archeological record, shows that all human beings descended from Africa. Does this make the modern European colonization attempts of Africa not colonization? Or consider a more recent case: If Muslims now returned to Spain and attempted to carve out parts of it for a state, with their own settler populations brought with them, they would clearly be colonizers. Perhaps the retort would be that Muslims were not the first inhabitants of Spain. Fair enough. But then why think that Jews were the first inhabitants of the lands of Canaan? The ancient history of that region is murky at best.
Moreover, even if Jews were natives to the land, the way that they return to it can be a form of colonization. It is true that no country sent the Jews to settle Palestine and that they came from different parts of the world. But it is not a conceptual truth that colonialism must be state-sponsored. Moreover, most Jews went to Palestine under the auspices of the various arms of the Zionist organization, including the Jewish National Fund. I see no reason an organization-sponsored program of taking land is not, let alone cannot be, a form of colonization. In addition, there were state-sponsored Jewish settlements in Palestine: Great Britain sponsored Jewish immigration to Palestine, and even Nazi Germany worked with Zionist groups to help Jews leave Germany for Israel (see on this Edwin Black, The Transfer Agreement: The Dramatic Story of the Pact Between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine). Finally, Israel itself sponsored some form of colonization by moving Arab Jews into Israel: yes, some were refugees, but they were brought in (mostly in the early 1950s) under the auspices of a Zionist Israel, and there is no conceptual reason why a refugee cannot also be a pawn in a colonial settler state.
On this point, David should also consider the role that Israel and the Mossad played in helping create a Jewish Arab refugee problem in the Arab world. That history has yet to be fully told, though some Israeli historian have started the process: “The Jewish Agency ... sought ways to contribute to the instability of the Jewish community, and sent agents who planted bombs near synagogues in Baghdad, in order to create additional terror and insecurity. This did much to bring this ancient community of Babylon back to Zion” (Ilan Pappe, A History of Modern Palestine, p. 176; see also Abbas Shiblak, Iraqi Jews: A History of Mass Exodus, and Benny Morris, Israel’s Secret Wars: A History of Israel’s Intelligence Services.)
Another factor to consider is the culture of the people who are moving into a land inhabited by another culture: that is, that a people of cultures different from that of the current natives could be a factor in characterizing the settlements as a form of colonization. I say “could be” because these factors are all up for discussion. My concern is that David does not consider them in his haste to defend Israel. The only factor that matters to him seems to be Jews’ ancestral ties to the land, not how they came to it, not what they wanted to do with it given its current inhabitants, and not their different ways of life compared to the Palestinian inhabitants.
Third, David pays lip service to Jewish (“not always full-hearted”) acceptance of a two-state solution. But there is much evidence indicating that many Israeli leaders wanted the entire territory, from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, and that acceptance of a two-state solution was a temporary move at best (see Benny Morris, 1948 and After, and Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine). Israel’s continued occupation of the West Bank is testimony to this: it jumped on the slightest provocation to invade the West Bank in 1967 and have not let go of it since then (see Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall, ch. 6).
Fourth, let us assume that the Palestinians were wrong to reject the United Nations Partition Plan and that they were not even morally justified (a tall order) to do so. That was in 1948, and today we are in 2023. What was morally justified then in terms of rejecting a nascent Jewish state is no longer so today. Lots of things have changed since then, and Palestinian rejection in 1948 is not the same as their rejection of 2023, so a leap from 1948 to 2023 elides a lot of crucial history. Israel is now a sovereign nation, with generations of Israelis who have been born and raised there, with their own ways of life, language, and all the other cultural and political aspects of a nation-state. Very few Palestinians think that they can (or even desire to) get rid of Israel. This is so for several reasons: (1) Israel is militarily one of the most powerful nations in the world, and it can depend, if it needs to, on virtually unlimited U.S. support. (2) Israel has the political backing of almost the entire world. (3) This backing includes most Arab states who have made their peace with the idea that Israel is here to stay—no Arab country today even imagines itself going to war. Not even Iran (decidedly not an Arab country) would go to war with Israel given the latter’s nuclear arsenal. Even Syria, supposedly the only remaining Arab country with a hostile posture toward Israel, was on the verge of completing peace talks with Israel during the regime of the current president’s father, and the stumbling block was who gets access to the waters of Lake Tiberius. And most important, (4) The Palestinian leadership, since 1967, has accepted Israel’s existence, either formally or informally, and was willing to have a state in what remained of historic Palestine. To compare the rejectionism of today with the rejectionism of 1948 betrays a lack of historical perspective, a lack of sensitivity to how things have changed during these years, and motivated (perhaps) by the desire to defend Israel no matter what.
Why is this important? It is important because since 1948, and since 1967 especially, successive attempts have been made to have a Palestinian state, all of which have failed for one main reason: Israel’s double-consciousness of having as much land as it can have, and of wanting peace with its neighbors so it can live with some ease and peace of mind. But note that Israel, soon after it acquired the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1948, started a settlement program that has since then increased with every successive Israeli government, including and especially labor-led governments. Indeed, as soon as Israel occupied the new territories, Levi Eshkol, the Israeli Prime Minister at the time, declared, “there should be no illusion that Israel is prepared to return to the conditions that existed a week ago [when Israel did not have the territories].” Israel’s settlement program belies its claims that it wants peace—at the very least, it sits in tension with that claim.
The settlement program, if you think about it for a minute, is mind-boggling if placed next to the idea that Israel wants peace: Did Israel not know that moving Jewish settlers into Palestinian territories would create friction and violence? As cynical as it sounds, one cannot help but think that this was all planned: move in settlers, expect Palestinians to be upset, move in more settlers, expect violence, and then cry “Foul!” and deny that Palestinians really want peace. This is, in essence, the game that Israel has been playing since 1967. From the start, Israel never wanted a two-state solution, as evidenced in the sayings of Zionist leadership in 1948 and Israel’s on-the-ground actions: if Israel had really wanted a two-state solution, it would have never settled the West Bank, certainly not to the extent that it has, and it would not have annexed East Jerusalem after heavily settling Jews in it and in its surroundings. Indeed, Jewish settlements are today vast and are planned in such a way as to make the West Bank look like Swiss cheese, not to mention all the apartheid-like separation of the Palestinians from the Israeli Jews there. It is virtually impossible to have a territorially coherent state in the West Bank. And lest someone trots out the removal of the settlers from Gaza as evidence that Israel is interested in peace, a reminder that the Gaza Strip (and the Sinai Peninsula for that matter) were never as important to Israel as the West Bank (and the Golan Heights, mostly for strategic military reasons). Israel’s desire to keep the West Bank, especially for religious and historical reasons, is deeper than its desires for Gaza.
One expected response is to bring up the various accords that have been agreed to between Israel and the Palestinian leadership that have gone nowhere. So the temptation is to mention the Oslo Accords and the Camp David talks, especially the latter, which were scuttled at the last minute and after which Ehud Barak, the Israeli Prime Minister then, accused the Palestinians of not wanting peace because he offered them more than any previous prime minister has and they still rejected the offer. What happened at Camp David is still in dispute, though one issue seems to have been that even though Barak gave the Palestinians a generous offer, it was only comparatively so, and it did not satisfy Palestinian aspirations for a proper state. Moreover, there seems to have been a disagreement about clarifying the meaning of certain words, such as “control,” “sovereignty,” and “authority,” with Israel preferring to leave them vague and the Palestinians insisting on clarity. Part of the Palestinian leadership’s insistence on certain things must be understood with the background of the failure of previous agreements to bring the Palestinian people any real progress. Simply put, Arafat was worried about taking to his people yet another half-baked agreement that does not give them true sovereignty and that does not address major issues, such as the status of Jerusalem and the refugee problem. Part of the Israeli hesitation for clarification seems to have been Barak’s fear of going back to the Israeli public with a clear agreement that would anger it and undermine his ability to run again for prime minister. (An excellent account is Clayton Swisher’s The Truth About Camp David: The Untold Story About the Collapse of the Middle East Process.)
I have gone into some detail about the history of the conflict to make three points. First, anyone who wishes to write intelligently and insightfully about this conflict needs to know their history. We cannot jump from 1948 to 2023 as if nothing has changed and as if the sole reason for the stalemate is Palestinian rejectionism, which is what David seems to imply.
Second, the Palestinian situation since 1948 has been steadily worsening, as any person who cares to objectively look at this conflict can easily surmise, with little hope for any just ending. Simply put, most Palestinians do not see a light at the end of the tunnel. So, when supporters of Palestine claim that “it is the occupation,” we should not understand this slogan narrowly, to refer to actual Israeli boots on the ground. We should understand it as referring to an entire system of political, economic, and practical measures that have kept the Palestinians in a chokehold. This is what we mean when say that it is the occupation. Indeed, my colleague Tom Kapitan, may he rest in peace, has argued that what Israel has done to the Palestinians (regardless of specific military actions) is structural terrorism (see the chapter “Terrorism” in our co-authored The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Philosophical Essays on Self-Determination, Terrorism, and the One-State Solution).
David chooses to understand “the occupation” narrowly when it comes to Gaza, and he admits it, but is somehow not moved by it, when it comes to the West Bank. I am not sure why this is. Perhaps Jewish aspirations are, to some people, more important than Palestinian aspirations. Perhaps Jews’ ability to have a state of their own is much more important than the Palestinians’. Either way, to ignore the Palestinian desire for some modicum measure of justice to what has been happening to them since 1948 is not just to ignore history and its lessons, it is to engage in moral self-indulgence at the expense of an entire population.
This brings me to my third point. David’s claim that the occupation doesn’t explain Hamas’s actions fails because the reason Hamas is attractive is the occupation and the sense of hopelessness it perpetuates. To prevent future massacres by Hamas, or other groups that will certainly replace it if Hamas were to be destroyed, is to give Palestinians and their Jewish allies in Israel and elsewhere hope.
A comparison to the war in Ukraine is helpful. Ukrainian leadership has largely avoided the moral slide into committing atrocities against Russian civilians, not because Ukrainians are a particularly ethical people. They avoided a catastrophic descent into inhumanity primarily because the Ukrainian population can still see a light at the end of the tunnel, albeit barely. If the Western support decisively falters, Russia overwhelms Ukraine, and that light gives way to complete darkness, Ukrainians will also start killing Russian men, women and children indiscriminately.
Sun Tzu, the celebrated Chinese tactician and philosopher, famously counseled the students of war to always give adversaries a bridge to retreat across. In denying them their own state, Israel and its western allies are refusing that bridge to Palestinians. They then blame Palestinians for losing their moral composure to hopelessness. This attitude lacks humaneness. Nothing will change unless Palestinians are given that bridge to their own state, to their own free and dignified future. Otherwise, innocents on both sides will continue being slaughtered by Israel, by Hamas, or by some other entity that replaces it. This is not what anyone with a heart wants, especially David, although that’s the foreseeable consequence of the position he takes.
Thus, even if the leadership and cadres of Hamas were to be uprooted, other will replace them. If they do not call themselves “Hamas,” they will use another name. We cannot act as if by treating the symptoms we have treated the disease. And that disease has been incubating and spreading for over seven decades, over seven decades of denial of justice to the Palestinians. As my Lyft driver from Nepal said to me two days ago, “These people need their justice.” It pretty much sums it up.
Anyone who wishes to address this conflict must understand the level of destitution that the Palestinians have come to, what years and years of Israeli military brutality, denial of rights, ridicule, and portrayal of them as terrorists have done to their psyche. It is a miracle that there are still many reasonable voices among them.
So yes, David, it is the occupation.
Special thanks to Burkay Ozturk and Rima Kapitan for comments and suggestions.
