How Long Has Israel Got?
When I was a teenager, the ticketing arrangement at the local cinema with that you bought a ticket at the box office and this gave you admittance to the cinema and any of the three screens available for as long as you wished. It was quite normal to stay and watch more than one film. You could enter leave at any time.
The consequence of this was that it was a really common experience to start watching a film halfway through and continue for the subsequent showing. The point would come when somebody would say “this is where we came in.“
The pointed which you came in would have a strong bearing on what you thought of the film. I often think the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians as a similar quality. The point of which you started following the saga must have quite a big impact on what you think of the rights and wrongs of it. In my particular case, I first became aware of it in the aftermath of the PLO attack on the Israeli athletes at the Olympic Games in Munich. With no previous context to draw on, the Palestinians seem to be the guilty party. A couple of years later Israel was attacked by its neighbours. I didn’t have much an opinion on way or the other to be honest. But my sympathies tended to lie with the Israels who seemed to be the victims, or at least the underdog.
It wasn’t until the massacres at Sabra and Shatila in 1982 that I gave it any thought. These are probably footnotes in the long story of the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians nowadays. Worse things have happened and are happening. But for me at the time the impact was huge. I remember reading the account of it in the Sunday newspaper in a park in northern London. It was one of those gorgeous warm sunny days you get in the UK in early Autumn infrequently enough that you appreciate them fully when they happen. The contrast with the horror I was reading made it even worse.
I have a feeling that if that was where I came in I’d have formed a different initial feeling about what Israel was like. But as it was I decided to look into the history of the conflict and see what the issues were. This might sound strange to someone who has grown up in the Internet age, but it was quite possible to know absolutely nothing about a subject in those days. And educating yourself required a bit of effort. But a few hours in a public library got me the gist of how things had got to where they were.
It was hard to justify even the existence of the state of Israel. But at the time the USSR was still around and pointing missiles at the UK. Israel’s neighbours were dictatorships backed by the USSR. South America was run by dictators. Africa still had a couple of apartheid states. Israel’s claim to its territory looked distinctly dodgy, but it was at least a democracy and had the rule of law. And it looked like a division of the land between the colonists and the original inhabitants was a likely outcome. I wasn’t as enthusiastic as previously, but it did still feel like Israel was preferable to no Israel.
But I wasn’t really invested in the matter. I don’t have any personal connection with the region and it is a long way away. Having taken the trouble to read a couple of books on the subject I was and still am curious about the outcome. This is much like the way you want to finish a book to find out what happens – even if you don’t relate to the characters much and it isn’t particularly well written.
As the years have gone by the likely outcome of a two state solution seems to have drifted out of favour. n=2 requires the two sides to at least tolerate one another. Every new attrocity makes this less likely. n=1 would seem to require either all the Israelis or all the Palestines to leave to other countries or be killed. n=0 is plausible given the power of nuclear weapons and the size of the country that is being argued over. Maybe higher values of n should be explored. Perhaps there is room for an apartheid state, a secular one, one for the original inhabitants and one for the ultra orthodox Jews. But in the long run, it has to be said that Israel is a crazy idea. It can’t last in its present form. Something has to give.
But the thing that has changed is that up until recently I thought that it was something that wouldn’t be settled in my lifetime. Now I’m not so sure.
