Israel-Palestine Q&A (updated 11/16/23)

Hi everybody.

I’ve been breaking a cardinal rule (it should probably be upgraded to a religious injunction) ever since the most recent dustup between Israel and Hamas began - namely, I’ve been discussing the topic on Twitter. Huge mistake, obviously, and one I’ll make again, no doubt, but for now I’m trying to correct it. Twitter is not the place for complex and nuanced discussions of topics charged with raw emotion on all sides. Instead, I figured I’d create this Q&A page, and update it as necessary, and have it be a one-stop shop for anyone who wants to know what I think about something.

Paid subscribers, as always, you guys can ask your own questions in the comments, and I’ll do my best to keep up.

Questions (I’ll make these into links that go to each question as soon as I figure out how to do that):

1. If you’re so smart and have such strong opinions, what’s your solution to this mess?

2. Why does the Israel-Palestine issue get so much more attention than other conflicts around the world?

If you’re so smart and have such strong opinions, what’s your solution to this mess?

I’ve been critical of how Israel has conducted the post-10/7 assault on Gaza, and so it’s fair enough that many people have asked what I think should be happening. The short answer is that I don’t see how this story has a happy ending with the way things have been going. A one-state solution (that is, the integration of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank as citizens of a semi-autonomous canton within Israel) is a non-starter because it would compromise Israel as a Jewish state. According to the most recent census, there are about 6.8 million Jews living in Israel. There are almost 11 million Palestinians currently living in Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, and the bordering countries (plus another 3-3.5 million living in other parts of the Middle East and around the world). There is simply no way Israeli Jews are going to tolerate a solution that reduces Jews to less than 40% of the population of the country. The problem is compounded by the fact that the Palestinian population skews much younger and usually maintains a higher birthrate. Even within the borders of the current State of Israel, the Jewish percentage of the population has dropped from a high of close to 90% in the 1950s and ‘60s to about 72% today.

Demographer and author Eric Kaufmann has pointed out that higher birthrates seem to track with regions of intense religious conflict. Gaza, for example, is undoubtedly the most difficult and dangerous place for Palestinians to live, and yet Gaza’s fertility rates are 15-20% higher than rates in the more peaceful West Bank (and both are higher than Palestinian birthrates within Israel). Similarly, we find that Israeli Jewish women have more than twice as many children on average than Jewish women in the US and Britain (3.17 vs 1.5, respectively), and in the tense environments of Jerusalem and the West Bank settlements the number shoots all the way up to 4.27 births per woman. The upshot of these trends is that the most radicalized and intransigent elements of both populations are outbreeding their more moderate countrymen by a very wide margin. American Monica Toft has described the two sides as being engaged in “wombfare.”

Kaufmann writes:

Within Israel, this demographic shift is already starting to cause tensions. Ultra-Orthodox Jewish men generally avoid full-time jobs and the military, and are instead encouraged to study the Torah at Yeshivas to fulfil the ideal of a “scholar society”. The Israeli Central Bank, as a result, fears that their growth will ultimately bankrupt the Israeli state.

Modern Orthodox Jews are, by contrast, successful and serve enthusiastically in the Israeli Defence Force (IDF). While the ultra-Orthodox are reluctant or pragmatic Zionists, the modern Orthodox are often passionately so, making up an increasing share of IDF officers and serving as shock troops of the Religious Zionist and Settler movements.

Who knows, sometimes crazy and unexpected things happen, so I could be wrong, but I think a one-state solution is a non-starter. That leaves the two-state solution, which has been the focus of the peace process - or, at least, it was the focus when there was a peace process. The two-state solution is just what it sounds like: Israel remains a Jewish state, and Palestinians will be allowed to create a sovereign nation state of their own. Seems simple enough on paper, but of course nothing about this conflict is simple, and it’s only gotten more complex over the years.

After defeating Egypt, Jordan, and Syria in the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel installed a military occupation regime to supervise Palestinian life in Gaza and the West Bank. Before that (since 1948), the West Bank had been under the military control of Jordan and Gaza was controlled by Egypt. In other words, since Israel was founded in 1948, there have only been nineteen years in which the occupation was not in place, and it’s now been in place for going on sixty years. Another part of the answer to the first question above (Why does the Israel-Palestine issue get so much more attention than other conflicts?) has to do with the long-running nature of the occupation. Fifty-eight years is a long time for a people to live as citizens of no state, with no civil or political rights that can’t be immediately and arbitrarily abrograted by a foreign military. There are other minorities around the world living in difficult circumstances - for example, the Kurds in Turkey - but in virtually every case those people are still citizens of their respective states. Kurdish militants have launched terrorist attacks against Turkey for years, and the Turkish government has often responded with extreme brutality. But Kurds can vote in Turkish elections. They can bring a lawsuit against a Turk and testify against one in court. Turks who commit crimes against Kurds are punished by Turkish law. (Does that mean Kurds enjoy real equality in Turkey? Of course not, but there are few states anywhere in the world where at least a portion of the minority population couldn’t justly lodge a similar complaint.)

The circumstances of the Palestinians are unique. There are a few other regions around the world that are not claimed by any state¹, but none with a permanent settled population that would form a state if they could. To be clear, many Palestinians are citizens of one state or another, and Palestinians in Israel are afforded the same legal protections (de jure if not always de facto) as other Israeli citizens. But there are an estimated 4-5 million Palestinians who have remained stateless since the end of the British Mandate for Palestine. It’s not good to be a minority (historically, nobody has known that better than the Jews), it’s worse to be a stateless minority, and it’s even worse to be a stateless minority under military occupation.