This week, a series of maps caused the blog-o-sphere to erupt in lively debate over the origins and future of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The maps in question…
…were posted by Juan Cole last week, picked up by Andrew Sullivan the next day, and subsequently criticized by Jeffrey Goldberg. It turned into Cole and Sullivan vs. Goldberg, retracing many steps of 2005’s Chomsky vs. Dershowitz debate. Goldberg accused Sullivan of rewriting history and wrote that Cole was engaged in an anti-Israel propaganda campaign. Cole dubbed Goldberg a militant ostrich. Strangely, it seems in the end that all parties are on the same page about what should happen. Goldberg wrote here:
I’m for the creation of a Palestinian state on one hundred percent of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (or a Palestinian state that equals one hundred percent of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, through land swaps); a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem that mirrors the Israeli capital in West Jerusalem; an immediate end to all settlements; Israeli negotiations with Syria that would bring about peace and an end to Israel’s occupation of the Golan Heights.
I presume that Cole and Sullivan share this objective. So the debate isn’t about where we should go, it’s about how we should get there and how we got here. The disagreement over the maps was a disagreement over the “how we got here” part. According to Goldberg, we’re here because the Palestinians rejected the 1947 UN partition plan. He writes, “All that happens today flows from the original Arab decision to reject totally the idea that Jews are deserving of a state in part of their historic homeland.” Cole claims that, in fact, Israel also rejected the UN partition plan:
Zionist leader David Ben Gurion noted in his diary when Israel was established that when the US had been formed, no document set out its territorial extent, implying that the same was true of Israel. We know that Ben Gurion was an Israeli expansionist who fully intended to annex more land to Israel, and by 1956 he attempted to add the Sinai and would have liked southern Lebanon. So the Zionist “acceptance” of the UN partition plan did not mean very much beyond a happiness that their initial starting point was much better than their actual land ownership had given them any right to expect.
According to Cole, we’re here because of Israeli expansionism, not Palestinian rejectionism. The disagreement essentially stops there. There’s no disagreement about the second two maps. The cantankerousness is really over the relevance and appropriateness of the first map. Here’s Goldberg’s take on the first map:
Jews lived throughout the territory then occupied by the British, including, by the way, on land that today constitutes the West Bank (though in 1946 Jews did not live in Hebron; they were expelled in 1929, after an Arab massacre of Jewish religious scholars). The intent of this propaganda map is to suggest that an Arab country called “Palestine” existed in 1946 and was driven from existence by Jewish imperialists.
The map draws a line of continuity between the influx of Jews to Palestine under the British Mandate and post-1947 Israeli expansionism. Cole calls into question the legality and legitimacy of the pre-partition plan influx, noting that British activities were supposed to be limited to “rendering of administrative advice and assistance.” He expands on this argument here. This argument justifies the link between the first map and the others. Still, I understand Goldberg’s objections to the first map’s labeling. Regardless, why not focus on the points of agreement, those being the last two maps? All parties to this debate agree that Israel has a right to exist (even Cole, despite his examination of the ways that the British overstepped legal boundaries during the Mandate era). All parties to this debate agree that the Israeli territorial annexations of 1967 were illegitimate and should be reversed (with some land-swap alterations). Strange, and also not strange, that such cantankerousness could emerge from an issue over which there is so much agreement.
