Hamas & Israel

Don't mistake anything that I say in this blog post as supporting the actions that Hamas took a few days ago. They can, without equivocation, be classified as war crimes. 

What did Israel's leaders think was going to happen?

I'm not talking necessarily about the horrible way that Israel treats the Palestinians, or how the government encourages the so-called settlers to usurp more and more Palestinian land in the West Bank. All of these are legitimate grievances and can certainly cause Israel to be seen as the bad guy in the region. 

No, I'm talking about how Israel gave Hamas free reign in Gaza. 

Hamas is a terrorist group masquerading as a government. They managed to win a legislative election in 2006 and after an internal Palestinian struggle with Fatah took control of Gaza while Fatah remained in control of the Palestinian government in the West Bank. They repudiated previous agreements between The Palestinian National Authority and Israel and maintained the position that Israel did not have a right to exist. They made it plain that they were not interested in compromise or negotiation. They used their position as the de facto government of Gaza to regularly attack Israel. Prior to Hamas' taking power in Gaza the Israeli government withdrew all of their military forces from Gaza, while blockading its borders and coasts. No real effort was made to constrain Hamas' actions. 

In short, Hamas was pretty clear about their goals and Israel's government pretended that all that vitriol and violence was contained. 

What did they think was going to happen?

There are people out there claiming that Israel is entirely responsible for the massacres, the murder and rape of civilians and the many atrocities that have been perpetrated by Hamas in the last few days. They claim that this attack was a natural and reasonable response to the many grievances that Palestinians have against Israel. I understand the anger that ordinary Palestinians feel - being relegated to a status even below that of second-class citizens, being denied their own nation while at the same time being denied citizenship in Israel itself. But natural and reasonable? Hamas functions not as a government that is using violence to defend itself and advance the well-being of its people, but as a terrorist group that is using the government to prop up and legitimize its terrorist bloodlust. 

Are Israel's hands clean?

I don't want to engage in false equivalency, but Israel exists and has every right to defend itself and to create a state security system that protects its citizens. Unfortunately, the very steps that it has deemed necessary to protect itself push down the millions of Palestinians who live in the no-man's land of the Occupied Territories. Ordinary Palestinians will be angry and out of that anger will be born groups like Hamas who exploit that anger in order to engage in horrific attacks such as we have seen. It's a vicious circle that has no clear end in sight. We can encourage Arab-Muslim states in the area to normalize relations with Israel, moderate Palestinians can reach accommodation with Israel, but there will always be those who view any compromise as capitulation. There will always be something like a Hamas.

What did the world think was going to happen?

One of the arguments made by many Palestinians is that Israel has no right to even exist, that it was created by Europeans with no regard for the people who actually lived there. Well does it? If the answer is no, then neither does Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, or Kuwait - all nations in the area that were created by the whims of British and French diplomats without regard for the ethnic groups who lived in these areas. All of these nations had been part of the Ottoman Empire and had never been distinct nations, at least in the way we view nations today. People like the Kurds did not get their own country, and other groups straddled the new national borders. Right or not, all of those nations, including Israel, do exist. It's a fact of twenty-first century geopolitics. 

But why was Israel caused to exist?

In the mid-to-late 1800’s in the United Kingdom and the United States there arose new interpretations of the Bible’s Book of Revelation. It would surprise many Evangelicals today that Christians haven’t always believed in “the rapture” or that the horrors in the last book of the Bible should be viewed as literal predictions for the future, or that this view of Revelation was new. One of the common threads among the different strains of "end times" theology is that the reestablishment of the nation of Israel was a necessary step toward the events in Revelation. The influence of those who held this view in the pre-World War I British government was critical in the moves that were made to create a Jewish state in the Middle East, preferably in the area where the Biblical Israel flourished. It's an oft-overlooked motivation for the creation of a Jewish homeland, especially one in the area of Biblical Israel: Britons and Americans, who routinely discriminated against Jews at home, wanted an "Israel" to exist in order to speed up the end times calendar. It's a significant reason for Evangelical support for Israel today. 

The problem was quite distinct from other efforts to create a nation-state to conform to a specific ethnic group. For example, if the French & British had decided to create Kurdistan from the remains of the Ottoman Empire, there were already a lot of Kurds living in the area. In Europe, after the Austro-Hungarian Empire broke up, there were concentrations of various peoples living in the areas that became their countries. When the British and French gained control of the region after World War I there were only about 24,000 Jews in Palestine, around 4% of the population.  Even right before Israel declared its independence in 1948 the Jewish population was only around 30%, and this after decades of the British encouraging unrestricted immigration. 

The British had been awarded the "mandate" of Palestine by the League of Nations, which originally included what is now Jordan. They separated "Transjordan" from Palestine to (1) reward an ally in the war with his own kingdom (they did the same with another ally in Iraq) and (2) reserve the smaller area, west of the Jordan, as a Jewish state. The British eventually withdrew and the United Nations drew up a map that divided the area into Jewish and Palestinian states. The Jewish state would include areas where there was a Jewish majority. Look at a map of the United Nations plan, the Jewish state included most of the coastline and the Negev desert (anticipated expansion). As small as this was, in order to fit most Jews into the proposed Jewish state, areas that were not majority Jewish, but had a significant Jewish majority, were included. The proposed Palestinian state included what we know as the West Bank, Gaza and significant portions of what is now Israel proper. A Jewish government-in-waiting declared independence, and several Arab states declared war on Israel, angrily denying that the Jewish state had a right to exist. Israel defeated them. Many Palestinians fled their homes - Palestinians say they were driven out, Jews say they left on their own - but many lived in refugee camps for many years.  

Many people are under the mistaken impression that the Israeli occupation of The West Bank and Gaza began at this time, in 1948. These areas were occupied, but not by Israel. The West Bank was held by Jordan and Gaza by Egypt. A Palestinian state should have been established right then and there, but the Palestinian leadership and their allies in neighboring Arab countries wanted it all. So from 1948 through 1967, when the Arab nations attacked again, the Palestinian territories were occupied by other Arab states. Israel's occupation began in 1967. Both sides were operating with alternative versions of the truth. The Jews of Israel believed that the tiny sliver of coastland plus an empty stretch of desert wasn't too much to ask for and the Palestinians saw land that they and their ancestors had lived in for centuries being appropriated without their consent. There really wasn't any overlap between the two extremes. Of course, once Israel's existence had been established de jure they were going to defend themselves, from both their Arab neighbors and from within their own borders and the occupied territories. Of course, when you think your ancestral land has been taken and given to usurpers, it's natural to resist. It's unreasonable to believe that Israel, now in it's 75th year is going to disappear, it's just as unreasonable to believe that there won't be resistance to the continued presence of a Jewish state in the region. There have been many, many, attempts at peace and compromise. The closest attempt came in 2000, when the establishment of a Palestinian state was so close, but Arafat, the Palestinian leader, rejected the terms, the latest in a long line of insistence by Palestinian leadership on an all-or-nothing deal - which was never going to happen. Their intransigence hardened the position of Israeli leadership, who doubled down on oppression of Palestinians, and encouraged Jewish settlers to encroach on Palestinian land in The West Bank, further motivating Palestinian violence which further incited Israeli violence...the cycle continued until there appears to be no end in sight. Neither side has any motivation to be conciliatory or open to negotiations any longer - that will only anger their own people who will see them as appeasers and traitors and the other side who will see them as weak and exploitable. 

As much as I like to hold out hope for a peaceful future based on compromise, I just don't see it happening.

What did we think was going to happen?

Anti-Democracy

It's pretty obvious to anyone who pays attention to politics that the United States Constitution, while providing for representative government, is a decidedly anti-democratic document. It was written in decidedly undemocratic times. Although the power of monarchs had been diluted over the previous century, the ruling classes represented only a small sliver of the population of any European country. The Constitution provided for the officers of the government to be elected, but did not define who would be allowed to do the electing. Individual states set the qualifications to be met by anyone who wanted to vote, and most of them restricted the franchise to white male landowners. Descendants of the original inhabitants and enslaved people were not even considered "people", let alone allowed to vote. Even that restricted electorate was not trusted fully by the founders. The Electoral College system provided a check against "the people" making the "wrong" choice when electing the president. 

The Founders were men of their time. This is not to say that it was morally right to hold the positions that they did, just that it was not unusual. It was perfectly normal in that time to look down upon non-White people as "lesser races", or to believe that it was the natural order for the élite to rule and the common folk to be ruled. 

But times changed. People changed. 

Few seriously believe that only the élite should get to make the decisions for the rest of us, that women should have no rights, that certain people were not "people" within the meaning of the law. We have, in so many ways, moved beyond the ethics and morals of eighteenth century society. So why do we still deify the men who instituted the framework of a nation based on eighteenth century ethics and morals and worship the document that they created?

The Constitution provided within itself a means to change it. In addition to the first ten amendments we collectively refer to as The Bill of Rights it has been amended seventeen times. A few of those of been procedural: changing the way the Vice President is chosen, providing for the direct election of Senators, changing the date a new presidential term begins, limiting a president to two terms; others were hugely consequential: outlawing slavery, prohibiting the denial of voting rights due to gender; and of course alcohol prohibition and its subsequent repeal. 

Changes have been made, but antidemocratic features still persist.

The equal representation of each state in the Senate, where every state, no matter its population, receives two Senate seats, gives small states a voice well out of proportion to their population. The makeup of the House of Representatives is capped at 435 members, despite the overall U.S. population continuing to rise. Since each state is guaranteed at least one representative, no matter how small the population, the population of Congressional districts vary between around 500,000 to over 900,000. This discrepancy carries over to presidential elections where a state's electoral votes equal the total number of members in the House of Representatives plus two Senators. 

In addition to Constitutional hedges against democracy, there are institutional features that have resulted in two of the last four presidents being elected despite not receiving the most votes. All but two states award all of their electoral votes to the candidate who receives the most votes in their state. Not the candidate who receives a majority of the votes. A third candidate other than those of the two major parties will cause the "winner" to have less than 50% of the votes. Nationwide, one candidate losing by a wide margin in some states while winning narrowly in others can result in the loser actually winning. Like I said, it's happened twice recently. 

There is no Constitutional requirement that it be done this way. My home state of Nebraska allocates one electoral vote for the winner in each Congressional district, and two for the statewide winner. In recent elections one electoral vote has gone to the Democrat, even though the Republican took around 60% of the total vote. Maine has a similar system. There's nothing to prevent a state allocating electoral votes this way, or even proportionally. Strict proportionality would have given the Democrat two votes in Nebraska if he had garnered 40% of the total vote. 

Primaries in most states are even worse. Statewide offices sometimes have a runoff provision, where the top two vote getters compete head-to-head, but in other states the "winner" could conceivably receive as little as 35% of the vote if there are enough candidates. This is especially true in presidential primaries. In most states the candidate with the most votes (again, not a majority) receives all or most of the delegates. Currently two small, white, rural states, Iowa and New Hampshire hold their contests first. Numerous candidates then drop out, mainly due to funding drying up for the losers. A nationwide primary day, with either ranked choice or a runoff, would give primary voters an opportunity to vote for their preference equally across the country. The way it stands now in the later primaries most of the initial candidates have dropped out. 

One way in which changing mores and societal consensus had been taken into account was the judicial doctrine of the Constitution as a living document. The opposing positions are Textualism and Originalism. These are two judicial approaches that adhere to the text itself. Textualism is the more strict and unbending version, basing court cases on what the Constitution says right in the text, no more, no less. Originalism is a slightly more flexible position, where the debates surrounding the writing of the Constitution, as well as the meaning of the words therein are used to interpret it. Living Document interpretation takes the view that evolving standards and mores should color how we view the Constitution. An example is the establishment clause of the First Amendment. A strict reading of the text indicates that establishment of religion is prohibited. An originalist might take into account that the Founders had a specific definition of "establishment" in mind and did not intend to prohibit government involvement in generic Christianity. Living Document jurists take into account that Christianity isn't the only religion observed in this country and that "establishment" in our times would include any action that privileges or endorses any religion. 

Unfortunately, due to a death and a retirement during Trump's term and the refusal of the Senate to consider a nomination during Obama's second term, there is a solid Originalist majority (or at least when it suits them) on the Supreme Court. 

For a long time the arc of progress in this country has been toward more democracy. More people enfranchised, fewer barriers to voting, less decision-making in the smoke-filled back rooms. But lately this has been reversed, at least among the White, Christian, "conservative" electorate. Realizing that their hold on the democratic process has been eroded due to demographics they now proudly champion the anti-democratic features of the system. Who hasn't heard the retort "We're a Republic, not a Democracy" from some knucklehead on social media? Or the insistence that a system like the Electoral College is a necessary feature of a republic?  Gerrymandered state legislatures pass laws that make it more difficult to register to vote and eliminate polling places in majority Democratic areas. These same legislatures pass laws that a majority of their citizens are against, and draw electoral maps that guarantee their legislative majority despite receiving a minority of the votes. 

All is not lost, but it's getting more difficult to preserve majoritarian government in the face of the tyranny of the minority.