When I first visited Israel in 1964, now 60 years ago, I struck up a conversation with a Jewish woman from the Soviet Union on the boulevard of Tel Aviv.
She was Russian and complained that there were so many stupid Jews living in Israel, in contrast to most Russian Jews, almost all of whom were intelligent in her view. Although minorities usually have to perform better to survive amid a hostile population majority than when they constitute a majority — such as the Jews in Israel — this was of course a kind of prejudice.
Nevertheless, judging by the decades that followed, this Russian woman’s prejudice acquired a certain degree of truth. After all, it had been the Zionist intention to make Israel the safest place in the world for Jews, but the great number of Israeli war crimes of recent decades have made Israel one of the less safe countries for them. And that was not very clever indeed.
Early Zionists recognised the impossibility of voluntary peace with the Palestinians
Yet the early Zionists were by no means stupid. On the contrary, they had the most obvious basics clearly in mind, being well aware that it would be impossible to achieve peace with the Palestinian Arabs because they wanted to take their land and occupy it, to transform the small Jewish minority in Palestine into a clear Jewish majority and in the end to occupy of all of Palestine. The Russian Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky already wrote about this in 1923:
*"There can be no voluntary agreement between ourselves and the Palestine Arabs\. Not now, nor in the prospective future… \[It\] is utterly impossible to obtain the voluntary consent of the Palestine Arabs for converting ‘Palestine’ from an Arab country into a country with a Jewish majority\. My readers have a general idea of the history of colonisation in other countries\. I suggest that they consider all the precedents with which they are acquainted, and see whether there is one solitary instance of any colonisation being carried on with the consent of the native population\. There is no such precedent\. The native populations, civilised or uncivilised, have always stubbornly resisted the colonists, irrespective of whether they were civilised or savage\."*
That is why, according to Jabotinsky, an "iron wall" had to be built around the yet-to-be-formed Jewish state, to shield it from the hostile Arabs, and to withstand any pressure from the Arab side. Reaching a voluntary agreement with the Palestinian Arabs was indeed an impossibility. And as long as the Arabs continued to harbour even the slightest hope that they could get rid of the Zionist Jews in Palestine, they would not give up that hope, according to Jabotinsky.
It was naive to expect that the Palestinian issue would disappear on its own
One might say that for decades many Israelis have been under the naive assumption that "the Palestinian question" would simply cease to exist and that the Palestinians would automatically leave Palestine once the Israelis would put them in open-air prisons in Gaza, the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem, and would continue to oppress and abuse them sufficiently severely. "Teach them a lesson," was the Israeli motto, assuming that if they would beat the Palestinians and other adversaries hard enough, or would "bomb them back to the Stone Age", the latter would stop revolting and resisting the occupation.
Palestinians were ethnically cleansed on a large scale, not only during the 1948-1949 war but also in the West Bank and East Jerusalem after 1967. The people in Gaza, however, had nowhere to go in 2023, because they had been virtually hermetically locked up for many years already.
Many Israelis, including their ministers, consider the Palestinians as “human animals” and as Untermenschen or subhumans. Yet, after decades of mistreatment and ruthless suppression of the Palestinians, the Israelis were surprised that on October 7, 2023, they were confronted with a counterattack by the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) and other armed organisations. It is only logical, however, that if you severely abuse people long enough, you can only expect them to counterattack and injure you one day whenever they get the opportunity. That made the Israelis furious and they took unlimited revenge.
In response to these attacks, Israel tried to force the departure of the Palestinians from Gaza in the form of a second Nakba, by carrying out its bloodiest attacks since 1948. This not only made Gaza the largest open-air prison, but also the largest cemetery in the world.
The assumption that the Palestinians would give up their resistance as a result of Israeli violent actions turned out to be — as could have been expected — incorrect. The opposite turned out to be the case: the resistance only increased.
In reality, the Zionist rulers in Israel may have been less naive than some may have thought, because they must have well realised that with their decades-long occupation, ethnic cleansing and war crimes, they cánnot achieve any real peace with the Palestinians.
Israel tried to further marginalise the Palestinians by concluding peace agreements in a roundabout way with various Arab countries in the region: first with Egypt and Jordan and then via the Abraham Accords with other Arab countries, such as Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan and the United Arab Emirates.
But this did not progress further, partly because of the criminal Israeli war actions in Gaza after October 7, 2023, as well as continuously in occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Arab authoritarian leaders generally find it difficult to completely defy public opinion in their own country. The Palestinian cause remains very sensitive to them, with the exception perhaps of a few Arab Gulf states. And if those authoritarian Arab regimes would have been democracies, the matter would have been even more sensitive.
Israel as Fremdkörper in the Middle East
Whichever way you look at it, Israel remains a Fremdkörper or foreign body in the middle of the Arab world and the Middle East. In Iraq, I sometimes heard the imagery of a hand counting five fingers. You can sew on a sixth finger, but it will always fall off eventually, because a hand with six fingers is unnatural.
The Jews in Iraq, however, have indeed formed an integral part of Mesopotamian society over the past two millennia. At the beginning of the twentieth century, as much as one-third of Baghdad’s population was still Jewish. Iraq also once had a Jewish finance minister.
But all that changed drastically after the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 and the incitements by Zionists from Israel to force Iraqi Jews — sometimes with intimidation and provocative false flag bombings of Jewish targets in Baghdad — to leave their country Iraq and emigrate to Israel, Chapter Seven, ‘Baghdad Bombshell’.). Israel felt at the time that it still had far too few Jewish residents, and that their numbers had to be drastically increased to adequately provide the new Jewish state with a Jewish majority. And the Arab world provided a welcome reservoir for this.
When the war in Palestine was in full swing in 1948, the Jewish Zionist writer Jon Kimche still wrote euphorically about the Jews in Baghdad:
"Not one Jewish shop in Baghdad — and there are many — had its windows broken, not one Jew of Baghdad’s estimated 110,000 was assaulted by the crowds. Even at the height of the crisis in the spring, the Jewish families took their Sabbath afternoon walk in their fineries, much in the same way as they did in Tel-Aviv or Aldgate High Street. It was an impressive exhibition of Arab tolerance and of the underlying difference in the Arab approach of the Jew and to Western Christians."
The major problems for Iraqi Jews clearly only began after the establishment of the state of Israel and the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians there. They were a reaction to it. Previously, most Iraqi Jews preferred to live in their native Iraq rather than in Palestine.
Israel has no affinity with the Middle East region
Israel believes that it belongs geographically in the Middle East, but does not feel culturally or otherwise related to the Arab region in which it is located. Israel focuses mainly on the West and has strong military and economic ties with the West in particular.
Israel also likes to participate in events that are not in the Middle East at all, such as theEurovision Song Contest. Furthermore, Israel continuously has one foot outside the Middle East, because of the many connections it has — including in terms of family ties — with Jews from all over the world who are native to other regions, especially those in the United States and Europe. And many of these Jews — who also form an essential part of the Israel lobby in the West — conversely have one foot in Israel. This element brings with it a dynamic that implies that Israel is bound to remain a restless outsider in the Middle East.
In addition, the Arab or Eastern Jews, theMizrahim, have largely had to adapt to the European or Western Jews, or Ashkenazim, dominant in Israel, even in terms of the poor European pronunciation of Hebrew that later became the standard pronunciation. The Arab Jews were generally looked down upon by the European Jews as inferior.
In contrast to Jews from the Arab world, most European Jews and their descendants have been unable to properly pronounce certain typical Semitic phonemes — also found in Arabic. Furthermore, modern Hebrew contains a ‘European’ linguistic substrate, due to the European background of the Jews who revived dead Hebrew. These Jews often spoke Yiddish — a kind of medieval German.
Semitic is first and foremost a linguistic designation: Amharic, Arabic, Aramaic, Hebrew, Maltese, Tigrinya and other languages all fall under the group of Semitic languages.
But even though modern Hebrew may have become slightly less Semitic than the other Semitic languages that have remained continuously authentic and alive, the concept of antisemitic applies exclusively to Jews.
However, antisemitism is more of a European phenomenon than something Middle Eastern and the understandable anti-Israel sentiments in the Arab world have nothing to do with the anti-Semitism that occurred in Europe. If there is so-called hatred of Jews, then this can entirely be explained by decades of Jewish-Israeli occupation, war crimes committed by Israeli Jews, and so on. It would be rather strange if there were no such hatred against the oppressors and violent occupiers, regardless of their background, irrespective of them being Jews or not.
Typically, when the Ottomans were driven back east from parts of Western Europe after their historic defeat at Vienna in 1683, many Jews fled with them, because they felt safer among Turkish or Ottoman Muslims than among European Christians.
Israel has every reason to be obsessed with its own security
Israel has always been obsessed with its own security, and has every reason to be, because through its own misdeeds — countless war crimes, ethnic cleansing, other gross human rights violations, decades of occupation, land expropriations, destruction of Palestinian towns and villages etc. — it will not be able to feel truly safe, because the issue of accountability always lurks around the corner. Israel realises this all too well, because "evil doers are evil readers."
Even if Israel were to withdraw completely to its pre-June 5, 1967 borders, much remains to be settled, including the issue of the 1948-1949 Palestinian refugees, the expropriation and destruction of their properties, and the compensation for all damage suffered as a result, worth many trillions of dollars.
But militarily, Israel has little to fear from the surrounding Arab countries in terms of security, because Israel is completely in control of them. A distinction must therefore be made between Israel’s security with regard to the Arab countries in the region and its security with regard to the Palestinian population it suppresses.
In this context, Israel is of course bothered and inconvenienced by the presence of the Palestinians in the areas it occupies. Because these naturally continue to resist the repressive and bloody occupation that has lasted for much longer than half a century. However, the Palestinians living under Israeli occupation do not pose any real threat to Israel’s existence. And this so-called Palestinian ‘threat’ almost completely disappears the moment Israel withdraws from the occupied territories, but Israel resolutely refuses that.
The two-state formula is a solution, but it is not a complete solution, because the problems created by the establishment of Israel in 1948 have not yet really been solved.
Nevertheless, the Arab side has long de facto accepted the existence of Israel within the pre-1967 borders, for example in the eight-point peace proposal of the then Saudi Crown Prince Fahd of 1981, now more than 40 years ago. Arab peace initiatives were repeated in 2002 and 2007, but they were always rejected by Israel, if they were responded to at all.
The well-known statement of the then Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban that "the Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity" should be reversed in that regard, namely that the Israelis have simply ignored most opportunities to conclude peace treaties with Arab countries, out of a sense of arrogance of power and superiority. And the so-called Israeli ‘peace proposals’ to the Palestinians were at most like cigars from their own box.
After all, Israel wants to retain all occupied Palestinian and Syrian territories. The Israeli reasoning is that only this can guarantee Israel’s security. However, that is a fallacy, because Israel, with its undisputed military supremacy and most modern techniques, has proven itself capable of attacking Arab countries, regardless of the distance. In the past, it has been able to bomb Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Sudan, Syria and Tunisia with impunity. And presently, Israel still regularly attacks Syria from the air; and for that it does not need the occupation of the Golan at all. Furthermore, Israel has been violating Lebanese airspace with impunity almost every day for more than half a century.
Israel’s obsession with its own security is difficult to combine with peace
It is understandable that Israel gives priority to its own security given the enemies it has created with its criminal actions. But that is difficult to combine with peace. However, Israel would rather retain its comprehensive military supremacy than — in its own perception — risk its security in any way by concluding peace.
Having military supremacy, however, implies that concluding peace does not undermine its security, but rather that it enhances it. There is no guarantee, however, that Israel will retain its military supremacy until eternity. That should be a reason the more for Israel to conclude peace with its enemies, long before that point might be reached. But for this it will have to make important concessions.
Whatever the case, without peace, Israel will have no real security.
Taking present Israeli policies as a point of departure, there will be no real peace, and without peace, Israel will always be at risk of being ‘threatened’ by those who want to get justice and demand that Israel be held accountable for its crimes.
In fact, every war criminal must always take into account a threat from those who demand accountability. This is also an essential part of our democratic legal systems, at least insofar as it is still applied and no exceptions are made for Israel due to double standards.
For Israel’s sake, the United States and most European Union states have long been seriously undermining the international legal order. If American and European interventions prevent Israel from being held accountable for its violations of international law, the victims of these violations will seek to exact punishment through other means.
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s statement in 2016 that "friends don’t take friends to the Security Council" is also significant, when he criticised all those friendly countries, including the United States, that had criticised Israel’s Jewish settlement policy in the occupied territories in 1967. By intimidating his allies, Netanyahu ensured that they would often turn a blind eye when it came to Israeli violations of international and war law. In the years that followed, this was frequently reflected in the UN voting behaviour of the ‘friends of Israel’, with the result that Israel got away with almost everything with impunity.
Israel as a nuclear weapon power
Israel therefore thinks it can avoid any reckoning for its misdeeds. After all, it is armed to the teeth and even — the only one in the region — has nuclear weapons. And Israel is further reinforced in this idea of impunity because many Western countries fully support Israel under the false guise of the Israeli ‘right to self-defence’ against the population of the territories that it occupies. Israel always wrongly presents itself as the victim of the population it oppresses.
And should Israel one day really find its existence threatened, it can be expected that it will deploy its vast nuclear arsenal against its adversaries, including Iran, with the possible result that the unnaturally sewn sixth finger of the original five-fingered hand will not fall off, but that those five fingers will be destroyed and only the sixth Jewish-Israeli (middle) finger will be left standing.
However, a devastating nuclear Israeli attack against its enemies does not mean that Israel’s existence would be really secured.
And with regard to a possible Iranian nuclear threat, it must be taken into account that if Iran — which currently has no nuclear weapons — were to carry out a nuclear attack on Israel in the future, it would also endanger its Arab allies in the area. The other way around, however, Israel would not endanger any of its allies with an Israeli nuclear attack on Iran. This makes an Iranian nuclear attack on Israel much less likely than a reverse Israeli attack on Iran.
Permanent occupation of Arab territory cannot be combined with peace
If we take into account how many decades it took before post-World War II Germany was fully accepted again in European circles, a Germany that no longer occupied other countries, had become a democracy and had been denazified, then one can imagine that Israel will not be fully accepted as long as it still occupies Arab territory.
Nevertheless, most Arab countries have become accustomed to pre-1967 Israel, they accept it and some officially recognise it. But the Palestinian refugees — including those in Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank — have certainly not gotten used to it, being continuously the direct victims of the Israeli occupation. Their traumas will live on for several generations to come, just as the traumas of the Holocaust lives on in successive Jewish generations. However, the Holocaust is a European crime that the Palestinians had nothing to do with.
Peace can presently only be achieved through coercion
Israel has often argued in the past that it did not have a suitable Palestinian partner to negotiate with, but it is highly doubtful whether Israel itself, with all its war crimes, is a suitable partner in this respect.
In short: peace with Israel cannot be expected under the current circumstances, not even in the longer term. The acceptance by the Palestinians and the Arab countries of Israel before June 1967 is already a miracle in itself, and Israel should be on its knees grateful if it can be accepted as such. But Israel is too arrogant for that, also because of its military supremacy, and wants to keep everything, preferably with as few Palestinians as possible or no Palestinians at all. And that alone, rules out true peace with Israel unless Israel is forced to do so. But it does not want that, because it has no confidence in it when others would help determine what Israel should do.
I still remember the Israeli ambassador in Cairo, David Sultan, saying to me: "Don’t put us under pressure, because we shall be more obstinate." But without pressure, the Israelis are even more obstinate.
This is all the more reason to force Israel to make peace, just as Jabotinsky argued a century ago that peace with the Palestinians was only possible under coercion; but the reverse is equally true.
Without peace, the countries in the region — and indirectly theUnited States and Europe — will ultimately run even greater dangers as a result of Israel’s idiosyncratic warlike behaviour, with all the disastrous consequences that entail.
However, experience shows that Western countries that sympathise with Israel prefer to defer the problems because that could cost their leaders votes in elections. In fact, it is mainly the United States that is able to really coerce Israel. But since American presidential candidates risk losing the elections there if they do not adopt a pro-Israel stance, little can be expected from that side for the time being.
Statesmanship and political wisdom focused on the long term, however, should be a clear priority in the interest of everyone’s self-preservation. Forced peace remains the best guarantee, not only for Israel’s security and survival but also for the safety of Israel’s friends and enemies.
But since this cannot be expected under the current circumstances, Israel will not get peace — mainly because of its own misdeeds — and the surrounding region will therefore even less so. Therefore, wars with Israel are bound to continue, with perhaps intermediate periods of less violence. This is a long-term reality that must be seriously taken into account.
The Israeli slogan shalom, or peace, has proven to be a completely empty phrase; and given the colonial nature of Israel, it could hardly have been otherwise.
Nikolaos van Dam is the former Dutch ambassador to Indonesia, Germany, Turkey, Egypt and Iraq, and Special Envoy for Syria. As a junior diplomat, he served in Lebanon, Jordan, the Palestinian Occupied Territories and Libya. He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Syria and Destroying a Nation: The Civil War in Syria
