Some time back I found myself unfriended on a certain social media platform by someone – a friend of a friend – who is based on the west coast of America and who took umbrage at a facetious comment I had made.
She had posted a map of where all the Biblical tribes of Israel had hung out many moons ago, this being part of her contribution to the claim by supporters of Israel that the modern state – and indeed Jews generally – have a claim to the whole of the territory of that benighted part of the world, including that now formally under the control of the rival Palestinian factions on the West Bank and in Gaza.
I had posed the question: “Where was the tribe of Brooklyn?” This went down as well as a Himmler impersonator at a Bar Mitzvah and I was unpersoned.
What reminded me of this was that the person concerned would be a strong supporter of Donald Trump so I was wondering what her view was on the likelihood that the new President might support a complete Israeli annexation of the entire West Bank including the 18% under the formal control of the Palestinian authority. That is the red part of the map, below. Dark blue is joint authority and the rest is mostly the settlements.
The Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich told the Knesset on Monday that he was confident that Trump’s victory presented an opportunity for such a move and that Smotrich had “instructed the Settlement Division in the Ministry of Defense and the Civil Administration to begin professional and comprehensive work to prepare the necessary infrastructure for applying sovereignty.”
Smotrich is in charge of the Israeli settlement programme which some depict as no more than the state-sanctioned expropriation of Palestinian and “no man’s land” by Jewish settlers who now occupy around 60% of the land on the West Bank. The population of the part of the West Bank other than East Jerusalem occupied by settlers has increased from 276,000 in 2007 to over 500,000.
The total number of settlers in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the smaller settlements is now approaching 750,000. The population of the settlements is growing at three times the rate of Israel as a whole. American Zionists are greatly attracted to the settlements and in 2016 there were already 60,000 American-born settlers.
It is difficult to see why any Jewish person living in the United States might feel that they have to emigrate to Israel and take land that someone else might have a claim to. Land on which families have lived for generations and generations back possibly in some cases to the Biblical times much referenced by their expropriators.
Where are these people, the Palestinians on the West Bank or indeed Gaza, meant to go? Presumably, Israel is not intending to kill several million of them. They do not, however, have any objection to forcing them out and have them join the hordes of refugees heading north to Europe. There is some crossover among American Democratic supporters of Israel and those same people who think that mass migration into Europe is a good thing for Europeans.
Many of the other settlers are also Zionist Jews who have moved to the area from outside of Israel itself. They have strong political support in the parties that comprise Netanyahu’s coalition as do the American settlers within the United States. Traditionally, Jews vote overwhelmingly for the liberal Democrats in the US but exit polls suggested that while still the favoured party that the Democrat lead over the Republicans has been eroded.
A Fox News exit poll found that Harris had outpolled Trump 2:1 among Jewish voters. Traditionally the Democrats are believed to take in the region of 80%. One of the reasons for the shift, if it happened, was undoubtedly some perception that the Democrats were not wholly behind the war in Gaza but even so, Trump is under no obligation to them particularly given the estimated polling numbers.
As someone from a traditionally Irish nationalist family my sympathies like theirs were generally pro-Zionist. Those who had been active in the republican movement in the 1950s and 1960s – and this was reflected in the pages of the United Irishman – mostly regarded Israel favourably for three main reasons; the fact that Haganah and Irgun had given the Brits a bloody nose, the successful effort to revive Hebrew as a living language, and the co-operative basis of the Kibbutizm land settlements.
In retrospect, whatever the settlers may have represented in the early days of the 1940s and 50s – and they were hugely popular across the western left – from an Irish perspective it would not be unfair at this stage to see the ongoing annexations of land by the settlers as more akin to the expropriation of Irish land by English and Scottish planters between the 16th and 18th centuries.
It will be interesting to see what line Trump takes with Netanyahu on this issue. Early in his first term, Trump famously took issue with the Israeli Prime Minister during a joint press briefing. In reference to the West Bank, Trump turned to Netanyahu and told him “As for settlements, I’d like to see you hold back on settlements for a little bit.”
One thing the Israelis have not been doing of late is “holding back a little bit.” Trump has promised to bring peace to the region and that can only mean either one of two things. One of which would be a further and massive escalation of the Israeli war backed by America leading to the defeat of Hamas and the cowing and possible military defeat of the Palestinian Authority as well as Hezbollah and Iran.
It is unlikely I think that Trump will give the go ahead for that and Israel needs it. They are unlikely to defy a direct veto by their strongest and almost sole ally of importance. The other alternative is that there is a negotiated settlement and that this will involve concessions by Israel including a dropping of any plan to annex the entire West Bank.
It ought also mean that the United States does more than just ask the Israelis to “hold back a little bit” on the settlements. It surely ought to mean that no American citizen is allowed just take a notion and head off to another country and take advantage of frontier settler law backed by a ruthless army to take some other person’s olive grove.
Realpolitik may dictate that ultimately Israel is preferable to any strong Islamist or autocratic Arab state. It does not mean that Israel should be allowed a free hand to indulge the ambitions of elements who do not even represent the whole of Israeli opinion. Nor ought their policy be driven by the taking of land from people who have nowhere else to go. Even if they did they should not be forced to any more than any other people on the planet.