Peter Beinart & the Palestinian Problem
Ben and Jerry’s decision to suspend sales in the West Bank has once again brought to the fore the ongoing conundrum of how to solve the Palestinian problem: a stateless people with millions living for more than seventy years in refugee camps. Though once a strong supporter of a two-state solution, columnist Peter Beinart evolved to become the most influential proponent of eliminating the Jewish state in favor of a binational Arab-Jewish one. He has also promoted the right-of-return for a substantial number of descendants of Palestinian refugees. While his aspirations may be understandable, his justifications are not.
The broad Palestinian animus towards Jews, he believes, is based on the oppression that they experienced. He sees the failure of Israeli Jews to apologize for their role in displacing Palestinians from their homes during the 1948 war (or what Palestinians call Nakba) as a huge stumbling block. By contrast he doesn’t see the Palestinian educational system as a problem. He writes,
It’s because of the Holocaust lens that so many Jews are convinced that Palestinian schools teach Palestinian children to hate Jews when academic studies have shown repeatedly that Palestinian textbooks are no more incendiary than Israel’s own.
In the one academic study he cited, 50 percent of Palestinian textbooks had very negative characterizations of Jews while only 16 percent had neutral or positive characterizations. By contrast, only 26 percent of Israeli government textbooks had an extremely negative characterizations of Palestinians while 51 percent had neutral or positive characterizations. More recent evidence further documents the hatred towards Jews manifested in Palestinian educational material.
Nor is it plausible that Palestinians would willingly grant Jews equal rights. When Jordan controlled East Jerusalem, Jews could not visit the Western Wall. And in their negotiating position for a two-state solution, Palestinian leaders have made clear that the West Bank would be cleansed of Jews in their future state. Beinart doesn’t even consider Hamas an impediment.
He also ignores the undemocratic conditions in Gaza where sharia law reigns supreme; where there is no independent press or judiciary. And the same is basically true in the West Bank where Prime Minister Abbas is in the sixteenth year of his four-year term and just assassinated a dissident leader in police custody. Why should Arab and Jewish Israelis feel comfortable supporting a one-state solution when Palestinian leadership has shown so little interest in developing democratic institutions?
Instead, Beinart focuses exclusively on anti-Arab sentiment among Jews. He claims that for most Jewish Israelis “the idea that Palestinians [do not] deserve … equality—or penalizing Americans for advocating their equality—constitutes a form of bigotry.” And among US Israeli supporters, anti-Palestinianism is a hatred so “ubiquitous,” that “almost everyone in Congress would be guilty of it.”
The reality is far different. Beinart ignores the Revisionist Zionist movement founded by Zvi Jabotinsky who unequivocally supported equal opportunity for Arabs. This was one of the reasons why there was so much affirmative action during the Netanyahu years, resulting in substantial integration of Arab citizens, particularly in the high-tech and medical sectors; and corrective policies to overcome past government underinvestment in Arab towns. And, of course, there is the recent inclusion of an Arab party in the ruling coalition.
Indeed, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has been in the forefront of improving the wellbeing of Arab citizens. He was instrumental in generating initial support for hi-tech initiatives, and then as educational minister provided crucial funds that enabled a rapid growth of Arab teachers in Jewish schools and computers in Arab schools. But these facts are ignored so all we are told is that he opposes a Palestinian state.
Beinart claim that just as Jews had a longing for their homeland so, too, do Palestinians for theirs is a dishonest comparison. The Jewish homeland reflected a spiritual aspiration that is absent from the Palestinian nationalist desires. Palestinian displacement is more like the Jewish displacement from other countries: intergenerational residency but no spiritual component. Indeed, Palestinian nationalism did not exist in the late nineteenth century when the population of Jerusalem was majority Jewish.
Beinart begins his discussion by noting: “The Palestinian families that mourn Jaffa or Safed lived there recently and remember intimate details about their lost homes.” However, given the passage of time and deaths among the original refugee population, these remembrances are, for the overwhelming share of descendants, family lore not lived experiences.
Moreover, the vast majority of Palestinian refugees came from poor rural villages. Given that the most of the village lands remains available for redevelopment, one might expect that it would be ideal. Indeed, Beinart points to “Palestinians gather[ing] soil from the villages from which their parents or grandparents were expelled.” However, the Palestinian scholar Rashid Khalidi claimed that few would chose the rural life as “most would probably prefer to live in urban areas.” Beinart then approvingly suggests:
Refugees would be granted citizenship and a sum of money and then left to find housing on their own, or a slower track that would require refugees to wait as the government oversaw the construction of housing designated for them near urban areas with available jobs.
Given their indifference to location, descendants could just as easily return to Palestine by having residency in the West Bank or even a rebuilt Gaza. Indeed, they could be offered financial compensation and other inducements to remain where they have lived their lives or to migrate anywhere in the world.
Beinart’s musings just prolong the victimization of those living in refugee camps, most prominently those in Lebanon. They lack Lebanese citizenship even though the last two generations were born there. The UN agency administering these camps reported, “Even before the pandemic and the financial meltdown of Lebanon, Palestinian refugees lived in poverty and faced systemic restrictions that limited their employment, property ownership and, at times, movement.” In 2019, new regulations led to dismissal of Palestinians “from jobs…and university and technical school graduates and various professionals were barred from working.”
Beinart should have been more realistic concerning the barriers to a one-state solution and how the Palestinian refugee issue cannot be solved by relocation of a small fraction to Israel. As a result, he should have admitted that financial compensation best serves the overwhelming majority of the descendants of the Nakba. Unfortunately, Beinart seems blinded by his belief that Israel must be forced to pay much more than financial restitution for the Nakba, regardless of what is in the best interests of Palestinians, especially the millions trapped in refugee camps.
Robert Cherry is professor emeritus of economics at Brooklyn College and author of the forthcoming book, "Beyond Ideology: How to Restore Hope to Failing Black Neighborhoods and their Vulnerable Youth."
