Mike Desch, of Notre Dame, is in town for the annual meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations. He told me about a neocon friend who said to him, "We [Israel] should have just pushed all the Arabs out in 1948, that was the answer."
Desch and I talked about the fact that David Ben-Gurion and recently Benny Morris have expressed the same attitude. I then brought up an idea I have heard from time to time: the great liberal democracy of the United States was built on genocide/ethnic cleansing of the Native Americans during the second half of the 19th century. At least one Israeli I know feels that they are excused–by western history–against similar criminal accusations against them in the 20th century.
Desch gave me a two-part response, one pragmatic, one moral.
If Israel had pushed out all the Palestinians in '48, it would have created two Lebanons on its border. One in Lebanon, one in Jordan. Imagine the trouble Israel would have if it had not just one society destabilized by refugees–Lebanon–but two.
Morally, he said, the whole idea of the Jewish state as proposed and ratified by U.N. Partition flowed from the Holocaust, the extermination of European Jews. What moral ground would there exist for Israel if it perpetrated such acts…
We didn't get into international law post-WW II, or Gaza. But you get the point.
