March 29, 2024

Two Peoples, One Land: Jim McCormick on the Conflict in Israel

May 8, 2002
Every day, we hear new reports about the deadly conflict in the Middle East -- suicide
bombings, terrorist killings, refugee camps filled with angry and desperate people, and two
leaders who can‘t seem to reach a peaceful compromise.
The conflict between Israel and the Palestinians has been erupting for over 50 years --
since the end of World War II when the United Nations ordered that Palestine be divided into a
Jewish state and an Arab state. Since the creation of Israel at that time, two different peoples have been fighting over one very small piece of real estate.
For many of us, it seems incomprehensible that so much unrest can result from such a
small piece of land. Yet, it continues on decade after decade with no peaceful end in sight.
What is the history of the conflict? Will Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and
Palestinian National Authority leader Yasser Arafat ever reach an agreement? And where does
the United States fit in?
Jim McCormick, a retired district court judge in Traverse City and author of “Jerusalem
and the Holy Land: The First Ecumenical Pilgrim‘s Guide,“ has journeyed to the Middle East
several times in the past ten years. He tries to sort it all out for us here.

NE: Who are the main players in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict?
McCormick: In Israel today, there are approximately 5 million Jews and about 1.2 million Arabs who consider themselves Palestinians. Politically, the Jewish population of Israel is extremely divided between the intellectual elites -- traditionally more sympathetic toward the Palestinians -- and the religious political parties, who are inclined to feel that the entirety of what was once
Palestine was given by God in the Old Testament to the Jews, and that they must claim it all.
And there‘s always been a peace camp in Israel who recognizes that they have to make a
compromise with the native population that was there before them -- the Palestinians. But that camp is very small right now because they‘ve been really traumatized and frightened in the past 18 months and are re-thinking whether they can work with the Palestinians. It‘s kind of like the United States since September 11. The peaceniks here have been very quiet with respect to any excess in the war against terrorism, lest they‘re thought to be unpatriotic. It‘s gotten that way in Israel over the past year.

NE: What is some of the history behind the conflict?
McCormick: The Palestinians have occupied the area known as Palestine for more than 1,000
years, almost exclusively. They‘re Arabic speaking, living primarily in villages and small towns, operating vineyards, olive groves, and so forth. Around 1900, the Zionist movement in Europe determined that for the salvation of the Jews in Russia and Poland and Eastern Europe, they had to leave Europe and go back to where their ancestors lived 2000 years ago in what is now called Palestine. So they began to raise money to send poor Jews from Eastern Europe to Palestine so they could buy land and begin farming, and that slowly developed throughout the first half of the 20th century. The Arabs soon realized that the goal of Zionism was to gradually take over the country and make it into a homeland for Jews, who were dispersed around the world but didn‘t have a country to call their own. And the Arabs began resisting it.
In 1947, after it was discovered what had happened to the Jewish population in Europe at
the hands of the Nazis, there was such an outpouring of sympathy for them that the Zionists were able to convince the United States and England -- and, through them, the United Nations -- to vote to split Palestine and give 55 percent to the Jews and 45 percent to the Palestinians. But the Palestinians didn‘t feel that their country should be used to compensate Europe‘s Jews for what Hitler did. That led to immediate outbreak of war in 1948, and by the end of that year, the new country of Israel ended up with about 78 percent of Palestine, not the 55 percent the U.N. said they could have.

NE: So they weren‘t happy with the deal..they wanted more land.
McCormick: Yes, their leaders wanted it all. The Israeli government, for public relations
purposes, accepted the 55 percent split by the U.N., but only as a temporary measure. They hoped to get the whole thing eventually. The Palestinians, on the other hand, didn‘t want a Jewish state at all and militarily fought it. They lost, and Israel ended up with 78 percent by 1949 and that‘s been the state of Israel ever since.

NE: What happened to the Palestinians at that time?
McCormick: About 700,00 of them who lived in the area that became Israel fled for their lives during the war. They‘ve never been allowed back. That‘s the refugees and their descendants. That‘s a great deal of the problem today.

NE: Where did they go?
McCormick: Some of them fled across the border into Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, but the
majority fled into the remaining 22 percent of the original Palestine that later became known as the West Bank and Gaza Strip. They lived in U.N.-built refugee camps, and many of their
children and grandchildren still live in refugee camps today 50 years later.
In 1967, war broke out again between the two sides. At that time, Israel with its superior
military power, conquered the remainder of the Palestinian land -- the other 22 percent and has militarily controlled everything since 1967. Most of the Palestinians gave up hope of ever
defeating the state of Israel and accepted the idea that they could just form a state on the 22
percent they‘d been living on after the first war. Since about the 1980‘s, the Palestinian leadership has been demanding statehood on the 22 percent, which is mostly Palestinian.

NE: The Gaza Strip has been referred to by some as the world‘s largest prison. What are
conditions like there and in the West Bank?
McCormick: The conditions are very appalling. There are about a million people on this little
Gaza Strip on the Mediterranean Sea coast, which is the most crowded area in the world right
now. It‘s only about 30 miles long and 10 miles wide. It‘s an absolute hell hole. And the West
Bank, which is larger, has a population of about 2 million Palestinians. That‘s where Israel, since 1967, has been building Jewish outpost settlements, mostly on the hills, led by Prime Minister Sharon, in order to establish the Jewish population as much as possible among the Palestinians in the West Bank and make it impossible for them to ever have enough land to form a Palestinian state.
The settlements all over the West Bank are basically little apartment cities connected by
private roads. The territory is carved up to the point where the Palestinians are in isolated towns surrounded by Jewish settlements and roads. So it‘s been made very difficult to unravel except by a solution in which Israel would agree to abandon these settlement towns, which is a hard pill for them to swallow because they thought that building these towns would guarantee they‘d never have to give up the West Bank.
There‘s also massive unemployment. The Palestinians have no way to market anything
they produce. With the checkpoints and the closings of roads, they‘re not able to get into
Jerusalem, which is the primary municipal center for the Palestinians. So it‘d be kind of like if Detroit was cut off from the rest of Michigan in terms of commercial transactions.

NE: What‘s the United Nations‘ stance on the settlements?
McCormick: The UN has always condemned the settlements and said, you don‘t occupy another people‘s country and start building your own towns there in order to keep it. The UN has fought it, and the peace camp in Israel has always opposed it, but they‘ve been pretty much swept out of the way by leaders like Sharon. I think probably a majority of the Israelis over the years have recognized that they have to acknowledge the existence of the Palestinians, that they‘re not going to be able to drive them off the land completely, and they‘re going to have to make some kind of fair settlement with them. But right now, because of the suicide bombings, the part of Israeli society that wants to make peace has been muted by the violence and silenced by the right wing.

NE: Why don‘t the Israelis just let the Palestinians have the 22 percent they ended up with after the war in 1949? Wouldn‘t that sort of solve the problem?
McCormick: There‘s a number of answers to that. One is that a sizable segment of the Israeli population feels it would be sinful to give up any of the ancient land from the time of King David. Many religious Israelis believe they can‘t give up an inch because it‘s God‘s will that it be theirs. There‘s also a lot of Israelis who are unwilling to give it up because they feel it‘s a matter of having defensible borders. And then there are people like Sharon, who is not a religious Jew, but an extreme nationalist who feels they have to have it. There‘s also the thinking that the Arabs will never really accept the 22 percent, and if they ever got it, they‘d use it as a base to try and defeat Israel altogether.

NE: Who are the suicide bombers we‘ve been hearing about?
McCormick: They‘re extremist fringe Palestinians militants who feel there‘s nothing else they can do to fight back from Israeli tanks and missiles accept something as pathetic as strapping explosives around their waste, walking into a store, and blowing themselves up along with everyone else. This is an extreme act of desperation by somebody who is so agitated over what they consider the injustice of the system and they feel so powerless to fight back in any other way, they‘re willing to blow themselves up. But suicide is probably not a correct characterization -- it‘s a desperate, violent act by somebody who is really deranged by the level of their anger. The Israeli government contends that the suicide booming has been at least approved by Arafat and the Palestinian National Authority, if not actually encouraged. I don‘t believe it‘s been encouraged by Arafat and the elected PNA, but Israel says they certainly haven‘t done enough to stop it.

NE: Who are the leaders of the different groups?
McCormick: There‘s Ariel Sharon, who‘s the Prime Minister of Israel, and he represents the
extreme right in Israel -- the most extreme militaristic, uncompromising part of the Jewish
society there. Sharon and Netanyahu, the former prime minister, are both from the die-hard,
uncompromising end of Israel politics. Yasser Arafat is the elected leader of the Palestinians.
They don‘t have a true government, because they haven‘t been permitted to form a country, but
he is the head of what they call the Palestinian National Authority. He‘s been caged up in the city of Ramallah for quite a while now, cut off. But prior to that time, he was their elected leader, and under the Oslo Peace Accords of 1993, they were given limited self rule in some parts of the West Bank and Gaza. So his Palestinian National Authority has been acting in that capacity and providing the local government in Gaza and some of the towns of the West Bank. They‘re considered to be pretty corrupt, but over the last generation, the majority of Palestinians have supported Arafat. Their main focus has been building up and creating the Palestinian nation in their territory.
There‘s also been a small minority of Palestinians who are Islamic radicals, and that
organization is called Hamas. They‘ve been like the opposition party among the Palestinians and they‘ve always taken an extreme Muslim religious point of view, comparable to the right wing Jewish orthodox point of view. The Hamas believe that the Jews have no right to form a state there at all and that all this land is holy land through the Muslims and they must get it all back.
The nationalists among the Palestinians want it all back, too, but they‘ve become realistic in the last 20 years and have accepted the fact that they‘re not going to get it. Israel is way too powerful, plus there are 5 million Jews living there. I‘ve talked to a lot of Palestinians in my trips over there, and I‘ve never met anybody who didn‘t accept the reality that Israel is here to stay and the Jewish state has a place there today and a right to security.

NE: Where does the United States fit into all this?
McCormick: The United States is the primary backer of the state of Israel -- financially,
militarily, and diplomatically. We‘ve always provided tremendous financial support and trade,
and we‘ve also provided them with the arms to build up their military. That little tiny country is now considered to be the fourth strongest military force in the world. Diplomatically, we‘re virtually their only supporter in the United Nations. Over the years, virtually every country in the world has concluded that Israel‘s treatment of the Palestinians is a massive injustice and needs to be corrected -- not by throwing the Jews into the sea, but by making a compromise settlement with the Palestinians and splitting the territory in some way. The whole world has come to that conclusion long ago, so we‘re almost alone on that. In my opinion, the Palestinians are not asking for that much at this point. They‘re willing to accept virtually a fifth of what once was exclusively Arab country.
I think from the beginning, American public opinion has always viewed Israel as a noble
experiment in order to give the Jews a homeland where they could be safe and secure and not
subject to persecution. Ironically, they‘ve been through 50 years of being surrounded by hostility in the Middle East. They‘ve had less security there than they ever had in Europe.

NE: It seems like the U.S. would be sympathetic towards the Palestinians...
McCormick: First of all, the Israeli public relations job has been extremely effective in portraying the Palestinians and virtually the whole Arab world as rabid anti-Semites and inferior human beings whose rights aren‘t taken seriously. Having been there a number of times, I have great respect for the society that the Jews have built up. The city of Tel Aviv is a very impressive modern city, the city of Haifa is a beautiful coastal city... they have very good symphony orchestras, museums, several good universities. They‘ve brought all of the middle class skills from Europe and the United States with them and have created a pretty impressive small country.
I hope they‘re thriving a hundred or a thousand years from now, but I don‘t think they will be if they continue to take such a blind point of view with respect to the Palestinians, who have been dehumanized in the process.
In fairness to Israel, the Palestinians have also made mistakes. In retrospect, it‘s too bad
that 50 years ago after World War II, they didn‘t accept the idea of giving some of the land to the Jewish Holocaust survivors. I can see why they didn‘t -- in their perspective, there was no justice in it. But when you look back, the Palestinians would have been much better off if they‘d agreed to the U.S. partition, even though it gave the minority Jewish population 55 percent of the country and it would have meant the majority of the Palestinians would have either stayed in Israel under a Jewish government or packed up and left home. They didn‘t have a lot of choices, but looking back, they would have been smarter if they‘d grudgingly accepted the state of Israel and gone on to build their country on the 45 percent the U.N. gave them. Maybe the history of the last 50 years wouldn‘t have been so tragic.

NE: Do you feel a compromise can be made at this point?
McCormick: I believe that if Israel could make a peace compromise that both sides would accept, a lot of things would fall into place in that part of the world. I think maybe the terrorism would subside. The movement of the Al Qaeda terrorists is not completely unrelated to the fact that the whole region has had this sense of humiliation, anger, and frustration over what Israel has done to their brothers and sisters in Palestine.
It‘s important to know the history, but I think you really have to look at the circumstances
on the ground today in terms of doing justice, and say, ok, who‘s there now and how can we split this place up in a manner that will allow both to live in peace? It seems like that has to be Israel maintaining the 78 percent it conquered in the first war in 1948, and the Palestinians forming a state on the other 22 percent. But Israel does not want to give up. They came close to a deal like that at the time of the peace treaties President Clinton was conducting under Prime Minister Barak two years ago. But now they seem to be farther apart than ever.

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