Guest post by Andrew Pessin: (Subscribe to his free substack)
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“I was forced to leave my study group
because my group members told me that the people at the Nova music festival
deserved to die because they were partying on stolen land.”
--M.I.T.
student Talia Kahn on her campus environment
1. 2023 and 1948
It may be 2023 but campus
responses to October 7 show that, for many, it’s still 1948.
Many campuses exploded in outright
celebration of the barbaric violence, the enthusiasts typically invoking, by
way of justification, the massacre’s “context” or “root causes”
(in Israel’s “occupation,” “apartheid,” “ethnic cleansing,” etc.) and the legitimacy
of “resistance” to those evils “by any means necessary.” Even many who didn’t
quite “celebrate” the violence invoked the same by way of explanation quickly bleeding
into justification. And many of those who remained silent about October 7, too,
were no doubt thinking the same when they said things such as “I need to learn more about this complex situation
before rendering judgment.” Now normally after watching armed men tie up a
mother and father and three small children and burn them alive you don’t need
to “learn more” to determine who the bad guys are, but hey, it’s “complex.” I’ve
argued elsewhere that that silence amounts to complicity, to borrow the popular expression many progressives apply
everywhere except to themselves: you’re in favor of October 7 or you’re
against, in other words, and silence entails the former.
But now this shocking campus
response itself has its own “context” and “root causes.” In my view the
twenty-year-long campus Boycott, Divestment, Sanction (BDS) campaign of lies against
Israel combined with the more recent expansion of progressivism (aka Critical
Race Theory, DEI, Wokeism, etc.) has amounted to a campaign to delegitimize and dehumanize not just Israeli Jews but all Jews; and the clear
success of that campaign explains why so many are somehow unable to see that
the torture, mutilation, rape, and murder of babies, children, women, pregnant
women, the disabled, and the elderly is a straightforward moral atrocity
constituting a mass terror attack. If every Jew is fundamentally guilty, then
their torture and murder is not merely permissible but even obligatory; if
every Jew is guilty, then nothing you do to the Jew can make the Jew a victim.
So what does this have to do
with 1948?
The dehumanization campaign above
in fact ultimately rests on the premise that the 1948 establishment of Jewish
sovereignty in the State of Israel was a massive injustice. For consider: if that
establishment were perfectly just, then the efforts to prevent it then
and the 75 years of nearly continuous “resistance” to it since, whether military,
terrorist, diplomatic, cognitive, or other, would be unjust. In turn,
many of the measures that Israel has taken over the years that detractors cite
as “root causes” above—as Israel’s “oppression” of Palestinians, as mechanisms subserving
its “occupation” and “apartheid,” etc.—would be seen not as illegitimate aggressive
measures of domination but as legitimate reactive measures of self-defense. Take
just two examples, the security barrier along western Judea and Samaria and the
blockade on Gaza instituted after Hamas took power there by an illegal violent
coup. Detractors call the former an “Apartheid Wall” and say of the latter that
it makes Gaza an “open air prison.” But to those who see the establishment of
Israel as just these are legitimate defensive measures justified by the
unremittent preexisting violence directed toward Israelis by Palestinians.
If Jewish sovereignty there is
legitimate, in other words, then Jews are ordinary human beings with ordinary
human rights including the right to defend themselves, by walls or blockades as
need be. But if Jewish sovereignty is not legitimate then Jews are simply
evildoers who, per campus dehumanization, lack even the basic human right to
defend themselves, and all such measures become aggressive mechanisms of an
unjust occupation. On this view every Jew is guilty and therefore worthy even
of the atrocious harms of October 7, including the babies, and Hamas is not a
genocidal Jew-hating terrorist group but “freedom fighters” fighting for
“decolonization.”
If 1948 is just, in short, then
2023 is a terrorist atrocity; if 1948 is unjust then 2023 is political
liberation.
So 2023 really still is
about 1948.
This point has actually been
clear for some time. Those who follow the campus scene know that the
anti-Israel movement long ago gave up on the demand merely for a Palestinian
state alongside Israel in favor of undoing Israel entirely. The popular chant,
“We don’t want two states, we want 1948!,” states that about as clearly as can
be. But it took October 7 to see how profound and visceral that demand is, as
it manifested itself in the celebration of the slaughter. For them, the massive
injustice of 1948 means that the Israeli Jews of today have it coming to them,
as the M.I.T. student above quoted her antagonists.
Clearly Israel advocates need
to double down on disseminating their “narrative,” the one grounded in the long
Jewish history in this land, and on finding ways to do it that will break
through the ideological fortress that BDS and progressivism have established on
our campuses.
But here I sketch an
alternative, complementary strategy.
2. Grant Them (Most of)
What They (Falsely) Claim
Let’s for the moment
(falsely) grant the detractors what they claim, or most of it, namely that
the establishment of Israel was an injustice: per their narrative, that Jews
were “settler-colonists,” outsiders who, via “ethnic cleansing,” took over the
land that became the State of Israel.
Even if so, I suggest,
the campus anti-Israel movement of 2023 is morally objectionable. And once we
see that this movement—that aims to undo the Jewish state “by any means
necessary,” to “dismantle Zionism,” to remove its supporters from campuses, with events, talks, panels, conferences such as this one numbering
in the thousands across hundreds of campuses in recent years—in
fact is morally objectionable, then we can begin to see it for what it actually
is: a campaign of dehumanizing hate that grotesquely leads its proponents to
see the mutilation and mass murder of Jewish children as the moral high ground.
3. The Child As a
Metaphysical and Ethical Fresh Start
Let’s start with a repulsive practice
that occurred for a while soon after October 7: activists not ripping down the
posters of Israeli hostages but instead replacing their “Kidnapped” headings
with the word “Occupier.” There was a photo of a sweet little kidnapped three-year-old
girl, for example, labeled as an “Occupier.” A three-year old who was born in
this land, very probably to parents who were born in this land, very probably
to parents who were born in this land, and so on, possibly stretching way back.
In contrast consider how
refugees and immigrants are considered in pretty much any other country in the
world. Someone moves to Canada, and maybe in time becomes, feels, is a
Canadian; but their children are largely raised as and feel Canadian, and
certainly their grandchildren. Three of my own four grandparents immigrated as
refugees from Russia to the United States, and my parents, and certainly I
myself, feel as American as can be. One or two generations is more than enough,
generally, for assimilation and ultimately legitimation. Anyone who claims
otherwise—who tells the children or grandchildren of an immigrant that they
don’t belong here—would instantly and correctly be branded a racist.
Well, those who put the word
“Occupier” on the photo of a three-year old are saying that no matter how many
generations her family may have lived in this land, even if her family is one
of those whose roots trace back two or three thousand years, then she
can never belong there.
They may as well put a target
right on her head—as Hamas in fact did.
Now what, exactly, is so
repulsive about this practice, beyond its obvious racism? It’s that that little
girl is entirely innocent, she cannot be blamed, for anything that
may have preceded her in this world. She is simply not responsible for the alleged
sins of her parents, or of her grandparents, or great-grandparents, any more
than the small child of a Hamas member is responsible for his parent’s
terrorist activities. Nobody is responsible for what anybody did prior
to their own birth. Nor is it her fault or responsibility that she was born
when and where she was.
A child, a new generation, is
fresh start, a “do-over” in the most profound metaphysical and ethical ways.
Keep this child in mind as we
next consider the question of how to rectify large-scale historical injustices.
4. On Rectifying
Large-Scale Historical Injustice
Take your pick for an
example; there is no shortage of historical injustices. Obviously,
unfortunately, we have no time machine, no way to literally undo the event or retroactively
prevent it. Uncountably many innocent lives have been lost and shattered in
every terrorist act or war, but there’s just no way now to make Sept 11 not
have happened, or the Vietnam War, or World Wars II or I, or the American Civil
War, or the French Revolution, or the 30 Years War—or the 1948 Arab-Israeli War
(which, curiously, is pretty much the only major historical event that large
numbers of people around the world ever even express interest in undoing).
So that’s off the table.
The next best thing would be
to compensate those individuals who actually suffered the injustice. But if the
injustice involved their death that’s also impossible; and unfortunately for
those who survive the injustice, they die off too as the event gradually sinks
into history. If there are ways to identify and compensate any remaining
survivors of specific concrete injustices, by all means have at it.
The most plausible mode of
rectification for some large-scale historical injustice, then, is to compensate
not the individuals who suffered the injustices but their descendants. And
that’s where things immediately get tricky.
First, from whom, exactly, should
they get their compensation? Presumably from descendants of those who
perpetrated the original injustice. But a child, we just saw, is a fresh start,
a “do-over,” who cannot be held responsible for the sins of her forebears. It
seems very unjust to demand recompense from someone who is in no way
responsible for the injustice in question.
Nor, though it’s more
complex, is it obvious that the descendant of the original victim should
actually be entitled to anything, period, especially as the generations
go on. If a new child is not responsible for the sins of her ancestors, neither
is she deserving of any of the merits or blessings of the ancestor; nor is she automatically
entitled, by virtue of being born, to restitution of something that may have
once belonged to them or compensation for something that may have happened to
them. Obviously where there is some concrete property in question and a
relevant enduring legal system in place there may be laws governing inheritance
and restitution, but that’s not what we’re discussing here. The fact that
something unjust happened to my grandparents or they were unjustly deprived of
something does not automatically mean that I am owed anything. I didn’t
suffer the loss, after all, and nothing was taken from me; I was born
long after, into the new reality created subsequent to the loss—a fresh start.
Of course an objector might
imagine here a counterfactual such as, “Well, if the loss hadn’t occurred then
I would have been born into a better situation, so I did after all suffer the
loss myself.” If so, then she might be entitled to restitution or compensation.
Perhaps, but this objection
opens up a whole set of problems. Once you open the counterfactuals then almost
anything goes. If the loss hadn’t occurred then many things would have
been different, a whole other course of life would have ensued, and who can
know what that may have included? Perhaps in this new course of life your
grandfather would have been hit by a truck or died of a heart attack and never
sired your parent, so you would never have been born—but if you owe your very
existence to the loss you can hardly claim that the loss harmed you! Or
perhaps if the loss hadn’t occurred you would have ended up far worse
than you in fact are, so the loss actually improved your condition. Millions
of people have become refugees and ended up resettling elsewhere, where their
children, or grandchildren, eventually end up with much better lives than they
would have had had the ancestors stayed put. Even if we grant that the
historical loss resulted in a negative outcome for you, it’s not clear that
that outcome can be blamed entirely or even maximally on the loss itself. In
the case of the Palestinian refugees, for example, even where we grant that their
contemporary conditions are poor, should we blame those conditions on the 1948
war—or on the 75 years of their mistreatment and mismanagement since, at the
hands (for example) of the refugee agency UNRWA and the many Arab states who resisted their rehabilitation and resettlement?
Moreover, why isolate and
emphasize only that single counterfactual concerning your grandfather? What if
your grandfather himself had acquired the thing in question by some unjust
means? Or inherited it from people higher up the ancestral ladder who had done so?
As you go up the ladder there are surely many injustices to be found, perhaps
in great quantities, particularly given the long history of human warfare
across the globe. If you insist that the descendant of the person who stole it
from your grandfather doesn’t have rightful claim to it, then what happens to
your grandfather’s claim to it if he only had it because one of his ancestors
had stolen it from another? Shall we go all the way back to the 7th-century
Muslim Arab conquest of the Land of Israel, which took the land ultimately from
(say) the descendants of the 1st-century Roman conquest of the Land
of Israel, which took it from the Jews? Shouldn’t we in that case give it all
back to the Jews, or the descendants thereof? If we insist on “root causes,”
shouldn’t we go all the way back to the roots?
So, yes, maybe you would have
been born into a better situation had one particular injustice not occurred—but
you equally might have been born into a worse situation had all sorts of
other older injustices not occurred. If you are contemplating counterfactuals
and thus undoing history, justice requires undoing them all.
If your grandparents did
something unjust to my grandparents, then, that does not automatically give me
a claim against you: you didn’t do anything, and I didn’t
suffer anything. More broadly, the fact that one community did something unjust
toward another community does not entail that all future generations of the
latter have any legitimate claims against all future generations of the former.
In fact if we go quantitative and acknowledge the enormous growth in the
relevant populations over time, then it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that
demanding compensation from later descendants of the original injustice-doers
would end up perpetrating against them an even greater injustice
than the original one their ancestors perpetrated. And it could hardly be just
to demand the rectification of some historical injustice by means of some even
greater contemporary injustice.
Let us repeat that point:
It is not just to demand the
rectification of some historical injustice by means of some even greater
contemporary injustice.
5. Still Not Convinced?
Even if you still have some
intuition that later descendants of injustice-victims should have such
claims, trying to accommodate those claims would literally be both impossible
to do and a formula for disaster. If we inherit both the sins and the claims of
our ancestors then we will live in a perpetual Hatfields v McCoys world in
which everyone ultimately has a claim against everyone else. World history both
distant and recent features massive injustices on inconceivable scales; as Arab
intellectual Hussain Abdul-Hussain has put it on social media, everybody’s grandfather
lost something, so everybody will have various, multiple claims to
compensation. Even restricting ourselves to the
Israeli-Palestinian-Jewish-Arab-Muslim Conflict (IPJAMC), even where we’re (counterfactually)
granting that the Jews came from outside and took over via ethnic cleansing, who
exactly were these perpetrator Jews? In the standard anti-Israel narrative these
Jews came from Europe—whence they fled overwhelmingly as refugees
escaping the massive injustice of persecution and pogroms. A simple glance at
19th century European antisemitism, culminating in mass-murderous pogroms
of 1881 and 1903 among others (not to mention in 1930s Germany and the
Holocaust), will easily demonstrate that. In addition to these Jews of course
were the hundreds of thousands who fled Arab and Islamic persecution and
pogroms across the Middle East and North Africa, leaving many lives and much property
behind. These Jews were all victims of injustice, even if, on the anti-Israel
narrative, they then victimized the innocent Palestinian Arabs. How can one
demand today’s Israelis compensate today’s Palestinian Arabs without also
demanding that most Middle East and North African countries compensate the
Israelis? Throw in the fact that many Arabs themselves emigrated from those
countries to Palestine in the 20th century and they, and/or their
immediate relatives, may well even have participated in the persecution of the
Jews who fled those countries. So today’s Palestinians also owe something to
today’s Israeli Jews!
Everybody’s grandfather lost something. To look backward, to maintain
and pursue all those claims, is only a formula for propagating violence and
instability.
All the more so when we step
a bit closer to reality, acknowledging the actual long history of Jews in the
Land of Israel and remembering that at the time of the U.N. Partition proposal’s
passing in November of 1947 there were zero Palestinian refugees. Zionism
itself, in other words, displaced no one. There was, in fact, room enough for
everyone in Palestine, until the Arabs launched the civil war and then the multi-Arab-army
international war. In the process one percent of the Jewish population lost
their lives, tens of thousands were injured, Jews were ethnically cleansed from
those parts of the land that Egypt and Jordan conquered, and so on. So even if the
Jewish immigration into the land (which displaced no one) were itself an
injustice, consider the disproportionate injustice then perpetrated
against them in the murderous military and terrorist activity that
followed. If the Arab descendants of 1948 have a legitimate claim against the Jews
of 2023, again, then surely the Jews of 2023 have similarly legitimate claims
against their contemporary Arabs.
So there may well have been some
massive injustice in the past. But it’s literally impossible to undo that
injustice, and any efforts to compensate for the injustice will only perpetrate
further, almost surely greater injustices, if not directly sink the region into
the pre-modern Hobbesian state of nature, a war of all against all, in which everybody
loses.
Everybody’s grandfather
lost something. And so unless we
accept the idea that every new child is a fresh start, then everybody has a
claim against everybody and all is lost.
(part 2)
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Thursday, November 06, 2025
Elder of Ziyon
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