Social Europe

politics, economy and employment & labour

  • Themes
    • Strategic autonomy
    • War in Ukraine
    • European digital sphere
    • Recovery and resilience
  • Publications
    • Books
    • Dossiers
    • Occasional Papers
    • Research Essays
    • Brexit Paper Series
  • Podcast
  • Videos
  • Newsletter

Europe and the tragedy of Israel/Palestine

Stephen Pogány 3rd January 2020

Amid the intractable struggle in Israel/Palestine for the moral high ground of legitimate victimhood, Europe has a historic responsibility.

Israel/Palestine
Stephen Pogány

As I learnt at first hand during a recent visit to Israel’s occupied territories, there is a widespread conviction among Palestinians that their misfortunes are attributable to Britain. It was a British foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, who issued the eponymous declaration, in November 1917, which led three decades later to the establishment of Israel and to what Palestinians refer to as the nakba (catastrophe). At least 700,000 Palestinians fled or were forced from their homes in the fighting which erupted in May 1948 between the forces of the newly declared state of Israel and Arab armies intent on extinguishing the nascent Jewish state.

The Balfour declaration had called for ‘the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’, while emphasising that ‘nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities’ in the territory. These objectives soon proved irreconcilable, however—particularly in a region no bigger than Wales (once Transjordan was recognised as a separate juridical entity from Palestine) and under the shadow of officially sanctioned anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany and much of central and eastern Europe.

During the inter-war era growing numbers of European Jews sought sanctuary in Palestine, triggering protests and occasional explosions of violence from within the Palestinian Arab community. After World War II, the efforts of thousands of Holocaust survivors to reach Palestine—administered until May 1948 by the United Kingdom under what was originally a League of Nations mandate—were greeted with dismay by Palestinians who saw large-scale Jewish immigration as a demographic threat to their hopes of establishing a unitary and sovereign Palestinian state.


Our job is keeping you informed!


Subscribe to our free newsletter and stay up to date with the latest Social Europe content. We will never send you spam and you can unsubscribe anytime.

Sign up here

From an Arab perspective Britain has been a willing accomplice of the Zionist project. In issuing the Balfour declaration, the UK recognised Jewish claims to a privileged status in Palestine. At the same time, as the mandatory power responsible for the welfare and governance of Palestine during the inter-war period, it was ultimately responsible for the rapid growth of the territory’s Jewish population. Largely as a result of immigration from Europe, the Jewish community in Palestine grew from 60,000 in 1918—less than 10 per cent of the population at the time—to over 716,000 in 1948.

In essence, the Balfour declaration was an act of political expediency, reflecting an exaggerated belief by UK policy-makers in the extent of Jewish power and influence. By pledging to secure the establishment of a Jewish ‘national home’ in Palestine, the UK hoped to consolidate Jewish support in various countries, including Russia and the United States, for its war effort.

Not inevitable

It’s important to recognise that there was nothing natural or inevitable about the appeal of a Jewish state or ‘national home’ in Palestine—then a remote, impoverished and underdeveloped territory—for Jews long settled in Europe, north America or Russia. Limited but growing interest among diasporic Jewish communities in Zionism—in the creation of a Jewish state—began to gather momentum in the final decade of the 19th century almost entirely as a reaction to the unexpected resilience of anti-Semitism in even liberal, affluent and progressive European countries.

In particular, in the 1890s the notorious and widely reported Dreyfus affair in France  demonstrated that virulent anti-Semitism was not confined to chronically ‘backward’ polities such as Tsarist Russia. In its wake, increasing numbers of secular Jews, including the Austro-Hungarian journalist Theodor Herzl, questioned whether acceptance and integration were even attainable. Herzl and others started to focus their energies on the establishment of a Jewish state.

For Jews from east-central and eastern Europe (ECEE) especially, the appeal of Palestine and of a Jewish state increased enormously after the Holocaust, in which two thirds of Europe’s Jewish population perished. Jewish survivors, returning from the Nazi camps to their homes in the ECEE area, faced indifference or, in some cases, open hostility from the local population, many of whom had occupied the Jews’ homes, taken over their businesses and appropriated their household effects. In several instances, in Poland, Hungary and what is now Slovakia, returning Jews were attacked and killed by credulous villagers and townspeople who had no difficulty believing rumours that the Jews were engaged in the ritual murder of Christian children.

Restrictive and discriminatory postwar immigration policies, applied by the UK and other western countries, also help to account for the fact that thousands of Jewish survivors, particularly those who were young and whose family homes lay in the ECEE region, believed that their only real option was to make their way to Palestine. As emphasised by Tony Klug, however, there is a bitter irony in the fact that the Palestinians have paid the price for centuries of unremitting European anti-Semitism:

Displaced, dispossessed and deserted, they [Palestinians] were among the principal losers in the geopolitical lottery that followed the horrors of the Second World War. Their original felony was, in essence, to be in the way of another distressed people’s frantic survival strategy, fuelled by an industrial genocide for which the Palestinians bore no responsibility.

As argued by Klug, the ultimate tragedy of Israel/Palestine is that, despite what is now an overwhelming disparity in power between the two peoples and the illegality as well as immorality of the Israeli occupation of the territories, both Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews can present a morally compelling narrative. Despite the serial injustices inflicted on the Palestinians before and after the creation of Israel—including by Arab governments—both Palestinians and Israelis can reasonably claim to be history’s victims.


We need your support


Social Europe is an independent publisher and we believe in freely available content. For this model to be sustainable, however, we depend on the solidarity of our readers. Become a Social Europe member for less than 5 Euro per month and help us produce more articles, podcasts and videos. Thank you very much for your support!

Become a Social Europe Member

Making amends

If European anti-Semitism and British wartime diplomatic manoeuvrings lie at the root of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict—as well as Britain’s breathtakingly arrogant assumption, in 1917, that it was entitled to make undertakings in respect of a foreign territory without consulting its inhabitants—how can the UK and Europe now make amends? At first sight, the prospects do not appear encouraging.

A growing segment of European opinion, particularly on the left, now regards Israel/Palestine in Manichean terms with Israelis consigned to the role of ‘Zionist settler-colonists’, their claims devoid of even a scintilla of moral legitimacy. Whatever its merits, such a rigidly ideological viewpoint is unlikely to contribute to an early or peaceful resolution of the Israel/Palestine conflict, or help alleviate the grave and worsening plight of Palestinians in the territories.

Israelis, having demonstrated exceptional tenacity in defending—and sometimes expanding—their state are unlikely to surrender their hard-won independence and sovereignty by agreeing to a new binational state in which Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs, including millions of Palestinians living in the west Bank and Gaza, would enjoy equal citizenship. That is the stuff of political fiction.

If a just and lasting peace is to be achieved and if the lives of Palestinians are to improve significantly, Israelis must recognise the injustice and futility of holding on to the occupied territories and of maintaining their oppressive policies towards Gaza, which is home to an estimated 1.8 million Palestinians. A two-state solution, as originally envisaged by the United Nations General Assembly in 1947, remains the only viable basis for a just and enduring peace, although establishing the final borders of the states is likely to entail protracted negotiations.

In the context of an overall peace settlement between the two peoples, Europe is unlikely to play a major role in providing security guarantees to either Israel or Palestine. It could however make a significant contribution to a just and stable political outcome by providing a massive injection of capital and know-how to help grow the Palestinian economy.

Such steps would go at least some way towards atoning for Europe’s historical responsibility towards both Palestinians and Jews.

Stephen Pogány
Stephen Pogány

Stephen Pogány is emeritus professor in the School of Law, University of Warwick. His latest book is Modern Times: The Biography of a Hungarian-Jewish Family (2021).

You are here: Home / Politics / Europe and the tragedy of Israel/Palestine

Most Popular Posts

Visentini,ITUC,Qatar,Fight Impunity,50,000 Visentini, ‘Fight Impunity’, the ITUC and QatarFrank Hoffer
Russian soldiers' mothers,war,Ukraine The Ukraine war and Russian soldiers’ mothersJennifer Mathers and Natasha Danilova
IGU,documents,International Gas Union,lobby,lobbying,sustainable finance taxonomy,green gas,EU,COP ‘Gaslighting’ Europe on fossil fuelsFaye Holder
Schengen,Fortress Europe,Romania,Bulgaria Romania and Bulgaria stuck in EU’s second tierMagdalena Ulceluse
income inequality,inequality,Gini,1 per cent,elephant chart,elephant Global income inequality: time to revise the elephantBranko Milanovic

Most Recent Posts

transition,deindustrialisation,degradation,environment Europe’s industry and the ecological transitionCharlotte Bez and Lorenzo Feltrin
central and eastern Europe,unions,recognition Social dialogue in central and eastern EuropeMartin Myant
women soldiers,Ukraine Ukraine war: attitudes changing to women soldiersJennifer Mathers and Anna Kvit
military secrets,World Trade Organization,WTO,NATO,intellectual-property rights Military secrets and the World Trade OrganizationUgo Pagano
energy transition,Europe,wind and solar Europe’s energy transition starts to speed upDave Jones

Other Social Europe Publications

front cover scaled Towards a social-democratic century?
Cover e1655225066994 National recovery and resilience plans
Untitled design The transatlantic relationship
Women Corona e1631700896969 500 Women and the coronavirus crisis
sere12 1 RE No. 12: Why No Economic Democracy in Sweden?

Hans Böckler Stiftung Advertisement

The macroeconomic effects of re-applying the EU fiscal rules

Against the background of the European Commission's reform plans for the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), this policy brief uses the macroeconometric multi-country model NiGEM to simulate the macroeconomic implications of the most relevant reform options from 2024 onwards. Next to a return to the existing and unreformed rules, the most prominent options include an expenditure rule linked to a debt anchor.

Our results for the euro area and its four biggest economies—France, Italy, Germany and Spain—indicate that returning to the rules of the SGP would lead to severe cuts in public spending, particularly if the SGP rules were interpreted as in the past. A more flexible interpretation would only somewhat ease the fiscal-adjustment burden. An expenditure rule along the lines of the European Fiscal Board would, however, not necessarily alleviate that burden in and of itself.

Our simulations show great care must be taken to specify the expenditure rule, such that fiscal consolidation is achieved in a growth-friendly way. Raising the debt ceiling to 90 per cent of gross domestic product and applying less demanding fiscal adjustments, as proposed by the IMK, would go a long way.


DOWNLOAD HERE

ILO advertisement

Global Wage Report 2022-23: The impact of inflation and COVID-19 on wages and purchasing power

The International Labour Organization's Global Wage Report is a key reference on wages and wage inequality for the academic community and policy-makers around the world.

This eighth edition of the report, The Impact of inflation and COVID-19 on wages and purchasing power, examines the evolution of real wages, giving a unique picture of wage trends globally and by region. The report includes evidence on how wages have evolved through the COVID-19 crisis as well as how the current inflationary context is biting into real wage growth in most regions of the world. The report shows that for the first time in the 21st century real wage growth has fallen to negative values while, at the same time, the gap between real productivity growth and real wage growth continues to widen.

The report analysis the evolution of the real total wage bill from 2019 to 2022 to show how its different components—employment, nominal wages and inflation—have changed during the COVID-19 crisis and, more recently, during the cost-of-living crisis. The decomposition of the total wage bill, and its evolution, is shown for all wage employees and distinguishes between women and men. The report also looks at changes in wage inequality and the gender pay gap to reveal how COVID-19 may have contributed to increasing income inequality in different regions of the world. Together, the empirical evidence in the report becomes the backbone of a policy discussion that could play a key role in a human-centred recovery from the different ongoing crises.


DOWNLOAD HERE

ETUI advertisement

Social policy in the European Union: state of play 2022

Since 2000, the annual Bilan social volume has been analysing the state of play of social policy in the European Union during the preceding year, the better to forecast developments in the new one. Co-produced by the European Social Observatory (OSE) and the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI), the new edition is no exception. In the context of multiple crises, the authors find that social policies gained in ambition in 2022. At the same time, the new EU economic framework, expected for 2023, should be made compatible with achieving the EU’s social and ‘green’ objectives. Finally, they raise the question whether the EU Social Imbalances Procedure and Open Strategic Autonomy paradigm could provide windows of opportunity to sustain the EU’s social ambition in the long run.


DOWNLOAD HERE

Eurofound advertisement

Eurofound webinar: Making telework work for everyone

Since 2020 more European workers and managers have enjoyed greater flexibility and autonomy in work and are reporting their preference for hybrid working. Also driven by technological developments and structural changes in employment, organisations are now integrating telework more permanently into their workplace.

To reflect on these shifts, on 6 December Eurofound researchers Oscar Vargas and John Hurley explored the challenges and opportunities of the surge in telework, as well as the overall growth of telework and teleworkable jobs in the EU and what this means for workers, managers, companies and policymakers.


WATCH THE WEBINAR HERE

Foundation for European Progressive Studies Advertisement

Discover the new FEPS Progressive Yearbook and what 2023 has in store for us!

The Progressive Yearbook focuses on transversal European issues that have left a mark on 2022, delivering insightful future-oriented analysis for the new year. It counts on renowned authors' contributions, including academics, politicians and analysts. This fourth edition is published in a time of war and, therefore, it mostly looks at the conflict itself, the actors involved and the implications for Europe.


DOWNLOAD HERE

About Social Europe

Our Mission

Article Submission

Membership

Advertisements

Legal Disclosure

Privacy Policy

Copyright

Social Europe ISSN 2628-7641

Social Europe Archives

Search Social Europe

Themes Archive

Politics Archive

Economy Archive

Society Archive

Ecology Archive

Follow us

RSS Feed

Follow us on Facebook

Follow us on Twitter

Follow us on LinkedIn

Follow us on YouTube