Are the Jews Alone in the World? Dr. Mackubin Owens

Wednesday, October 25, 2023

Dr. Mackubin Owens, MINDSETTER™

 

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The disgraceful reaction of too many people to the recent slaughter of some 1,400 Jews by Hamas in southern Israel confirms the observation of Eric Hoffer in a 1968 essay for the Los Angeles Times: “the Jews are alone in the world.” This reaction, especially as it plays out on college campuses and editorial rooms, is based on malice as well as ignorance tinged with more than a little anti-Semitism.

According to this argument, it is acceptable for Hamas to kill Jews because Israel is a “colonizer-settler” state that is illegitimately “occupying” Palestinian land west of the Jordan River from the Golan Heights to the border of the Sinai Peninsula. But this is nonsense. It is the ancestral land of the Jews, which was “colonized” by Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Ottomans, and the British, among others.  During the Roman era, the territory was known as Judaea, but after Hadrian suppressed the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132-136 AD, the Romans, in an effort to extirpate any remnants of Jewish nationalism, killed or exiled the Jews and renamed the region “Syria Palaestina.”

With the Allied victory in World War I and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, Great Britain ruled “Palestine” as a mandate. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 explicitly provided for “a national home for the Jewish People” after centuries of occupation by the Ottomans, Turks, and other “colonizers.”

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In 1947, the United Nations passed a resolution calling for the partition of the Palestinian Mandate. Three-quarters of the territory had already been established as the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. The remainder was to be divided into two more states, one Jewish and one Arab. Palestinian Jews agreed to the plan. Palestinian Arabs and the five Arab members of the UN rejected it and launched a war to destroy the fledgling state.

Over one percent of the Jewish population were killed. About 700,000 Palestinian Arabs became refugees, which the Arab states refused to assimilate. As Hoffer wrote in his Los Angeles Times essay, “The Jews are a peculiar people: things permitted to other nations are forbidden to the Jews. Other nations drive out thousands, even millions of people and there is no refugee problem.  Russia did it, Poland and Czechoslovakia did it….But in the case of Israel, the displaced Arabs have become eternal refugees. Everyone insists that Israel must take back every single one.” Meanwhile, the Jews expelled from many Arab states—many of whom had lived in these places for generations—immigrated to Israel.   

Just as there has never been a “Palestine” in a political sense—as noted previously, it was a geographical region associated with Roman Syria—there has never been a distinctly Arab “Palestinian people.” The Balfour Declaration refers to the “people living in Palestine,” meaning both Arabs and Jews. As Zuheir Mohsen, a senior PLO leader, stated in 1977, “The Palestinian people do not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity… Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct ‘Palestinian people’ to oppose Zionism.” 

So much for the history of the region. What can we say about the domestic response to Hamas’ attack and the murder and kidnapping of Israeli civilians? Most Americans were sickened by the carnage but a significant minority of has approved of the violence in the name of dismantling Israel’s “apartheid state.” This is the work of the “intersectional left,” which includes much of academia and the press as well as some members of Congress.

“Intersectionality” is an academic theory that asserts that all social relationships arise from the interaction of oppressor and oppressed. Its origins can be traced to Karl Marx and his materialist theory of history and the relationship between economic classes, the bourgeoisie, owners of the means of production, and the proletariat, the oppressed workers. Antonio Gramsci expanded the argument to apply it to social groups; today we see it manifested in arguments about race and “gender.” In short, “intersectionality” holds that all oppressed peoples must unite to overthrow their common oppressor. 

It would seem that Jews, a small minority among the peoples of the world who have been subjected to all manner of persecution and violence, would be counted among the oppressed. American Jews, long the target of discrimination and exclusion, tended to see themselves as the allies of the downtrodden. Indeed, during the civil rights campaigns of the 1960s, Jews were major supporters of African-American claims and were overrepresented among the “freedom riders” who challenged discriminatory practices in the American South. Some paid with their lives. But the success of Jews in America and Israel in the Middle East has made them “oppressors.”

Accordingly, many groups, such as Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have celebrated the carnage that Hamas wrought, treating it as an extension of the struggle at home. Thus, they do not disavow Hamas’ mass murder, rape, and kidnapping. This sort of reaction should be shocking to decent people everywhere.

The irony is that Arab and Muslim citizens of Israel possess more rights and freedoms than Arabs or Muslims in Arab and Muslim states. Israel has taken risks in its repeated attempts to secure peace. It gave up control of Gaza in 2005 in an effort to trade “land for peace.” The result was Hamas, the charter of which calls for the destruction of Israel. Yet many persist in slandering Israel as an “apartheid” state. The truth is just the reverse.

Mackubin Owens is a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He previously served as editor of Orbis: FPRI’s Journal of World Affairs (2008-2020). From 2015 until March of 2018, he was Dean of Academic Affairs and Professor at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C. From 1987 until 2014, he was Professor of National Security Affairs at the US Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. 

He is also a Marine Corps veteran of Vietnam, where as an infantry platoon and company commander in 1968-1969, he was wounded twice and awarded the Silver Star medal. He retired from the Marine Corps Reserve as a Colonel in 1994.

Owens is the author of the FPRI monograph Abraham Lincoln: Leadership and Democratic Statesmanship in Wartime (2009) and US Civil-Military Relations after 9/11: Renegotiating the Civil-Military Bargain (Continuum Press, January 2011) and coauthor of US Foreign Policy and Defense Strategy: The Rise of an Incidental Superpower (Georgetown University Press, spring 2015). He is also completing a book on the theory and practice of US civil-military relations for Lynne-Rienner. He was co-editor of the textbook, Strategy and Force Planning, for which he also wrote several chapters, including “The Political Economy of National Security,” “Thinking About Strategy,” and “The Logic of Strategy and Force Planning.”

Owens’s articles on national security issues and American politics have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, International Security, Orbis, Joint Force Quarterly, The Public Interest, The Weekly Standard, The Washington Examiner, Defence Analysis, US Naval Institute Proceedings, Marine Corps Gazette, Comparative Strategy, National Review, The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor; The Los Angeles Times, the Jerusalem Post, The Washington Times, and The New York Post. And, he formerly wrote for the Providence Journal.

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