Black hats and white hats

In classic Hollywood westerns, you could always tell the villains from the good guys by the color of their hats. There was no doubt who was the struggling family trying to forge a living in the wild west and who was the villain trying to cheat him and her of the fruits of their labor, by murdering and pillaging. It is only human to seek clear cut moral judgements, to have unshakable convictions of what are allowable acts and what are hideous transgressions. But, in reality, this is simply not the way the world usually works. The history of Israel and of the Palestinians demonstrates the absurdity of summary judgements and the need for sympathy for both sides who are caught in an ever worsening spiral of hatred and killing. Unfortunately, almost everyone feels compelled to take sides. But from my perspective, there is a remarkable symmetry between the passions and fears of these two antagonists that compels sympathy for both. Both sides have feel that their continued existence in the "holy land" is threatened; their religions sanction war and they cannot see the humanity of the other side; they are locked in a spiral of hate. The terrorism of Hamas and the actions of Netanyahu's government have slammed the door shut on any 2 state solution. How did this ghastly situation happen?

In virtually every conflict, there is significant context which must be understood before making judgments. In this case, some central facts in the attitudes of both sides have extremely old roots. The Jewish side is the oldest, dating from roughly three millennia ago. Clearly, the conflict of Jews with other Middle Eastern groups began when God (Yahweh) promised Abraham and later Moses that he was giving the Jews the land of Canaan bounded by the Mediterranean and the Jordan river (or even the whole land between the Euphrates and the Nile, see Genesis 15:18!). This is stated multiple times in the Torah, along with all the rules whose observance qualifies Jews to own this land and whose neglect causes great anger from Yahweh. And of course, this led to fights with the Canaanites such as the bloody battle for Jericho, described in the book of Joshua which describes the killing of all its inhabitants (except for the prostitute Rahab who had saved several Israeli spies). Later, one finds ferocious battles with the Philistines who were the inhabitants of Gaza. We are talking of conflicts three millennia ago but the story has legs. What is important today is how many Israeli Jews believe that the entire Torah is literally the word of God: a recent survey by Haaretz found that 65% of Israeli Jews believed this. To be blunt, this means 65% believe God has given them ownership of all the land between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean.

This situation is mirrored in the Quran, dating now from a mere one and a half millennia ago. Again, observant Muslims believe the Quran is literally the words of God (Allah now) and should be taken literally. In this case, this is not so simple as there are both multiple "sword verses" as well as multiple "peace verses" which appear to require different actions of the faithful. This contradiction means that while Islam can be a peace-loving religion for most believers, it also motivates violence in others. Following the sword or other means of "persuasion", in the centuries after Mohammed, Islam spread East to Morocco and Spain, North to Turkey and later Southeastern Europe (as far as the gates of Vienna), South to Yemen and Somalia and West to India. At the least, Allah requires embracing Jihad to defend any land once occupied by Muslims from non-believers, e.g. to defend Palestine against the Israelis. I don't think one can doubt that these religious edicts created a powder-keg that could explode in conflict between Jews and Arabs. And now it has.

How did the powder-keg explode? The modern conflict dates from the First Zionism Congress in 1897, led by Theodore Herzl. At that time, Jews had been suffering from centuries of persecution, pogroms especially in Eastern Europe. But the Arabs were suffering too from the yoke of the ruling Ottoman Turks. The Ottoman empire had ruled the entire Middle East for roughly half a millennium. But at 1900 it was failing, encumbered by large debts, and the Arabs in Palestine were mostly poor and illiterate peasants described by Herzl as "barbarians" (the full quote is that the Zionist state would "form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.") With the help of Britain, who acquired a mandate to rule Palestine, and with their own paramilitary groups Haganah and Irgun, the Zionists proceeded to acquire substantial tracts of land in Palestine in the next decades, one way or another. This might have led to some accommodation later except for the nightmare that befell Europe's Jews.

The Nazi holocaust is even now a key element of the present conflict. For one thing, Jews, as a group, can absolutely never forget the holocaust and fear in their bones the possibility of non-Jewish peoples coming together to try to annihilate them. For another, many non-Jews, certainly all with a Western education, have read books and seen movies and even witnessed by visiting the death camps all of which make vivid the inhuman actions of Hitler and the Nazis. This indisputable reality strongly affected emotions in Jews and non-Jews and led to world-wide support of Zionism after the end of WWII. At the same time, I never heard any voices asking about the fate of the 1.4 million Palestinians living in Palestine, even though more than half of them were driven out or killed in the 1948 war, known as the war of independence, resp. nakba (catastrophe). This amounts to an estimated 80% of the Palestinian population in what originally became Israel, many thinking it might be temporary but all finding they were imprisoned in refugee camps by their Arab neighbors, not given citizenship or work permits or any compensation to this day. Curiously, given the fact that America provided refuge for many persecuted religions like the Pilgrims, the Mormons and the Amish, the option of a Jewish homeland in sparsely populated America (about 90 people per square mile, less than 140 for the entire land mass of the world, including mountains, deserts and snow) never took root.

How did I, a Caucasian Christian, get involved? Aside from he fact that a large fraction of my fellow mathematicians, including my wonderful PhD advisor Oscar Zariski, are all Jews, I have visited Israel multiple times. I first visited in September 1967 with my family on our way to Bombay, staying for 3 weeks in a Moshav collective on the coast (where I worked on my math research, my family found Roman pottery lying around and we all followed Talmudic separate milk/meat meals). The "six-day war" had taken place in June and the Israelis were euphoric with relief. Moshe Dayan had pushed through the policy of leaving the Temple Mount in Muslim hands and I naively thought the Jews and Palestinians could make peace based on 2 states, a divided Jerusalem and reparations to the refugees. I came back in June 1995 on the invitation of my good friend Prof. Mina Teicher. Again, there was a ray of hope from the two "Oslo accords", one in 1993 and one a few months later in September 1995. Crossing into Jordan to visit Petra, I remember a sign on the border with the words "peace, shalom and salam", English, Hebrew and Arabic, the latter two cognates in the same language family, almost identical. Rabin's assassination, Arafat's intransigence and the drumbeat of terrorist suicide attacks doomed that hope. Next I made a round trip with my son Jeremy through Lebanon, Jordan, Israel and Occupied Palestine in 2004. Guided by the Palestinian mathematician Iyad Suwan, we visited Birzeit University, navigating many checkpoints (that pop up and down without notice, creating delays from minutes to hours) and eating at his house only a few yards from the wall. I wrote about this trip in the May 2005 Notices of the AMS (American Math. Society). I saw the vitality of the universities are in every country but also how hard life was under the West Bank occupation, how densely Israeli settlements were spread even then and how the system of zones makes any meetings between Israeli and Palestinian mathematicians impossible. The atmosphere was tense and I heard from colleagues detained by the IDF (Israel Defense Force) nightmarish stories of their treatment. Finally, I went back in 2008 as one of 3 recipients of the Wolf Prize. As a past President of the International Mathematical Union, I was concerned that mathematics should be able to flourish in all countries and mathematicians should be able to collaborate. So I decided to give my portion of the award half to Birzeit University and half to Gisha, an Israeli organization working for Palestinian students rights (see September 2008 AMS Notices). For this, I got a lot of press and was called anti-semitic by quite a few people but thanks from many Palestinians.

I have recently published a book with the AMS entitled Numbers and the World, Essays on Math and Beyond, in which Chapter 17 describes two of my encounters with political conflicts. However, I refrained in that chapter from writing at length about my involvements in the Middle East, especially because I had reason to believe the AMS did not want to be drawn into political disputes and would not publish my book if I did. But now the catastrophe in Gaza has made the conflict so hideous and I find people taking sides without thinking about the full complexity of the crisis. Moreover, the US Congress is debating laws that would label me as anti-semitic, which I feel is totally false, but which drives me to argue as calmly and rationally as I can to explain my attitude.

Why indeed might I be said to be anti-semitic? First of all, let me say that I hope to be able to regard every human being as having the rights that Thomas Jefferson enunciated: the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I interpret "the pursuit of happiness" as meaning having as many opportunities as his fellows, that one should strive to give everyone the education they seek, equal access to jobs of all kinds and the possibility of expressing their beliefs freely. Of course, I recognize that there are criminals and terrorists who must be restrained as much as possible. But in the present context, this means equal respect for the lives of Jews and Muslims, more specifically the lives of Israeli Jews and Palestinian Muslims. (Before 1948, about 10% of Palestinians were Christian, now it's only 2% of Palestinians.) There have been and there are now terrorists in both the Israeli and Palestinian sides but I believe the vast majority of both peoples seek peace. Secondly, I interpret expressing ones beliefs freely to mean one can criticize people or governments freely if you feel they are violating basic moral values that you hold dear. But note that such expressions always come with a context and that omitting this context distorts their meaning. To be specific, thirdly I believe that the present government of Israel wishes to annex all of Palestine without creating any Palestinian state and that this is a blatant violation of Palestinians rights.

What is anti-semitic came to a head recently when Elise Stefanik, a Representative from New York, asked three college presidents whether they would punish students calling for genocide of Jews. Such statements sound to me like incitement to criminal actions and I see no context that could make either legitimate. Surely such statements would be anti-semitic. But Stefanik had been referring to students praising Hamas, and here is a context to consider. Even though Hamas's terrorists savagely murdered and raped thousands, still the fact that the Gaza strip has been an open air prison with over 2 million inmates for 16 years helps one understand why some of its inhabitants came to dehumanize their victims. Not justify, just understand. For my part, I don't see how anyone could praise such butchery. In a larger context, there are movements in Congress to define anti-semitic speech. One was the actual house vote that anti-zionism is anti-semitic, another is that criticism of any "Jewish community institution" (the definition in the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance 2015 draft) is anti-semitic. The first seems to me a bad idea because zionism has a long history and some of it certainly involved Jewish terrorists. The second is problematic because the government of Israel is certainly a Jewish community institution. This also seems a bad idea to me: every person reads about actions of the government of every country and reacts with approval or disapproval. Every country can be ruled by people who commit actions you hate and freedom of speech for me means you can say and write about your feelings if you are not taking action or advocating violence. My own belief that Netanyahu's government is violating Palestinian rights and that believing and writing that is not anti-semitic by any reasonable definition.

"Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap''. This quote is from the Christian bible, Galatians 6:7, a letter from Paul to the people of Galatia concerned principally with the relations of Jewish converts to Christianity towards the non-Jewish converts, urging the Jews to follow faith in God, not their ancient Talmudic laws. The idea of reaping what you have sown is ringing in my head as I read about Gaza, the war of Israel versus Hamas. People are horrified at the utter brutality of Hamas and feel killing Palestinians while attempting to destroy Hamas is legitimate retribution. But this totally ignores the causes, what situation led Hamas soldiers and Israeli soldiers to dehumanize each other in the white heat of their anger and whether Hamas will only grow if this retribution kills many non-combatants. Few mention what Israel sowed, that Gaza crams 2.4 million Palestinians in an area less than half the size of New York City, blockaded by land and sea, without meaningful work or any hope of escape. And what has Hamas sowed? Hamas's avowed aim is to destroy Israel and this is emblazoned in their flag. Depending on what Netanyahu's government does, Gaza might turn into a recreation of the Warsaw ghetto: the overcrowding is nearly as bad, the blockade was total for a while but is now a little better. However, one fears that Israeli bombs may collapse some of Hamas's tunnels and bury alive Hamas soldiers and their hostages alike. Israel has vastly more power than the Palestinians, as it has since 1967, so the ball is in its court to choose a new direction. But giving up any real power to the Palestinians seems extremely unlikely. Can Israel tolerate running Gaza as a full fledged prison with troops everywhere permanently? Would the Arab world tolerate another massive wave of refugees, as in 1948? Would the US? Israel seems trapped now, something has to give, some major change inevitable.