Anyway, why didn’t the Palestinians welcome all those Jewish immigrants to Palestine. It is required per Catholic Social Teaching.

Well, come to that, we could probably have a pretty extensive argument about colonialism and imperialism too — but that’s for another day. (Say, not in Holy Week.)

I don’t have any interest in justifying the actions of the Stern Gang and other various Jewish militias back in the 30s and 40s. (Nor, I imagine, do you have any interest in doing so for the Arab militias.) Unquestionably things got very ugly and there is plenty of blame to go around on both sides.

However, I think it’s problematic to denounce the whole project of Jews having moved into Palestine in the late 19th and throughout the 20th century, or to denounce their wanting to stay there and maintain a stable government at this time. Going back to the late Ottoman period when all this got started, there were sizeable Jewish and Arab and Christian populations in the area, and it was honestly pretty sparsely settled. I don’t think we can say that the Jews had no right to move there seeking to create a better life for themselves anymore than we can say that Jews had no right to move to the US in the 30s and 40s, or that Hispanics have no right to move to the US now.

(As a half-Hispanic from California, this strikes me as particularly relevant. A lot of towns in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and California are now almost entirely Hispanic, and major cities have very large Hispanic populations. However, thankfully, both nationalist Hispanics of the La Raza sort, who insist that the Southwest should become a Hispanic ethnic state, and anglo nationalists who insist that its a violation of their rights for so many Hispanics to move in, are distinct minorities in our country. Nationalism of this sort has never been much of an American phenomenon.)

So unless we’re to accept nationalist assumptions about particular ethnic groups having a divine right to a specific piece of land, I don’t think we can say that Jews immigrating to Palestine was any kind of a problem. What did create strife was the fact that both the Jewish and Arab populations in the region became caught up in ethnic nationalism such that by 1947 both wanted to have a specifically ethnic state in the same place.

What impresses me about Israel is that despite its occasional paranoia and excesses in self defense (and at a human level, who can blame them given their history over the last 60 years) it has moved beyond this ethnic nationalism to become a pluralistic democracy. And what I think would be by far the best thing for the Palestinians would be if they would do the same — either on their own or simply reconciling themselves to Israel and its existence.

The comparison is telling: nearly a million Jews were expelled from surrounding Arab states, and they forgot about what they’d lost and absorbed into the Israeli population — making up roughly 40% of the current Jewish population in Israel. The Arabs who were expelled (or left thinking that the Jewish state would soon be wiped out and they could return) from Jewish territory have not been absorbed by Jordan, Syria and Egypt — those countries have been quite happy to keep them on Israel’s doorstop, in poverty, as a political and military tool against Israel.

Hard as it may be to swallow, Israel is now a 60-year-old fact (as old as many countries in the world right now) and fighting against it now is not necessarily more reasonable from a just war perspective than if the descendants of the plains Indians were still fighting against the US in the 1930s and 40s.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benny_Morris

I’ve wrestled with this previously (see Thoughts on Israel’s war with Hamas American Catholic 12/30/2008), and I think it would depend on the specific action taken (I’m inclined not to issue a general condemnation of Israel’s actions until I know the facts).

As I stated then, in ascertaining moral culpability, I think you’d have to address several pertinent questions:

Did Israel adopt all other means at its disposal to prevent the attacks before resorting to armed force?

In resorting to armed force, did Israel deliberately target Palestinian civilians, or target a site with the specific intention of killing civilians?

Did Israel take necessary precautions to prevent harm to civilians?

However, I cannot fathom any moral justification for bombing with the deliberate attempt to inflict mass casualties upon civilians, as is the intent and product of suicide bombing.

Benny Morris’ books give accounts of terrorist acts of this nature by both Israelis and the Arabs. Both were gravely wrong in doing so.

It’s all disgusting to me – suicide bombings, civilian deaths, aerial bombardment, “shock and awe”. If I were completely wrong about the Palestinians being the victims and the Israelis being the aggressors, then I’d rethink my views.

I don’t want to justify any atrocities, but the rational part of my brain says, “these Palestinians are desperate, they’ve been terrorized and humiliated and they are lashing out like madmen”. I see a method in the madness, and if I were Muslim, and not Christian, I’m not sure how I would respond to the situation.