The tragedy of Palestinianism: a response to John Baxter

David Warden
Oct 31
14 min read

Updated: Nov 8

By David Warden

David is the humanist representative on the Bournemouth & Poole Holocaust Memorial Committee. In this article, writing in a personal capacity, he responds to some of the criticisms made by John Baxter of his article on anti-Zionism in our August issue.

I'm very grateful to John Baxter for his detailed reply to my article about anti-Zionism in our August issue. I can't respond in detail to every point he has made because it would make this article far too long. What I have attempted to do is to pick up on some of the main differences between us. I look forward to meeting John again next year in Wincanton, when we may have the opportunity to debate this topic again in public. This article can be read on its own but reading John Baxter's article first will help the reader to understand the whole discussion.

Palestinianism and the 1948 War

John takes exception to my opposition to the ideology of ‘Palestinianism’ which he takes to mean that, for me, ‘there are no Palestinians, just non-Jewish Arabs who happen to be wrongly believing they are Palestinians with a claim to the land.’ This is not an accurate statement of my position. I use the term ‘Palestinianism’ as it is used by the Israeli politician and writer Dr Einat Wilf to mean the belief that Arab Palestinians have a right to return to the homes and villages that were lost, either by them or their ancestors, in the 1948 war. Dr Wilf and Adi Schwartz discuss the legal implications of this belief in detail in their book The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace (2020), which I recommend.

My debate with John largely hinges on our different beliefs about what actually happened in 1948, and this difference is downstream from heavyweight historians who disagree about what happened. I’m inclined to side with Benny Morris, Professor of History at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Be’er Sheva, Israel, and author of 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (2008). John is inclined to side with other historians, such as Ilan Pappé and Ahron Bregman.

Morris claims that the 1948 War was started by the Arab Palestinians, first as a civil war from November 1947, directly after the UN General Assembly voted in favour of a two-state solution, and then as a multi-state attack from 15 May 1948, the day after the British left and Israel came into being as a Jewish state. Morris does not deny that atrocities took place, and that some Arab Palestinians were forcefully expelled. But he claims that the majority of Arab Palestinians simply fled under conditions of war, presumably believing that they would be able to return once Israel had been defeated. However, this defeat never happened. The Arabs lost their war of annihilation against the fledging Jewish state and they have remained in a state of hostility ever since. Under such conditions, there can be no question of a ‘right of return’ which is still motivated by a desire to destroy the Jewish state. John presumably believes the alternative narrative, which is that the Arab Palestinians were ethnically cleansed in 1947/1948 and that they have a right to return.

Given that there is no consensus about these rival narratives at the most senior levels of academic history, it is difficult to see how John and I can resolve this basic disagreement. Disagreements often stem, however, not just from an objective assessment of the facts but also from one's entire political worldview. Ilan Pappé, for example, is considered to be post-Zionist or anti-Zionist. He questions the very legitimacy of Israel from its inception, viewing it as a colonial settler enterprise. Pappé writes as an activist; he’s not simply a historian but a campaigner for Palestinian rights. His critics (including many Israeli historians such as Benny Morris) accuse him of ideological bias and selective use of sources. John Baxter and I cannot resolve such arguments but we need to be alert to ideological bias in our sources.

Zionism

John claims that I accept ‘the Zionist claim that four thousand years ago the Jews had a patriarch, Abraham, who told them that their god YHWH had given them the land of Zion.’ Actually I don’t accept this because I’m an atheist. However, I do accept that the Jewish state existed in antiquity, on and off for perhaps 1,000 years, until it was terminated by the Romans in the second century. From 135CE to about 1880, most Jews were exiled from their ancient homeland. It is, of course, remarkable that their coherence as a people, and their desire to return home, remained intact throughout those long centuries. As imperialism gave way to ethno-nationalism in Europe, it became a matter of survival for the Jews to find a safe homeland. A variety of places were mooted, but the obvious place was Palestine (renamed as such by the Romans just to annoy the Jews).

The population and land question

John believes that I have ‘brushed aside’ the fact that ‘for the last two thousand years the population of Palestine has never since their calamitous expulsion by Rome had more than a small Jewish minority in the Jerusalem area’ and that ‘since 635 CE, apart from a period of Crusader control, the land has been under Muslim rule’. I have not brushed these facts aside. What I would say is that humans have always migrated and different lands come under different jurisdictions at different times. The break-up of the Ottoman Empire led to the creation of many new nation states. Given the existence of different ethnic populations in the empire at the time, it seems arbitrary and unfair to insist absolutely that they should all have become Arab Muslim. If you count all the states that have emerged from areas of Asia and Africa once ruled (to varying degrees) by the Ottoman Empire, you get roughly 17 independent Arab states today, and one Jewish state which exists on less than one percent of the Ottoman Empire’s former land area. There would have been 18 Arab states had the Arab Palestinians accepted the UN deal in 1947. But instead, they have spent 78 years trying to destroy the Jewish state and it has brought them nothing but ruin, death and misery. That's what I mean by the ‘tragedy of Palestinianism’ which, we may note in passing, is perpetuated and underwritten by the United Nations.

Israel a country of refugees

John writes ‘Warden is happy with the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine by the UN in 1948 as a response to the Holocaust and pogroms in Europe, despite ALL the surrounding Muslim states and ALL non-Jewish Palestinians rejecting this as an unjust imposition on predominantly Arab land.’ The tragedy is that, after the Second World War, hundreds of thousands of Jewish survivors – often called Displaced Persons (DPs) – were stuck in camps across Europe, mainly in Germany, Austria and Italy, for several years. Many could not return home because their families and communities had been annihilated. In parts of Poland and Eastern Europe, antisemitic violence – including the Kielce massacre of Jews in 1946 – made return dangerous. Meanwhile, the United States, Britain, and most Commonwealth countries admitted very few Jewish refugees in the immediate post-war years. The British government (still in control of Palestine under the Mandate) continued to restrict Jewish immigration, allowing only about 1,500 legal entrants per month. Attempts by survivors to reach Palestine illegally were often blocked by the Royal Navy; refugees were detained in camps in Cyprus or sent back to Europe, as in the notorious Exodus 1947 incident.

The Exodus 1947 incident

The Exodus incident was one of the most dramatic and politically significant refugee episodes in the aftermath of the Second World War. In July 1947, a ship named the SS Exodus left the port of Sète, France, carrying over 4,500 Jewish Holocaust survivors and refugees. Its destination was British-controlled Palestine, where immigration by Jews was severely restricted. As the ship approached the coast of Palestine, the Royal Navy intercepted it on 18 July 1947, just off Haifa. British forces rammed the ship and boarded it violently, leading to three deaths and many injuries. The passengers were forcibly removed and placed on three British deportation ships. Instead of interning the refugees in Cyprus (as Britain had done previously), the ships were rerouted to Hamburg, Germany – still under British occupation – where the refugees were forcibly disembarked into camps in the very country where many had suffered persecution. This caused a huge international outcry.

The Exodus incident, combined with growing global sympathy and Zionist advocacy, shifted public opinion and in 1947, the UN voted to partition Palestine and create a Jewish state. When Israel declared independence in 1948, it immediately opened its doors to survivors and other Jews, framing itself as a refuge for all Jews. Between 1948 and 1951, roughly 700,000 Jewish immigrants arrived in Israel, many of them Holocaust survivors. So from 1945 to 1947, most Jewish survivors had nowhere else to go. Israel (or, more precisely, Mandatory Palestine before 1948) was the only destination that actively sought and accepted them, though they could not legally enter until independence was declared.

John seems to call this ‘an unjust imposition on predominantly Arab land’. From my point of view, it's only unjust if your theory of post-imperial land apportionment is based on the principle of absolute Arab supremacy and callous indifference to the plight of Jewish refugees. Why, one might ask, did the members of one Abrahamic religion not embrace the displaced members of another, welcoming them as brothers and sisters to share a modest sliver of their ancient Abrahamic homeland? What does it say about religion if this basic human impulse is absent?

When the League of Nations granted Britain the Mandate (formally approved in 1922), the territory initially included everything from the Mediterranean Sea to the desert borders of Iraq and Arabia – about 117,000 km² in total (roughly half the size of the UK). Image from Wikipedia, public domain.

From the river to the... desert?

John complains that ‘Zionist Jews’ always worked ‘not just for a limited share, but for the whole of what they have called Greater Israel “from the river to the sea”.’ This comes back to the question of how to apportion imperial territories to post-imperial states. The Balfour Declaration promised to support ‘the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’. At that point, ‘Palestine’ was not yet defined geographically, but it was generally understood to refer to the entire region the British captured from the Ottomans — both west and east of the Jordan River.

When the League of Nations granted Britain the Mandate (formally approved in 1922), the territory initially included everything from the Mediterranean Sea to the desert borders of Iraq and Arabia – about 117,000 km² in total (roughly half the size of the UK). The Mandate text explicitly incorporated the Balfour Declaration, committing Britain to facilitate the establishment of a Jewish national home. However, Article 25 of the Mandate gave Britain the right to ‘withhold’ those provisions in the territories east of the Jordan River. Before the Mandate was formally ratified, Britain split the territory. The area west of the Jordan became Palestine, where Jewish settlement was to be encouraged, and the much larger area east of the Jordan became Transjordan, ruled by Emir Abdullah, a Hashemite prince installed by the British. From 1922 onwards, Transjordan was explicitly excluded from the provisions concerning a Jewish national home.

So while the original concept (1917–1920) of the Mandate envisaged that the entire area – both sides of the Jordan – would be part of the zone in which a Jewish homeland might develop, the British decision in 1921–22 effectively restricted that vision to western Palestine, less than a quarter of the total Mandate territory. And when the UN Partition Plan carved up western Palestine in 1947, the Jewish state got just over half of that reduced portion of the Mandate territory. Today, after several wars, the Jewish state covers around 80 per cent of western Palestine. If Arab Palestinians living in the remaining 20 per cent still want to annihilate the Jewish state with rocket attacks and terrorist outrages, it's not altogether surprising that some ‘Zionist Jews’ would quite like to take over the entirety of western Palestine, but that does not seem to be on the cards following President Trump's peace plan.

The question of indigeneity and genetics

John claims that I fail to recognise that ‘very few Israeli Jews, unlike most Palestinians, can claim long-standing multi-generational roots in the country’. That's an important point. It does appear to be the case that modern Palestinians are, in large part although not exclusively, the descendants of long-standing inhabitants of western Palestine, whose ancestors lived there continuously through waves of conquest and cultural change.

If we look at modern population genetics, however, we discover that Israeli Jews and Palestinians share a deep ancestral layer rooted in the ancient Levant (a historical-geographical term for the eastern Mediterranean region). Genetic studies (see footnote) consistently find that Jewish populations – whether Ashkenazi (European), Sephardi (Iberian/North African), or Mizrahi (Middle Eastern) – retain a strong Levantine genetic component. This means that even after nearly two millennia of diaspora, a significant portion of their ancestry derives from ancient Israelites or related peoples of the southern Levant. Similarly, Palestinian Arabs show a genetic profile that is also predominantly Levantine, overlapping heavily with other populations from the same region (Lebanese, Syrians, Druze, Samaritans). When plotted on genetic maps, Palestinians, Samaritans and Jewish groups cluster together.

Of course, Jewish communities in different parts of the world absorbed some local ancestry. Ashkenazi Jews (from Europe) have a blend of Levantine and southern European ancestry (often estimated around 40–60 per cent Middle Eastern, 40–60 per cent European) whereas Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews show much higher continuity with Middle Eastern populations. Palestinians, meanwhile, are the largely continuous descendants of people who remained in the region through antiquity – Canaanites, Israelites, Greeks, Romans, and others – who gradually adopted Arabic language and Islamic culture after the 7th-century Arab conquests. Their genetics, too, show deep Levantine continuity, with only minor Arabian or North African components.

Does any of this matter? I think it does. But the picture is complex and multifaceted.

The claim of genocide and irreconcilable interpretive frames

John claims that Israel's response to the 7 October 2023 attack was grossly disproportionate (60,000 deaths vs 1,500 – about 40 to 1) which amounts to genocide, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, and the use of hunger, starvation and famine as weapons of war on a population of millions made deliberately homeless. He claims that all such charges are rejected both by Netanyahu and me as ‘Hamas propaganda’. He argues that ‘looking at the terrible images we see’ it is ‘hard to accept’ military explanations regarding the difficulties of urban warfare and the inevitability of mass civilian casualties.

John must know this is a feeble argument. Human beings do not see reality just as it is, whether it is directly in front of them or via a TV screen. Everything we see is filtered through our interpretive frames, just as our ancestors who saw the Sun going round the Earth believed that men like Galileo should be tortured for doubting the evidence of their own eyes. And this really goes to the nub of the debate between those who support Israel and those who support the Palestinians.

Over recent decades, two extremely complex interpretive frames have hardened into irreconcilable narratives about the conflict. Each one is like a string of pearls. The pro-Palestinian frame starts with the foundational myth of ‘Jewish/imperial settler colonialism’ followed by the Nakhba, occupation, racism, apartheid, perpetual victimhood, ethnic cleansing, starvation, genocide and jihad until the end of time. The pro-Israeli frame starts with biblical stories of an ancient kingdom, 1800 years of exile, marginalisation and lethal persecution, gradual refugee migration followed by fragile statehood, defence against existential attacks, suicide bombings, intifadas, the 7 October genocidal pogrom and Iran's nuclear threat. We cannot have an intelligent debate about this conflict until we unpick these strings of pearls to see which one, if either, comes closest to reality. What we can't do is simply look at images on a TV screen and treat them as confirmation bias for our preferred narrative. John does of course agree that facts may be disputed and that, even if we agree on the facts, they can be read in different ways.

The future

John wants the State of Israel to be dismantled by outward migration of Israelis to other countries. He wants Jews to become a diaspora people again and abandon their illegitimate state on disputed land in an overwhelmingly Muslim Middle East area. I think this is an outrageous and preposterous suggestion, but that's because my interpretative narrative is utterly different to John's. For me, it's like being a heliocentrist in a world full of geocentrists. It's very difficult to convince the geocentrists to stop believing the evidence of their own eyes and to try on a different pair of glasses. All I can do is keep trying. But cognitive frames are extremely difficult to shift, especially when allied to one's sense of moral rectitude.

Let me end on an optimistic note. The ideology of Palestinianism – which demands the destruction of Israel to make way for the 18th post-Ottoman Arab state – has been dealt a crushing blow. Israel is a regional superpower and the Jews are not going anywhere. Numerous Arab states are coming to terms with this reality, and there's a good chance that Gaza will be rebuilt for the benefit of the two million Palestinians who still live there, in a bit of Palestine they can call their own and make a paradise. It does not have to look like a concentration camp or a prison, as long as they disavow their desire to annihilate their neighbours. Peace and prosperity is a better narrative than jihad.

Academic papers on genetics

Genetic studies have consistently shown that Jewish and Palestinian populations share deep Levantine ancestry, reflecting common origins in the ancient peoples of the region. See D. M. Behar et al., “The Genome-Wide Structure of the Jewish People”, Nature 466, no. 7303 (2010): 238–242; M. Haber et al., “Genome-Wide Diversity in the Levant Reveals Recent Structuring by Culture”, PLoS Genetics 9, no. 2 (2013): e1003316; H. Ostrer and K. Skorecki, “The Population Genetics of the Jewish People”, Human Genetics 132, no. 2 (2013): 119–127; and A. Nebel et al., “High-Resolution Y-Chromosome Haplotypes of Israeli and Palestinian Arabs Share a Common Pool of Y-Chromosome Lineages”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 97, no. 12 (2000): 6769–6774.