Palestine

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/6167695.stm

Toynbee was one of the first to have written about the massacres of Armenians under the direction of Turkish nationalists in 1915. The first time the phrase “crimes against humanity” was used was in a statement by the Allied Powers in relation to what is now, by many people, called the Armenian genocide.

In my opinion, genocide-denial, if that is what it is, by the successor of the state which sponsored it, would be a reason to delay Turkey’s entry into the European Union. Economic incompatibilities would be another. Religious differences are not a reason.

In the first volume of the Study, Toynbee writes about the extermination of indigenous peoples that occurred in North America at the hands of white Protestant immigrants. The word genocide did not exist in 1934. Is it appropriate here?

North Americans have come to terms with the record on slavery, and its aftermath (1865-1965), but they haven’t with the other issue.

Toynbee often contrasts the behaviour of Catholics worldwide with that of Protestants: the Protestants come off much worse. We’ve had a little from him on Mexico already (a country of whose race relations he has a rather rosy view) and on the treatment of black people by Protestants in Africa and America.

On Israel, his view was very blunt. The crime committed against the Jews in Europe did not justify the crime committed against the Palestinians in Asia. He identified Zionism with imperialism and colonialism. In fact, a possible Zion discussed between 1903 and 1905 was in Africa, in “Uganda”, land which is now actually in Kenya. He believed that it was easy to create a Jewish state at a distance, where mere Arabs were involved, not so easy to think of one closer to home. The perpetrators of the genocide of the Jews in central Europe should have given up some of their own land for this state.

It seems very doubtful that this could have been discussed in 1945. The decision as to the location of the Jewish state had been taken a generation earlier. Immigration into Palestine by Jews had started a generation before that. But Toynbee was accusing the West of two crimes: against the Jews and against the Palestinians, by sponsoring the creation of a Jewish state on Palestinian land. He was not necessarily speaking in practical political terms.

There’s a school (Melanie Phillips) which equates criticism of the Jewish state with a more general Western defeatism, of the sort of which Toynbee was often accused. But such was his view.

I suppose Toynbee’s least demanding suggestion now would be: withdrawal by Israel to secure pre-1967 borders without giving Palestinians the right to return to lands within those borders. After a certain point you cannot visit on the sons the sins of the fathers. His more challenging one would be: all peoples of all religions and races should live together in the single space of Palestine-Israel in a secular state.

Depressingly, I fear that Toynbee may be quoted in Ahmadinejad’s disgraceful conference.