Jewish and Palestinian Claims Rest on an Unresolved Shared History

Barry Strauss argues that the Jewish connection to the land is historical, continuous in memory, and supported by evidence reaching far beyond modern Zionism. But he does not present that connection as proof that the land had only one people or one legitimate name. “Israel or Palestine?” has the answer “both and,” he says.

Strauss’s case begins with continuity. Jews, he says, never abandoned their association with or yearning for the land of Israel. The resident Jewish population was often exceedingly small between late antiquity and the nineteenth century, but there were always Jewish inhabitants, pilgrims, visitors, and immigrants. When Zionism emerged in the nineteenth century, he argues, its proponents did not choose the Ottoman province of Palestine at random. They sought the land because it was understood as the historic Jewish homeland and remained present in Jewish prayer and collective memory.

He traces secular evidence for an Israelite people in the region to the thirteenth-century BCE Merneptah Stele from Egypt, followed by inscriptions referring to the king of Israel and the House of David. Archaeology and the Bible’s historical books, he says, point to Jewish kingdoms that rose and fell, to exile under Assyria and Babylon, and to the return to Jerusalem permitted by Cyrus the Great in the sixth century BCE.

Judea was later independent under the Maccabees before Rome conquered it in 63 BCE. Strauss cites Rome’s destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple after the revolt of 66–70, followed by further revolts, including Bar Kokhba, which Rome suppressed in 136. After that defeat, surviving Jewish communities in the land, especially in Galilee and the Golan, embraced a rabbinical ideal of spiritual rather than armed resistance. Jewish life also became centered for centuries in Iraq.

The point of that chronology is not merely that Jews once ruled in the region. Strauss argues that a Jewish relationship to the land persisted through political defeat, dispersal, and changing centers of Jewish life.

At the same time, he describes the territory as historically plural. Greek-speaking communities, descended in part from Philistines and intermarried with local Canaanite populations, lived there; so did Samaritans, Arab populations in the north and south, and Idumeans, some of whom converted to Judaism. Greek writers including Herodotus and Aristotle used forms of “Palestine,” Strauss says, as did Assyrians. Jews called the land Israel or the Land of Israel. The competing names, in his account, arose from a region inhabited and described by more than one people.

For Barry Strauss, Israel is properly described as a Western liberal democracy, but not as a society in which Jewish and Arab citizens occupy equal positions. His conclusion is deliberately qualified: Israel is “an imperfect democracy,” he says, operating in what he describes as an exceptionally difficult regional environment.

Strauss puts Israel’s population at roughly 9 million people: about 7 million Jews and 2 million non-Jews, most of them Arabs. Those Arab citizens include Muslims and Christians, as well as Bedouin, Circassian, and Druze communities.

From the standpoint of Jewish citizens, he calls Israel “a democracy with a vengeance.” He cites electoral participation, estimating turnout in the most recent Israeli election at 71%, compared with 64% in the most recent U.S. presidential election. He also points to the practical force of public protest. In his account, mass demonstrations against the government’s proposed judicial reforms helped stop those reforms, while protests for hostages and their families during the current war have had substantial effects on Israeli policy.

Military service is central to his explanation of how Israeli society works. Jewish men and women generally perform universal military service, Strauss says. He notes that ultra-Orthodox Jews had an exemption, though he says the law had recently changed and that more were being required to serve. Circassian and Druze citizens are also conscripted.

Because Israel relies substantially on reservists, Strauss argues, military service carries political as well as social weight. He compares it to college in the United States: a person’s unit, record, and relationships can shape later opportunities. Arab citizens, except for the Circassian and Druze groups, are not drafted. That absence from the military, he says, limits their career prospects in a society where service is an important network and credential.

Strauss’s assessment of Arab citizens is more critical. Arabs make up about one-fifth of Israel’s population, he says, but hold roughly 10% of Knesset seats at present, though they have held as much as 12.5%. He attributes the gap partly to prejudice and partly to lower Arab electoral participation. He estimates Arab turnout in the last election at around 53%, compared with overall turnout of 70% to 71%.

He also says public schools in Arab communities receive less support than those in Jewish communities, and that Israeli Arabs generally have lower economic status than Israeli Jews. Whether those differences arise from prejudice, sociology, or societal values is open to debate, Strauss says. The unequal outcomes are not.

At the same time, he emphasizes settings where cooperation is routine. The health system is his principal example, with Arab doctors, nurses, and pharmacists working alongside Jewish Israelis. The coexistence of those institutions with unequal education, income, participation, and career access is central to Strauss’s description of Israeli democracy.

Barry Strauss places the Palestinian displacement of 1948 alongside the displacement of Jews from Muslim countries after Israel’s creation. At the time Israel was founded, he says, Arabs were the majority in Mandatory Palestine. The consensus, as he presents it, is that about 700,000 Arabs fled or were expelled.

Strauss does not reduce that exodus to one cause. Some Palestinians fled, he says. Some were advised by Arab armies preparing to invade the new state to leave temporarily, expecting they could return after an Arab victory. Others were expelled by the Israeli army.

At the same time, he says, the Jewish population across the Muslim world was about 1 million, and an estimated 900,000 Jews fled or were expelled from Muslim countries in the wake of Israel’s creation. Some had been subjected to violence earlier, including the 1941 attack on Jews in Baghdad. Strauss calls these upheavals an exchange of populations and argues that such movements have been common in the Middle East.

His principal comparison is Greece and Turkey. The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, he says, provided for an exchange in which about 1.2 million Greeks left Turkey and 300,000 to 400,000 Turks or Muslims left Greece. The categories were religious as well as linguistic or national: some Christians who left Turkey belonged to the Greek Orthodox Church without necessarily speaking Greek.

Strauss also cites Cyprus, where a 1974 Greek coup seeking union with Greece was followed by a Turkish invasion. About 200,000 Greeks and 50,000 Turks were forced to flee, he says, and the island remains divided.

The significance of these cases for Strauss is their duration. The Greek-Turkish conflict began in 1821 in his telling and remains unsettled in important respects. His work on Jewish resistance to Rome concerns two centuries of conflict. Against that history, he regards a near-term settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as extremely unlikely.

Barry Strauss distinguishes criticism of Israel from opposition to its continued existence as a Jewish state. His analogy is Ireland. A person might say they admire the Irish but believe Irish independence was a mistake and Ireland should return to British rule. Strauss says he could, at least initially, accept that such a person was not necessarily anti-Irish.

He would not accept the same assurance, however, from someone marching behind a program that Ireland should be British, Protestant, and free from coast to coast. In Strauss’s argument, the rhetoric matters because it implies a political future in which the people whose national independence is being rejected have no recognized place.

Strauss applies the analogy to anti-Zionism. Someone might advocate a binational Israel-Palestine in which no group is dominant and everyone lives as equals. He calls that vision a “pipe dream,” but says he would give its proponent the benefit of the doubt about whether the position was anti-Israel. He would then ask what evidence suggests that the two groups could live together peacefully under those conditions now.

His sharper objection is to slogans and assertions that, in his view, leave Israel’s status undefined or deny the Jewish connection to the land altogether. He cites “from the river to the sea, Palestine must be free,” asking where Israel fits in that formulation and what “free” is meant to signify. He objects to claims that Palestine is the land’s only legitimate name, that Israelis are settler-colonialists with no historical connection to it, or that Jews should return to Poland.

That last demand, Strauss says, does not match the origins of Israel’s Jewish population: a majority of Israeli Jews do not come from Poland or Eastern Europe, but from Muslim countries.

Barry Strauss situates the question of anti-Zionism amid what he describes as a renewed rise in antisemitism in the United States and elsewhere in the Western world. He begins to cite an FBI figure for an increase in antisemitic incidents, then withdraws it during the talk, saying he may have misstated it and that the increase could have been closer to 36% than 63%. He maintains that antisemitic incidents and violence have risen, including attacks involving murder and synagogue arson.

Rather than only asking why antisemitism has risen, Strauss asks why overt antisemitism had been so muted in the United States for much of his life. He attributes that period to revulsion and shame after the Holocaust, gains produced by the civil-rights movement, and an era of American confidence and optimism. He notes that Jews faced substantial barriers to elite American universities before the 1960s and that those barriers later weakened.

Virulent antisemitism never disappeared in many parts of the world, Strauss says. He argues that Nazi antisemitic doctrine entered Middle Eastern anti-Israel propaganda early, citing the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem’s support for Hitler and the Nazis. Had Germany won at El Alamein and reached Mandatory Palestine, he says, the consequences for Jews there would have been grave.

Social media, in Strauss’s view, compounds the force of slogans. He calls it “the devil’s toolbox”: a place where many people now receive information about the conflict, but not one designed for calm, rational, sustained debate. People understand those limitations and still rely on it, he says, allowing slogans to shape views of a conflict whose history does not fit easily inside them.

That concern rests on a broader warning about American assumptions. Americans, Strauss argues, often view foreign societies through domestic political and economic expectations: that everyone wants to be like the United States, that business and wealth are the principal human aims, and that American political categories can explain politics elsewhere. But people may value honor more highly than commerce, or see war, violence, and conquest as paths to wealth and power. The Middle East, in his view, has to be approached on its own historical and political terms.