Letter to the Editor: In Reply to “Buy Out the Settlers”

“Therefore, what possible reason is there to believe that simply bribing a few Jews out of a few homes in the West Bank will result in Hamas and Fatah making peace with Israel?”

Michael D. Purzycki seems to think that he has had an epiphany when it comes to sorting out the West Bank. Apparently, Jews are “settlers,” and the West Bank is unquestionably “Palestinian.” Purzycki, in his piece “Buy Out the Settlers” published the day after the ceasefire was signed ending the 2021 Israel–Palestine crisis, seizes upon an idea of Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s that the United States should buy out the West Bank Jewish “landlords” and give the land back to the locals.

Unfortunately for Purzycki, it appears that Schlesinger was not talking about the Middle East but, rather, colonial Africa, where “landlords” were more often colonial corporations rather than people with roots going back millennia. This is then not so much a Schlesinger idea as a Purzycki idea.

The areas commonly referred to collectively as the West Bank largely cover what were once ancient Judea and ancient Israel. This land was not named for Palestinian Arabs. When the Romans exiled the Jews and renamed Palestine after the Philistines, who were not Arab or “Palestinian” or even present, far from righting some perceived wrong, the Romans were sending a message to other restive peoples in their empire that they had the power to erase a nation and rename its former land if they so desired.

Palestine was not teeming with “Palestinians” when Edmund Allenby’s forces arrived in 1917. In fact, the region was sparsely populated even then. Most of the early population growth during the Mandate came as a result of immigration. Jews came largely from Eastern Europe, and Arabs arrived primarily from Lebanon and Syria. Immigrants were both Arab and Jewish, which means that if some Jews were settlers, so were their Arab immigrant counterparts.