The Peculiar Dialectic of History

From the Oracle of Delphi to the Trump Hotel of Gaza

Theodor Herzl, the father of many nations. Source: The Palestine Poster Project Archives

History is a series of unintended consequences. Herodotus tells the story of Croesus, king of Lydia, who was told by the Oracle of Delphi that he would “destroy a great empire” if he went to war with Persia. In 547 BCE, Croesus duly attacked the Persians and destroyed a great empire—his own. Closer to our own time, Theodor Herzl was the father of modern Zionism by intent and Palestinian nationalism by accident. The Ottoman Empire ruled the Middle East for 400 years, during which time Palestine was never even the name of a province. Historically, no state has ever been called Palestine, nor were the Palestinians considered a distinct people. Of course, there were Arabs living in the territory that, in 1920, became British Mandatory Palestine. But they identified with their clan, religion, and perhaps broader geographic region (al-Sham, or Syria). Arabs only began commonly describing themselves as Palestinians during the period of British rule. The 1917 Balfour Declaration promised British support for the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” so a Palestinian Arab identity—opposed to Jewish immigration, let alone statehood—developed in response. The great Jewish scholar Gershom Scholem observed, “We educated the Arabs about nationalism. It was our very existence that created Arab national consciousness. That is the peculiar dialectic of history and I'm not sure that there is any escape from it.”

The term “dialectic of history” recalls the Hegelian dynamic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis that supposedly drives events. Thus we could imagine the thesis of Zionism generating the antithesis of Palestinian nationalism, followed by the synthesis of an Israeli-Palestinian confederation. But Scholem’s is an inescapable (or possibly inescapable) dialectic, not a formula for progress.¹ He lacks the faith of Hegel or Hegelian epigones like Marx and Fukuyama, who saw an end to history in the Napoleonic era, global communism, or Pax Americana. Instead, Scholem evokes thesis and antithesis, action and reaction, in the Joycean sense of history as “a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” The word “peculiar” brings to mind the enigmatic prophecies of the Oracle of Delphi, not the false assurances of Marxist laws of history. But while we cannot rely on historical inevitability, we are not mere victims of fate, either. After all, Croesus could have interpreted the Oracle’s prophecy differently and not gone to war. For the Greeks, fortune was fleeting, but human nature was constant. An understanding of who we are can guide right action and mitigate disaster, even if it can’t ensure progress. “Know thyself” was inscribed on the Temple of the Oracle of Delphi, but since we are all of the same species, to know thyself is also to know other people.

Herzl understood the peculiar dialectic of history. He founded the modern Zionist movement as an antithesis to antisemitism, as a reaction to the disaster to which he knew it would lead. In an 1895 letter, he justified his pessimism regarding the Jews’ fate in Europe: “If someone were to ask me how I know this, I should tell him that I also know where a stone rolling down an incline finally arrives—namely, at the very bottom. . . . they will chase us out of these countries, and in the countries where we take refuge they will kill us.”² As historian Martin Gilbert notes, “Hitler absorbed, reflected, and intensified that same Viennese anti-semitism which scarcely ten years earlier had helped to drive Herzl forward into Zionism. Indeed, the same anti-semitic speeches of the Mayor, Karl Lueger, spanned the whole decade, and were read by both men.”³ Yet Herzl did not foresee that Zionism itself would spur an antithesis in Arab counter-nationalism. In his 1902 novel The Old New Land, Herzl imagined a Jewish state that provided equal rights for its Arab minority. His basic position, and that of most of his Zionist contemporaries, was that Arabs would materially benefit from Jewish immigration and investment, and so would support (or at least not actively oppose) Zionism out of economic self-interest.⁴ He was right that the people whom we would later call Palestinians would have been better off as citizens of a Jewish state (as, indeed, Israeli Arabs are better off than most other Arabs in the region). But the peculiar dialectic had other ideas.

While the early Zionists (with some notable exceptions like Ahad Ha’am and Ze’ev Jabotinsky) failed to adequately account for Arab attitudes, the Jews ultimately accepted the principle of partition as proposed by the British in 1937 and the United Nations in 1947. Over time, most Israelis came to recognize the present, if not historic, reality of Palestinian nationhood. In other words, they adjusted to a changed dialectic. Following a series of Arab-initiated wars that sought its elimination, Israel agreed to Palestinian self-governance in the West Bank and Gaza in 1993, with the ultimate goal of establishing a Palestinian state. Despite a wave of terrorist attacks, Israel offered the Palestinians statehood in 2000 and 2007. Both offers were rejected. In 2005, Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza, which consequently became a terror base for Hamas. Declining Israeli support for a two-state solution is part of a dialectical relationship with Palestinian rejectionism and violence. Researchers have even quantified the increased support for the Israeli right that results from rocket attacks and suicide bombings. Of course, destructive Israeli actions—like settler violence in the West Bank—trigger predictable Palestinian reactions, as well. The dialectic goes both ways, as Israeli extremists help empower Palestinian extremists. But as historian

Benny Morris

says, “the settlements and the occupation are obstacles to peace, without doubt; but the bigger obstacle is the essential rejectionism of the Palestinian national movement.”

The basic Zionist misconception was that Arabs would accept equal rights and material prosperity in exchange for minority status in a Jewish state. The basic Arab misconception is that the Jews are simply colonialists, like the French in Algeria, and can be driven back to their “real” homeland(s) through violence. But while Israelis largely adjusted to their reality check, the Palestinian national movement has not.⁵ In 2021, Hamas leader Yahyah Sinwar sponsored a conference to discuss “post-liberation” (ie, post-Israel) Palestine. Among its conclusions: “The minute 'Israel' collapses, the interim government's security apparatuses must put their hands on the data regarding the agents of the occupation in Palestine . . . using this information we can purge Palestine and the Arab and Islamic homeland of the hypocrite scum that spread corruption in the land.” While most Jews would be killed or expelled, Jewish “experts in the areas of medicine, engineering, technology, and civilian and military industry” were to be temporarily “retained” (ie, kidnapped) as elite human capital for the triumphant theocracy.⁶ The October 7 attacks were committed by an organization genuinely, delusionally committed to the destruction of Israel. While, as of a June 2024 survey, “only” 40% of Palestinians support Hamas, that still leaves the problem outlined by Morris: “There are simply too many extremists; the moderates end up bowing to their will.” Fatah, the more moderate Palestinian party, has a mere 20% support and signed a national unity agreement with Hamas in July 2024.

Imagine Sinwar consulting the Oracle of Khan Yunis on October 6, 2023. “Should I attack Israel?” he asks. “If you do,” the veiled fortune teller replies, “the map of Palestine will be redrawn.”⁷ Sinwar duly orders his terrorist massacre to proceed. Two years later, President Donald Trump expels the Palestinians from Gaza and declares it American territory. Yes, Trump’s plan is unlikely to come to fruition, but that it’s even being discussed is further proof of history’s unpredictability. Yet while we can’t predict the future, we can learn from past mistakes. For example, Arab attempts to destroy Israel have historically resulted in Arab losses. Therefore Hamas’s act of war, while it may have achieved certain short-term gains (delaying Israeli-Saudi normalization, making Palestine a cause célèbre on American college campuses), was a foreseeably bad move for the Palestinians. We can also act with greater wisdom when we recognize the dialectical nature of history. A dialectic involves multiple participants, each with agency and a worldview. If we don’t learn to understand the other participants, their actions will catch us by surprise, sometimes tragically. The October 7 attacks were successful because Israel mistook Hamas, a terrorist militia openly dedicated to its destruction, for a manageable political actor. But Israel has defeated its enemies, and will likewise defeat Hamas, because they mistake a 3000-year-old re-indigenized nation for a European colony. So it goes with history’s peculiar dialectic.

1. But don’t despair! As Scholem writes in The Messianic Idea in Judaism (1971), p. 10, while “[t]he Bible and the apocalyptic writers know of no progress in history leading to the redemption,” they do foretell “transcendence breaking in upon history, an intrusion in which history itself perishes, transformed in its ruin because it is struck by a beam of light shining into it from an outside source.”

2. Quotation from Martin Gilbert, Exile and Return: The Struggle for a Jewish Homeland (1978), p. 47. Early Zionist Moses Hess was similarly prescient, writing in 1862 that “The German hates the Jewish religion less than the race; he objects less to the Jews' peculiar beliefs than to their peculiar noses.”

3. Gilbert, p. 70.

4. There was no need for Jews to displace Arabs, because the land—thanks to Zionist development—could support both populations. As Lyman Stone observes, Jews were able to peacefully immigrate and support themselves in British Palestine because “there were copious amounts of marginal lands available for purchase. Had Ottoman rule yielded a bustling economy with productive agriculture, Jewish immigration would simply never have worked. Mismanagement by Islamic states is the proximate factor that enabled Jewish migration to be so dramatically effective as a strategy.” Palestinian displacement was a consequence of the Arab war to destroy Israel following the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan, not a necessary corollary of Jewish immigration.

5. The settler movement has its own basic misconception, which is that a Jewish state can indefinitely rule the entirety of the Holy Land despite demographic near-parity with Arabs.

6. Hamas thus implicitly accepted the early Zionist argument that Arabs would benefit from Jewish skilled migration.

7. Yes, fortune telling is haram, but this is a fantasy, just like Sinwar’s vision for the future of the Middle East.