The Israelis Slaughtered by Hamas Were Not ‘Settlers’

By Roy Altman

Thursday, November 02, 2023

 

On October 7, just hours after Hamas terrorists invaded Israel and slaughtered some 1,400 Jews — including women, children, and 260 college-age kids who were dancing at a music festival for peace­ — Zareena Grewal (a professor in the ethnicity, race, and migration program and the American studies department at Yale College) had this to say on social media: “Settlers are not civilians. This is not hard.” There’s already a petition seeking Grewal’s termination that’s been making its way around the Yale alumni community (of which I’m a proud member). But that petition — which focuses mainly (and rightly) on Grewal’s support for the gruesome murders of toddlers and octogenarians — misses a more obvious point: Grewal is just wrong on the law and the facts.

 

Grewal’s underlying premise, after all, is that the Israelis who were butchered on October 7 were interlopers (“occupiers,” to use the fashionable term), living in some illegal settlement on Arab lands. But the people who were slaughtered were not settlers (and, even if they were, they weren’t legitimate military targets under any legal regime I’m aware of). On the contrary, under international law, they had just as much right to be where they were as an American does in New York City.

 

To understand why, we’ll need to retread a bit of history. In 1947, the United Nations voted to partition the British Mandate in Palestine into what would become two states — one Arab, the other Jewish, with Jerusalem under international administration. Nor was there anything artificial about this new Jewish state. In partitioning the land between Jews and Arabs, the U.N. recognized that Jews had lived in the land of Israel since biblical times — until they were expelled (and their Temple destroyed) by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 b.c.; that they had been allowed to return to Israel by Cyrus the Great of Persia in the 530s b.c.; that they ultimately built a flourishing (if semi-autonomous) Jewish state within the Greek Seleucid Empire in the first and second centuries b.c. — until the Romans ousted the Greeks and established a Jewish client state in Judea in 63 b.c.; that the Jews had built the Second Temple in Jerusalem during the reign of a Jewish king, Herod the Great, in the 20s and 30s b.c. — a temple the Roman emperor Titus later destroyed after he crushed the Judean Revolt in 73 a.d.; that Jews were living in Israel when the Ottomans conquered it in 1516; and that they remained in Israel throughout the 402 years of the Ottoman occupation, which came to an end when the British took over the region after World War I (in 1918). In granting the Jews their own country, in short, the U.N. acknowledged that Jews are (and have always been) indigenous to the land of Israel.

 

The Mandate was set to expire on May 15, 1948. That same day, the surrounding Arab nations, rejecting the partition, invaded the Jewish lands — the newly declared State of Israel.

 

Unfortunately for the Arab states, they lost that war. Even worse, during the defense of its internationally recognized borders, the fledgling Israeli military, then called the Haganah (the “defense”) captured some of the lands that had formerly belonged to the Arab states. A similar story unfolded in 1967, when Israel decisively defeated six Arab nations in just six days — hence the Six-Day War — and in 1973, when Egypt and Syria invaded Israel on Yom Kippur, only to see their forces dismantled and humiliated.

 

In each of these wars, Israel was provoked, Israel won, and Israel ended up with more land — much of which Israel used to buffer itself from its hostile neighbors, who for many years refused even to accept Israel’s right to exist. The upshot is that Israel is considerably larger today than it was in 1948. And this territory — less the Sinai Peninsula (which Israel returned to Egypt as part of the Camp David Accords of 1978) and excepting Gaza (from which Israel fully withdrew in 2005) — is the land that Israel’s critics now claim is “occupied.” (Note that Gaza isn’t occupied: There are no Israeli buildings or houses in Gaza; no Israeli citizen may enter Gaza; even the Jewish gravesites in Gaza were disinterred and moved to Israel.)

 

As a practical matter, then, the “occupied” lands are what we in America refer to as the West Bank (so called because it lies west of the Jordan River, on Israel’s eastern edge, but note that the Palestinian Authority has partial autonomy over much of the West Bank) and the Golan Heights, at the northern border with Syria. As I’ve suggested, these lands aren’t “occupied” in any meaningful sense of the word, either, because Israel won them in wars the Arab states had started.

 

But the critical point that Grewal missed is that the towns and communities Hamas attacked on October 7 were unambiguously not occupied — they couldn’t possibly be occupied — precisely because they were part of the original Jewish portion of the partition plan (the original State of Israel). That Grewal didn’t understand this basic fact probably disqualifies her from a faculty position at one of the most prestigious universities in the world.

 

Let’s quickly dispose of two possible counterarguments. The first is that Grewal might have been referring to the Israelis who live in the West Bank — and who, the argument goes, are settlers. Two problems with this. One, that’s not what Grewal said. She specifically referred to the Israelis who were murdered on October 7 as “settlers” — and those people, as I’ve just highlighted, were not settlers. Two, even if they were settlers, the notion that children and grandmothers who live on “occupied” lands are, to use Grewal’s words, “not civilians” — in other words, that they’re legitimate targets of violence, which on October 7 took the form of unspeakably brutal torture, rape, and murder — is absurd. Although Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, prohibits an occupying power from “transfer[ring] parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies,” such transfers don’t convert civilians into legitimate military targets. Under international law, the occupying state — and the state alone — would be the responsible party. To use but one obvious example, no one would credibly suggest that members of the Cherokee Nation — angry that Georgia is being “occupied” by Americans — have the right to kidnap and kill women and children in Atlanta to vindicate their claims to the land.

 

The second counterargument is even more problematic. Maybe (this second argument goes) Grewal did know her history. Maybe she meant that all Israelis — whether in 1948 lands or not — should be slaughtered with impunity. On this theory, the men, women, and children of Sderot (a small city in Israel, near the Gaza border, that suffered a Hamas rampage on October 7) are occupiers, just as much as the men and women of Tel Aviv.

 

Again, two problems with this. One, to suggest that Israel is illegally “occupying” the lands that, in 1947, the combined nations of the world, through their representatives, recognized as the lawful boundaries of a Jewish State, would be to stretch the word beyond all comprehension. You cannot trespass on — much less “occupy” — land that, by law, is yours to begin with. Two, this second argument places Grewal in the uncomfortable position of subscribing to Hamas’s hateful charter, which “strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine,” and which, to effectuate that end, implores all “Moslems [to] fight [the] Jews and kill them.” In fairness, this may well be her view. Just hours after Hamas terrorists threw live grenades into bunkers full of terrified Jewish families, Grewal tweeted something I haven’t yet mentioned: “It’s been,” she gloated, retweeting a news video about the onslaught, “such an extraordinary day!”

 

Here’s the point: If Grewal (and people like her) subscribe to Hamas’s genocidal mission statement, they probably shouldn’t be serving as role models for our college-age children. But even if they don’t subscribe to Hamas’s hateful charter — if they’re just wrong about the basic facts — then they shouldn’t be teaching our children, the custodians of America’s future.