Dear Palestinians, everybody’s grandparents lost something. Get over it.

The fact that something unjust happened to my grandparents or they were unjustly deprived of something does not automatically mean that I am owed anything.

The BDS movement against Israel (photo: Palestinian BDS National Committee)

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This is a guest essay written by Andrew Pessin, a professor of philosophy at Connecticut College.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.

Share this essay using the link: https://www.futureofjewish.com/p/dear-palestinians-everybodys-grandparents-lost

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Let’s for the moment (falsely) grant the detractors what they claim, or most of it, namely that the establishment of Israel was an injustice, even a large one: per their narrative, that Jews were “settler-colonists,” outsiders who, via “ethnic cleansing,” took over the land that became the State of Israel.

To be clear, we grant this only for the sake of argument, while continuing to work on correcting that false narrative.

Even if so, I suggest, the anti-Israel movement of 2024 is morally objectionable. And once we see that this movement in fact is morally objectionable — because it aims to undo the Jewish state “by any means necessary,” to “dismantle Zionism,” to remove its supporters from campuses, with events, talks, panels, conferences numbering in the thousands across hundreds of cities in recent years.

Thus, we can begin to see it for what it actually is: a campaign of dehumanizing hate that grotesquely leads its proponents to see the mutilation and mass murder of Jewish children as the moral high ground.

Let’s start with a repulsive practice that occurred soon after October 7th: activists not ripping down the posters of Israeli hostages but instead replacing their “Kidnapped” headings with the word “Occupier.”

There was a photo of a sweet little kidnapped 3-year-old girl, for example, labeled as an “Occupier.” A 3-year-old who was born in this land, very probably to parents who were born in this land, very probably to parents who were born in this land, and so on, possibly stretching way back, was an “occupier.”

In contrast, consider how refugees and immigrants are considered in pretty much any other country in the world. Someone moves to Canada, and maybe in time becomes, feels, a Canadian; but their children are largely raised as and feel Canadian, and certainly their grandchildren. Three of my own four grandparents immigrated as refugees from Russia to the United States, and my parents, and certainly I myself, feel as American as can be.

One or two generations is more than enough, generally, for assimilation and ultimately legitimation. Anyone who claims otherwise — who tells the children or grandchildren of an immigrant that they don’t belong here and should go back to their country — would instantly and correctly be branded a racist.

Well, those who put the word “Occupier” on the photo of a 3-year-old are saying that no matter how many generations her family may have lived in this land, even if her family is one of those whose roots trace back two or three thousand years, then she can never belong there.

They may as well put a target right on her head — as Hamas in fact did.

Now what, exactly, is so repulsive about this practice, beyond its obvious racism? It is that that little girl is entirely innocent, she cannot be blamed, for anything that may have preceded her in this world. She is simply not responsible for the alleged sins of her parents, or of her grandparents, or great-grandparents, any more than the small child of a Hamas member is responsible for his parent’s terrorist activities. Nobody is responsible for what anybody did prior to their own birth. Nor is it her fault or responsibility that she was born when and where she was. 

A child, a new generation, is fresh start, a “do-over” in the most profound metaphysical and ethical ways.

Keep this child in mind as we next consider the question of how to rectify large-scale historical injustices.

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Take your pick for an example; there is no shortage of historical injustices. Obviously, unfortunately, we have no time machine, no way to literally undo the event or retroactively prevent it.

Uncountably many innocent lives have been lost and shattered in every terrorist act or war, but there’s just no way now to make September 11th not have happened, or the Vietnam War, or World War II and I, or the American Civil War, or the French Revolution, or the 30 Years War — or the 1948 Arab-Israeli War (which, curiously, is pretty much the only major historical event that large numbers of people around the world ever even express interest in undoing).

So that is off the table. 

The next-best thing would be to compensate those individuals who actually suffered the injustice. But if the injustice involved their death that is also impossible; and unfortunately for those who survive the injustice, they die off too as the event gradually sinks into history. If there are ways to identify and compensate any remaining survivors of specific concrete injustices, by all means have at it.

The most plausible mode of rectification for some large-scale historical injustice, then, is to compensate not the individuals who suffered the injustices but their descendants. And that is where things immediately get tricky. 

First, from whom, exactly, should they get their compensation? Presumably from descendants of those who perpetrated the original injustice. But a child, we just saw, is a fresh start, a “do-over,” who cannot be held responsible for the sins of her forebears. It seems very unjust to demand recompense from someone who is in no way responsible for the injustice in question.

Nor, though it is more complex, is it obvious that the descendant of the original victim should actually be entitled to anything, period, especially as the generations go on. If a new child is not responsible for the sins of her ancestors, neither is she herself deserving of any of the merits or blessings of the ancestor; nor is she automatically entitled, by virtue of being born, to restitution of something that may have once belonged to the ancestor or compensation for something that may have happened to them.

Obviously, where there is some concrete property in question and a relevant enduring legal system in place, there may be laws governing inheritance and restitution, but that is not what we are discussing here. The fact that something unjust happened to my grandparents or they were unjustly deprived of something does not automatically mean that I am owed anything.

I did not suffer the loss, after all, and nothing was taken from me; I was born long after, into the new reality created subsequent to the loss — a fresh start. 

(Interestingly, again, it seems to be only with respect to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that people even raise this possibility. It literally would not occur to me to imagine that I should be compensated for what my grandparents and great-grandparents lost in fleeing Russia.)

Of course an objector might imagine here a counterfactual such as, “Well, if the loss hadn’t occurred then I would have been born into a better situation, so I did after all suffer the loss myself.” If so, then she might be entitled to restitution or compensation.

Perhaps, but this objection opens up a whole set of problems. Once you open the counterfactuals then almost anything goes. If the loss had not occurred then many things would have been different, a whole other course of life would have ensued, and who can know what that may have included?

Perhaps in this new course of life your grandparents would have been hit by a truck or died of a heart attack and never sired your parent, so you would never have been born — but if you owe your very existence to the loss you can hardly claim that the loss harmed you!

Or perhaps if the loss had not occurred you would have ended up far worse than you in fact are, so the loss actually improved your condition. Millions of people have become refugees and ended up resettling elsewhere, where their children, or grandchildren, eventually end up with much better lives than they may well have had had the ancestors stayed put.

Even if we grant that the historical loss resulted in a negative outcome for you, it is not clear that that outcome can be blamed entirely or even maximally on the loss itself. In the case of the Palestinian refugees, for example, even where we grant that their contemporary conditions are poor, should we blame those conditions on the 1948 war — or on the 75 years of their mistreatment and mismanagement since, at the hands (for example) of the Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA and the many Arab states who resisted their rehabilitation and resettlement? 

Moreover, why isolate and emphasize only that single counterfactual concerning your grandparents? What if your grandparents themselves had acquired the thing in question by some unjust means? Or inherited it from people higher up the ancestral ladder who had done so?

As you go up the ladder there are surely many injustices to be found, perhaps in great quantities, particularly given the long history of human warfare across the globe. If you insist that the descendant of the person who stole it from your grandparents does not have rightful claim to it, then what happens to your grandparents’ claim to it if they only had it because one of their ancestors had stolen it from another?

Shall we go all the way back to the seventh-century Muslim Arab conquest of the Land of Israel, which took the land ultimately from (say) the descendants of the first-century Roman conquest of the Land of Israel, which took it from the Jews? Should we not in that case give it all back to the Jews, or the descendants thereof? If we insist on “root causes,” should we not go all the way back to the roots?

So, yes, maybe you would have been born into a better situation had one particular injustice not occurred — but you equally might have been born into a worse situation had all sorts of other older injustices not occurred. If you are contemplating counterfactuals and thus undoing history, justice requires undoing them all.

If your grandparents did something unjust to my grandparents, then, that does not automatically give me a claim against you: You did not do anything, and I did not suffer anything. More broadly, the fact that one community did something unjust toward another community does not entail that all future generations of the latter have any legitimate claims against all future generations of the former.

In fact if we go quantitative and acknowledge the enormous growth in the relevant populations over time, then it is hard to avoid the conclusion that demanding compensation from later descendants of the original injustice-doers would end up perpetrating against them an even greater injustice than the original one their ancestors perpetrated. And it could hardly be just to demand the rectification of some historical injustice by means of some even greater contemporary injustice. 

Let us repeat that point: It is not just to demand the rectification of some historical injustice by means of some even greater contemporary injustice. 

Even if you still have some intuition that later descendants of injustice victims should have such claims, trying to accommodate those claims would literally be both impossible to do and a formula for disaster. If we inherit both the sins and the claims of our ancestors then we will live in a perpetual Hatfield’s versus McCoy’s world in which everyone ultimately has a claim against everyone else.

World history, both distant and recent, features massive injustices on inconceivable scales; as Arab intellectual Hussain Abdul-Hussain has put it on social media, everybody’s grandparents lost something, so everybody will have various, multiple claims to compensation.

Even restricting ourselves to the Israeli-Palestinian-Jewish-Arab-Muslim Conflict (IPJAMC), even where we are (counterfactually) granting that the Jews came from outside and took over via ethnic cleansing, who exactly were these perpetrator Jews? In the standard anti-Israel narrative these Jews came from Europe — whence they fled overwhelmingly as refugees escaping the massive injustice of persecution and pogroms.

A simple glance at 19th-century European antisemitism, culminating in mass-murderous pogroms of 1881 and 1903 among others (not to mention in 1930s Germany and the Holocaust), will easily demonstrate that. In addition to these Jews of course were the hundreds of thousands who fled Arab and Islamic persecution and pogroms across the Middle East and North Africa, leaving many lives and much property behind.

These Jews were all victims of injustice, even if, on the anti-Israel narrative, they then victimized the innocent Palestinian Arabs. How can one demand today’s Israelis compensate today’s Palestinian Arabs without also demanding that most Middle East and North African countries compensate the Israelis?

Throw in the fact that many Arabs themselves emigrated from those countries to Palestine in the 20th century and they, and/or their immediate relatives, may well even have participated in the persecution of the Jews who fled those countries. So today’s Palestinians also owe something to today’s Israeli Jews!

Everybody’s grandparents lost something. To look backward, to maintain and pursue all those claims, is only a formula for propagating violence and instability.

All the more so when we step a bit closer to reality, acknowledging the actual long history of Jews in the Land of Israel and remembering that at the time of the U.N. Partition proposal in November of 1947 there were zero Palestinian refugees. Zionism itself, in other words, displaced no one. There was, in fact, room enough for everyone in Palestine, until the Arabs launched the civil war and then the multi-Arab-army international war.

In the process, one percent of the Jewish population lost their lives, tens of thousands were injured, Jews were ethnically cleansed from those parts of the land that Egypt and Jordan conquered, and so on. So even if the Jewish immigration into the land (which displaced no one) were itself an injustice, consider the disproportionate injustice then perpetrated against them in the murderous military and terrorist activity that followed.

If the Arab descendants of 1948 have a legitimate claim against the Jews of 2024, again, then surely the Jews of 2024 have similarly legitimate claims against their contemporary Arabs.

So there may well have been some massive injustice in the past. But it is literally impossible to undo that injustice, and any efforts to compensate for the injustice will only perpetrate further, almost surely greater injustices, if not directly sink the region into the pre-modern Hobbesian state of nature, a war of all against all, in which everybody loses. 

Everybody’s grandparents lost something. And so, unless we accept the idea that every new child is a fresh start, then everybody has a claim against everybody — and all is lost.

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