Growing up in the Middle East

I did and didn’t grow up in the Middle East. I had two years of schooling in Israel, eighth grade and a postbaccalaureate year at Hebrew University and a Talmudical Academy, or Yeshiva. The rest of my growing up was done in Seattle until age 16 and at Harvard after that. But of course, coming from a traditional Jewish family and having a prolonged if somewhat fragmentary Jewish education, I can certainly say that the geography of Eretz Yisrael (the Hebrew term for the Anglophone geographer’s Palestine) was more familiar to me than that of the Western Washington of my early youth. My own Zionist inclinations and the vagaries of the academic job market took me and my wife and our then-infant son to Israel in 1995, and our four children have all grown up in Israel and all served or are serving in the Israel Defense Forces. So far only one of our four children has done more schooling in America, and when her fellow students wanted to elect her an “honorary Asian,” she pointed out to them that, unlike her Indian American, Chinese American, and Vietnamese American colleagues, she was actually born in Asia.

Growing up means accepting the norms and duties of adulthood. Nations, like individuals, can grow up in that sense. Some have even managed to age out of adulthood into a second childhood of senescence, no longer interested or capable of the adult duty of maintaining their own independent existence—and even joining in lawfare and worse against those for whom that duty carries over into actual fighting.

The recent cease-fire, formally between Israel and Lebanon, gives us a chance to think about what it would mean for the nations of the Levant to grow up and to what extent they have. In the post-1945 world, as I have argued in my academic writings, nations have mostly lived under what I call “1945 rules.” These rules outlaw the acquisition of territory by force and have almost entirely prevented the extinction of states through military force and have outlawed as genocide the extinction of nations. These rules have also mostly prevented the settlement of post-1945 international conflicts.

To quote the most adult of contemporary Israeli politicians, United Arab List head and Knesset member Mansour Abbas: “Israel is a Jewish State and so it will remain.” If we look at the history of Israel’s rivals and enemies in the Levant, we can see when each of them accepted this as unchangeable fact and thus accepted, to some extent and to variable degrees, the obligation to live alongside Israel as a Jewish State and to seek to resolve all conflicts with her by peaceful means.

For example, one learns from Michael Oren’s magisterial history of the 1967 Six-Day War that Egypt renewed belligerency against Israel by closing the Straits of Tiran, aiming only to overthrow the servitudes it had to accept after defeat in 1956. Egypt in 1967 did not aspire to or expect to conquer Israel and did not even have a plan to attack first. In 1973, the Egyptians and the Syrians did attack first, but then they too had only the limited aim of regaining the territories they had lost in 1967. Partly for fear of Israel’s rumored nuclear weapons, the Syrians did not pursue their initial success on the Golan Heights into pre-1967 Israeli territory.

With regard to Lebanon, up until the present war, Hezbollah (officially declared by the Lebanese Cabinet to be “The Defender of Lebanon,” even though it does not answer to Lebanese state organizations nor is part of the official Lebanese armed forces) has only engaged in violence against Israel and Israelis for colorable Lebanese national goals, first to drive the Israeli occupiers from Israel’s self-declared Security Zone in South Lebanon, at which they were successful, and then to force Israel to concede certain small bits of border territory that the Lebanese state claims from Israel. In the present war, Hezbollah’s chief, Nasrallah, took Hezbollah to war for the cause of the Palestinians. Nasrallah and most of his senior subordinates were killed in the ensuing conflict.

Certainly, some Lebanese are ready to grow up. Lebanese Druze politician and former Environment Minister Wiam Wahab said in a November 19, 2024, interview: “The slogan of destroying Israel is not a realistic slogan. We should not be fooling ourselves. This is not a realistic slogan. [Israel] is an advance post of America and the West. How can we remove it? We should aim for a one-state [solution] and let democracy decide between the Jews and the Palestinians in the future. What more can we do? Are we supposed to tether down the region for another 100 years to the slogan of destroying Israel? I do not think anyone would join us under this slogan.” Lebanese academic Imad Chamoun explicitly spoke the language of “maturity” in his October 23, 2024, interview on Lebanon’s MTV television:

“How come you reinvent the myth about throwing Israel into the sea? And that Israel is an occupier and this is not their land… Do you want to build the new future of your children and mine on war and hatred? Or do you want to build it on the acceptance of the other? I would like to salute the Sunnis in the world. After their reckless attempt to throw Israel into the sea—which failed even though all the Arab countries were together in this—what did they do then? Egypt—that numbers 100 million Arab Muslims—recognized Israel and made peace with it. The Hashemites in Jordan recognized Israel and made peace with it. This Sunni Islamic maturity led to the point where the UAE, the most civilized country in the world today…”

Interviewer: “They all recognized Israel. We have to move on…”

Chamoun: “So to conclude, I’d say that the Shiite immaturity has destroyed us. Let’s see tomorrow if they learned their lesson like the Sunnis have.”

In the days after a very shaky ceasefire, it is too early to say whether the Shiite Hezbollah and its non-Shiite Lebanese allies have grown up as a result of their losses in this war. But at least some Lebanese know what growing up would require.

With regard to Gaza, the West Bank, and the Palestinian diaspora, the crucial question is clear: How many Palestinians are ready to grow up and agree with Mansour Abbas that their future is either as loyal citizens of Jewish Israel or in a Palestinian state that is Israel’s peaceful, if occasionally unfriendly, neighbor? Neither of the two dominant Palestinian political parties, not the Islamist Hamas against whom Israel is fighting in Gaza nor the secular Fatah that rules the nominally autonomous Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, seem ready to face adult realities.

And what about my own people, Israel’s Jews? For us, full maturity would require accepting without reservation as fellow citizens those who, like Mansour Abbas, want the burdens and privileges of Israeli citizenship without equivocation. Maturity would require recognizing that even if the Palestinian people have only a recent existence—in 1947-49 the Arabs of Palestine fought the Jews not for a separate national existence but as part of a broader Arab coalition and eventually accepted Egyptian and Jordanian rule over them without resistance—we Jews of Palestine will have to find a way to live peacefully with and alongside them. Finally, maturity requires recognizing that we are not going to get to peace until our enemies do some growing up and that we should not infantilize them but rather hold them to adult expectations. But we Jews need to be mature enough to recognize that while unilateral actions on our part (whether concessionary or belligerent) can, perhaps, incentivize maturity, they cannot force it.

As those of us who have adolescent and adult children know, growing up has to come from within, but we can put off their maturation by supporting them in their childish or adolescent demands. The states and peoples of the Levant will mature faster if the adult and senescent peoples of the world aid them in growing up and stop aiding them to persist in petulant fantasies of a Middle East without a Palestinian people or a Jewish State.

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Michael S. Kochin is Associate Professor in the School of Political Science, Government, and International Relations at Tel Aviv University, and Visiting Scholar at the Hillsdale College Kirby Center in Washington, D.C. and the Catholic University of America.