The Geography of Blame

Homeland and Elsewhere

A list.

The history of Jewish displacement:

722 BCE: Assyria conquers the Kingdom of Israel.

586 BCE: The Neo‑Babylonian Empire destroys the First Temple in Jerusalem. Jews are exiled to Babylon, in present‑day Iraq.

539 BCE: The Persian Empire (present‑day Iran) conquers Babylon and permits Jews to return to Jerusalem to rebuild the Temple. The Second Temple period begins.

70 CE: Rome destroys the Second Temple.

135 CE: Rome crushes the Bar Kokhba revolt, expels Jews from Judea, and disperses them across the Mediterranean, to Italy, Greece, and surrounding lands.

From the late 19th century through World War II, waves of anti‑Jewish violence swept Eastern Europe — Russia, Poland, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary. Nazi Germany eventually carried out systematic genocide. Six million Jews perished.

Another list.

1947: The United Nations passes Resolution 181, recommending the creation of separate Arab and Jewish states in Palestine.

May 14, 1948: Israel declares independence.

The next day, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon send troops into Palestine.

At the time, the Arab League’s population was more than forty times that of the Jewish community in Palestine. Israel’s population at founding was about 650,000, mostly Holocaust survivors and Jewish immigrants from the Middle East.

1938, Cairo. A Jewish family walks down a street. Someone calls out: “Go back to Palestine.”

They later do go to Palestine.

1948, Jaffa. An Arab family locks their front door, takes the key, and boards a boat for Beirut. They think they will return in a week.

That key still exists.

Compensate the Jews with a piece of land in Germany. This line was first voiced by Arab leaders.

The logic: the persecutors of Jews were Europeans — Germans, Poles, Ukrainians, Russians. These places are thousands of kilometers from the Middle East. The Arabs of Palestine were not perpetrators; in fact, they share a Semitic ancestry with Jews. Historically, when famine struck Canaan, Egypt took in the Israelites. After the Babylonian exile, the Persian Empire granted them freedom. By any reckoning, Palestine should not be the one to pay.

That logic has never changed. The Arab world has never accepted the equation: Europe does the harm, the Middle East foots the bill.

But Israel’s founders did not calculate that way.

In Theodor Herzl’s 1896 pamphlet The Jewish State, he did not analyze who was friend or foe. He analyzed one question: where can we survive?

The Uganda Proposal was floated. In 1903, Britain offered a slice of East Africa if Palestine proved impossible. The Zionist Congress debated fiercely and ultimately rejected it. One reason: it was not Zion.

Zion is in Jerusalem. Jerusalem is in Palestine. Palestine has people living there.

June 5, 1967, early morning. Israel launches airstrikes.

Egypt’s air force is destroyed on the ground. Within six days, the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Golan Heights, and Sinai Peninsula fall into Israeli hands.

Israel’s territory triples in a week.

That week is known by three names: in Israel, the Six‑Day War; in the Arab world, the June Setback; for Palestinians, another Nakba — catastrophe.

The 1973 Yom Kippur War. Egypt and Syria try to recover lost ground, gain initial breakthroughs, then are pushed back. After the war, Israel’s strategic establishment reaches a consensus: the Arabs will not accept the status quo, but Israel cannot make the Arabs disappear by force.

In 1979, Israel returns the entire Sinai Peninsula — 61,000 square kilometers, the largest tract of land captured in 1967 and three times Israel’s own area at the time — in exchange for a peace treaty with Egypt.

It is Israel’s first land‑for‑peace deal. By far the largest.

After that, Israel never loosens its grip on the Golan Heights. The Golan overlooks the Sea of Galilee, source of 40% of Israel’s freshwater. Syrian artillery once shelled Israeli villages from those ridges.

Distance determines security. Security sets the limit of concession.

What would the Arabs choose?

From the Arab perspective: in 1948, Palestine had about 1.2 million Arabs and 600,000 Jews. The UN resolution allotted 55% of the land to the Jewish state. The Arabs had no vote in the matter.

They had not started World War II. They had built no concentration camps. They had not organized any pogroms in Eastern Europe.

But they lost their homes.

In the refugee camps of Beirut, Amman, Damascus, Gaza, the Palestinian “right of return” is not diplomatic rhetoric. It is a physical act: opening a drawer, pulling out a rusted key, and saying, “This is my father’s father’s house.”

Israel’s founding narrative: after the Holocaust, we finally have our own state. The Palestinian narrative: after Europe’s slaughter ended, we became the second wave of victims.

Two narratives repel each other on the same land.

2026. The Israel‑Iran conflict escalates from proxies to direct confrontation. Israel openly threatens to strike Iranian nuclear facilities. Iran’s military presence in Syria is less than fifty kilometers from the Golan Heights.

Israel’s ties with Ukraine warm after that country’s war. Ukraine has a large Jewish population; Israel is one of the few countries that maintains dialogue with both Ukraine and Russia. This is not “flirting with the very country that oppressed Jews in World War II.” It is geopolitical calculus in 2026. Ukrainian grain, Russian military presence in Syria, post‑U.S.‑election Middle East policy shifts — each is a live interest, and none points to the historical ledger.

The historical ledger only functions in national education and museums. In the foreign ministry’s war room, what matters are military maps marked with missile ranges and intelligence assessments.

Finally, two keys.

One hangs in Jerusalem’s Jewish Museum. It came from Morocco, left behind when Jews departed North Africa in the 1950s.

One sits in a Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut. It came from Jaffa, taken by an Arab family when they left in 1948.

The two keys are almost the same size.

They hang on different walls in different countries, pointing to the same fact: on this land, both peoples see themselves as the dispossessed. One came back because they were driven out of Europe; the other was driven out because someone came back.

Who pays for whom has never been settled. And unsettled accounts always land on specific bodies: a mother signing a conscription paper, a child searching through rubble, an ambulance stopped at a settlement checkpoint, a sentence spoken in two different languages: This is my home.

No outsider has the right to answer for them.

They have not finished answering for themselves.