So I was thinking about this Israel Hammas thing and isn’t it accurate to say that a huge part of the conflict is built into the idea of how “the nation” is going to work as a thing? Like you go, Israel is a nation for exiled Jews. Okay. But wait, so is there a no girls allowed sign for all non Jews, or is it a Jews welcome thing or how does it work? The question is basically about how it can possibly organize its own history. Like alright, so there’s WW2 and everybody everywhere is just not getting the matzah thing. What are we going to do, figure out how to stop acting like bastards to people about their haircuts? Nah, they’re gonna need their own country.
So the first Israelis touch down in modern day Israel post World War One, because why? Because that’s what a bunch of racist people wanted, and if you’re a Jew in a country where that’s what’s going on, then probably that’s the best deal on the table for you. Once we acknowledge that the original Zionists were largely a bunch of non-jews who wanted Jewish people to disappear from their nations forever, then can we be that surprised when modern day celebrity racists like Richard Spencer are all about Israel’s declaration that it’s a racially Jewish state? After all, what people like him want is basically the same declaration in the US, but for whatever “whiteness” is supposed to be as douchebags like him define it, which is apparently dressing like you belong to the Manchester Good Boy club until you’re sixty years old. It’s no challenge to sniff out the violent stink in any call for white power, no matter how much it might try to act like it’s some prep school chess club and nothing more. But that’s the result of a very specific history. When we hear the call for black power, we don’t jump to the same conclusions quite as quickly. The modern state of Israel is a very painful answer to the question of whether we can have our cake and eat it too here. Is racially defined political power inherently wrong? Or does the acceptability of any political power depend entirely on the historical sagas that put it where it is? Once we step outside the screaming that follows any discussion of Israel like a noon time shadow, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that what we’re looking at when we look at an Israel that simply refuses to deal with the historical reality of other people in its borders, is a nation that defines itself with the criteria of the people who were trying to erase them. Nobody would let them be Jews, so now they don’t want to let anyone be anything but a jew. And you go, okay, but is that possible?
Picture from time Richard Spencer stopped skipping in shorts with a giant lolly pop so he could put on the church clothes his mom bought him.
Quote from the Article: “White Nationalist Richard Spencer Backs Israel’s Contentious Nation-state Law” by Haretz:
“In a series of tweets, Spencer writes of his admiration for the law, which confers the right to national self-determination in Israel to the Jewish people alone, and says Jews are ‘showing a path forward for Europeans'”
I mean it’s negatives like this that control the definitions of countries. You, go, okay so there’s a nation called France. Who are the French people if not an ethnically defined tribe? But then that’s not totally accurate, because actually homogenizing their culture into something politically, linguistically and historically uniform has been a very post hoc affair, as in; first the national boundaries were drawn by people much smaller than the boundaries they drew, and then the work of holding those boundaries in place required the assertion of a negative. That is not French. This is French. And the “Frenchness” part of it gets anchored in a few places; a national constitution, an administrative state. If you want a good grade, this is the right answer. And which answers are right and which answers are wrong are determined by the state, so compliance with their correctness involves the achievement of Frenchness. This is a big deal for them specifically. They have a council that controls what their language is, they’re very conscious of the slippery hold they have on this French thing. The problem is that hey, history takes forever and forever is a long time. We ask ourselves what the history of the French is, but to ask that we have to assume there is a thing called a Frenchman, which the French themselves didn’t really think was there until a few hundred years ago. But now that this construct is there, it has to historically assert itself, which means insisting on a certain set of cultural limits. This sets up a certain spectrum of political belief in any given nation state, where the question of what the nation is, is a question of how a person can be considered a part of it, and the answers to that question flow from a direct paternal lineage on one side, to a protocol based continuity on the other. Either the French are this group that was in this border, or the people in this border are people who do things the French way.
And the answer is always kind of both, where the attempt to assert either answer completely involves unraveling something important. No people are a monolith, so saying that: “We are the people who were here first.” Is always a violent thing to say, in so far as it takes for granted that there are no identity defining disputes inside the group of people who say it for the way things are actually done there. By the same token if France were nothing other than some giant national Mcdonalds franchise where you could order your citizenship like some big mac, people would feel the absence of historical continuity. To be a part of this nation and not some other one, there’s a specific collection of stories and events that has to be entered, and for it to be entered, it has to be geographically centered. France is these stories right here. We are their next chapter. This place, this place is ours.
There’s a little more to it than this, it turns out.
So Israel dealing with the Palestinians is very much Israel asking themselves what their country is. Are they a genetically defined historical legacy of exile who is going to return the favor to all other people they meet, or are they a new way of doing things begotten by that legacy of exile? The crisis looks very historically and geographically specific to them, but it’s something the United States had to deal with as its largest existential crisis in the Civil War. The 1947 partition of muslim Pakistan from the majority Hindu Indian state is a very messy set of answers to the same line of questioning. It left 15 million people displaced and at least one million people dead. Today the border between them is the second most heavily fortified border in the world, behind only North and South Korea. It’s not just a question of who is a jerk and who is not a jerk in those nations, it’s a question about how possible the nation is as a collective exercise. To answer it we have to think about how it’s possible to hold a culturally specific set of stories together, which is to say, we have to find a way for different people in the same boundaries to share the morals of their stories.
The first thing that everyone says when it’s time to talk about this Israeli Palestinian conflict is that there’s no time for them to talk about it. The specific cultural history is just too long, they say. The underlying assumption there is that there’s some bread crumb trail of times someone shoved someone else first that can be followed back to a Grandma’s house of moral correctness, where we all actually belonged the whole time. But if Israel is evidence of anything, it’s that no such promised land exists. Promises are retroactive things, and Israel’s problem is a problem of everyone trying to stab some version of a country that doesn’t exist anymore back into the world. Israel is not going to exterminate millions of Palestinians and short of doing that, there is no exclusively Jewish state to speak of. For exactly the same reason, anything that could hope to be a Palestinian state is surrounded on all sides and literally divided by Israel, so much so that any political independence it tried to assert for itself would be defacto negated by Israel the second Israel disagreed with any of its choices. Palestinians in the Gaza strip have no means to settle any kind of trade dispute over shipping channels with Israel, they have no corridor to establishing political continuity in the West Bank that Israel doesn’t agree to give them, at the point of a much bigger gun than the Palestinians could ever hope to point back. So no matter how we choose to talk about the state of Palestinians in Israel, there will literally never be an independent Palestinian state. There will only be a second class of citizen in territory controlled on all sides by Israel, who can elect no force capable of militarily asserting their own independence, as this war will likely settle once and for all. So then what this war will decide is how totally conquered the Palestians are, and once you totally conquer a people, you have to govern them. The only thing that looks like justice that can come out of that, is allowing the Palestinians a voice in the Israeli government, which necessarily means Israel expanding their national concept into a collective account of the events that have taken place inside it since its modern foundation, where the moral of story those events tell is about emerging from the turmoil of a pointlessly brutal and exclusionary tide of history to the shores of the peace that all religions look to achieve for their followers.
From the New Yorker:
“Across the Indian subcontinent, communities that had coexisted for almost a millennium attacked each other in a terrifying outbreak of sectarian violence, with Hindus and Sikhs on one side and Muslims on the other—a mutual genocide as unexpected as it was unprecedented.” Let’s learn from history.
Wars end when the sides that contest them dissolve. In this case, that either means genocide or the dissolution of first and second class Israeli citizens. Right now, Palestine is an elaborate Israeli prison, which is why Hammas’s offensive reads more like an escape from Alcatraz than it does like any kind of serious military attempt. While nobody thinks they’re right for taking the lives and hostages they’ve taken, until the Palestinians have their collective conviction for being Palestinian in Israel overturned we can be sure we’re strapped in for more of the same. Prisoners try to escape. Wars are fought between different identities.
The second thing that everyone who talks about this conflict says is that they’re not going to solve it, which certainly feels like the only fair thing to say. But it immediately raises the question of why they feel compelled to talk about it at all. At least part of the answer to that question has to do with this crisis at the heart of the nation as a human invention, which as far as inventions go, is a fairly recent addition to the way we do things. We can all feel the hypocrisy that’s standing us up beside walking adult wedgie targets like Richard Spencer, and much of the fast talking, palms-up-in-front-of-us discussion we offer on the subject has the hummuna hummuna feel to it of someone trying to talk their way out of an awkward situation. In the United States we’ve been forced to confront the way we nationally define ourselves and that confrontation has been so intense that our experience of it has become a huge portion of our national identity. We identify ourselves as people with the courage to redefine who we are when it becomes obvious that the way we’re doing things is brutally asinine. We’re still one kind of place. We value formality less here, we have our own holidays, our own stories with their own morals. But this crisis of identity appears to extend well beyond us, as something built into the nation as a human exercise. Each nation has to find their own answer to it, like each person has to find their own path to meaning in their lives. While there are as many different paths to meaning as there are individual people, it would be disingenuous to say that there are no wrong answers. Everybody’s got to live. The Palestinians will be a second class state until the Israelis decide to stop treating them that way, because that’s how having more power than the other guy works. Everybody says they’re not going to solve the problem because in an important sense there is no solving it, as long as we define solving it as some absurd kumbaya moment where everyone is holding hands and singing. But there will be solving it as soon as we accept that the solution will be as messy a thing as God has ever put on this Earth. Dissolving boundaries is always messy, but if things like the perpetual settlement of the West Bank by Israelis or the humanitarian crisis that existed in Gaza before the war broke out are evidence of anything, it’s that trying to impose boundaries is much messier. As long as we acknowledge that border control and national identity are inseparable things, we acknowledge a single Israeli state, with some very bad ideas about the Palestinians in its borders, who are more than willing to return that imagination. It’s not hard to hear the echo of the ugliness that pushed the Jews to Israel reverberating here, and to stop the perpetual reappearance of that awful shriek we have to start having a different conversation. It’s a change all nations, and by extension, all people have to live through, and if history has taught us anything, it’s that there are definitely better ways to do it, the ways that step outside rigid, genetic definitions of national identity, and into a definite range of standards designed to share the moral of a people’s history with everyone who has to live their challenges.
Jews in a Nazi ghetto.
Palestinian kids trying to get water.
From the Council on Foreign Relations:
“Gaza, a small territory of about 139 square miles (360 square kilometers), or roughly the size of the city of Detroit, was already experiencing a severe humanitarian crisis before the current hostilities broke out. As a result of a sixteen-year blockade by Israel, about 95 percent of the population cannot access clean water, while more than half of all Gazans depend on international assistance for basic services. Additionally, some 80 percent of Gaza’s residents are considered refugees under international law, and Palestinians overall compose the largest stateless community in the world.”
Princess Fantastic 