Free Walestine

Palestine is much less an ideal of nationhood than an ANTI-ideal of nationhood. It’s been that way since the Romans first came up with the cunning plan to un-brand the homeland of the Israelites with a Greek place name referring to its neighbouring polities.

Palestine thus came into human historical existence very specifically as ‘Not Israel’ or even “Seeya Israel’, and this turned out to be the basis of its appeal to Arab ‘nationalists’ in the last century.

Nations are imagined communities and this one, almost uniquely in today’s world, specifically contains a starkly negative component: a national community imagined without its location-specific indigenous people.

And not just in politics either. Visit a so-called Palestinian restaurant in New York and this project of erasure is baked into almost every aspect of the aesthetic, on the plates, on the walls. This all belongs to us and nobody else, it all screams. The others are like, usurpers.

The flip-side of this dogged negativity is the insistence that Israelite nationalism is in its very nature a dark and unpleasant thing — and in that way the anti-ideal contained within ‘Free Palestine’ is freely projected onto its nemesis, making it possible for seemingly fair and reasonable people everywhere to be “Anti-Zionist” in a manner they would almost certainly never imitate in relation to any other community’s national aspirations.

To understand the absurdity of this situation, imagine Wales divided into two extremely hostile 'cultural' camps: Welsh-speakers and English-speakers.

Now consider that the latter have always refused to be part of ‘Wales’. Indeed, when it was first proclaimed independent, they immediately attempted to completely destroy it — with considerable help from over the border in England — even though they had been given the opportunity to have their own part of the country where only English need be spoken: WALESTINE.

No, they absolutely wanted the whole place for themselves, and not in order to share it either, even though in Wales itself English-speakers had the full rights of every citizen, in spite of being a potentially troublesome minority. (It was always a given that the Welsh-speaking zone would be more hospitable to English-speakers than vice versa. )

The forebears of the Walestinians had been around in this area speaking English and generally lording it over all other minorities including those annoying Welsh-speakers for centuries, and could see no reason at all why this situation should not be preserved for all eternity.

And so Walestine has always been conceived of as a place where only English-speakers with a certain well-defined set of values would be welcome.

Everyone else would have to get with the programme, basically a somewhat extreme spin-off of English nationalism elsewhere on the island. (Though it must be said that even the English — white van, St George's flag-waving fanatics aside — have become more than a bit fed up with their Walestinian ‘cousins’ over the years.)

Meanwhile, the UN has been perpetuating what was already an almost un-resolve-able situation by declaring that all the Walestinians (plus their progeny), long ago displaced as a result of their own failed attempt at eradicating all the Welsh-speakers, have become forever refugees, even if they are working in the city of London and making a fortune.

And in spite of the fact that the UN recognises Wales and was clearly 'at fault' for the original bungled attempt at partition, a rather radicalised section within it, the one responsible for the Walestinians — now possibly ten times in number, leaving it unclear how many of them are just plain English — is committed to the idea that they should all have the right to flood back into Wales at some point in the future, thereby destabilising this vulnerable little democracy completely, and most likely leading to a replay of the original attempt at country-cide.

While there may be fairly strong underlying ethnic component to this conflict, one suspects that any attempt to map it onto DNA will result not only in several surprises, but also a good deal of additional confusion and murkiness.

One has to recognise therefore that the essence of the ‘argument’ however, is cultural identification: do you speak English and align with England, or do you want this rather small area to be at least partly a sanctuary for those weird Welsh-speakers, where they can determine their own destinies (and manage their own historically-fraught security issues).

Yet under the auspices of the so-called international community, this argument has been spun into a terrible cycle of violence and a catalytic process of fortified unreasonableness wherever one chooses to look.

(For the record, as I am quite used to being misrepresented when I make statements relating to this topic, and not just by the usual suspects as it turns out. My base position is broadly similar to the one promoted by leading British historians of Jewish heritage, such as Sir Simon Schama and Simon Sebag Montefiore, who consistently promote a pro-peace, anti-Netanyahu position set within a sincerely-held compassionate take on the whole ugly situation.

And just like them, I would draw a clear line between these views and the faux-humanitrarian, antisemitic toxicity of the 'Free Palestine' campaign with its rather prominent ties to Jihadi intolerance and attempts to delegitimise and overrun the Jewish state entirely.)

 

 

 

 

Bitter Aftertaste

Maybe the biggest advantage of living here compared to any city in the US, but also many in Europe as well, is a comparative, not absolute, isolation from the synthetic...the proudly contrived.

Social media provides a daily window onto this divergence. So when I see affluent people in the developed world celebrating their consumption, there is nearly always something inauthentic one can observe (or sniff) about about this, the food and drink they eat, plus the environment in which they down it.

This extends beyond the phenomenon of blatantly synthetic comestibles, so called ultra-processed food, because even top quality grub in London or New York can come soaked in a semiotic sauce which for me at least, is bitter to the taste.

The same sort of people venture over there and tend to make much of the culture that they immerse themselves in, and down to the last plate of frijoles it can appear fundamentally more grounded in human realities than in branding and marketing communications.

I think the essential difference is that such aspects of culture around here do not expressly exist as some sort of compensation for all the rest of the crap. A sort of smokescreen.

Ethno-states

One of the ideas that floats around in the empty heads of the use-X (add your suffix of choice) idiots, is that Israel = an ethno-state. 

There is of course an element of "well, duh" about this. 

Israel is a post-colonial nation and one of the defining characteristics of such, at least those which achieved independent statehood in the last century, is usually an ethnic or ethno-religious patina to the political structures. 

This is true not only in the Middle East, where the phenomenon is close to ubiquitous, but also in parts of Asia — like the Indian sub-continent — even when a form of democratic rule with broad enfranchisement has long been established. Parts of Africa too. 

Where post-colonial nationhood tends to look starkly different is actually in the Americas. 

Here, independence was achieved earlier under the auspices of landed or bourgeois elites, many of whom kept slaves (and their womenfolk out of politics). Ethnic tensions were generally resolved with blatant genocides — then not understood as such — which were far less exposed to the critical outside gaze. 

Where this process dragged on late into the twentieth century, in places like Guatemala for example, things got seriously ugly for they became cross-contaminated with the ideological fancies of the era. 

So if Israel has been constructed around the idea that there should be at least one country in the world where Jews are in charge of their own destinies (and specifically, security) there is indeed a very clear ethno-religious component to the state that has been built there. 

That said, whichever structural inequalities remain — and may now be experiencing reinforcement — every Israeli citizen has the right to vote and to participate up to the highest levels of their society, as well as that of equality under law. (In the UAE if an Emirati crashes into the back of your car, it's YOUR fault. In theory at least, these kind of shenanigans are less prevalent in Israel.) 

This is another reason why 'Apartheid State' is another slur, and a pretty far-fetched one at that. If you think you can draw useful, non-absurd comparisons between that other tortured post-colonial state, South Africa, up to the very end of the last century, then you might as well try to crowbar the same analogy into place across a range of contemporary and historical societies — many perhaps more deserving, yet it would still not be especially illuminating. 

Take Roman Britain for example. Fearing for the security of the society they were attempting to build on our island, they constructed a wall across the top of it, the general idea being that some (not all) of the people living to the north of these bricks manifested as obstinately hostile marauders. Sometimes the wall itself was not enough and they had to venture north on campaigns designed to (often brutally) restore the basic stability…incidentally rather notoriously once losing an entire legion this way.

Would the Picts have had a trans-historical case for describing this state of affairs as as "Apartheid"?

Well, unlike their non-Roman southern counterparts, they showed almost zero inclination to participate, to collaborate with civilised life on any sort of level. And the Romans erected their stone barrier, not because they were following the dictates of racist creed, but because they knew what would happen if they operated an open border policy. 

The Britons who were meanwhile mingling a little more usefully in the south enjoyed a mixture of rights plus potential for wealth and status. There was clearly a lot of the sort of formal inequality that the ancient world was famous for. But there was also that fundamental tension between tribal forms of organisation and larger-scale state building which has been a feature of our world and its gruesome conflicts during my lifetime. 

When I first came to Central America in the 80s I associated with an individual who harboured certain fantasies which, if not 'Leftist' as is now generally understood, were deeply revolutionary and presumably dependent on fairly extremist action for their realisation — he wished to foster the formation of a Mayan ethno-state, mainly out of northern Guatemala and other parts of the Yucatán, with its capital on Lake Petén-Itzá, at Flores, no less.  

If there seemed to be one native American people for whom this might make some sort of crazy sense — if only in a (bloody) wet dream — it would have been the Maya, with their strong association, going back around three millennia, with a specific geographical expanse — the 'Mayab' — and who, unlike say the Mexica or the Inca, had no significant history thetein of enforced hegemony over subject races. 

The point is that before it became fashionable for some sections of Arab opinion and at least some of their transnational eedjits to — hypocritically — decry the Jewish state as grounded in ethno-religious prejudice, it was quite common for radicals to imagine post-colonial orders based rather firmly on shared ethnic identity, especially when these identities pertained to so-called indigenous or 'original' populations, such as the Israelites...with their strong association going back around three millennia with a very specific geographical expanse.