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June 19, 2003
It is easy to notice but it is hard to break out of. And it bothers me.
When watching the television news about the Middle East have you noticed the simplification, that reach for the easy cliche? The media represents the conflict between two sides, Israeli's and Palestinians? Its an eternal struggle between white and black; or even a bitter personal conflict between Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat. The complexities of geopolitics and the history do not matter here. And it is unclear where this discourse in media stand on the two state solution. (Israeli and Palestinian states living side by side in peace). It appears that this is tacitly rejected in the media because the Palestinians are assumed to not only want to reclaim the occupied territories but to destroy Israel.
Oh I know, that is the media. We all know that. The media has become infotainment. It (the commercial media) is ever heedful of the bottom line and the low attention span of the channel-jumping consumers. But the public media (the ABC in Australia) are no different. Their representations are black and white as well. They just give a different content to the black and white to the commercial media.
The ABC is more sympathetic to the Palestinians, whilst the commerical media are more sympathetc to the Israeli's. Each inverts the hierarchy of the duality. But generally, in Australia, the Israelis are good guys whilst the Palestinians are the bad guys. It is okay for the Israeli military forces under Prime Minister Sharon to counter terrorism by destroying the infrastructure of the Palestinian Authority and the structure of a future Palestinan state.
I'm sure you have noticed the duality in the daily news as well. It bothers me, especially when I post on the subject at public opinion. And I search the Internet for media that would allow me to escape the rigid duality----to prise it open with some geopolitics and history. I don't suceed (for various reasons). I slip back into academic stance of the birds eye view, even though I know that I write from a situated perspective. ( My sympathies are with the Palestinian people because of their suffering from the occupation of their homeland.) But how do we begin to think differently on this?
I know that many Israelis and Palestinians do not agree with the policies and actions of Sharon and Arafat-----their voices are full of dissent and resistance and their strength comes from a love for their country. Recognizing this diversity or difference is a step out of the hierarchal duality onto some new terrain. But then I get lost.
To put in a philosophical way I am not able to put the categories of this discourse into question. In being self-reflexive I can see that I have reversed or reprivileged the hierarchy of the given Israel/Palestinian duality, and so naively passed to the other side of the discourse. But I have not been able to reinscribed the newly privileged term through extending its range and scope.
What I end up doing is puzzling about the straitjacket as I search for help out of the media flybottle. Well I have find something to help and just by chance. Its a little post on a weblog. It was right under my nose. Others had noticed and linked but I didn't see it.
The opening is here The 'Why Israel and Palestine are not morally equivalent' is
a great and courageous post.
I have some quibbles.
First, an ontological one. Consider this remark by Scott that "Jews are not a collective. They are just a collection."
Well no. Jews are not a bunch of stones lying on the ground. We are talking about the Jews as people, then they are a collective, made so by their social relations, culture and history. They are a people who located themselves in a particular to become a nation. They have constructed a state to enable them to do this. It is the relationships that are crucial not just the things.
This is important difference. Consider Scott's next remark:
"Now, this is the key point of this whole post: The Palestinians are a collection, and are therefore incapable of being responsible for terrorism. Hamas is a collective. Fatah is a collective. Al-Qaeda is a collective. They are capable of bearing collective responsibility for terrorism. The Palestinians are not."
Hamas is a collective but so are the Palestinan people, though they are a different kind of collective to military organization. The Palestinan people are bonded by their social relations, culture, and their historical experience of Israel's occupation of their territory. And they have some responsiblity for the terrorism since it is a weapon and tactic which they deploy as a people to defend themselves against an occupying army, the demolition of their houses and the settlements. They do not have tanks, an army, an airforce or a navy funded by an imperial power.
Same with the dissident Jewish people. As citizens they see themselves as having responsibility to fight the occupation and settlements. They see it as a form of colonialism with all its arrogance and inhumanity embodied in its methods of suppressing the local population, seizing land and giving settlers superior legal status. These voices of refusal fight for an other kind of Israel.
Now I agree with Scott's next remark:
"You need do little more than turn on the news to hear someone in the Arab world saying that "the Americans" and "the Israelis" are responsible for whatever injustices they feel aggrieved by. It's easy to get from there to concluding that you are justified in killing Americans and Israelis in response. If they said America and Israel were responsible,I wouldn't be nearly so bothered. Sometimes, I might even agree. It's a lot harder to go from America is doing something bad to Americans must die."
I accept the distinction being made here between a people--the Israeli's ---and the state--Israel. Some sections of the Israeli people are in opposition to the state's actions of occupation and those sections of the Israeli people (the settler movement and ultra-Orthodox communty) who support the state. The Palestinians, in contrast, do not have a state as Scott rightly points out. They have Hamas and Fatah but not a state. One day perhaps the Palestinian Authority might become a state of the Palestinian people.
So what is the point of difference between Scott and myself? One has to do with nationalism. My understanding of a people is that they are nation. Scott says that he hate nationalism because it:
"It makes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a battle between two "nations" - two of the same sort of thing - instead of what it really is: a conflict between the Israeli state and a bunch of people called Palestinians."
Well not quite. It is a military conflict---a war--between the Israeli state and Hamas and Fatah etc.
Scott continues and introduces a bigger point. He says that nationalism:
"helps people to confuse collections with collectives. It encourages "us vs. them" sorts of thinking, preventing people from recognising how their conflicts are with collectives rather than with groups of individuals. The outcome of that sort of thinking is obvious enough: repression, collective punishment (which has to do with punishing collections for actions taken by collectives), ethnic cleansing and, in the most extreme cases, genocide."
Nationalism is equated with ethnicity here: an ethnic nationalism And this has given rise to proposals for ethnic cleansing in the form of planned explusions of the Arabs.It could be achieved through the Israeli state imprisoning Palestinians in enclaves surrounded by settlements stripping Arab Israeli's of their citizenship, then expelling all Palestinians from the country. Israel would then be ethnically pure. Beyond that strategy we have the right wing proposal to "transfer" all Palestinians out of Palestine.
But there are different forms of nationalism. For instance, You can fight colonialism (Indians against British rule) or imperialism to defend your country and people from suffering and oppression (Vietminese against the Americans) Dissident Israels can, and do, fight the settlement process and Israel dominion over the occupied territories in the name of the other Israel.
But Israeli nationalism could be a civic one anchored in western liberal values. It did develop a democratic government from the authoritarian David Ben-Gurion days. What can do is to develop a multiple ethnicity----one state two peoples. We can then redescribe ethnic nationalism as cultural nationalism However, integration in liberal democracies is not dependent upon cultural nationalist assimilation policies in the face of cultural heterogeneity. Given this cultural heterogeneity in Israel, a state-sponsored nationalist projects of cultural assimilation may be both ineffective and counterproductive to the goal of integration. One state two cultures may well be an option.
Scott's responsibility claim will have to wait.
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