Dialogue with
Gans 2
AA - Well, I guess
due to our particular backgrounds none of us can actually claim neutrality
when dealing with the issue of the Arab-Israeli struggle. Nonetheless, our
mutual commitment to the use of language to defer violence already creates a
bond between us that I am sure would help us forge ahead with this dialogue
regardless of the touchiness of the issue involved. Having said this, let me
respond to couple of points you made in your answer to this question.
· Can
the Palestinians realistically be expected to sympathize or show any sign of
reciprocity with the Israelis where there is nothing yet created on the
ground that can give them any sense of closure? Sympathy seems to be the
prerogative of the strong.
EG
- I understand your point here. But the whole idea of the Oslo process was
that real negotiations, that is, between symmetrical partners, were
possible. This has subsequently proved illusory.
Let me put the
discussion on a more general level. As a reader of my Chronicles, you
are aware that I have been trying to construct an ethic for our
"post-millennial" or post-victimary era. Our problem is that the political
mechanisms of liberal-democratic society are effective only between relative
equals, yet the victimary approach to asymmetrical relations that worked in
the past is no longer viable. In other words, we have to understand
resentment and attempt to allay it, but we cannot accept it as a source of
truth.
The application of
this formula to the Israeli-Palestinian situation is that, indeed, the
Israelis must maintain their sympathy for the Palestinians, but they cannot
simply accept the Palestinians' vision of reality and the demands that flow
from it. Palestinians customarily describe Israel in the most violently
hostile terms. Here is the beginning of a recent, typical, article in the
Palestine Times: "It all began more than 52 years ago when Arab nations
sold Palestine to marauding Jews from Europe and America who came to the
land of Milk and Honey to pillage, plunder and massacre the native
inhabitants." Even Israeli "revisionists" critical of Zionist policy toward
the Palestinians cannot engage in dialogue with this kind of language.
No doubt it is too
much for Israel to expect sympathy from the Palestinians, but we can hope
for a gradual diminution of resentment. Unfortunately, having Sharon on one
side and the terrorists on the other is not conducive to this process. But I
do not think we should see failure as inevitable, or as irrevocable. Had
Barak been more diplomatic, had Arafat been more statesmanlike, it seems to
me that there was a real chance for peace. Such a chance, we must believe,
will come again. Arafat has certainly been sounding pretty
statesmanlike lately. [This was written before the recent (December-January)
Palestinian promises and attempts to crack down on terrorism. At the very
least, the change in tone reflects the delegitimation of political violence
since September 11, which, hopefully, can provide some common ground for
both Israeli and Palestinian negotiators.]
·
Palestinians are in many ways doing everything the Zionists did to create
their state. Their violence is neither unusual nor unique. Some would argue
that it is even more "justified," since they are seeking to liberate part
of their original homeland, most Palestinians having already accepted the
right of Israel to exist. Can we blame the Palestinians for being as prone
to violence as any other people in the same circumstances? I mean,
personally, I do condemn violence, and I am not one of those people who
condone suicide bombings for any reason. But the circumstances of the
struggle, and the way the world is responding to it, are such that the
Palestinians seem to be encouraged indeed to think of themselves and, hence,
act as ultimate victims.
EG - Tout
comprendre, c'est tout pardonner, and one can well understand the
Palestinians' frustration. But terrorism makes negotiation impossible.
Whatever its crimes, Jewish terrorism before the creation of the Israeli
state was limited and purposeful; it focused on discouraging the British so
that they would get out, which they did. What is the focus of Palestinian
terrorism? It is a mode of revenge rather than a political act. And its
result is to harden Israeli positions. Sharon wouldn't be in power without
the Intifada, and he wouldn't be occupying Bethlehem as I write if one of
his ministers hadn't been assassinated. The only possible rational context
for Palestinian terrorism is a campaign to drive the Jews out of the Middle
East altogether--a desire often expressed in Arab countries, as you know.
·
You
said: "if Israel is by its mere existence a persecutor and the Palestinian
community its victim, no conversation is possible." But then, the
Palestinians were indeed victimized by the creation of the State of
Israel with hundreds of thousands of them getting thrown out of their homes
(Barak himself, it is said, came very close to admitting that, without
endorsing the right of return, of course). Thus, they were victimized in the
ultimate sense because there is no undoing the injustice that fell upon
them.
For a long time this is what the Palestinians have been unprepared to
accept, but with the Oslo Accord, they proved that they have finally come to
terms with that. What went wrong after that?
Let me be more clear. You refer to the assassination of Rabin in a Chronicle
that came out at that time; do you think Rabin would have been able to
deliver peace? As such, is the problem with the peace process related to the
leaders involved? Or are we faced here with a typical Girardian situation
where the people on both sides are dictating the course of action to the
leaders and demanding the right sparagmos. If so, how can this situation be
handled?
EG - No doubt the
Palestinians suffered in 1948, but you can't forget that the Arab countries
invaded Israel at the outset and that history would have been very different
had they accepted the original partition agreement. And of course you are
aware that Israel only took over the West Bank after another invasion in
1967, and that Jordan subsequently refused to take it back.
But I don't think
we should be discussing the subject on this level, where each side can cite
its arguments. The fundamental problem is that, in the eyes of the Arab
world, certainly until recently, and I think still today in most quarters,
Israel simply has no right to exist. The Oslo accords (which followed peace
treaties with Egypt and Jordan and some lessening of international tension)
seemed to reflect a change in this attitude. But here I return to my earlier
point: if
Israel has
a right to exist, and the Palestinians have a right to a state, then,
however disparate their power, they must be able to negotiate in symmetry.
Which is to say that some signs of mutual sympathy are necessary. I'm not
sure if Rabin and Arafat shaking hands was quite enough, but it was a first
step.
I understand the
Palestinians' desire for a "right of return," if only as an acknowledgement
of their symmetry with their interlocutors. Perhaps there is a way of
finessing that issue. Clearly Israel can't just give back its land, most of
which has been greatly transformed, to those who occupied it before 1948.
Nor is it very clear what a returnee would do with his property in a country
utterly unlike the one he left. Perhaps some kind of compensation would be
satisfactory; perhaps even the right of Israeli citizenship, although one
must understand Israel's fear of no longer being a--the only--"Jewish
state." Or perhaps, as I heard at the time of the negotiations, all the
Palestinians desired was an acknowledgement of their right in abstracto.
Yet I can't help thinking, considering the extent of Barak's offer, that the
real reason it was not accepted was not that Israel had rejected the "right
of return," but that, when push came to shove, the Palestinian
leadership--not to speak of the Palestinian "street"--just could not bring
themselves to accept the legitimate existence of Israel.
I don't know if
Rabin would have been able to bring peace, but if, as I believe, there
was a real chance of peace, perhaps just a little thing like that
handshake on the White House lawn, coupled with Rabin's great prestige in
Israel, might have made the difference. I also believe that Arafat had
genuine respect for Rabin and would have been far more willing to take a
chance on him than on Barak, who, as I understand, never reached out to him
personally.
Now we'll just
have to wait for the latest cycle to play itself out. Perhaps if the US is
successful in destroying the al Qaeda network (which remains to be seen),
the glamour and apparent usefulness of terrorism and "martyrdom" will
diminish even in "the land of milk and honey." After all, the IRA has begun
disarming; the Berlin wall fell; apartheid was ended. One should never
despair.
AA - How
legitimate, in your opinion, is the feminist criticism of GA and the works
of Girard as being too "masculine?" How would you respond to this criticism?
EG - There have
also been attempts at Girardian feminism. Since Girard is "for the victim,"
his thought has sometimes been appropriated by practitioners of victimary
thinking. This being said, and putting aside the rhetorical aspects of the
feminist critique, I think the point of legitimate debate is whether
culture, including language, functions primarily to defer violence or
whether it is an artifact of humanity's unique family structure, a domain in
which women may be considered to have taken the lead. The evident facts that
women's bodies, including both primary and secondary sexual characteristics,
have been modified by evolution far more than men's, and that sexual
attraction was and continues to be the driving force in this process--whose
adaptive function is clearly to secure masculine support for our helpless,
large-brained infants--might seem to imply some linkage between our sexual
uniqueness and that other distinctive human trait which is representation.
By one account
(written by a man, incidentally), the first intentional signs were ochre
markings used by women to simulate menstrual blood in order to attract
males. But such speculations have not persuaded me to abandon the
fundamental principle that culture exists primarily, because critically, to
defer violence. There is really no society, except perhaps our own, in which
women have an equal part in social decisions, particularly those concerning
the sacred. Either women are deemed unclean and kept away from sacred rites,
or they are considered sacred and placed at the center of these rites--two
variants of the same general configuration. If women had been the
originators of signs and therefore of culture, how could they have "lost
control" of it? No doubt there have been throughout history fluctuations in
the relative power of men and women, but the notion that men at some point
"usurped" a once-maternal power is just a resentful myth.
It is not simply
because men are physically stronger than women that culture has always been
dominated by males, but because culture functions primarily to defer
violence and violence is a male prerogative--and a male danger. A society
that sends its women into battle is not going to survive through very many
generations. That doesn't make women "inferior" to men; on the contrary,
their lives are generally held more precious than men's. I can imagine a
feminist of the future who, on reading that in the Titanic disaster most of
the women were saved while most of the men drowned, alleges this as proof
that in 1912 women held more political power than men.
AA - In one of
your early Chronicles, you rejected the hypothesis that language and
representation were indeed invented by mothers seeking to communicate with
their infant children. The essence of your objection seems to have been that
the intimacy of the mother-child relation would have stood as an obstacle in
the face of disseminating any system of communication that developed between
the two.
A potential
counter-argument here could be that intimacy at the time did not require
privacy. The mother-child relation, no matter how intimate, was not quite
private, as such mimesis could have taken over and the system could have
easily spread to the community.
The real point
here is this: why insist that representation was strictly invented in order
to defer violence? Why can't we speculate that language had evolved through
some other system, but its potential for deferring violence was only
"discovered" at a certain mimetic crisis?
EG - My answer to
the previous question can be applied here. As you see quite clearly, the
real question is whether language and culture emerged in order to defer
violence or whether this deferral is merely a collateral function.
The point of the
originary hypothesis is to account not so much for the superiority of human
language over that of our ape cousins as for its different mode of
operation, through symbols as opposed to "indexical" signals. Human is to
ape language more or less as the Keplerian is to the Ptolemaic planetary
system: both can enunciate certain basic facts, but the latter, in contrast
to the former, cannot be extended to other data without an exponential
increase in complexity. Apes can no doubt communicate all sorts of things in
their languages. But a language of conventional signs, even if at the start
it doesn't communicate very much information, has an essentially unbounded
capacity for such communication, whereas animal signal systems do not. What
must be explained is why we adopted a potentially more effective
system at a moment when it did not convey more information.
The originary
hypothesis explains exactly how the linguistic sign differs from the signal:
it is not part of an action to appropriate its referent, but a gesture of
renunciation of this referent, incarnating a general interdiction that could
only have arisen as a means to defer conflict. Girard presents a good deal
of evidence in La violence et le sacré in support of the hypothesis
that all rites are sacrificial and that sacrifice is a means of channeling
and dispelling violence. Why should language, which is a minimal rite, have
a different origin?
As for the
mother-child relationship, when mothers teach their children to speak today,
they don't invent a private or semi-private language, they teach them a
simplified version of the language they speak with other adults. Language is
a reciprocal exchange and the mother initiates her child into language so
that he can learn to take part in this exchange. How could such an exchange
have originated in the context of a fundamentally unequal
relationship? Barring some radical reformulation, the idea of mother-child
language origin seems to me a feminist pipe-dream rather than a serious
hypothesis.
AA - In one of
your recent Chronicles you raise the issue of vulnerability and the
possibility of relapse as a counter-argument to Francis Fukuyama's thesis
expounded in The End of History and the Last Man. But Mr. Fukuyama
himself has repeatedly asserted that he does not discount the possibility of
relapse.
What he seems
to be suggesting is this: in a society that, for one reason or another,
failed to achieve liberal democracy, or where there occurred a relapse,
aspirations will still lead the people, sooner or later, towards the
fulfillment, or at least, the envisioning of liberal democracy as the system
that could not be improved upon. This means that the discovery of liberal
democracy marks the ideological end of history.
In Mr.
Fukuyama's own words in his introduction to the '93 paperback edition of his
book: "While some present-day countries might fail to achieve stable liberal
democracy, and others might lapse back into other, more primitive forms of
rule like theocracy or military dictatorships, the ideal of liberal
democracy could not be improved upon."
By arguing
against Fukuyama, are you, by any chance, suggesting that the liberal
democratic system can be improved upon? Or are you simply trying to
keep the option open so as to safeguard the idea of liberal democracy from
becoming a "dogma"? Or is there some other explanation?
EG - I think some
of the Chronicles I have written recently make my position clearer. I
admire Fukuyama's clarity and forcefulness and have often referred to him in
my columns. But there is a contradiction between unilaterally declaring the
end of history and describing this "end" as a political mode that is
incompatible with any such declaration.
Fukuyama,
following Kojève's Hegelian fundamentalism, doesn't seem to see the
difficulty of applying Hegel's "absolute idealism" to an open-ended human
temporality that continually generates new knowledge and options. The
nation-state is not the final incarnation of the Weltgeist. Marx, at
least, thought of the Hegelian "end of history" as the beginning of a new,
creative world of freedom. Fukuyama, in contrast, in the only silly passage
in his brilliantly prescient 1989 article, evokes the wistful sadness of
seeing history come to an end and the boredom of living "after history,"
when just the opposite should be the case. Forgetting for the moment about
Bin Laden, the integration of all of humanity into the global economy would
not result in a stagnant utopia but in ever more creative and unpredictable
forms of interaction on every level.
But we cannot
forget about Bin Laden. As I said in my Chronicles in answer to some
remarks of your own, even if al Qaeda doesn't have right now the ability to
destroy the global market system, we can't just assume that next time this
will still be the case. We must respect our adversaries enough to
acknowledge the coherence of their world view. The "medieval" society they
prefer--with or without Islamic law--is exactly what they would bring about
if they did succeed in destroying modern civilization. This gives their
destructive actions a consistency that was not the case for either right- or
left-wing "socialism" (recalling that Nazi is short for
"National-Socialist"). These doctrines, however cruel, claimed that, once
the eggs were broken, the omelet would be superior to anything eaten before,
in both the moral and the material sense: the International Soviet or
the Thousand-Year Reich would be not only morally superior but more
economically productive than bourgeois society. (In the Depression, such
claims had a certain credibility.) The terrorists make no such promises of
material prosperity.
Fukuyama is
certainly right that their ideology does not express any really new ideas.
But suppose they won; suppose our civilization were destroyed. Would it
really be useful to say that we were still really at the end of history, but
that the Idea just met with some temporary setbacks on its way to
incarnation? I think that, even in the narrow sense in which Fukuyama uses
the term, the "end of history" requires, at the very least, a consensus of
all states or state-like entities. One can argue that McVeighs will always
be possible within liberal democracies (I have made this case in an article
called "Originary Democracy and the Critique of Pure Fairness," in The
Democratic Experience and Political Violence, ed. David Rapoport and
Leonard Weinberg, London: Frank Cass, 2001, 308-24), but al Qaeda is a
problem for the Idea itself. It's all well and good to talk about liberal
democracy and globalization, but if large parts of the less developed world
can't be integrated into the global system fast enough to prevent events
like September 11, then some changes must be made, the Idea must be tweaked.
To speak more
concretely: at a minimum, as life in the US demonstrates more clearly each
day, "liberal democracy" must install a much more powerful and pervasive
security apparatus. And this, in turn, will necessarily restrict the
liberties in which the Idea of liberal democracy consists. Liberal democracy
is successful because it is maximally adaptable. But one can't simply
dismiss every possible adaptation as epiphenomenal by claiming that it's
already implicit in the Idea of liberal democracy. This is closed,
apocalyptic thinking, like Girard's claim that Christ has already revealed
the whole of anthropological truth. For Girard too, life in post-history is
boring.
One more point.
The "end of history" is homologous with the end of war. WWII was the last
total war that civilization, and perhaps humanity itself, could survive. War
between the most advanced states having always been the motor of political
history, the impossibility of war brings history to an end. Throughout the
Cold War, as its name implies, the possibility of war seemed to be not
abolished but indefinitely suspended, so that the "two world systems" were
expected to remain face to face indefinitely into the future. The end of the
Cold War then appeared to put an end to the very Idea of war. But now we are
waging a new, "asymmetrical" kind of war. And all of a sudden we realize
that our side is vulnerable--that if we don't do things right, we could
lose. If even this time of uncertainty and tension doesn't qualify as
"history" in the eyes of our faithful Hegelian, then we'll just have to
imitate Marx and stand him back on his feet.
AA - You have
touched in your responses on the September 11 terrorist attacks, but let us
here address this issue in a more direct manner. In your Chronicle
referred to above you introduce the concept of the "Talibanization" of the
world. What exactly do you mean by that? Do you buy into the notion that
this attack represents in some way a "clash of civilizations?"
EG - I've tried to
answer this question in my most recent Chronicles. No, I agree with
you (and Fukuyama) that there is no "clash of civilizations"; the conflict
or "dialectic" is taking place within global society. But the
conflict is with an "internal other" not satisfactorily conceptualizable in
Hegelian terms. Resentment is not a Hegelian category; even in the
master-slave dialectic, the slave isn't resentful, he just learns while the
master vegetates, and eventually, as Kojève puts it, he becomes a freed
slave, a bourgeois.
What I meant by
"Talibanization" is certainly not that the Taliban would take over the
world. But if the terrorists and their friends, this time or the next, can
put together enough weaponry to destroy the fabric of global civilization,
the keepers of the order that would emerge in the ensuing "state of nature"
would be gangs of armed men, the most stable and powerful of which would
probably follow a rigid, transcendentally imposed ideology like that of the
Taliban. As Durkheim observed, the core function of religion is ensuring
social cohesion; secular society requires a much higher level of
organization than religious society.
AA - Finally,
and by way of concluding this session of our continuing dialogue, let me
revisit the issue of the Holocaust, if only by way of registering a personal
sentiment.
It is rather
unfortunate that many Arabs choose to ignore this issue. I can understand
the reasons behind this attitude, namely the way the Israelis and their
supporters use this issue on occasions to make the world turn a blind eye to
developments in the Occupied Territories.
Still, I think
the issue is much too significant in the course of human history to be so
ignored or, worse, to be considered as some sort of political fraud, as some
conspiratorialists imply at times. On the other hand, I really fail to
understand why so many people in Europe and the States seem to be so
obsessed with not revising the numbers involved here. Would the tragedy be
any less significant had its victims been one million rather than six? It is
the nature of the tragedy and not only its scale that is
significant here.
Here is one
example where one people were singled out for destruction not because of any
real fault of their own, but because of the internal logic of the Nazi
movement and Nazi society. The reasons which the Zionist fathers give to
explain the persecution of the Jews in Europe, namely their perceived
isolationist tendencies and what seemed like archaic particularities, could
explain (but never justify) discrimination, an ugly tendency in itself. But
they could never explain something like persecution, pogroms, or a
holocaust. Never. These things could never be explained by any alleged
"fault" of the victims, or their way of life.
As such, I
totally agree with you when you say that, in this case, there is no need to
"see both sides."
EG
- This is a good place for me to express my admiration for your concern for
dialogue, on this as on a whole range of issues. First, a couple of details.
No doubt it is impossible to determine the number of Jews killed in the
Holocaust within ten or a hundred. I have seen low estimates of somewhere
around five million. But there is a point at which, as Engels might have
said, quantity turns into quality. Killing one million would no doubt be bad
enough, but when the consensus of historians, both Jewish and non-Jewish,
has settled on the figure of six million, reducing it to one million cannot
but cast doubt on the basic thesis. If all these people have been
exaggerating by a factor of six, then, perhaps, beyond the usual wartime
brutality, nothing really happened at all. Maybe, as the revisionists say,
there never were any gas chambers; the prisoners just died of overwork and
disease. I won't go any farther along that path.
I'm not sure what
you mean by the "Zionist fathers"' explanation of the persecution of the
Jews. No doubt assimilated Jews like Herzl displayed a certain impatience
with the "shtetl Jew" and his archaic ways, but the obsession with
the "Jewish question" beginning in the mid-nineteenth century requires a
more organic explanation. After all, if these backward tendencies were the
problem, there would be no need for Zionism; one could just modernize, as
most Jews have done in the US. Zionism reflects a deep despair (born in part
from Herzl's experience of French anti-Semitism during the Dreyfus affair)
that the Jews would ever be accepted within Christian society.
The "Jewish
question" fascinates me for many reasons. One is that few people, even few
Jews, really understand modern anti-Semitism--the one thing that Tim McVeigh
and Bin Laden have in common. Anti-Semitism is not garden-variety racism. We
should certainly accord Gypsies, homosexuals, the mentally ill, not to speak
of millions of Russians, a place in our memorials of the Holocaust. But,
numbers aside, in how many speeches, in how many political tracts, did the
Nazis refer to these other groups? Anti-Semitism was their constant
obsession, the very core of their political doctrine. I have several times
had occasion to refer in my Chronicles to the American neo-Nazi novel
The Turner Diaries--most recently because, at the climax of the
story, the protagonist flies a nuclear-armed airplane into the Pentagon.
This novel portrays the triumph of the White race over a United States run
entirely by Jews, for whom Blacks and others serve as henchmen: the Jews
punish disobedient Whites by handing their wives over to Blacks to rape. The
Jews are vermin, but they are also the secret masters of market society, as
the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion--still reprinted,
unfortunately, in the Arab world--makes clear. Given the association of Jews
with the market, it should not surprise us that the first modern
anti-Semites were men of the left: Alphonse Toussenel, the author of the
first major work of French anti-Semitism (Les juifs, rois de l'époque,
1844), was a socialist, a disciple of Fourier.
The Holocaust--the
greatest of human horrors, as even Chomsky affirms--was focused on the Jews.
It provided the archetype for the victimary epistemology that was so
spectacularly successful in the postwar era. Jew is to Nazi as: colonial to
colonizer, Southern or South African Black to White, woman to man,
homosexual to straight, handicapped to "normally abled" . . . This process,
like affirmative action, has scarcely benefited the Jews, who have gone from
sub-human to Honky in a generation. The only compensation the Jews received
for the Holocaust, aside from some inadequate and still largely unpaid
reparations, was Israel. The British finally gave their blessing, the Soviet
Union its recognition, Germany a good deal of financial assistance--and, of
course, the United States its backing and continued support. During its
first decades, Israel was seen (outside the Arab world) as a courageous
little country fighting against huge odds. But since 1967, or at least since
the Yom Kippur war in 1973, when Israel's military superiority became
incontestable, anti-Zionism has become the new rallying cry for the enemies
of global market society--Chomsky being, once more, a usefully caricatural
example.
Thus, all question
of blame or responsibility aside, the Jews once again find themselves at the
center of the historical dialectic. It is far from fantastic to speculate
that, without Israel, there would be not only no al Qaeda, but no
fundamental friction between Islam and the West; perhaps the Arab countries
would even have evolved into democracies, or in any case into more vigorous
economies . . .
Some might see
this revival of the "Jewish question" as just a historical accident, but it
seems inherent in the mimetic ambiguity of the notion of the Jews as the
"chosen" people. The Jews are in a very real sense the first nation,
the first people who define themselves by something other than a territory.
Whence their survival in a stateless condition for so long. Yet, again in
contrast to the Gypsies, the religion they created to ensure their survival
(or vice-versa) is at the core of all Western or "Abrahamic" religion.
However many Jews have converted to either Christianity or Islam, the
persistence of Judaism makes it impossible for either of its more successful
rivals to declare itself the "end of history" in the religious sphere.
Over the past
century and a half it has become increasingly clear that, however absurd it
may appear to Enlightenment rationalism, the stigma of sacrificial election
borne by the Jews is the central sore point of Western history. The "end of
history" has to do with the Jews in a quite literal sense. Christians
identified "the conversion of the Jews" with the end of this world and the
coming of God's kingdom. The Marxists wanted to void the "Jewish question"
by abolishing religion altogether and treating the Jews as a
"nationality"--Stalin's increasingly vicious anti-Semitism after WWII
reflects his frustration with the failure of this policy. And for the Nazis,
of course, the extermination of the Jews was the key event that would move
society into "post-history."
These
eschatological visions are defunct. Fukuyama's is not, but it requires
correction. If we take Marx's association of the Jews with capitalism not as
an anti-Semitic slur but as the Hegelian assimilation of a people to an
Idea, then we may interpret Fukuyama's thesis as saying that history is
over, not because the Jews have been eliminated, but because they have
univocally triumphed: globalism even more than liberal democracy is "Jewish"
in its disregard for national boundaries and its insistence on the
circulation of capital. But to put Fukuyama's thesis in these terms is only
another way of displaying its inadequacy. The end of history cannot be
defined by either the annihilation or the triumph of any people.
Today the "Jewish
question" is concentrated in Palestine. The Palestinians did not exist as a
people before the founding of the state of Israel; they were simply the
Arabs living in a particular area in the Middle East, one that had been
incorporated into Trans-Jordan (as it used to be called) but that could just
as well have become part of Syria. The very idea of a Palestinian nation, as
you suggest above, emerged in mimetic opposition to Israeli statehood. I do
not mean to say that it is for that reason spurious or inauthentic. In a
very real sense, all nationalism takes the Jews as its model. This was quite
clear in the case of Germany, as a number of Jewish-German thinkers pointed
out before 1933: the Germans, always the odd men out in Western Europe,
fancied themselves the "chosen people" of the Aryan race.
Israel is
perceived by most Moslems as a source of rage and humiliation. Jewish
exceptionalism is realized there in the most scandalous possible way, by the
implantation of a Western-type society in one of the central holy places of
the Umma. History's answer to those such as Toynbee who thought that, with
the founding of their own state, the Jews would become an ethnic group like
every other, is that Israel merely amplifies the scandal of the "chosen
people" to state level, obliging the Jews to affirm for the sake of their
very survival the sense of superiority to other groups that they had always
been accused of secretly harboring.
History would be
easier without Israel, but it is only with Israel that it can achieve
closure. One of Barak's proposals that I hope will one day be renewed is the
agreement to share control of Jerusalem. It is certainly true that
Jerusalem, whatever its significance for Moslems, is the only city sacred to
the Jews; no one is asking for joint control of Mecca or Medina. But,
precisely for that reason, the peaceful sharing of power in Jerusalem would
be the sign of a genuine peace, even the beginning of friendship between
Israelis and Palestinians, and thus between Jews and Moslems. In biblical
(or Koranic) terms, this would be the reconciliation of Isaac and Ishmael,
the legitimate heir and the outcast. By sharing Jerusalem, the Jews would
symbolically share the "chosenness" that has made them the objects of
millennial resentment with an Arab nation that is in a very real sense
Israel's own creation. However unrealistic it may sound at the moment, I
think it is only through the benign example of the oldest nation serving as
godfather to the newest that the phase of history dominated by war will end.
As things are
going at present, this peace and friendship may be a long time in coming.
Meanwhile, by way of making a beginning in the realm of ideas, I am grateful
for this opportunity to converse in peace and friendship with you.
1
|