Sunday, November 22, 2009
"People try to make out that the conflict is more profound than it is: a clash of civilisations, a clash of religions, about what the bible says. It is not. It is about one group of people trying to steal another people’s country. I don’t find that so complicated! I don’t believe it requires a degree in rocket science to decipher its mysteries, in the same way that it doesn’t require any profound knowledge to understand why Native Americans fought back. It wasn’t because of a clash of civilisations, or because of anti-Christianism or anti-Europeanism or some such, it was because they were being displaced and dispossessed from their homeland – and so they resisted."
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
"For me, politics is very personal. So there are both political and intellectual elements to it, of course, but I always fix in my mind’s eye people that I personally know who are the victims, and that tells me that I should continue. My friend in Palestine – a wonderful, decent human being who is being ground under by this merciless occupation and merciless country – that is my motivation."
ReplyDeleteThis is very close to Hannah Arendt's position, and why she was excoriated when she was questioned about her views of the "Jewish people." She responded about her friends, and confessed that she had no particular attachment to "a people."
Hannah knew that her problem was not that she was stateless, but the nation state in the 20th century that reduced Jews to a non-recognized minority. This now produces another “stateless” among the Palestinians. The only question that remains is will the state of Israel try to liquidate the “problem” they created.
So the question of Ahabath Israel remains, of which she answers that I love my friends not a people. She goes on to rightly consider the non-separation of religion and state disastrous (and it has proven to be true). Or the substitution of god for the people, so that even the interpretation is that the people returning is essentially the mashiach – she does not believe in them but belongs to them. She is physei and not nomo. Being this she can take her own stand politically, whether or not they conform to some supposed norm of “Jewish” in being or in the political position. What had changed from her earlier views? That we may indeed by Jewish yet be divergent in our views. The rise of Fascism and totalitarianism did away with a place in the nation state, which arose from personal experience. So to accede to Zionism is to do away with the universal nature of the Never Again, and carries with it the seeds of our own destruction.