Hi Jordan. I read your piece. It is interesting but I am not quite sure of the point it is trying to make.
We know that the area has been called some version of Palestine since antiquity. But the point of the modern conflict isn't really a name. Would things have been peaceful if the modern state of Israel settled on calling itself Palestine rather than Israel?
We also know that there has been a historical polity known as Israel - so it's not just a modern invention.
The contestation today is about the fact that there exists a large Arabic Muslim population who refuses to share land and power with a Jewish population. And no, this isn't a case of Jewish settlers imposing themselves on a poor native population. There were many Jews living in the area continually through different imperial eras, many who were exiled from neighbouring countries, and many who fled genocides and rightfully looking for a new home.
Jews fleeing pogroms didn't overthrow the Ottomans because the Ottomans allowed them to stay. It was only in response to Arabic violence that there became a desire to declare an independent Israel.
For the Jews, this wasn’t some fun colonial experiment. It was an existential project. They had faced persecution everywhere. Poland had been one of the countries to accept Jews after they were exiled from England and Spain. And then the Nazis attacked. Same goes for the Netherlands.
And it doesn’t matter if you view Jews as an ethnicity, a culture or a religion. The Nazis identified them as an irreconcilable genetic line that had to be purged. That meant that Jews didn’t even get to choose if they were Jewish or not. And like it or not, we are identified by our enemies – no matter how we self-identify.
Israel exists because Jews have been hounded for millennia by ignorant and capricious civilizations. It exists because no other country has stood up to defend them.
To further contest your article, Palestine being referred to as a “country” does not give it a national-identity. Nationalism is a 19th century construct and there was never an independent Palestinian national identity. It was always a colony of a larger empire.
In fact, the closest thing there was to Palestinian nationalism was Zionism. And the Palestinians simply renamed themselves to Israelis.
The reason that modern Palestinian identity is so questionable is because it hijacks the name of Palestine and uses it to grant an identity that never really was. Arabs in historical Palestine didn’t care about independence. They just wanted to live under an Islamic Arab polity. The idea of a Palestinian nationhood was only founded in the 1960s after other Arabic countries failed to destroy Israel.
Yasser Arafat, an Egyptian, then used the term Palestine to gain international support and fabricated a simplistic idea of a native population supplanted by European settlers. A fiction.
Nations as political entities are a relatively new political construct. Most nations were founded in the 20th century. Ghana was never a nation-state. South Africa became a nation-state in reality when it broke away from the British Empire in 1961. South Sudan became a nation-state in 2011.
I think your article misses the point.
The Israeli people, aka. the Jews have maintained a continuous connection to that land, regardless of what it is called, for thousands of years. That means something.
There is a huge difference between a country and a nation. A country is a defined geographical territory. A nation is the common identity and political will of a people.
Prior to Arafat, there was no expression of a Palestinian national identity divorced from Zionism.
Palestine also was never independent. It may have been called a country in some texts, but it was called so irresponsibly. Prior to becoming Israel, Palestine never had sovereign borders and an independent government. It was a territory of larger polities.
The first expression of it being an independent country and nation was when it was named Israel in 1948 and declared its independence from the British Empire.
Hi Jordan. I read your piece. It is interesting but I am not quite sure of the point it is trying to make.
We know that the area has been called some version of Palestine since antiquity. But the point of the modern conflict isn't really a name. Would things have been peaceful if the modern state of Israel settled on calling itself Palestine rather than Israel?
We also know that there has been a historical polity known as Israel - so it's not just a modern invention.
The contestation today is about the fact that there exists a large Arabic Muslim population who refuses to share land and power with a Jewish population. And no, this isn't a case of Jewish settlers imposing themselves on a poor native population. There were many Jews living in the area continually through different imperial eras, many who were exiled from neighbouring countries, and many who fled genocides and rightfully looking for a new home.
Jews fleeing pogroms didn't overthrow the Ottomans because the Ottomans allowed them to stay. It was only in response to Arabic violence that there became a desire to declare an independent Israel.
For the Jews, this wasn’t some fun colonial experiment. It was an existential project. They had faced persecution everywhere. Poland had been one of the countries to accept Jews after they were exiled from England and Spain. And then the Nazis attacked. Same goes for the Netherlands.
And it doesn’t matter if you view Jews as an ethnicity, a culture or a religion. The Nazis identified them as an irreconcilable genetic line that had to be purged. That meant that Jews didn’t even get to choose if they were Jewish or not. And like it or not, we are identified by our enemies – no matter how we self-identify.
Israel exists because Jews have been hounded for millennia by ignorant and capricious civilizations. It exists because no other country has stood up to defend them.
To further contest your article, Palestine being referred to as a “country” does not give it a national-identity. Nationalism is a 19th century construct and there was never an independent Palestinian national identity. It was always a colony of a larger empire.
In fact, the closest thing there was to Palestinian nationalism was Zionism. And the Palestinians simply renamed themselves to Israelis.
The reason that modern Palestinian identity is so questionable is because it hijacks the name of Palestine and uses it to grant an identity that never really was. Arabs in historical Palestine didn’t care about independence. They just wanted to live under an Islamic Arab polity. The idea of a Palestinian nationhood was only founded in the 1960s after other Arabic countries failed to destroy Israel.
Yasser Arafat, an Egyptian, then used the term Palestine to gain international support and fabricated a simplistic idea of a native population supplanted by European settlers. A fiction.
Nations as political entities are a relatively new political construct. Most nations were founded in the 20th century. Ghana was never a nation-state. South Africa became a nation-state in reality when it broke away from the British Empire in 1961. South Sudan became a nation-state in 2011.
I think your article misses the point.
The Israeli people, aka. the Jews have maintained a continuous connection to that land, regardless of what it is called, for thousands of years. That means something.
There is a huge difference between a country and a nation. A country is a defined geographical territory. A nation is the common identity and political will of a people.
Prior to Arafat, there was no expression of a Palestinian national identity divorced from Zionism.
Palestine also was never independent. It may have been called a country in some texts, but it was called so irresponsibly. Prior to becoming Israel, Palestine never had sovereign borders and an independent government. It was a territory of larger polities.
The first expression of it being an independent country and nation was when it was named Israel in 1948 and declared its independence from the British Empire.