Polemics

This afternoon they all looked visibly worn out.

Reconstruction af the offices coincided along with the summer’s festivals and a flurry of boisterous people had wrecked their days and nights for the last week.

M: “Yesterday I missed my chance to paint a picture which I find important. I want to continue that today.

We talked about religion as a road to dignity. We saw how a revolution was built into the struggle that ended up producing the Iranian constitution.

Gerald compared with our society, and I attempted an answer but frankly failed. What I missed was constructing a bigger picture.

We stupidly ask why Iranians revolt against status quo. They had a good modernising society. We have self respect, so they must have self respect. Nobody is disrespecting them.

And that is key: Not them, but us. We have self respect and that is built into our laws and constitution. Rubbish! It is a product of being privileged and unchallenged. We do not have to topple any system to introduce a discontinuity. We are already where we want to be.”

G: “Is that from the playbook?”

C: “The question is not whether it sounds corny but if it can work like that.”

Gerald was thinking.

G: “Let’s be honest: None of us know enough about history to be able to judge those bold claims. What do other people say?”

C: “Endless debates about whether Israel is a coloniser or not depending on what you highlight from history. I’m sceptical to the point that I’d be willing to argue that any journalist who even bother investing time in analysing if anybody is something is wasting our life.”

M: “I doubt we can do any better. Thinking is nothing but us chasing our own tails.”

One random article

C: “Okay. We’ll see what other people are saying. Let’s look at random articles. Here:”

GAZA AND THE DE-COLONIZATION NARRATIVE - HUSSAIN ABDUL-HUSSAIN - PERSUASION

But history shows that Western colonialism of Arab territory, which arguably started with Napoleon’s 1798 landing in Egypt, did not alter the course of a centuries-old downward Arab trend. If anything, Western colonialism helped halt the decline a bit […]. Without Europeans colonizing, creating Arab states, then giving them their independence, the Arabs would almost certainly still have been living in Turkish provinces up until today.

C: “The logic I guess is this: Nothing in history changes of its own. No first cause, no change. It took Napoleon to trigger the Arab Nahda.”

G: “That one is easy. Just extrapolate until the picture looks strange. Napoleon only stood in Egypt because he was part of a much bigger change which may have been spearheaded by France, England and USA but was certainly to take place all over the map. No spillover effect ever to have happened? He came as a conqueror wrestling with the Ottomans and then the British Empire. But he floated on top of a liberalisation process which had begun without him. No French Revolution, no Napoleon.

Which of the old empires remain today? Nationalism ended empires. The right to political self determination ended empires.”

C: “What is easy about that? When you explain, you focus on the how ideas move across the political map. Hussain focusses on which great man plants a seed there. You are picking from the library of history just as much as he is.”

But Western (mainly European) powers left the Middle East and North Africa over half a century ago. For the Arab spectator, Israel became the befitting substitute for Arab rage against the West. Anti-imperial progressive Arabs saw Jews as alien colonials who had immigrated from Europe to Mandate Palestine. It did not matter that in 1950, already half of the Jewish population of Israel had relocated from Arab countries.

G: “In my view, Israel and Arabs both launched political nationalist projects around the same time - as the power of the British and French subsided. That caused them to compete with each other, and more importantly, Egyptian, Syrian, Jordanian, Iraqi, Yemeni, Lebanese projects often competed with each other.

The Arab world - even without Israel - was amply able to constitute a balance of power system with inevitable losers in the battle for the land. Israel was beset by fear of annihilation. As it was clear that independent nations would come into existence around them, and as they felt they had to either grow into a nation or vanish. The 1936 Arab uprising was just one reminder.

They opted for declaring the state of Israel in 1948 in the face of Arab rejection of UN 181.”

C: “So you agree that there is something wrong in reducing everything to Arab being victims of stronger powers?”

G: “I agree with his critique that if, and indeed only if, the emblem of colonialism has been attached to a group, that group is reduced to its guilty quality in the eyes of posterity.

I need the colonial framing to clearly see the structural reasons to why Palestinians very late in the process started to build constitutions, something which Israel started much earlier.

But I also need the very fierce dynamics of competing ideologies to explain e.g. the Yemen Civil War (monarchism vs republicanism) or the Lebanese civil war (Maronite Christians vs Shia vs Sunni and others). In this case, I see the colonial big foot as nothing more than a valve opening up a power vacuum and the subsequent explosion is then only formally explained by colonialism. The big guys left and everybody struggled over the remaining land.

Consequence of colonialism? Both yes and no.”

Christine nodded in partial agreement.

C: “But you can’t come up with such an explanation without also adding that big footing leaves a buoyancy effect: Those suppressed will only slowly rise. And frankly, the colonisers protected their investments and commercial ties longer than that.”

M: “Arab, besides all that, is a strange word in this picture, as it effaces distinctions between Hashemite monarchists, Marxist republicans, pan-Arabist Nasserists, Ba’athist socialists, ascendent Islamists later in the 1970s-1980s. The Arab revolt was very agentic. That however does not in any way preclude the existence of colonialism. Or should I say colonial mechanisms, as we risk the same danger of effacement fallacy: There is no “Arab” as there is no “coloniser” but people whose decisions feel justified to themselves.

One detail remains: Colonisation is always about power. Don’t forget that. You have to add more than feelings and yearnings to the equation. Organisation, goal seeking planning and realisation are where it becomes real.”

C: “So you do believe in a smoking gun!

May I remind that the author of the article also has that errand: Rejection of a singular image of Arabs as victims and expansion of the horizon when it comes to Arabs. At least initially. Then he seems to trail off on a course towards a world where Arabs only have themselves to thank for their worries.”

M: “I only say it because I don’t want us to speculate aimlessly. And yes, Gerald, I am aware that we have to examine on a case by case basis.”

G: “I believe in finding another article, preferably from the opposite end.”

Christine obliged his wish readily.

Another random article

C: “It seems Laleh Khalili, an Iranian professor in politics in Britain, is busy refuting a rather forthright article as well as a book by Adam Kirsh which again labours to bemoan a left wing that obsesses (as he sees i) with settlements. The term settlement colonialism is the central one here.”

G: “Yeah okay. We are used to arriving in the middle of an argument by now. Let’s hear.”

HISTORY LESSON - JEWISH CURRENTS - LALEH KHALILI

IN AUGUST 2024, The Atlantic published a slapdash essay by the literary critic Adam Kirsch titled “The False Narrative of Settler Colonialism.” Kirsch claimed that the concept of settler colonialism was developed in the 1990s “as a way of linking social evils in [Australia, Canada, and the United States] today—such as climate change, patriarchy, and economic inequality—to their origin in colonial settlement,” and that it could not possibly be applied to brave little Israel.

G: “That’s the opening line? What on earth are they talking about? Colonial climate change?”

Christine scrutinised and shrugged her shoulders.

C: “I think overall Kirsch is in an errand to discredit the idea that Israel is comparable to other colonial powers.”

After all, unlike the US or Australia, Israel’s settlement of a former “province of the Ottoman Empire” did not have continental reach, what with Israel being “about the size of New Jersey,” pluckily bobbing in a hostile sea of Arab states. And whereas settler colonialism is marked by “the destruction of Indigenous peoples and cultures,” Israel, Kirsch insisted, “did not erase or replace the people already living in Palestine.”

M: “Oh this is embarrassing. I know of the field of settler colonialism but I haven’t read anything myself. It certainly is a scholarly field.”

C: “That would explain why Khalili reacts against Kirsch’s non-scholarly line. Kirsch is doing what we are doing: Shooting from the hips. Scholars are entrenched in theory, Kirsch is not.”

M: “That is why Khalili complains that Kirsch’ article is anti-woke. Kirsch is another person fighting opinion with theory. The usual response from the scholarly world faces the same challenge: Their theory cannot be easily explained and certainly not if you expect the innocent reader to accept its views. Their best shot is a mix of authoritarian appeal and use of a nomenclature that nobody dares challenge. The scholar, for her part, is faced with a double demand: Both educate the reader and convey a thought. She does well, if you ask me. I can reverse engineer fragments of what settler colonialism is all about.”

Zionist political institutions such as the Histadrut, the General Federation of Labor in the Land of Israel, guaranteed jobs for new Jewish migrants and created a racialized wage regime whereby unionized Jewish workers could earn as much as four times more than Arab workers—in other words, a system of apartheid.

G: “Wouldn’t it be wiser to skip labels such as apartheid from the outset? I would contend that Jews arriving from East Europe and Russia would naturally experience centripetal forces and protect those of the same kind. If you add a sense of vulnerability, you could easily explain Jewish behaviour in the Yishuv. Kirsch sounds like he is doing a much worse job of obscuring the human reality with loaded words. But flipping his sign and walking in his footsteps is hardly an excuse.”

M: “She isn’t flipping anything at all. She is rightly pointing out that once organisation and systematisation sets in, the regime becomes institutionalised and routinised.”

G: “I understand that. In vain I try to return to the point where these behaviours became forged in the first place.

Palestinians and Jews both did pretty much what you and I would have done under similar circumstances. If you call that apartheid, you are only condemning yourself. When I say “you” and “I”, that entails our cultural awareness, our vocabulary, history and realities. Holocaust doesn’t have to be a remembered trauma to affect decision making. The mere reflex that Jews are susceptible to become victims is enough, if you are seeking security guarantees.

Such vocabulary constitute our straight lines which extrapolated shows where we as a nation decide to go. They were both aggressors and both scared of each other. The fact that it resulted in unfair distribution and structural asymmetries is a lamentable fact baked into the fabric of history by now.”

M: “Decolonisation is the required remedy for un-baking those facts from history.”

G: “I’d rather prefer my process for undoing history. Khalili’s decolonisation process seems to falter when being sold to Israelis. Apparently few settlers like to be lectured.”

C: “What other road to peace than what Khalili talks about is then possible?”

G: “Christine, if only I knew.

Will you agree with me that historically speaking there is nothing unimaginable in suggesting that Israel and Palestinians will in hundred years from now be fighting tooth and nail on the same side in some very different war? History has produced similar changes of the tides before. England and France are hardly the rivals they once were. Hypothetical, indeed, but conceivable. You can imagine it and I can. Why? Because deep down we know the conflict isn’t rooted in reality itself.”

Miranda looked at the two others, but her mind was on her old studies.

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