State of exception. Land of confusion. It can be plausibly be asserted that Zionism has been intertwined in racial identity issues since its modern incarnation that began before Herzl. The hierarchy and pecking order, the old tropes of status and distinction were to be reproduced outside Europe in a new ghetto in which the oppressed could now switch roles. This involved a re- constructing of ‘the Jew’, a kind of social psychological cosmetic surgery where hefty noses, slouched posture and the aura of victimhood found the scrapheap of the laboratory and replaced by new differentiations between Palestinian and Jew and between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jew.Under such a foundational basis, the ideal of a one state solution can only be realized through an understanding of Israel as a racial entity rather than ethnocentric collectivity or colonial project.
Jean Leon Gerome. Lentin:In line with Said’s logic that thinking Palestine is indelibly linked to thinking Zionism, Goldberg argues that ‘Israel cannot live with the Palestinians, purging them persistently from green-line Israel, but cannot live without them, conceptually as much as materially, existentially as much as emotionally’. However, Zionism is not only about the modernising imperative according to which Jews (though ancient Biblical people) are modern, while Palestinians (Philistines) are pre-modern and thus in need of European Zionism’s civilising – though always also colonising – mission, or what Goldberg calls ‘historicist racism’. Zionism also articulates ‘the Jewish race’, creating homogeneity for ‘the Jewish people’ despite obvious Jewish heterogeneity . Foucault’s idea of the need to defend society and Burleigh and Wipperman’s (1999) theorisation of the Nazi state as the ideal type racial state, where the object was the protection of the body of the volk, bring to mind the Zionist imperative to protect the nebulous body dubbed ‘the Jewish nation’ from antisemitic persecutions, which led to its state building aspirations. Indeed, the Israeli geneticist Rafael Falk reads the entire history of Zionism as a eugenicist race project, aiming to save the Jewish genetic pool from the degeneration forced upon the Jews by diaspora existence . Read More:http://www.ronitlentin.net/2010/12/01/re-thinking-israel-palestine-racial-state-state-of-exception/ image:http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/87.15.130
Lentin: Goldberg’s racial state is a state of power which excludes and includes in order to construct homogeneity, achieved through governmental technologies such as constitutions, border controls, the law, policy making, bureaucracy, population census, but also invented histories and traditions, ceremonies and cultural imaginings, including ancient (in Israel’s case, Biblical) origins. Modern states, each in its own way, are defined by their power to exclude and include in racially ordered terms, aiming to produce a coherent picture of the population by keeping racialised others out and by legislating against the ‘degeneracy’ of indigenous minorities.
If we agree with Goldberg’s theorisation of all modern nation-states as racial states, and with Foucault’s view of racism as intrinsic to all modern, normalising states (through the use of bio- and thanato-political technologies ranging from social exclusion to mass murder), there is little doubt that Israel must be theorised as a racial state par excellence, where, according to Shenhav, ‘there is a constant state of emergency.Read More:http://www.ronitlentin.net/2010/12/01/re-thinking-israel-palestine-racial-state-state-of-exception/
---Thus racism has two functions, the first is separating out groups within a population, the second is making it possible to establish ‘a relationship between my life and the death of the other … the more inferior species die out… the more I – as species rather than individual – can live, the stronger I will be’ (Foucault 2003: 255). Race – understood in classificatory rather than biological terms – becomes a tool of social conservatism and of state racism, which society practices against itself. In the case of Israel, this explains ‘ethnic cleansing’, from Plan Dalet to today’s ongoing land confiscation, house demolitions, and plans to ‘transfer’ Palestinians outside the state’s borders (e.g., Pappe 2006). Read More:http://www.ronitlentin.net/2010/12/01/re-thinking-israel-palestine-racial-state-state-of-exception/
From the beginning, the praxis of the dialog was not to to deny the Arab existence,- the myth of land without a people- but to de-construct these individuals of all human capacities,-especially the desire for a homeland and cultural survival. But, to promote the capacity to be duped and agitated into violence. What results is a condescension, even in a rare gesture of good-will, from a privileged position. This gesture further privileges the Zionist as the one who defines the terms of relationship and, importantly determines whether an antifada, an uprising is a popular expression of the collectively oppressed. Like Apartheid, eventually, the system becomes unsustainable, leading to the present fortress mentality and large scale public intractability in the face of mass complicity.
For the Zionists, the Palestinians were and are “the other”, much as the Arab world had been the other to European society Christian believers since the Crusades. The origins of conflict seemed to be sparked with the first blast of Jewish immigration during 1880-1905 period of pogroms. Tensions then heightened after a second immigration wave and reached its zenith with the Balfour Declaration of 1917. Then began the Jaffa Revolt of 1921, followed by “the lull” until the Jerusalem riots of 1929, the final polarization and deadlock.
---the Zionist Morris, despite his important revelations, refutes ethnic cleansing or the existence of a Zionist plan to evict the Arab population, and has repeatedly said that he regrets the Nakba was not more complete; had Ben Gurion, he wrote in 2008, ‘carried out a full expulsion - rather than a partial one - he would have stabilized the State of Israel for generations’. Read More:http://www.ronitlentin.net/2011/09/05/review-of-palestinian-women-narrative-histories-and-gendered-memory-fatma-kassem-london-zed-books-2011/#more-446 image:http://www.palestineremembered.com/GeoPoints/Jerusalem_5180/Picture_15398.html
Outside the racial issue, the other dimensions of the Zionist vision: spiritual homeland, land of renewal, and geopolitical reality which redeems Jews from the nexus of historical oppression and Diaspora, seemes to serve more as window dressing and flashy public relations. Zionism,for even “liberal” poets like A.M. Klein, would reverse the assimilative and destructive patterns, and restore Jews to the present and future. overlooked, in the idyllic vision, is Klein’s clear and unequivocal acceptance the necessity of armed militancy on behalf of Israel, Zion, and sheer survival. This acceptance is generally mournful,- the shoot and weep syndrome- but sometimes presented with vindictive satisfaction, a relish in the kill.
So, we see that his conflict, particularly complex, has been going on for a long time, and the tactics have remained pretty much the same for a century:
Muslim notables and worshippers objected to certain Jewish observances at the Wall. A crowd of young Jewish men “staged a hitherto unprecedented procession through the streets of Jerusalem to the foot of the Wailing Wall. There they raised the Jewish flag and sang the Zionist anthem–Hatikvah–against the specific instructions of the (British) High Commissioner” . Muslims held a counter-demonstration, and bloodshed followed. The religi
dispute, as Klein knew, fueled the growing fire of Arab hostility toward Zionism….
---Why did you choose to focus on house demolitions? We believed, and still do, that all of the occupation's grievances are bound up in this one issue. I think that, aside from murder, there is no greater injustice than to demolish a family's home, especially in the case of innocent people. I'm not referring to terrorists' houses being demolished; but even in those cases we object to it. We don't believe in sanctioning collective punishment, in punishing an entire family because of one son's actions. However, the majority of house demolitions are carried out against people who build without a permit, because the state refuses to grant them ( the Pelestinians ) construction permits. House demolitions demolish entire families. Think of the trauma children undergo; and trauma is not limited to the children. It's something that can never be erased. This is the reason we chose to deal with this issue, because it is more terrible than other issues. ( Meir Margalit ) Read More:http://www.justvision.org/portrait/76019/interview image:http://www.palestineremembered.com/GeoPoints/Jerusalem_5180/Picture_15392.html
…”Greeting on This Day” was Klein’s response to the intensification of conflict in 1929-1930. The poem seemed even more apt after the Palestinian Revolt of 1936-39, when the struggle between Zionists and Palestinians (with the British playing the middle) finally reached the stage of organized and protracted violent conflict. For Klein, a life-long Zionist, the Palestinian Revolt–not recognized as a popular uprising by Zionists–took place against the backdrop of Nazism and worsening anti-Semitism. Klein was one of the first Zionist spokespeople and Jewish writers to warn against the Nazi menace. Klein was hardly concerned with the claims, grievances and fate of Palestinian Arabs. The fiat was a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and events in Europe strengthened resolve, added urgency, and reinforced the biblical and historical rationale for Zionism. ( Lemm )
---as Abu El-Haj points out, the ‘racist character of the Israeli state – the organisation of the state around the distinction between Jew and non-Jew, military and civilian legal systems, enclosure and movement, and, since the 1967 war, the additional distinction between citizen and subject – becomes … unspeakable for much of the Euro-American world’ (2009: 30), who are blind to the racial nature of the Israeli state as I now argue....The state inherited the British Mandate’s “Emergency Regulations” under which it continued the anomalous suspension of the law, within the law… this system enables: one rule (life) for the majority of the state’s citizens, and another (death, threat of death, threat of expulsion) for the state’s subjects, whose lives have been rendered “bare”’ . Israel keeps creating zones of exception, or, as Abu El-Haj (2009) puts it in relation to Gaza whose inhabitants have been abandoned to their besieged fate, ‘zones of abandonment’. Read More:http://www.ronitlentin.net/2010/12/01/re-thinking-israel-palestine-racial-state-state-of-exception/
israel should be the fist nation to vote “yes” at the united nations and offer full recognition to the state of palestine. the u.s. should follow. it is not just in the best interests of the peoples of israel and palestine to recognize each other’s right to independence and security, it is the most fundamental call of human rights….but mutual recognition has been offered and has been both accepted and rejected by both sides. both sides have leaders in government who reject recognition of the other and pursue concrete policies to undermine the very potential for reconciliation…. ( Hune at Martin Buber Institute )
---Tim Dirks:The film conveys the enigmatic, complex life and exploits of an eccentric, rebellious, desert-loving, messianic, Oxford-bred British Army officer/Welsh cartographer (repeatedly referred to as an "Englishman"), who unites the desert-dwelling Arabian Bedouins against the oppressive Turks (allies of Germany) during World War I. His extraordinary knowledge of the politics and culture of the Mideast allows him to organize the various, willful Arab tribes to repel enemies of the British. Read More:http://www.filmsite.org/lawr.html
Yakov Rabkin:Herzl had already noted in 1894 that Jews had ‘taken on a number of anti-social characteristics’and that Jewish character was ‘damaged’. David Frischman wrote that traditional ‘Jewish life is a dog’s life that evokes disgust’. Chaim Brenner likened Jews to ‘filthy dogs, inhuman, wounded dogs’. A.D. Gordon wrote that European Jews were parasites. M.J. Berdyczewski called traditional Jews ‘spiritual slaves, men whose natural forces had dried up and whose relation to the world was no longer normal,’ and elsewhere, ‘a non-people, a non-nation – non-men indeed.’
Israeli society, which incarnates these theories, naturally inherited this basic anti-Semitism with respect to traditional Jews, which the author illustrates with chilling cartoons drawn from mainstream Israeli press: “it is an ugly picture, and it recalls centuries of anti-Semitic iconography, from sixteenth-century woodblocks of Jews draining the blood of Christian innocents to Nazi portrayals of Jews as vermin” ….
---Rabbi Chaim Soloveitchik the Brisker (1853-1918) asserted that the real purpose of the Zionists was not so much to establish a state as to tear the Jews away from Judaism. In this sense, it becomes irrelevant whether Zionists are Jewish or Christian since both negate the Jewish tradition and strive to transform a Jew into a different entity, a goal that many would deem truly anti-Semitic.--- Read More:http://www.yakovrabkin.ca/english/articles/judaism-zionism-and-israel/antisemitism-in-zionism-and-in-israel/ image:http://www.palestineremembered.com/GeoPoints/Jerusalem_5180/Picture_78752.html
…Efron recalls that the main objective of Zionism was “regeneration” of the traditional Jew and his transformation into a virtually Aryan model of a Muskuljude, a strong, blond farmer tilling the land and valiantly defending his land and his people. This negates any value to the traditional Jew: intellectual, urban and meek, in line with Europe’s varieties of transformative nationalism of the 1930s.
At the same time as it professes it, Zionism postulates that anti-Semitism is a constant of this world and that only in Israel can Jews feel truly safe. Israel has benefited from moderate doses of anti-Semitism: it has increased its Jewish population by attracting those who feel threatened by the anti-Semites elsewhere. Israeli agents are even known to have spread anti-Jewish sentiments in order to frighten Jews and to encourage their aliya (e.g., in Morocco and Iraq). Read More:http://www.yakovrabkin.ca/english/articles/judaism-zionism-and-israel/antisemitism-in-zionism-and-in-israel/
---Feisel's camp is under attack from the Turks. They are interrupted by the sounds of explosions and Turkish bi-planes flying overhead in an air-raid bombing attack on the camp. Obviously indifferent to the needs of the Arabs, Brighton explains why the primitive Arabs are so vulnerable and how they ignored his suggestion to move south: They simply will not understand what modern weapons do. Out of the billowing black smoke, Lawrence appears almost as an answer to the Prince's prayers. Demoralized and feeling defeated, Feisal realizes his sword, and other long-standing, archaic Arab methods of warfare, are powerless against the modern weaponry from the air. You understand, Lieutenant Lawrence, my people are unused to explosives and machines. First the guns and now this.... Read More:http://www.filmsite.org/lawr.html
ADDENDUM:
From Lawrence of Arabia:
Brighton: The one essential sector of this front is and must be the Canal. You can see that, sir, surely.
Feisal: I see that the Canal is an essential British interest. It is of little consequence to us.
Brighton: I must ask you not to speak like that, sir. British and Arab interests are one and the same.
Feisal: Possibly.
Sherif: Ha! Ha!
Brighton believes the Arab guerrilla tribes should retreat to Yenbo because they need discipline, training by European officers (and ultimately absorption into the regular British forces), and equipment: “a modern rifle for every man.” Instead, Feisel demands “guns like the Turkish guns at Medina.” Brighton insists that the English must first teach the Bedouin to “fight a modern, mechanized army.” Although silenced by his military superior for being a disloyal “traitor,” young Lawrence is sympathetic with Feisal’s views and will not remain quiet. He is allowed to speak his personal opinions in “Feisal’s tent,” expressing a “passionate” appreciation of the vastness of the desert and the independent fighting spirit of the Arab tribes:…
---"even in the deepest sinking there is the hidden purpose of an ultimate rising. thus it is for all men, from none is the source of light withheld unless he himself withdraws from it. therefore the most important thing is never to despair." - nachman of bratzlav. the hurt is a fact, but the despair is a choice. (most times)--- Image:http://www.palestineremembered.com/GeoPoints/Bab_al_Sahira_Herod_s_Gate_3950/Picture_12386.html
…Lawrence: I think your book is right. The desert is an ocean in which no oar is dipped. And on this ocean, the Bedouin go where they please and strike where they please. This is the way the Bedouin has always fought. You are famed throughout the world for fighting in this way and this is the way you should fight now.
Brighton: I don’t know.
Lawrence: I’m sorry sir, but you’re wrong. Fall back on Yenbo, sir, and the Arab uprising becomes one poor unit in the British army.
Lawrence remains with the soft-spoken Feisal after Brighton and Sherif Ali leave the tent, and as they speak about the Arab destiny in the face of Western warfare, the masts of the tent creak as the wind blows. All too well, Prince Feisal understands the imperialistic English hunger for Arab lands. “Desert-loving” Lawrence has his own personal hungers for “desolate places”:
---Lemm:When the first wave of Jewish immigrants arrived, Palestine was still ruled by the decadent Ottoman Empire. In 1880, seventy percent of Palestinian Arabs were peasant farmers, paying taxes to an exploitative Turkish feudal system. Indeed, cultivable land was returning to desert, but more because of Ottoman rule than Palestinian ineptness. Even in 1880-1914, Palestinian peasants who survived Turkish exploitation supported themselves on their farms. There were cities, too, primarily developed and occupied by Palestinians: Acre, Jerusalem, Nazareth, Jaffa, Jericho, Hebron, Haifa, Ramlah. Palestinians constituted the majority in the region until the "uprooting" of 1948. The dominant landowners who sold to Jewish settlers were: 1) absentee Lebanese and Syrian landowners; 2) the Ottoman government, through auctions of land on which peasants could not pay taxes; 3) Palestinian Christian families; 4) Palestinian Muslim notables. Those landowners share responsibility for the conflict, but their distance and power spared them. Read More:http://dev.hil.unb.ca/Texts/SCL/bin/get.cgi?directory=vol16_2/&filename=Lemm.htm image:http://www.palestineremembered.com/GeoPoints/Dome_of_the_Rock_3747/Picture_15431.html
Feisal: Colonel Brighton means to put my men under European officers, does he not?
Lawrence: In effect my lord, yes.
Feisal: And I must do it because the Turks have European guns. But I fear to do it. Upon my soul I do. The English have a great hunger for desolate places. I fear they hunger for Arabia.
Lawrence: Then you must deny it to them.
Feisal: You are an Englishman. Are you not loyal to England?
Lawrence: To England, and to other things.
Feisal: To England and Arabia both? And is that possible? (He walks right up close and looks into Lawrence’s eyes.) I think you are another of these desert-loving English…No Arab loves the desert. We love water and green trees, there is nothing in the desert. No man needs nothing. Or is it that you think we are something you can play with because we are a little people? A silly people, greedy, barbarous, and cruel? What do you know, Lieutenant. In the Arab city of Cordova, there were two miles of public lighting in the streets when London was a village…
Lawrence: Yes, you were great.
Feisal: ..nine centuries ago…
Lawrence: Time to be great again, my Lord.
Feisal: …which is why my father made this war upon the Turks. My father, Mr. Lawrence, not the English. Now my father is old. And I, I long for the vanished gardens of Cordova. However, before the gardens must come fighting. To be great again, it seems that we need the English or…
Lawrence: …or?…
Feisal: …what no man can provide, Mr. Lawrence. We need a miracle! Read More:http://www.filmsite.org/lawr.html
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---are full of despair and "stoic" "waiting"--without the promise of Zion or a final release from oppression. Klein's "frozen patience" and "bright empirics" echo forward to the forlornness and last-ditch stand in "Portrait of the Artist as Landscape," with the poet as "nth Adam" whose "secret shines .... At the bottom of the sea." The paradox of the drowned poet has its counterpart in Klein's "Childe Harold," another Wandering Jew, whose pilgrimage is a tour of Jewish suffering through the centuries, and whose poetics are an ironic solace within "a saecular imperturbability." In 1940 the "cauchemar" had returned. For Klein, a homeland in Palestine seemed more essential and more remote than ever. --- Read More:http://dev.hil.unb.ca/Texts/SCL/bin/get.cgi?directory=vol16_2/&filename=Lemm.htm
The excitable, emotional Auda is angered and displeased while looting the Aqaba garrison when he finds only paper money and not a “box of gold.” To appease his ally, Lawrence makes out a voucher for payment of gold to Auda before crossing the Sinai to reach Cairo:
Lawrence: Did Auda come to Aqaba for gold?
Auda: For my pleasure as you said. But gold is honorable. And Aurens promised gold. Aurens lied.
Lawrence: See, Auda. (He speaks the words as he writes out a promissory note) The Crown of England promises to pay 5,000 golden guineas to Auda Abu Tayi. Signed in his Majesty’s absence by me. (He hands the voucher to Auda) In ten days, I’ll be back with the gold – with gold, with guns, with everything.
Auda: In ten days. You will cross Sinai?
Lawrence: Why not? Moses did.
Auda: And you will take the children?
Lawrence (his voice echoing): Moses did.
Auda (shouting after him): Moses was a prophet and beloved of God…
(To Ali) He said there was gold here. He lied. He is not perfect.
---"The long-run goal," writes Edward Said, "is, I think, the same for every human being, that politically he or she may be allowed to live free from fear, insecurity, terror, and oppression, free also from the possibility of exercising unequal or unjust domination over others. This long-run goal has different meanings for the Palestinian Arabs and for the Israeli Jews. For the latter, it means freedom from the awful historical pressure of anti-Semitism whose culmination was Nazi genocide, freedom from fear of the Arabs, and freedom also from the blindness of programmatic Zionism in its practise against the non-Jew. For the former, the long-run goal is freedom from exile and dispossesion, freedom from the cultural and psychological ravages of historical marginality, and freedom also from the inhuman attitudes and practises toward the oppressing Israel"--- Read More:http://dev.hil.unb.ca/Texts/SCL/bin/get.cgi?directory=vol16_2/&filename=Lemm.htm image:http://www.palestineremembered.com/GeoPoints/Mahaneh_Yehuda_3954/Picture_11631.html
While crossing the Sinai, Lawrence spots a cyclone of dust that he calls “a pillar of fire,” alluding to Moses….Read More:http://www.filmsite.org/lawr2.html
Read More:http://dev.hil.unb.ca/Texts/SCL/bin/get.cgi?directory=vol16_2/&filename=Lemm.htm
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