Pearls and Irritations

Palestine’s problem is only partly expressed as a frustrated 2-State Solution; it might, more effectively be understood as a 2-Israel problem.

The times are desperate, and the belief systems and politics that create them must be called out and described for what they are: preposterous. The poets make more sense of than most; Yeats, especially:

“We had fed the heart on fantasies / The heart’s grown brutal with the fare”.

Translation: no matter how much one might long for it, a Palestinian state alongside the state of Israel – the Two-State Solution – is a doomed aspiration.

It is a hope besieged on all sides by a confluence of forces, and given that it has been frustrated for 76 years, it has already passed, by several factors, beyond the longest sieges of history – Candia (21 years); Philadelphia, Anatolia 12 years); Ishiyama Honganji, Osaka (10 years); Drepana, Carthage, and Thessalonica, Macedonia (both 8 years); late 18^th Century Gibraltar (43 months); Leningrad (872 days).

These forces have been described in straightforward political-historical terms on this site, especially in the insightful and compellingly argued accounts by former Australian ambassador to various Middle East states, Dr. Bob Bowker. What follows are a couple of riffs upon the themes which he, and many others address for the purpose of highlighting strains of thought and action which, though present, need to be repeated so that their nature might be captured – and yes – held up to the ridicule and contempt that they deserve.

It helps to understand this objective if one approaches the world of international politics as a dysfunctional realm in which cognitive dissonance is both the required and the operational emotional state of all those who enter it.

Put another way, they are not only required to normalise the need to hold contradictory beliefs and attitudes, and therefore to engage in contradictory behaviour but also to interact with others in generically the same state but whose beliefs and behaviours will frequently contradict their own.

For Palestinians whose demand is that they live in their own genuine nation state, on lands they have long inhabited, their appeal fails at a fundamental level: the system of states -and that mythical shapeshifter, the “international community” – loudly proclaims four fundamental principles which are antithetical to each other.

These are that: state sovereignty is inviolable; nations and other collectivities of peoples have the right to self-determination; democratic politics within states is the best guarantee of international order; and the protection of human rights is universally agreed.

What is not proclaimed is the Principle of the Exception. Although some might say that the occasional reference to Thucydides – “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must” – and that his overall history of the Peloponnesian Wars is a paean to imperialism’s self-absolution from acknowledging rights or justice in the relations between states, they do not capture the nature of the Exception.

And for the Palestinians that nature is ordained by the ultima ratio which is God and by whose dictates, according to the state of Israel which now occupies most of their traditional lands, they are dispossessed by divine ordinance.

Consider this ultima ratio in its most recent introductions into the discourse of the multi-front wars in the Middle East. Two articles on this site, Paul Heywood-Smith (25 June this year) and Jeffrey D. Sachs (4 October last), capture the claims of Zionism and the reasons that negotiation and compromise with the Palestinians are impossible as long as they remain dogma.

On the bases of biblical passages in Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy, Ezekiel, Joshua, Samuel, and Genesis – especially what is referred to as the Abrahamic Covenant – the people of Israel were deeded all land west of the Jordan River and violence is morally mandated to ensure its possession.

To those who subscribe to this ideology, the attacks by Hamas on 7 October 2023 not only warranted retribution but reinforced the underlying sense that ethnically cleansing that territory of Palestinians, by genocidal war, if necessary, is both justified and imperative.

If peace (minimally defined as the absence of actual fighting) is to have any chance, the logic of the situation is that either the Palestinians must deny their history as once co-inhabitants of the lands in question and agree to become a diaspora with all the tragedy that would entail, or the Zionists must adopt compromise as a negotiating tool – a stance that, for them, amounts to betrayal. Peace, in these circumstances, demands nothing less than unconditional surrender by one side and absolute victory for the other.

With only the ancient Hebrew Bibles to justify their claims, it is doubtful whether the Zionists would be taken seriously were it not for the deciding factor that force – Israel’s own and that of its patron, the United States – plays.

But the true significance of this relationship exceeds that of Patron-Client and is more accurately that between the Israel derived from the Hebrew Bible (Israel 1.0) and an Israel (Israel 2.0) usurped by American political leaders, scholars and commentators down the years.

What this corpus of national expression describes is an extraordinary trajectory – from what superficially appeared to be Reformation settlements to incarnation as God’s New Israel. It is as though the Republic of laws and not of men was never enough; what mattered, and still matters is the will and the drive to be Exceptional.

Israel 1.0 is to be honoured, respected, and protected as the progenitor and prophetic precedent of Israel 2.0 but it could not and can never be 2.0; indeed, America’s role is to engage, when necessary, in regenerative intervention of Israel 1.0, because, in Edward Gibbon’s phrase, it sees itself “invested with the sublime perfections of the Eternal Parent.”

Phrased differently, Palestine’s problem is only partly expressed as a frustrated 2-State Solution; it might, more effectively be understood as a 2-Israel Problem.

What is to hand is a self-congratulatory history infused, as Walter Russell Mead notes, with claims, historical writings, sermons, and narratives that are redolent with an informed self-awareness of an America as historical world exemplar “set like a ….. light unto the Gentiles as they sit in immemorial darkness.”

From the beginning, the idea of America was one embodying an “inexpugnable uniqueness” beyond the common conceits of national identities found universally. Since America was constructed and defined in oppositional terms to Europe and its entrapment in history; America was to be “the land that left Europe and history behind” because it was both outside of history, and the end of history.

Inseparable from an understanding of this fantasy is the meaning given to the land which was America, and its method of seizure. It was a continent of virgin land, abundant in natural resources, and without the structures which gave rise to history as understood by the European settlement.

When, in time, a successful revolution led to the establishment of republican government, and the ample opportunities for wealth creation which the land afforded, the mythic views of the new world which were first expressed in the old, European world blossomed: America was part of God’s eternal plan, which by definition meant “America” was ahistorical, and which, accordingly, rendered human history as experienced in Europe, chrono politically impossible and theologically inadmissible for America.

Taken together, the elements of American Exceptionalism have induced in the United States a discourse of unique sensibilities, not just of nationalism, but of national mission – a tendency to universalise the American experience and to either export it, or impose it, or both.

As Todd Gitlin put this still-prevailing view many years later, “we are not so much a nation as a mission. . . We are the people who think we have been chosen to choose.“

Believing it is “exceptional”, it believes it is also invincible; believing it is “exceptional” and the instrument of a universal mission, it tends neither to compromise nor to trust diplomacy (for that, in its classical Greek legacy, has a basis in compromise). It tends, therefore, to decide in solitude, and to act unilaterally.

Moreover, caught between the “truth” of its own exceptionalism and the world’s non-American realities, it is ethically adrift, which is to say only pragmatic. But since pragmatism, understood as such, is a poor excuse for war, when conflict occurs the situation requires that “Americans must define their role . . . as being on God’s side against Satan.”

Of equal significance is that to all such adventures are attached an indulgence, a special favour, rather than a legal right, which provokes no guilt for the harm caused no matter its historical dimensions.

As Lewis Lapham caustically observed, the denial of ethical deliberation which this disposition entails gives rise to hypocrisies of monumental dimensions, proclaiming as they do:

. . . rose-coloured images of the American paradise shaped by the milk-white hand of Providence, the citadel of virtue and the ark of innocence, a nation so favoured by God . . that it never killed a buffalo or a Cherokee Indian, never ran a gambling casino or lynched a Negro or bribed a judge or elected a President as stupid as Warren Harding. And because it had behaved itself so well (always doing right, always dressed for church), it had become a land entirely overgrown with honeysuckle, where the urban poor go quietly off to reservations in Utah and nobody . . . fornicates on Sunday afternoons.

Denial, however, is counter-balanced by expropriation. Robert Bellah observed that, at every point behind American history, as reflected in American Exceptionalism, lie Biblical archetypes: Exodus, Chosen People, Promised Land, New Jerusalem, Sacrificial Death and Rebirth.

Indeed, in conjunction with the equation of America with ancient Israel, there is a justificatory role for virtually every demarche undertaken in the name of the national interest.

In this light, Johan Galtung discerns that the United States becomes the incarnation of the dream of the mythological Israel; it is the metaphor made fact in thinking and acting, as President William Howard Taft made clear in 1912:

We are not going to intervene in Mexico until no other course of action is possible, but I must protect our people in Mexico as far as possible, and their property, by having the government (in Mexico) understand that there is a God in Israel and he is on duty.

Acting on the premise that American Exceptionalism implies a covenant with God and that the United States is “God’s New Israel” (Israel 2.0) it follows that the US has a religious understanding of itself, similar to Israel 1.0 but extending it and transcending it.

Israel 2.0 denies the temporality of America. Being born outside of history, and being chosen by God as His herald, America is simultaneously situated at the dawn of time and in the end time: essentially, it is the timeless embodiment of timeless truths. History, in this context is irrelevant, Palestinian history included.

Even those unconvinced of the bases for the Abrahamic Covenant, Chosen-ness, Exceptionalism, Manifest Destiny – and these at times include members of the political elite in both Israel and the US – are complicit in the crimes committed under their aegis because they recognise the mobilising power of metaphor and the immutable authority accorded the Bible, when combined with infusions of conceit-laden identity.

Cynical manipulation is both obvious and endemic. Consider the current disfigurements of America’s “wilted present:” many of the leaders of the country that Ralf Dahrendorf once called “the Applied Enlightenment” are now more concerned to justify their actions according to Revelations than the principles of the Republic.

Deadly and obscene consequences spring from this, most of them covered by the judgment of one of the foremost thinkers on international politics in the US in the 20^th Century, Stanley Hoffman: he wrote that the strategic culture which American Exceptionalism bequeaths to American policymakers causes them to “ask the wrong question, turn to the wrong analysis, and thus in the end provoke the wrong results.”