a zionist analysis by Ofra 2:27am Mon Jul 14 '03 ... print article Many Zionists define themselves in relations to others. They need the Arabs to be the “bad guys” so they can be the “good guys” and be victorious. On a day to day basis they maybe perfectly nice and approachable but their attitude takes a wrong turn once the enemy is involved. They define themselves by their enemy. The enemy is always “bad” and that is how they see themselves as being “good”. If there was no enemy to struggle with they would have an identity crisis as they would no longer be the good guys fighting a “just war” but average people struggling to justify their pasts. add your comments

Seems to be true of everyone by Dr. Landen Spiegelhaus 3:55am Mon Jul 14 '03 print comment Your analysis of Zionist ideology seems to me to fit pretty well with almost every type of existing nationalism out there. Also, it seems to fit the situation of most activists, be they conservative or radical. We all define ourselves against an 'other', and almost invariably, the other is a less wholesome being against our purity. Many American/Palestinians/Leftists/Rightists define themselves in relations to others. They need the Arabs/Israelis/Commies/Capitalists to be the "bad guys" so they can be the "good guys" and be victorious. On a day to day basis they maybe perfectly nice and approachable but their attitude takes a wrong turn once the enemy is involved. They define themselves by their enemy. The enemy is always "bad" and that is how they see themselves as being "good". If there was no enemy to struggle with they would have an identity crisis as they would no longer be the good guys fighting a "just war" but average people struggling to justify their pasts. add your comments

i disagree! by Invalid comparison, landen 4:25am Mon Jul 14 '03 print comment Genuine leftists are struggling against Zionism not because they need to define themselves as good in comparison, but because Zionism is murdering Innocents in their names. Your comparison is not valid. Leftists are not responsible for war crimes on the level Zionists are and don’t dehumanize an entire people (i.e. Zionists) to feel superior. I understand the dilemma Zionists are facing because if one had a choice between being the good guy constantly fighting a "just war" and an average person struggling to justify his pasts, most would choose the glamorous Zionist role. ( I probably would) add your comments

changed my opinion. by dear landen 4:27am Mon Jul 14 '03 print comment On second thought, I agree with you. add your comments

If I may also add... by that 4:45am Mon Jul 14 '03 print comment You seem to throw all nationalism to the trash bin without differentiating between valid national pride and not a valid one. Zionism may be an artificial type of national fervor because it is based on myths. Palestinian nationalism is valid because Palestinians are indeed a displaced people and there fore their national pride is justified. Until the wrongs that were done to them in the name of Zionist nationalism are dealt with they will naturally be embracing of their nationality which is as old as the ancient olive trees that used to grace the landscape. add your comments

All nations are born out of myth by Dr. Landen Spiegelhaus 8:54am Mon Jul 14 '03 print comment Gellner, Ernest. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983, pp. 6-7. "In fact, nations, like states, are a contingency, and not a universal necessity. Neither nations nor states exist at all times and in all circumstances. Moreover, nations and states are not the same contingency. Nationalism holds that they were destined for each other; that either without the other is incomplete, and constitutes a tragedy. But before they could become intended for each other, each of them had to emerge, and their emergence was independent and contingent. The state has certainly emerged without the help of the nation. Some nations have certainly emerged without the blessings of their own state. It is more debatable whether the normative idea of the nation, in its modern sense, did not presuppose the prior existence of the state." ----------- Historian Eric Hobsbawm on Nation and Nationalism (Hobsbawm, Eric J. Nations and Nationalism Since 1780. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.): "Like most serious students, I do not regard the 'nation' as a primary nor as an unchanging social entity. It belongs exclusively to a particular, and historically recent, period. It is a social entity only insofar as it relates to a certain kind of modern territorial state, the 'nation-state', and it is pointless to discuss nation and nationality except insofar as both relate to it. Moreover, with Gellner I would stress the element of artifact, invention and social engineering which enters into the making of nations. 'Nations as a natural, God-given way of classifying men, as an inherent ... political destiny, are a myth; nationalism, which sometimes takes preexisting cultures and turns them into nations, sometimes invents them, and often obliterates preexisting cultures: that is a reality.'" "Finally, I cannot but add that no serious historian of nations and nationalism can be a committed political nationalist, except in the sense in which believers in the literal truth of the Scriptures, while unable to make contributions to evolutionary theory, are not precluded from making contributions to archaeology and Semitic philology. Nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently not so. As Renan said: 'Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation.' Historians are professionally obliged not to get it wrong, or at least to make an effort not to. To be Irish and proudly attached to Ireland - even to be proudly Catholic-Irish or Ulster Protestant Irish - is not in itself incompatible with the serious study of Irish history. To be a Fenian or an Orangeman, I would judge, is not so compatible, any more than being a Zionist is compatible with writing a genuinely serious history of the Jews; unless the historian leaves his or her convictions behind when entering the library or the study. Some nationalist historians have been unable to do so. " ------------ Benedict Anderson on Nation as an Imagined Community (Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Revised Edition ed. London and New York: Verso, 1991, pp. 5-7.) "In an anthropological spirit, then, I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community - - and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. "It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion. Renan referred to this imagining in his suavely back-handed way when he wrote that 'Or l’essence d'une nation est que tons les individus aient beaucoup de choses en commun, et aussi que tous aient oublié bien des choses.” With a certain ferocity Gellner makes a comparable point when he rules that 'Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist.' The drawback to this formulation, however, is that Gellner is so anxious to show that nationalism masquerades under false pretences that he assimilates 'invention' to 'fabrication' and 'falsity', rather than to 'imagining' and 'creation'. In this way he implies that 'true' communities exist which can be advantageously juxtaposed to nations. In fact, all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined. Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined. Javanese villagers have always known that they are connected to people they have never seen, but these ties were once imagined particularistically-as indefinitely stretchable nets of kinship and clientship. Until quite recently, the Javanese language had no word meaning the abstraction 'society.' We may today think of the French aristocracy of the ancien régime as a class; but surely it was imagined this way only very late. To the question 'Who is the ‘Comte de X?’ the normal answer would have been, not 'a member of the aristocracy,' but 'the lord of X, 'the uncle of the Baronne de Y,'or 'a client of the Duc de Z.' "Finally, it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings. "These deaths bring us abruptly face to face with the central problem posed by nationalism: what makes the shrunken imaginings of recent history (scarcely more than two centuries) generate such colossal sacrifices? I believe that the beginnings of an answer lie in the cultural roots of nationalism." add your comments

not all nations are born of myth! by point 9:27am Mon Jul 14 '03 print comment The Palestinians have lived in Palestine for centuries if not millennia. They don’t need a fantasy imposed on them to bond them. They are a nation by virtue of living on a piece of land for so long, their status as a people not wavering when other empires colonize it. When rejecting a faulty sense nationalism it doesn`t mean that all nationalism should be rejected off hand. add your comments

Myths they are, along with all the others by Dr. Landen Spiegelhaus 10:34am Mon Jul 14 '03 print comment I am sorry, but you are blinding yourself for ideological purposes. The fact that the populations that make up the present Palestinian people existed on this land for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years, does not have anything to do with the status of their presently existing self-perception as a organic community concieved of as a nation. This self-perception of nation is a cultural artefact of recent lineage. Your problem is that you have accepted the parameters which equate national self-perception and modern ideas of territory as the main criterion which legitimizes rights and recognition on the international statge. The legitimacy of these rights should have nothing to with self-perception of organic community or certain notions of territoriality. There are many cultures around the world which never had theses notions of either community or territory. However, the legitimacy of their claims over the land they and their ancestors lived upon and their right to control their own destinies is not diminished in any way by this fact. So desist from your rejecting for ideological purposes what is by now common knowledge, that all nations are artefacts of recent lineage. Palestine was never a homogenous population. There was always movement of populations into and out of the region. Plus, the various communities of Palestine did not percieve themselves as one people with a common history or destiny. The Philistines were sea-farers most likely originating around Anatolia. Bediouns came into the region with the Arab invasions after the demise of the Nabatean populations in the Negev (around the 7th century C.E). During the Roman period, Mediterreanan traders, Roman citizens from lands to the East and West mixed with the local populations. The Druse are a Shi'a break off, coming from Egypt to the highlands of the Galilee to avoid opression. During many periods of Muslim rule, especially during the late Abbasid, Mamluk and Ottoman periods, the local 'Palestinian' elite were actually not Arab at all, but 'Turkish' military slaves from Transoxania and the Caucasus. At different periods, there was movement from all over the areas of Dar al-Islam. Greeks, Armenians, Turks, Arabs from further east, North Africans, etc. moved into the region and intermarried with the local population. Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi, the Muslim conqueror of Jerusalem from the Crusaders was a Kurd. The Palestinians are made up of a mixture from all of these origins, and it is most likely as specious to say that Palestinians are the direct descendents of the indegenous population (Canaanite, Am Yisrael, etc.) as it is to say that the Jewish Diaspora are the direct descendents of the local indegenous population. Nationalism is built on the ideological projection of a unified mythological idea of historical community onto the present. This is equally as true of the Palestinians as it is of the Israelis. Both nationalisms are built on fiction and both populations are made up in large part of non-indegenous populations who at some point migrated either as the conquerors themselves or on the heels of the conquerors. add your comments

hi spigellhaus by point 11:18am Mon Jul 14 '03 print comment Your statement that Europeans are no more likely to be the descendants of Palestinians of biblical times than modern day Palestinians is unlikely, The natives have lived here for millennia interbreeding with people from other lands but that is true of biblical times as well. Jews and none Jews of biblical times were always living in a changing environment as Palestine is a port town, where business export is conducted. Nationality is not defined by people of identical background as if that were so the notion of a Jewish nation would fall flat on its face. Nationalism is defined by a common culture which is permeated in the society. add your comments

Culture vs. Nationalism by Bryan Atinsky 1:01pm Mon Jul 14 '03 bryan@indymedia.org.il print comment I couldn't help but notice that the topic of this disussion fits closely with the subject of a book by the great Twentieth Century political theoritician and activist, Rudolf Rocker (1873-1958). The book is titled "Nationalism and Culture". The book, first published in English in 1937 got great reviews from the likes of Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein: For instance, Bertrand Russell wrote of the book: "...an important contribution to political philosophy, both on account of its penetrating and widely informative analysis of many famous writers, and on account of the brilliant criticism of state-worship. I hope it will be widely read in all those countires where disinterested thinking is not yet illegal." Though I have a copy of the book on my shelf, it is actually possible to read the entire book on the internet: http://www.anarchosyndicalism.org/rocker/nc.htm Anyway, here is an excerpt from the book, on the relation of culture to nation/nationalism. It may be a bit long, but it really touches in a substantial way on what has been discussed in the above comments, and I believe will add a lot to further the discussion: ALL nationalism is reactionary in its nature, for it strives to enforce on the separate parts of the great human family a definite character according to a preconceived idea. In this respect, too, it shows the interrelationship of nationalistic ideology with the creed of every revealed religion. Nationalism creates artificial separations and partitions within that organic unity which finds its expression in the genus Man, while at the same time it strives for a fictitious unity sprung only from a wish-concept; and its advocates would like to tune all members of a definite human group to one note in order to distinguish it from other groups still more obviously. In this respect, so-called "cultural nationalism" does not differ at all from political nationalism, for whose political purposes as a rule it serves as a fig-leaf. The two cannot be spiritually separated; they merely represent two different aspects of the same endeavour. Cultural nationalism appears in its purest form when people are subjected to a foreign rule, and for this reason cannot pursue their own plans for political power. In this event, "national thought" prefers to busy itself with the culture-building activities of the people and tries to keep the national consciousness alive by recollections of vanished glory and past greatness. Such comparisons between a past which has already become legend and a slavish present make the people doubly sensitive to the injustice suffered; for nothing affects the spirit of man more powerfully than tradition. But if such groups of people succeed sooner or later in shaking off the foreign yoke and themselves appear as a national power, then the cultural phase of their effort steps only too definitely into the background, giving place to the sober reality of their political objectives. In the recent history of the various national organisms in Europe created after the war are found telling witnesses for this. In Germany, also, the national strivings both before and after the "wars of liberation" were strongly influenced by romanticism, whose advocates tried to make the traditions of a vanished age live again among the people and to make the past appear to them in a glorified light. When, later, the last hopes which the German patriots had rested on liberation from the foreign yoke had burst like over-blown bubbles, their spirits sought refuge in the moonlit magic night and the fairy world of dreamy longing conjured up for them by romanticism, in order to forget the gray reality of life and its shameful disappointments. In culture-nationalism, as a rule, two distinct sentiments merge, which really have nothing in common: for home sentiment is not patriotism, is not love of the state, not love which has its roots in the abstract idea of the nation. It needs no laboured explanation to prove that the spot of land on which a man has spent the years of his youth is deeply intergrown with his profoundest feeling. The impressions of childhood and early youth which are the most permanent and have the most lasting effect upon his soul. Home is, so to speak, man's outer garment; he is most intimately acquainted with its every fold and seam. This home sentiment brings in later years some yearning after a past long buried under ruins; and it is this which enables the romantic to look so deeply within. With so-called "national consciousness" this home sentiment has no relationship; although both are often thrown into the same pot and, after the manner of counterfeiters, given out as of the same value. In fact, true home sentiment is destroyed at its birth by "national consciousness," which always strives to regulate and force into a prescribed form every impres-sion man receives from the inexhaustible variety of the homeland. This is the unavoidable result of those mechanical efforts at unification which are in reality only the aspirations of the nationalistic states. The attempt to replace man's natural attachment to the home by a dutiful love of the state -- a structure which owes its creation to all sorts of accidents and in which, with brutal force, elements have been welded together that have no necessary connection -- is one of the most grotesque phenomena of our time. The so-called "national consciousness" is nothing but a belief propagated by considerations of political power which have replaced the religious fanaticism of past centuries and have today come to be the greatest obstacle to cultural development. The love of home has nothing in common with the veneration of an abstract patriotic concept. Love of home knows no "will to power"; it is free from that hollow and dangerous attitude of superiority to the neighbour which is one of the strongest characteristics of every kind of nationalism. Love of home does not engage in practical politics nor does it seek in any way to support the state. It is purely an inner feeling as freely manifested as man's enjoyment of nature, of which home is a part. When thus viewed, the home feeling compares with the governmentally ordered love of the nation as does a natural growth with an artificial substitute. (pp.213-14) Rocker, Rudolph 1998 (1937) Nationalism and Culture. Buffalo, NY: Black Rose Books. add your comments

throwing the baby with the bath water.. by tolerance versus nationalis 7:04pm Mon Jul 14 '03 print comment I am not negating “love of home”. I am negating nationalism based on the stripping of other peoples right to “love of home”. Nationalism is a healthy ingredient of a community as long as it isn’t manufactured on the debasing another culture. If it is embracive of other cultures and is conducive to a harmonious environment then its a positive aspect in society. add your comments

Bryan Atinsky & Rudolph Rocker by Rowan Berkeley 9:59am Tue Jul 15 '03 print comment I'm really not surprised to see Bryan quoting Rocker, since this is exactly where one would expect today's hip capitalist globalising Leftists to be, now that Marxism-Leninism, Stalinism, and their origin-denying bastard child Trotskyism are no longer respectable. However, the destruction of nations is not necessarily the only cure for the Jewish inability to have, or to be, one. There are three possibilities, two of which are equitable but only one practicable: 1) Abolish all nations and turn the world into a global dictatorship (what Rocker would call "anarchism"); 2) Allow all nations to be themselves (including Israel, and Germany, and the USA, and so on, with their own national religions, ethnic supremacisms, etcetera); 3) Allow some but not others (allow Israel, but deny as many of the others as you can, because they're all "Anti-Semitic" so they don't deserve to be free, ever). add your comments