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Thread: Palestine

  1. #151
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    Default Re: Palestine

    There are structural similarities between the massacres of Armenians and Jews, as Michael Mann has shown in his richly textured book The Dark Side of Democracy. Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (2005), where he also looks at the massacres in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and other examples (and massacres with different structures and causes). The emergence of Turkish nationalism by definition was incompatible with the multi-cultural, multi-religious and multi-national identies in the Ottoman Empire, just as the collapse of the German Empire in 1918 meant that a subsequent re-definition of what it meant to be German resulted, in the case of the Nazis with a definition so narrow it not only excluded every Jew but threatened to de-legitimise many Germans, owing to the peril/folly of attempting to define a German in law, and then to apply that law (attempts to define a Jew in law in Israel have met with any number of contradictions).

    At root, there is I think the challenge of modernization and globalization, in which capitalism erases differences between people by tying them to economic transactions; in which the sense of 'the nation' is disrupted by the capitalism which promotes human mobility and changes the character of urban life as immigrants seek the opportunities offered by the new economic order wherever they arise. Challenges to capitalism can thus embrace the dissolution of nationality and religion and enhance the claims of workers everywhere regardless of their origin -Marx in his pure form- or attempt an assertion or re-assertion of an idea of the 'nation' before it succumbs to the pollution and inevitable decline associated with the appearance en masse of the other. The Jews, in this regard, have often been seen in economic rather than military terms -the Jew who has an uncanny abillity to swindle you out of everything you own, and because this process takes place often without you seeing it, the Jew becomes part of that mysterious conspiracy in which unseen forces are controlling everything but you just don't realise the truth.

    The whole point of Turkey as its founders saw it, was to erase separate identities and subsume everyone under one identity. This version of nationalism is integral to the concept of fascism that was being developed across Europe at the time, which sought as much to create something new, as it appealed to some nostalgic idea of the past, much as there are some people in this country who insist they are of 'Anglo-Saxon' stock, whatever that means. The crucial component is 'the Turk' who belongs to Turkey where the non-Turk no longer belongs, that other who may be cast as the villain who has prevented the full realisation of the aspirations of the X People (insert your national identity). In Turkey the men behind the Committee of Union and Progress in 1908 knew very well that the assertion of Turkish nationalism would be rejected by the Arab nationalism that had emerged in the 19th century around the same time and that the Ottoman Empire was not sustainable for that reason. The Armenians thus became caught in an Anatolian trap which they could not escape -they were not going to re-define themselves as Turks any more than the Kurds, the Jews or the Greeks, and the majority did not want to go and live in 'Soviet Armenia' knowing full well that it was not an independent state -the Independent State of Armenia lasted barely a year from 1919-20 and, crucially, there was not much on offer there, other than the emotional attachment to Mount Ararat (symbolic heart) and Etchmiadzin (religious heart).
    But what is perhaps crucial, is that the people who welcomed this concept of Turkey were not just people who had lived in Anatolia for generations, but included those Muslims or Ottoman loyals from places like Bosnia, Serbia, Bulgaria and 'Macedonia' who had decided to leave when the Ottomans lost control of those colonies in the 19th century and they became Christian states, although not always independent as the struggle to control the Balkans by the Austro-Hungarian Empire reminds us today. In other words, the winners for Turkey were those people who were happy to pledge themselves to this new identity, even if it meant becoming part of a secular state; the losers were those for whom it was simply unacceptable, just as that decision meant they they no longer belonged, regardless of the fact that Armenians had lived in that land for two thousand years or more. The Armenians suffered the most, but also because in an era of land hunger, they were targeted because of their extensive farms and estates.

    A similar process took place with the creation of Israel, because in 1948 the option to become citizens of Israel was as unacceptable to non-Jews who were living in Palestine, whether it was the Arabs -Christian and Muslim- or the small population of Armenians and Greeks who had lived there since the formation of their Orthodox churches in the early Christian era. Indeed, there were some Jews who disputed the right to create a 'Jewish homeland' in 'Palestine' which raises questions about the authority of Theodor Herzl and later Chaim Weizmann to speak for 'all Jews'. But again, the beneficiaries of Israel were those Jews who were happy to re-define themselves as Israeli where before they might have been British, American and so on, and the mass migration of Jews out of Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad and the Yemen often in situations of aggressive harassment and violence is yet another example of the curse of nationalism insisting that only certain people can live here, and you aint one of them. As it happens, some Jews -possibly many- lived to regret being forced out of Baghdad and the other mostly Arab places because they had lived well there, whereas when they arrived in Israel and became equal citizens in law with pale skinned European Jews, the latter regarded them as schwarzers and treated them accordingly with all the prejudice that implies. This resentment, plus demographics was behind Menachem Begin's victory against Labour in 1977.

    Again and again, one comes back to the curse of nationalism, an attempt to create a pure identity which, by definition must destroy, just as the futile search for a pure Islamic state by definition must destroy before it can create, but is condemned to destroy itself in the process.

    Or one can just go and live in the USA or Canada where you can be who you want to be and where national identity by definition accepts diversity as a welcome reality...


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    Last edited by Stavros; 08-20-2014 at 03:31 AM.

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