This week the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, made a remarkable statement, "something that some of you will not believe." He claimed that he and "Israel [...] care more about Palestinians than their own leaders do,"
The basis of this claim was that accusation that Hamas, "the terrorist organisation that rules Gaza," has misappropriated humanitarian aid funds. "Hamas used this stolen money to build a war machine to murder Jews," he continued. The implication is that Israel would ensure the aid funds were put to their intended purpose. Of course this completely overlooks the fact that their intended purpose is the mitigation of consequences of Israeli government policy in the first place. He's like a school bully who stole your lunch money pretending to be your friend by pointing out the person who said they would buy you lunch instead has actually spent their money on something else.
But what interests me here is the conflation of the terms Israeli and Jew.
Israeli and Jewish identities are not the same thing. They are not freely interchangeable. There are some Israelis who are not Jewish (although a small minority with a specific status). There are many Jews who are highly critical of the Israeli Government . Importantly, we must always remember there is a very significant body of opinion within Israel itself that is highly critical of current government policy towards the Palestinians in the same way that many within the UK were highly critical of the Westminster government’s illegal war in Iraq.
Nevertheless on occasion the two identities are casually conflated.
Advocates of the Israeli government position often point out how someone motivated purely by antisemitism can use criticism of Israeli government policy and the broader objectives of modern Zionism in general as a pretext for indulging their prejudices. They accuse their critics of conflating Jewish and Israeli identities to find a socially acceptable way of indulging their socially unacceptable prejudices.
However this conflation seems to me to be practised most often the other way round, to allow the persecutors of the Palestinians to become the victims, to facilitate the "spurious victimhood of the aggressor" I describe elsewhere in my article "The Natives." Sometimes accusations of antisemitism are used to take control of a conversation that was initially about something else entirely and stop us talking about the real problem. We have to be careful that, when pointing out the possibility that sometimes criticism may not be sincere, it does not mean all criticism may be dismissed out of hand as disingenuous, even if it is sincere and valid.
So when Benjamin Netanyahu claims to "care more about Palestinians than their own leaders do," as he did this week, he is repeating exactly the same sort of rhetoric used by Eurocentric North American nativism in the 19th century to justify rounding up people to whom a degree of indigeneity has been attributed and restricting their freedom "for their own good."
He is caring about Palestinians in exactly the same way the US Government cared about Native Americans when they relocated them to inhospitable, multi-deprived reservations like Pine Ridge. As President Andrew Jackson said, to justify the Indian Removal Act of 1830 which resulted in the Trail of Tears, "it will separate the Indians from immediate contact with settlements of whites [and] enable them to pursue happiness in their own way, and under their own crude institutions." The violence is portrayed as benefiting the victim. Netanyahu's concern about humanitarian aid intended for the Palestinians is reminiscent of concern expressed in 1830 that the "Indians" were “aided in their transportation [and] receive subsistence for the first year."
He was caring about the Palestinians in the same way the British cared when they put Boer women and children in concentration camps in South Africa, and deported the Kikuyu to detention camps in Kenya, and relocated the Chinese into "new villages" in Malaya.
On every occasion indigeneity is attributed to an inconvenient population, who are then oppressed for their own "benefit" by a group professing an assumed nativist identity that confers a supposed superiority to enable them to "know what's best." The leaders of the oppressed are blamed by the oppressor for forcing the oppressor's hand. Resistance is considered an awkward, contrarian refusal to just "get with the programme."
On this occasion the reservation into which the oppressed are herded is Gaza and the fragmented remains of the West Bank.
And as discussed previously, the justification for seizing Palestinian property is the same as the justification for the dispossession of the indigenous peoples resident in North America: for "manifest destiny" read "chosen people," for "pioneers" read "settlers." Israel and America are locked into a pattern of mutual legitimisation. However a nagging insecurity undermines their confidence, making their demonstration of it all the more strident.
For centuries the Jewish diaspora sustained a unique Jewish identity and tradition which forms a part of our glorious global patrimony of cultures to which all communities contribute and from which all benefit. The form the preservation of Jewish identity took was necessitated by the scattered and stateless nature of these diaspora. A completely different set of circumstances apply now to the state of Israel. It is wrong to treat Israel as though it was the ultimate diaspora. It is a modern state with protections and obligations under international law, and a member of the United Nations. And yet this is the response articulated in Israeli government policy. The same sort of exceptions and exclusions that were necessary in one situation are being enforced in another even though they are damaging and divisive under these altered circumstances rather than protective and unifying.
Ultimately all national identities are artificial. There is nothing special about any of them that is not shared by the rest. We are all human. The only things unique and individual about our identities are the stories we tell ourselves to perpetuate each of them. Where an identity comes from is not important. What matters is what you do with it, whether that means you act as though it entitles you to land and property, or confers moral authority to indulge in illegal wars, or - as is supported by every tradition in the world - you consider that you have a duty of compassion to all people as equals whether or not they share your identity, and seek a stable and just peace through truth and reconciliation rather than violence.
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