Rationality vs. Nationalism in the Palestinian conflict – Part I
Posted by Harry Stotle on January 19, 2009
Few topics are subject to more irrational partisanship than the Palestinian conflict. Any discussion of historical claims or legitimacy issues is a sure way to reach a quick dead-end, the particular complexity of the regional history being buried under a thick layer of ideological beliefs and errors. Here is a quick reminder.
The very name Palestine was given by Emperor Hadrian to his province of Judea, as a punitive symbol after the bar Kochba revolt. He also simultaneously renamed Jerusalem Aelia Capitolina and banned the Judeans inhabitants from the city. Palestinia was a transposition of a word used by Herodotus for the land of the Philistines, these descendants of the People of the Sea (including the Phoenicians), a mixture of Indo-European populations having invaded the so-called ‘Asian’ territories of Egypt during the 12th century BCE. The renaming was nothing but an expression of the Roman aggravation in front of the obstinate refusal of the Judean Bedouins to integrate the Empire: at the time of Hadrian, very little was actually left from the former Philistines in Judea, except a small presence around Gaza.
For most of its long history the territory today known as Palestine (corresponding more or less to the southern part of the Roman province of Judea Palestinia) was subject to a series of realms and (mostly) empires: including but not limited to Cannaites/ Phoenicians, Egyptians, Hittites, Hebrews, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Franks, Mongols, Turks and British.
As to the Hebrews, they dominated the area as a group of beduinic tribes over the 11th century BCE. A short-lived unified kingdom lasted for about one century until the death of Salomon (-933). It was then divided into a Kingdom of Israel in the North (10 tribes) and a more destitute kingdom of Judah in the South (2 tribes). In -733 the Kingdom of Israel was thoroughly annihilated by the Assyrians. In -586 the Kingdom of Judah was in turn destroyed by the Babylonians and its modest population deported to Iran (soon to be called Persia).
The Persians rebuilt Judea as a buffer state against Egypt, reintroducing part of the Hebrews in the area and rebuilding their temple in Jerusalem. When Alexander conquered Persia, a significant part of the local population was sent to the new city of Alexandria. Judea remained a Greek dominion until the Romans took over.
Following their preference for indirect rule, the Romans allowed the creation of a Judean client-state under a Jewish (new name for the Hebrews) dynasty, the Hasmoneans (-138), replaced in -37 by the mixted (Greco-Edomite-Nabatean-Jewish) Herodian dynasty. A succession of revolts, mainly in 66-73 and 132-135, ended in direct Roman rule followed by the exile of most of the remaining Jewish population.
Beduinic armies coming from the Arabian Peninsula conquered the region in 637, defeating both the Persians and the Romans (now the Byzantines), and converting most of the population to Islam. Palestine was thereafter placed under the domination of a succession of Islamic empires almost never run by Arabs but by a mixture of Turco-mongols or even European conquerors or slaves, until the dismantlement of the Ottoman Empire after WWI.
In 1881, before the arrivals of the firsts Zionist migrants, the population in Palestine was limited to 457.000 souls (400.000 Muslims, 40.000 Orthodox Christians and 17.000 Jews). As the Arabian conquest did not take the form of a migration, it is reasonable to believe that a significant part of the Muslim population of Palestine was then formed by descendants of the Roman Jews converted to Islam.
The recent part of the story is the direct consequence of the rise of Nationalisms, from the mid 19th century on. Nationalism, a French creation, is the invention of mythical common origins in order for a culturally or geographically connected group to claim a right of absolute sovereignty over a territory. Please recall that the Normans and Britons were Vikings, French monarchs Germans, Provence Roman, then Germanic, then Arabic, before integrating the German empire of Charlemagne, that Burgundy was German and Spanish, that Picardie was annexed by Louis XIV, and that Savoy and Nice joined France 20 years after Senegal. The unification of 200 German speaking principalities, in spite of their deep religious divisions, under Prussia (a State artificially created during the Crusades), was a response to French imperialism. The historical existence of a ‘German nation’, however, rested on even weaker grounds than the one of a ‘French nation’.
A Jewish nationalism was soon to follow, first as an intellectual reaction against these evolutions, then as a practical escape from their dire consequences. A vast majority of the European followers of the Jewish religion were settled inside the Russian empire. Some were certainly actual descendants of the exiled Hebrews; many others were the descendants of Turkic populations converted to Judaism over time (such as the Khazars). Some were preserving their ethnic idiosyncrasies; others were assimilating into the dominant Christian fabric.
The pogroms which had followed the assassination of Czar Alexander II, as well as the Dreyfus affair in France, triggered a sudden growth of Jewish nationalism. In spite of its shaky foundations, the idea was then accepted that all the Jews in the world (then speaking in excess of 130 different languages, and having very distinct ethnic characters and genetic origins, including Yemenites and north-African Berbers among several others) were nothing but the very same Hebrews that had been dispersed by the Persians and the Romans. About ¼ migrated to America and British dominions, ½ were exterminated by the Germans, and a good part of the remaining ¼ took step by step the road to Palestine.
Last but certainly not least of all, the Arab nationalism had taken birth out of the decaying corpse of the Ottoman Empire. Populations who had little in common, except a language (more or less) and a religion started feeling a common origin and a common destiny. Their new origin was of course as mythological as in all other nationalisms, and their common destiny an illusion. Various ‘nationalisms’ were attempted by trial and errors: from Arab at large, to Palestinian, via Syrian, etc. At the end of the day, no actual ‘Arab’ nation took birth, and – except in Egypt- the nationalisms adopted the artificial divisions introduced by the British Empire and secondarily by France.
Only one area of the former Ottoman Empire, Palestine, could not be filled by an Arabic state, as the Zionist migration first and then the creation of the state of Israel made it impossible. Both Arabs and Israeli refused to even imagine a common state. The question then became: would the Arab-speaking populations of Palestine be the only ones without a State reflecting their nationalistic aspirations? Both Jordan and Lebanon had by then acquired enough identity to prevent their territories from turning into a solution for the missing Palestinian element. Backed by the United States of America, Israel was now militarily invincible and could not be removed. Fueled by an anti-American sentiment, most Arab states (and later the Islamic Iran) funded the terrorist turn of the Arabic resistance in Palestine.
While the nationalist ideology was reaching a climax both among the Jewish Israelis and the Muslim Palestinians, the most powerful force in contemporary politics – public opinion – was called to take sides.
(to be continued)
