Israel’s independence is the historical moment around which the ahistorical phenomenon of “Palestinian nationalism” has been conceived. The Palestinian narrative is not formed out of the naturally evolving folklore of a people, it is rather a mechanism of globally disseminated linguistic colonization whose assumptions ground the landscape of postmodern thought, determining the nature and limits of political, religious, philosophical, and social discourse, and thereby displacing the possibility of free dialogue. In it, the medieval and pre-modern conceptions of the Jew as “sorcerer”, “heretic”, “witch” and “devil worshipper” are historically appropriated in secular language, to wit, the Jew as “colonial settler”, “imperial hegemon”, and “apartheid state”. Out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire the territory called Palestine, under the modern administrative authority of the British Empire, comes into focus through the lens of Western reason as it evolves from existing within the hermeneutic horizon of British imperialism to the hermeneutics of American anti-imperialism, decolonization, and the internationally sanctioned ethical-legal principle of self-determination. The logic of post-colonial thought is the condition of the possibility of the myth of Palestinian nationalism, that is, of the Enlightenment version of pre-modern antisemitism, a rehashing of the same superstitions that have helped to create anti-Jewish mythology from time immemorial, only now cloaked in a pervasive simulacrum of Reason.
Israel’s independence signifies the success of the Western global-historical paradigm of creating a sovereign nation-state modeled after Western style democracy. At the same time it marks the gradual turning of the Western world against Israel, against the consummation of that very paradigm that had become the basis of Western logic. The reason for this seeming contradiction is simple. It is the same reason why medieval Christianity did not apply the logic of forgiveness when it came to the Jews, or why it only applied it with strict qualifications. It is because the Jew is the exception to the rule. The real nature of this exception is not within the scope of our present inquiry. Bear in mind, however, that hints to the nature of this exception are everywhere, and that, with patience, we will come to fully understand it. The historical events that face the Jew in our time and within witch Palestinian nationalism is conceived will be the scope of this discussion. What I will aim to show above all is the nature of that barbaric, Dionysian savagery that calls itself “Palestinian nationalism”, the spearhead of the modern attack on the existence of the Jew.
In 1914, after the second Aliyah, between 80,000 and 90,000 Jews were already settled in Palestine, the Jewish homeland so named by the Romans after they conquered it and expelled most of the Jews in 70CE. From 1453 Palestine had been under Ottoman rule. Before the first world-war, foreseeing a victory over the Ottoman Empire, the British government contemplated support for the establishment of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine. In 1917 the Balfour declaration confirmed this support and was incorporated into the Mandate for Palestine, in effect becoming binding international law. Because the growing belief in a principle of self-determination for all people was evolving into an internationally sanctioned right soon to be placed in the framework of international law and diplomacy, the British attempted to treat the Arabs in Palestine as equals to the Jews, regardless of evidence to the contrary (e.g. Arab banditry and harassment of Jews, the Nebi Musa riots, the Arab uprising of 1936-1939, murder of Jewish civilians, lack of industry and absence of modern values, to name some). The notion of “equality” has become part of the discourse of modern politics and has well served the cause of so-called “Palestinian nationalism”. The logic of “different but equal” is the ahistorical assumption that politics inherits from Western philosophy when the latter renounces the possibility of a philosophical position from which truth could be known. As such, all we have to work with is “difference”, before which no truth claim can stand. Truth is thus constantly changing, differing from itself, passing away, and losing credibility. It is from this nihilistic exhaustion that the assumption that all values are “different but equal” emerges. Equalitarianism is the signpost that points to the truth of all nihilism, that is, to undifferentiated substance. In this kind of substance all differences are eliminated, and all nations gradually dissolve into the melting pot of international equality. Before nations dissolve, however, empires must fall, so that nations can take their place and create the conditions for global equalitarian hegemony.
After the passing away of the Ottoman Empire, the area of Ottoman Syria under British civil administration operating between 1920 and 1948 was called Mandatory Palestine. Along with the Balfour declaration, Woodrow Wilson’s “principle of self-determination”, grounded in the general assumption of “different but equal”, was to guide any post war territorial appropriations in the former Ottoman region. The purpose of the mandate was to administer these regions until they developed into independently functioning states. British policy aimed at treating Jews and Arabs as different but equal, all the while bumping up against natural inequalities that bespoke real differences, making the state building process increasingly difficult to manage. The British were frustrated, the Jews were building, and the Arabs were barking.
Out of this arrangement emerged Israel, Transjordan, disputed Gaza, the disputed West Bank, and the so-called All-Palestinian Government. The termination of the Mandate in 1948 turned over the territories to the authority of the United Nations. On May 14th of that year Israel declared its independence. A provisional government was recognized by the United States as the de facto authority in Israel, while the Soviet Union was the first to recognize the Israeli government de jure. Following the major powers were countries in South America, South Africa, and Europe. Under the United Nations general assembly resolution 273 Israel became a member state of the U.N. following the approval of U.N. Security Council Resolution 69. As the world community accepted the fledgling state into the concert of nations, the Arab states rejected it. Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and the Arabs within Israel mobilized against the new Jewish state as soon as its independence became a reality. Arab military commanders instructed Arabs within Israel to leave, promising a swift Arab victory after which the Arabs could return to the land, Judenrein.
After the war, the West bank was occupied and later annexed by Jordan, and Gaza and was placed under the authority of the so-called All-Palestinian Government, an entity furnished by the Arab League to support Palestinian Arabs. Neither helped to relieve the situation of the Arabs whose promise of a Jew-free homeland was broken. Indeed, Jordan would have preferred to annex the West Bank and Egypt to annex Gaza rather than be concerned with supporting a Palestinian state, unless annexation was no longer an option and a Palestinian state served their interests. After the 1967 war, this became the case. Israel took over the West Bank and Gaza, and the use of Palestinian Arabs as perpetual victims of the Israelis became a fully grounded norm. The United Nations agency for the so-called Palestinian refugees focused on maintaining the refugees rather than actively supporting the possible creation of a recognizable political state that would operate as the framework of a home for the remainder of Arabs, those yet to be ordered by the modernizing operations of the international machine. There is a reason for this seemingly unusual oversight, this people existing untamed in a region that underwent relatively swift modernization in the post-Ottoman vacuum.
During the mandate period, the British were working toward the creation of a Jewish state and an Arab state in Palestine. The region to the East of the Dead Sea became the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, the Arab “half” of Palestine. To the west would be the Jewish homeland. The difficulty was that Arabs rejected this partition, wanting what was left of Palestine to be a Palestinian Arab state. The U.N. partition plan proposed a compromise that significantly reduced the size of the Jewish half, to which the Jews agreed but the Arabs did not. Increasing tension due to the Arabs’ reaction to the British White Paper policy, Arab fear of Jewish immigration, and the Arab League’s proposal to Britain that the idea of a Jewish homeland be abandoned altogether triggered riots and Jihad among the Arabs against Jews. If the remainder of Arabs agreed to compromise then they would lose their whole advantage. Any compromise would concede that a Jewish state should exist, and a fair resolution would dissolve the Arab grievance, that the Jews displaced them from their native home. Therefore the landless Arabs must remain landless to fulfill the anti-Zionist cause. Arab nationalist Haj Amin al-Husseini seized the opportunity to fuel the flames of anti-Jewish feeling among the Palestinian Arabs, instigating riots and demonstrations.
Under the mandate, Husseini was appointed by the British as Grand Mufti of Palestine. He seized upon every opportunity to make trouble for the Jews and to continue a process that began before the Ottoman fall. Looking back, the seeds of Palestinian nationalism were sown among the Palestinian Arab notables who would telegraph Constantinople to protest Jewish land purchases during the Ottoman period, the work of Husseini kept the seeds growing, and they sprouted into a national ideology with the Palestinian Liberation Organization under the charismatic, yet slovenly leadership of Yasser Arafat. During WW2, Husseini collaborated with the Nazis, helping them to recruit Bosnian Muslims to the Waffen SS. Husseini’s influence upon the Palestinian Muslims spanned from 1921 – 1959 when the All-Palestinian government was dissolved by Nasser and Egypt took Gaza, whereupon Husseini fled to Lebanon. By then having lost most of his authority, he joined the PLO.
Husseini ‘s role is critical in understanding Palestinian nationalism as he brought the influence of fascist nationalism to both Palestinian nationalism in particular and Arab nationalism in general by disseminating Nazi propaganda, recruiting Muslims for the Nazis, and identifying the common enemy of both Muslims and fascists, that is, Western democracy and the Jews. This was part of the process of defining the purpose of Arab nationalism and fusing it with the stateless Arabs of Palestine, giving them a clear sense of direction, but as yet no home. Indeed, maintaining their homelessness as a tactic for the purpose of creating a so-called “nation” is an indispensable condition for the refinement of the Palestinian cause, for the concentration of anti-semitism into a single point that could masquerade as a victim of the heretical, imperialist hegemon, Israel.
Since the war of 1948 the remainder of Palestinian Arabs did not become part of the Arab nation states, nor did they become Israeli citizens. In the ambiguity of war there is much room for filling in gaps. At the start of the 1948 war, the Arab military instructed the Palestinian Arabs to leave, the Haganah was fiercely retaliating for attacks against Jews, and the frustrated British were at a loss and prepared to withdraw. The popular explanation is that the Israeli forces “displaced” Palestinian Arabs. After 1948 these “displaced” Arabs were not given citizenship by their fellow Arabs, and they remained hostile to Israel. The popular interpretation is that these remaining Arabs are victims of the so-called “Jewish colonial settlers”. This remainder was the unfinished business of Husseini, and an opportunity for Yasser Arafat. The former was able to strengthen the movement through its alliance with Nazi Germany, and the latter was able to transform it into a formal national liberation movement.
Within the equalitarian value-system of the international system, any group that can claim the status of “a people” can have a right to self-determination. Parallel to the growth of Palestinian nationalism, which generates an image of a “people”, is the inscription of this national origin myth upon the minds of the Palestinian Arabs and their supporters in the West. This ahistorical narrative is meant to displace the historical narrative of Israel for the purpose of Arab hegemony in the region.
The importance of the language of “displaced persons” must not be overlooked. By naming the remainder “displaced persons” one is capable of generating and sustaining a narrative that describes an indigenous Palestinian people who pre-existed the Israeli state. Once the U.N. recognized this remainder as a “displaced people”, and, as such, also as “refugees”, the myth of a native Palestinian people became the global hermeneutic assumption which was the springboard for Arafat’s success as a national hero. The remainder is thus placed into a context that is fabricated in order to be able to make sense of them within the hermeneutic situation of the modern world. In other words, the Western world wants to see sovereign states made up of individuals with a shared culture. Since this remainder identify first as Muslims, as do virtually all Arabs in spite of Western-Muslim syncretism, there were no traits in this remainder of Muslims that could be rationalized by the modern mind. Consequently this remainder was taken up in the logic of nationhood where it could find a place in the modern world. The Western mind created the philosophical and political framework within which its deadliest enemy would cunningly cast itself as the victim of Western hegemony in general, of Zionism in particular, thereby killing two birds with one stone.
Ironically, the Israeli state, a perfect fit in the modern paradigm, would now be cast as the remainder – the last colonial, settler, apartheid state – the last barrier to a streamlined, modern global community in which nations were a mere stage in the evolution of the global international world order. The nationalism of the Jew, his connection to his Holy Land, now becomes pivotal in determining who is in and who is out. Jewish national pride becomes the heresy of the Jew in a world where patriotism, imperialism, and fascism are synonymous. The Jew is now seen as a force of imperial hegemony that displaces Palestinian natives who would otherwise comply with the new world order.
Taking up the cause of the world’s most beloved victims, the U.N. deployed two agencies that administer refugees. There is the “U.N. Refugee Agency” and the “U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees”. The 2nd was originally created in 1949 to aid the 600,000 - 700,000 of the remaining Arabs of Palestine that were without a state. After the 1967 war, Israel took the West Bank in its defensive war with Jordan and it took Gaza in its defensive war with Egypt. Israel neither annexed these territories, nor did the Arab national states absorb the remaining Arabs. Since this remainder was not rooted as a native people in Palestine, they had to be formalized in some way in order to make sense of the situation. Many refugees had not lived very long in the villages they left. The United Nations adapted the definition of “refugee” to define Arab refugees from Israel to include any Arab who had lived in Israel for 2 years before leaving. Even if the Arab had moved just a few miles, and even if he had returned, he was still called a “refugee”. Jews who moved the same distance for the same purpose were not called refugees. For refugees other than Palestinians, the definition includes (1) leaving out of a “well-founded fear of being persecuted” (2) being “outside the country of his nationality” and 3) being “unable to, or… unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country”. A Palestinian refugee is (1) “anyone whose normal place of residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948,” and (2) “who lost both their homes and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict”. In addition UNRWA counts all descendants of those who meet these criteria. Whereas the first definition of refugee is universal, the second is unique to the Palestinian-Arab remainder. This aspect of special treatment is necessary in the myth creation process, as it creates the illusion of a native Palestinian people by generating so many so-called refugees as a result of tweaking the definition of the word.
Without a clear sense of who the enemy is, a myth will not succeed. The hero and the villain define the myth and give it meaning. The Nazis and the Muslims had a common enemy in the British, the French, the Jews, and Western democracy in general. Hitler found a natural ally in the Arabs while the British found a natural ally in the Jews. Husseini became the most important Arab collaborator with the axis powers. In addition to recruiting Yugoslavian Muslims to the SS, he started out touring Arab towns in Palestine to whip up anti-Zionist sentiment and anti-Jewish demonstrations, he played a lead role in the 1936-1939 Arab revolts in Palestine, and he had agents in the Kingdom of Iraq, the French mandate of Syria, and Mandatory Palestine, and he supported the Iraqi Golden square coup d’etat. He also helped prevent Jews from leaving Europe by protesting British immigration policy in Palestine. Nazi support for Husseini meant support for Palestinian liberation from the British and for the attack on Israel. The influence of German National Socialism on nationalism in the Arab Muslim world is far ranging and little cited. The Young Egypt Party was modeled after the Nazi youth. The Syrian Social Nationalist party was fascist-inspired. Hassan al Banna, ally of the Mufti and founder of Muslim brotherhood, acknowledged Muslim common interest with the Nazi anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist purpose. Both hated Jews and Western democracy. The Muslim world, caught up in the evolution of the modern, secular nation-state, took its lead in its own nationalism from the axis powers, which not only lent it practical support, but also injected it with the anti-Western angst of fascists and Nazis.
For the Arabs, WW2 effectively characterized the Western powers as the enemy of world peace and as the friend of the Jew. The polarization of Muslim and Jew, fascism and democracy, was the framework within which Palestinian nationalism, yoked to fascism, continued to take shape. As Arab nation-states imbibed anti-Western and anti-Jewish propaganda, so the stateless Arabs imbibed with them. The Arab remainder, state-less and untamed, was poised to become the spearhead of the Anti-Israel/Anti-Western movement of the 21st century, the post-modern sacrificial lamb of the nations.
The creation of the myth of Palestinian nationalism represents the opposite pole of Western civilization. It is not a historical event but rather a disguise, the point in which the West, inscribed in the name of the Palestinian, turns against itself as the Palestinian wars with the modern Israeli state, that is, where the West, inscribed in the name of the Jew, fights for itself and its history as the Jew. The Palestinian Arab exists behind an illusion of modern nation building while it functions as the concentrated locus of modern anti-semitism. The Jews of Israel form a fully functioning Western style democracy. But the Jew is not forgiven for his nationalism which is seen as both the source of Palestinian Arab suffering and of global disfunction. This duel image of injustice - the Arab as victim of Jewish hegemony on one hand, and the blocking of international progress by the dark powers of the maleficent Pharisee on the other, is the superstition of our time. It frames our thoughts, shapes our conscience, and guides our behavior. It is the chaos that tears at the seams of reason and civil society. It is the metaphysical sign that hangs above a savage mob of bloodthirsty witch hunters whose madness spreads across time and reaches deep into the bowel of nothingness.
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