Placement of Jewish People in Palestine

Placement of Jewish People in Palestine

Introduction

Among the many crises that confront the world today, few blaze hotter or with more obscuring smoke than the conflict over Israel's 'right to exist'. The claim that any state, as opposed to any people, might or might not have such a right is peculiar enough that it should raise a red flag. Debates over existence rights have so typically centered on living, breathing creatures that we seem to make a category mistake when we add institutions to the list. This is true above all when the institution in question not only is not a mortal entity but also is not, in one of its key functions, a moral entity: when it is, to borrow Nietzsche and Freud's morose definition of the state, a larger quantity of power amassed for the purpose of crushing smaller quantities of power. As such, the state is a possible protector of rights but not a bearer of them.

Literature Review

The certainty of many Jews that hostility to Israel is symptomatic of a universal anti-Semitism has its inverted form in the suspicion of many Muslims that Jews endorse the Israeli government's oppression of Palestinians as a result of some pernicious ethno-religious essence. Then there are the equally preposterous if diametrically opposed assumptions that Jews are eternal victims without coresponsibility for the web of human action of which they are a part, even after they have won state sovereignty; and that Jews are the secret authors of Western imperialism, global capitalism, 9/11 and other nefarious plots. The notion of Zionism as an utter anomaly rather than a member of the panoply of modern ethnonational movements surfaces on both sides of the debate.

On the one side is the view that Zionism reflects the Jews' status as God's chosen people or resolves their unique predicament as exiles in every society. On the other side is the view that Zionism either is singularly vicious or exhibits a singularly vicious version of the imperial desire to control other territories and peoples instead of the dangerous but all too familiar desire to control a territory for one people alone. Meanwhile, the Jewish belief that Zionism is exceptional is often weirdly accompanied by the conviction that nationhood will bring normalcy to the Jews by assimilating a scattered people not within other nation-states but to the family of nation-states as a whole. A similar assumption is made with respect to Palestinian nationalism, with too few people willing to inquire into the nature of the normalcy that nationhood brings, or whether freedom and happiness follow automatically from national sovereignty. In fact, almost every solution posed by various Jewish and Arab factions to the question mark of Israel's existence is a conveyance en route to the pitfalls of national self-determination. There is the brutal one-state, one-nation solution, involving the expulsion of Jews from a greater Palestine or Palestinians from a greater Israel.

There is the disingenuous one-state, majority rule solution, in which one or ...