When Does History Begin?
The Massacre at Jerusalem, from The Story of Titus and Vespasian
Note on labels and demographics: I don’t know what terms to use in this essay that will not provoke anger. From what I can tell with what research and due diligence I have dedicated to this essay, “Indian” is the preferred term of most American Indian populations, and if there are any people I most wish to avoid offending, it is those who are part of American Indian tribes and tribal nations. Indigenous may be the next term rising, and Native American may be the last term fading, but Indian is still the word I hope will cause the least offense. I choose to put the word “American” before “Indian” mainly because Asian Indian Americans now outnumber American Indians, and the distinction, while silly sounding when taken together, needs to be made. This is all imperfect language, and there are many opinions surrounding that language, and I have no doubt more changes are to come; I only ask for a bit of latitude as my intentions are to cause the least offense to American Indians.
1. Native Land?
Russell Means, the brilliant actor and member of the Lakota tribe, along with several other Lakota activists, once proposed a Lakotah Republic as outlined in the map below:
You may notice that the land included part of five different states from the Yellowstone River to the Mississippi. When he proposed it in 2007, it was largely a symbolic gesture as no one in power, and few besides, seriously considered the idea as practicable. In the merciless light of retroactive morality, an outsider like myself might sigh at the quixotic nature of the proposal, knowing full well what historical injustices and geographic tragedies had befallen all American Indian groups, including the Lakota, in the past. Considering the turn of political wheels that continue to amplify unreasonable and unrealistic ideas, there may still be a movement to make that republic a reality to this day. I should also mention that the Lakotah Republic would be open to peoples of all races, even though the land it would encompass was chosen by Means because it was the ancestral land of the Lakota tribes.
There is only one minor problem with that term: “ancestral land.” As far as we know, the Lakota didn’t originate anywhere near that land. Partly through archeology, partly through piecing together accounts from French trappers, and partly from the oral history of the Lakota’s sometimes-rival tribes in the region (the Kiowa and Crow), it’s relatively clear that the Lakota originated in what is modern day Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula (UP) of Michigan. Thus the land currently claimed by the Lakota as “ancestral” is really the land once held by the Crow, Kiowa, Pawnee, and a group of Plains Apaches (which is fascinating to me, as I thought the Apaches were mainly centered in the southwest–but research is fun that way).
You may remember that the Lakota were the subject of the ridiculously popular Kevin Costner film Dances With Wolves, wherein the Lakota were presented as a beautiful ancient horse culture living in their traditional way on their ancestral land, conveniently omitting that they had recently arrived from the UP and conquered the Black Hills and Northern Plains from other Indian tribes. They had, to use a common phrase from our times, occupied the land they stole. This conquest happened before a single American got there. The Louisiana Purchase, when the United States bought most of this land from Napoleon, was brokered after this Lakota conquest was already well underway; Lewis and Clarke hadn’t even strapped on their boots when this pattern of “migration” was complete. Which brings up another wrinkle. The land was claimed by the French and English, and even the Spanish, at various times in the two hundred years before a single American (The United States didn’t exist for most of that history) witnessed the awesome power of tens of millions of American Buffalo roaming in giant herds, hunted by a dozen American Indian Horse Tribes, all practicing their ancient traditional ways of life.
But then, that illustration isn’t entirely accurate either. The Lakota pushed the Crow south between 1775 and 1805 while the Eurasian Horse wasn’t introduced to them by the Cheyenne until the middle of the 18th century. The horse in general wasn’t available to the tribes of the plains until the Spaniards–deservedly notorious in their rape, enslavement, and slaughter of American Indians–started losing horses to Indian uprisings, the most important of which was the Pueblo Uprising of 1680, during which a Spanish herd of perhaps five hundred horses were scattered on purpose by the Pueblo Indians to keep the Spanish settlers from escaping Santa Fe (upon which the slaughter of the Spanish settlers began).
In another peculiarity of history, the pre-horse Comanche tribe of the Southwest had been pushed to near-extinction by their regional rivals, but took to the horse probably better, and certainly faster, than all the other American Indian groups in the Southwest. With their new resource, the Comache proceeded to build an 18th century empire, pushing the Navajo, Apache, and Pueblo–the groups formerly responsible for pushing the Comanches to near extinction–back to the borders of their original territories as the Comanche advanced, each other group in turn being raided, butchered, and enslaved by the Comanche somewhat regularly for a little over a hundred years.
The horse changed everything from Santa Fe to the UP, from the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains. And the ancient horse cultures weren’t really ancient at all. In fact, hunting buffalo on foot before the horse arrived meant that life on the Great Plains was somewhat Hobbesian: they were malnourished, exhausted, and always fighting either each other or famine, which appears to have kept populations from thriving. But the horse rejuvenated the Plains tribes, helping their populations first grow and thrive, and then helped them bounce back again and again after wave after wave of Afro-Eurasian diseases cut through them like a scythe. The horse turned a hardscrabble/basic-subsistence way of life into a prosperous, if competitive, existence, where conflict with other tribes, and surplus of resources, led to the formation of warrior castes (often called “societies”) like the Dog Men of the Chayenne, or the Little Rabbits of the Kiowa. Development of a caste denotes a surplusage of resources, something the Plains tribes didn’t have before the horse arrived.
So, Crow, Lakota, Chayenne, Apache, Pueblo, Comanche, Navajo, Spanish, English, French, Americans–all claim the same swath of land. Some of this history is contested and much of it is incomplete as oral traditions are about as reliable as you might imagine they would be. Clear claims are further muddled by the treaties brokered by United States officials that were broken by settlers, prospectors, and opportunistic Americans (white and black) in their tens of thousands, and then broken again by the US government before being renegotiated by a different administration. Rinse, repeat.
With this continuous cycle of conquest and ownership in view, my question when it comes to these borders, boundaries, and disputed histories is: When does history begin?
2. Holy Lands
Now that the shock of what is happening in Israel has left me with merely a dull pain in my mind that never leaves, not only can I resume my usual detached sardonic tone, but I may also consider more abstract questions around the issues surrounding Israel and the present conflict. Particularly, the question on my mind is of ownership of the land embraced by far right-wing Israelis, or alternatively by the “post-colonial” outlook sold to the Palestinians by Western activists.
As some may know, and without adding my own bias, it is clear that some of those who call themselves Palestinian were expelled/left many areas of what is now Israel several generations ago (and yes, some stayed, and are now Israeli citizens, some stayed in the West Bank region, and some stayed in Gaza–just to be clear). However, Israel’s borders have fluctuated so much since 1948, and the Palestinian people have had such scattered victimized history through that same period, that it is nearly impossible to know the specific borders they have a ‘right’ to claim; which is one reason why their claims are so blunt: they want the entire thing back, or some do, or some leaders do, etc. But it wasn’t really theirs before 1947, they had no country, no government, no recognition from other nation-states. This area–what can be considered Israel and its territories–was part of the British Empire under which Jews, and Arabs of both the Muslim and Christian variety, and half-a-dozen other smaller groups (many still around and conveniently ignored in the press) lived, technically, on British-owned land, stolen fair and square from the Ottomans (Turks) who were unlucky enough to have chosen Germany as allies in World War I. At the time of that war, not a single nation-state that now exists from the present Turkish border all the way down the Arabian peninsula existed. Not one. No Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, or Israel. The Ottomans held an empire that included that little strip of land that would become Israel starting in 1516, when their sultan Selim I (known as Selim the Grim, perhaps for his campaign of beheading every male Shia Muslim aged 7-70 who lived within his territory) took what is now Israel from the Mamluks–who overthrew the Ayyubids (who had once already lost and gained back Judea/Israel/Palestine/the Levant(ish, sort-of)). The Mamluks had defeated the Mongols (in 1260, Battle of Ain Jalut–thus they make the Top-Bad-Asses in history list) to gain partial control of the Levant, sharing it with the small crusader kingdom, which had been expanding and contracting since the mostly Frankish, but also Italo-Norman (somewhat direct descendants of the Norsemen, or Vikings), army of Crusaders had come out of Dark Ages Europe in 1096 to defeat the Seljuks (also Turks), including laying siege to, and then massacring everyone in the City of Jerusalem (a sub theme of this brief history). Of course, the Seljuk Empire took that land from the Fatimids, who took it from the Ikhshidids (a real word, I assure you), who took it from the Abbasid Caliphate, who traded it with the Tulunids, back and forth, and all of that history roughly reaching back to the 9th century. In the 8th century it was the Umayyad Caliphate, the first major Muslim empire, who took it from the Byzantine Romans in roughly 637-8, who had controlled it since they were just plain Romans, who started a relatively bloodless conquest (just kidding, it was awful) in the 1st century BC.
Kudos to the Romans for keeping the peace in that tiny strip of land for the longest period of time in history–except they did it by massacring everyone in Jerusalem in 70 and tearing down the Hebrew temple; although they wouldn't expel the Jews from their “ancestral” lands for another 62 years. In the interim, the Romans fought off the Jews in a series of rebellions that left hundreds of thousands of Roman civilians dead in 115 AD. Mostly Greek-speaking Roman citizen populations were massacred by Jewish communities in Cyrene, Cyprus, and dozens of other places in an insurrection against the Roman occupation of Judea–no doubt those Jews were chanting “From the river to the sea! Judea must be free!” The Romans got the Jews back, massacring several hundred thousand in several locations. Some of these numbers are disputed, and the only good records are Roman, but they are all we have to go on, and Cyrene was said, by Christian historians, to have suffered so terribly at the hands of the Jews in that revolt that it was still a wasteland 400 years later. The Jews were scattered by Hadrian in the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132. It might have been a peace, but it was certainly Roman-style peace with all the attendant evils thereof.
Before the 1st century the ‘occupiers’ of this land include the Seleucids, Parthians, and Maccabees, the latter of which fought off Hellenized Jews, and Greek-Macedonian conquerors, who rolled over Achaemenid Persians, who defeated the Babylonians, who had previously conquered Judea (it’s only name at the time-ish, sort of) from the Assyrians (who are still around! Not Syrians, Assyrians. I met one once, she was very proud of being an Assyrian for some reason). They held it from attacks by the Egyptians, who took it from the Babylonians, back to the Assyrians, back to the Egyptians, etc., until finally, back far enough in the timeline, the land of Israel is a thriving Hebrew tribal kingdom called Israel ~2800 years ago, which historians assume is when David and Solomon reigned for a brief time at the dawn of the Iron Age before Rehoboam tore the nation asunder. The records of those days were somewhat unreliable, or biblical, as it were–Herodotus not having invented history yet. Even if we take the books of Genesis through Joshua as legitimate historical accounts, the Hebrews themselves left that land, were enslaved, came back, lived through the Bronze-Age collapse and subsequent dark age, emerging from that period to conquer it from the Canaanites and sundry other groups, nearly all of whom were slaughtered to the last living person in their cities, all in what is now Israel long before David was ever born, if he lived at all.
The point is that nearly every major power in history within a geographic region roughly the shape of a giant inverted triangle with points in England, Egypt, and modern Mongolia has controlled this land. Nearly every single one of those powers had to conquer another power to take it.
The word “colonized” doesn’t begin to describe the land that is now Israel. In two and a half millennia that land has been the colonial holding one empire after another, averaging a new ruler every few hundred years. It turns out being geographically at the crossroads of three continents isn’t a recipe for a peaceful history.
3. The Post-Colonial Narrative
So, who decides when history begins? When it comes to the ‘Levant’, on the one hand are the Jews who claim it as their land, at least partially with a historical/biblical justification, while on the other are the Palestinians who never owned/controlled it but certainly existed there for some not insignificant amount of time, but only by the leave of the empires that owned the land. The far right in Israel seems to invoke (explicitly or implicitly) that the land of Israel (sometimes broadened to include a mythological expanse that includes Lebanon, parts of Syria, Jordan, and Egypt, as well as what Israel already controls) is the Jewish homeland infallibly, historically, and forevermore as if they sprouted out of the river Jordan itself. This is as absurd as it is counterproductive, as that Assyrian woman I met would possibly have something to say about deep historical roots that somehow justify ownership. However, that view is a minority view in Israel itself, and therefore not the subject of this essay. What does concern me is what the Palestinians have been taught by their Western left-wing allies, that the Palestinians should control the land of Israel because history starts in 1948 with a hazy shade of historical context floating back in time diminishing right after the Turks were kicked out by the British. If the “de-colonizer” set has taught me anything, it’s that everything is somehow the British Empire's fault. Or worse, before these anti-imperialist Western “scholars” started turning their loathing inwards, the Palestinians were taught by their Sunni Muslim Majority Arab-nation-state neighbors that the land that is now Israel is somehow part of a lost Muslim Caliphate that needs to be reclaimed from the infidels. This is the position of ISIS, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, etc. While Iranian leaders, and their trouble-making arm in Lebanon, Hezbollah, seem to hold a similar view, with a Shia turn of mind, claiming Israel for their Islam, which, if achieved, we must assume, would throw the entire Levant region into a bloody nightmare akin to the current Islamic civil war in Yemen.
It should concern us all that with all these warring ideologies at play informing the various global powers and political thinkers, the muddle that is the question of legitimacy of ownership cannot be cleaned up. The dueling paradigms that I’ve tried to present above are completely at odds with any future peace that isn’t dependent upon a prologue-like series of massacres.
In the main, it is easy for us to dismiss religion-based claims, because we (you) are (likely) Westerners with a Western understanding that the Bible, the Quran, or indeed, any ancient religious texts, are not rational sources for making geopolitical policy decisions. Never mind that these are two sets of claims that fuel the fire of the current conflict, regardless of rhetoric. I don’t need to convince most of you that just because Cain went out east of Eden into the land of Nod, this doesn’t mean we should be digging around in search of ancient Nod while we scour the world for Cain’s ancestors so that they might be repatriated. Thus the religious claims on the land are easily discarded by “us” in the west.
However, the anti-imperialists/de-colonizer paradigm is one that I am more likely to encounter in this country. In this narrative framework, history appears to have begun somewhere in the 19th century, with the British Empire reaching its apogee while the American westward expansion and industrialization created our Gilded Age. In some circles there is a tendency to start with Columbus and leap-frog the 17th and 18th centuries (see: the untold story of the Plains Indians above), but essentially, the mid-late 19th century is the dawn of time to the “post-colonialists.” Frantz Fanon, John Paul Sartre, Edward Said, and of course that rascally little hobgoblin Michel Foucault, and many others, had varying degrees of (lacking any) moral clarity, but all are certainly observing imperialism’s problems with relative accuracy. However, their inheritors in academia (and of late, Congress, don’t forget The Squad!) continue to speak about, and act towards the present as if imperialism didn’t die a miserable ignominious death decades ago–in most places almost 80 years ago. Furthermore, this same ideological position seems to be uninterested in understanding and incorporating any kind of history before British India was established in 1848.
Any view of history that doesn’t observe the continuous rise and fall of empires, the conquest and reconquest of lands, the back and forth roil of armies, raiders, peoples and cultures, is blind–and many of those post-colonialist academics do not have the excuse of being ding-bat college students chanting stupidities with a crowd. They are smart enough to know better. They have simply chosen to view history this way.
And why not, it is an attractively simple narrative: Western/European/White-American/Whiteness is evil, everyone else is a victim. This paradigm has all that snarky shame-that’s-really-pride I wrote about a month ago, and provides an avenue for self-righteous anger for young people whose lives are devoid of meaning and desperate for a cause. Plus, these conclusions seem to come with tenured positions and chairmanships of departments at top universities. A professor at Yale writes, “Settlers are not civilians. This is not hard” on October 7th. By “Settlers,” of course, she means the entire state of Israel, the whole thing, all 7 million Israeli Jews. 100 Columbia professors signed a letter supporting Hamas’s so-called “military action.” In addition, the letter described the Israeli presence in “Palestinian territory” as “illegal occupation.” Across the protests and marches there have been signs and posters expressing sentiments of “occupation,” delegitimizing the very existence of the State of Israel, and claiming the legitimacy of the state of Palestine. This perspective is the ideology of post-colonialism. It imagines a world where the history of the Levant began in 1948, a world where a distinct people, distinctly brown, called Palestinians, lived in a legitimate recognized country called Palestine, ruled by them, going back in time to the dawn of humanity, until along came the evil white Zionists who snatched the land from them. The attitude also implies that none of the history from the ‘48 war through the Yom Kippur war in ‘73 ever happened; that the Cold War competition between the US and the Soviet Union wasn’t a central part of the conflict there in the ‘60s and ‘70s; that the violent expulsion of the Mizrahi Jews of North Africa and the Middle East never happened; that the generations of horrendous treatment of the Palestinians by the surrounding Arab states never occurred. And that’s hardly to mention that those very same Arab states continue to either use as pawns, or ignore the Palestinians. The only things that matter are the times that Israelis have treated the Palestinians horribly, starting in 1948, and all else is washed away.
To the post-colonial mindset there is only the colonizer and the colonized, and once the mob has decided which is which, once the slogans have been written and chanted, once the signs have been painted, and the marches held, that is all that matters.
4. Too Much, Too Late
Why? As with Black Lives Matter gaining traction just as Black Americans were making extraordinary progress towards parity, and the United States was entering a period as free from racial bigotry as it had ever been in its history, so this moment is coming at a peculiar time. Israel had made strides gaining recognition and peace from several Arab states, and the Palestinian Authority, and was on the verge of peace with Saudi Arabia with the Abraham accords; yes the settlements in the West Bank were continuing to be a problem, and Netenyahu was clinging to power like a child to a toy–I don’t want to sugar coat that situation; his covert support of Hamas should bring up charges of treason, and if proved, no one would be more justly executed. Bad as the situation in the West Bank might have been, it was clearly better than suicide bombings and war. Gaza was still a mess, but at least there was partial movement for the Palestinians. More generally, this is the least imperial moment in global history since the early modern period began. The United States left Afghanistan, and hasn’t seriously intervened in Latin America since Granada 40 years ago. Though arguably a hegemon, the US was never an empire the way the other empires were. Globalization, which I have major problems with and think should probably be restructured, to give the devil his due, has lifted at least a billion people out of desperate poverty in the last half century, which is a hell of a lot better a track record than any particular ideology can claim. Meanwhile, the old empires are kind of a joke. The British Empire is one in name only, the French, who held on the hardest, lost it first. China still sits on Tibet and looks more and more like it has finally dominated Hong Kong. However, of the Empires of the past, the only one that is truly acting like a colonial empire is Russia with Putin’s treatment of Russia’s neighbors appearing to have been taken right out of a 19th century playbook for petty imperial pretenders.
I hate to break it to all the Western intellectuals who have more degrees than sense, but there just aren’t colonies anymore (Guam just doesn’t count). Colonialism died just as Israel was being born. And Israel was never, ever, a colony of Jews. I think that’s the sticking point for so many of those marching in the streets and on college campuses; the real cause of their outrage. Sure, maybe some protesters in this country are Palestinian, and some are following the Palestinian oppressor/oppressed dichotomy that passes for deep thought in post-colonial studies programs (I still can’t believe they exist). However, what’s really going on is this performative shame/pride dance of strident anti-colonialism as an exercise of self-validation, where colonialism does not actually exist any more. This inappropriate narcissistic apology for history takes the form of projecting the supposed sins of the past on Israel in the present, and exposes the great lie of postcolonial studies department’s professors, students, and fellow-travelers. It is subtle and never-articulated, but it is a lie made clear by the stridency of those who decry the excesses of empire at protest after protest, that they believe they would have done it differently had they been in charge in the past. They undoubtedly protest too much.
Israel is their foil, their way to prove their anti-colonial bona fides. Since there aren’t any real colonies left, the academics and activists had to make one up; Israel is a straw-man nation of colonizers, just white enough to fit the part of the villain. The complexities of the region, the complexities of history, the culpability of the neighboring states, the fact that the majority of Israelis aren’t white Europeans; all of that is easy to ignore in pursuit of validating one's moral righteousness. All these mostly-white, mostly affluent petite-bourgeois academics, politicians, and college kids marching against Israel-as-colonizer are out to prove how moral they are by fighting the last great fight of the imperial age (or the first big fight of the next imperial age). And the beautiful part for these self-important scolds is that the only people who have to actually pay for this great act of masturbatory self-validation are the dead Israelis and Palestinians, who are, conveniently, thousands of miles away, and whose suffering is either–if Jewish–justified by the most evil ideological rationalization since eugenics (see: “Settlers are not civilians”), or–if Palestinian–sanctified as sacrificial proofs on the altar of anti-colonial justice. Thus these activists can spend all day shouting slogans, then high-five each other, post their achievements on insta-twit-toc-a-gram-i-tube, and then go to brunch at Panera.
As the halls of the dead grow overcrowded with innocents, these brave Western “allies” of the “colonized” Palestinians are the only ones whose needs are being met. A group of largely Western privileged narcissists overwhelmed by shame/pride with a few token authentic victims ginning up outrage amongst the masses of Gen-Z protest hobbyists wouldn’t be much of a problem, if it weren’t making everything worse. These “intellectuals” have successfully influenced enough people in enough places that a new strategic pathway is believed to be possible by Hamas, and those like Hamas, that if properly provoked, the Israelis will respond in such a way that they will go a bridge too far and be forced to bow in defeat under international pressure. In other words, the post-colonial left in the West has convinced Hamas and many Palestinians (and apparently my colleague here at Chorus of Union) that together they can win.
But what does winning look like?
5. From the River to the Sea
It’s a good slogan. It’s punchy, simple, powerful, and it comes with a grand crowd-pleasing symbolic arm gesture that looks like one is cutting a slice off a giant cake. The call-and-response followup phrase, “Palestine will be free!” is also an excellent crowd pleaser here in the West where we love freedom so much, regardless of what kind of spin we put on the word from right to left.
It has the added power of being vague enough to carry two different meanings–therefore it can bring together two wildly distinct and otherwise adversarial groups of advocates. One meaning championed by some Western postcolonial “thinkers,” and the other by all of Hamas and their allies. There is overlap for this fuzzy Venn diagram that is difficult to see because it requires serious cross-examination of each individual sloganeer to unpack which meaning is being advocated by the slogan.
Those two meanings can be seen in a series of exchanges when Ben Shapiro appeared at the Oxford Union debate hall for a short speech and question and answer period. In that appearance, I was surprised at how painfully polite he tried to be, especially in the face of extraordinary rudeness from multiple questioners. Separately, two Muslim women asked him questions about the current conflict. It’s interesting to watch the answers, and, whatever you think of Ben Shapiro, he held his own, again, with almost painstaking politeness. At the end of each exchange with the two Muslim women, he asked them in turn some version of this question: “Which part of Israel is ‘Occupied Palestine’?” The first woman’s response: “All of it,” was all she offered, she walked away without clarification. He asked the second Muslim woman the same question, and she responded at first similarly, all of Israel is occupied Palestine. When he responded by accusing her of advocating for the genocide of the Jewish people in Israel, one of his only edgy moments of the visit from what I saw, she responded by saying: “I’m not calling for the destruction of the Jews. . . you can have a state where everyone has equal rights.” Their time to discuss that point was cut off by the moderator, but that young woman expressed, clearly, and well, one of the two interpretations of what “From the river to the sea” might mean. I’ll return to that second woman in a moment.
The first woman did not shy away from the accusation that she advocated for the “obliteration” of the state of Israel. This is the one interpretation of the slogan that we should fear. This proposition is simple and brutal, that the state of Israel must be razed, and that the Jews there should leave or die. This is Hamas’s stated chartered goal, it is the position of the Iranian leadership, it is the very point of the existence of Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, and any number of other terrorist groups that formed, not to bring peace, but to bring death. The Jews must leave or die, and never again walk the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. I don’t believe this is a possibility, but that woman does, and so does Hamas, and millions of supporters who chant that chant, or think it just. This is advocacy of real genocide, and once again, the Ubiquity Fallacy rears its head, as our collective memory of the Holocaust is too far in the past now for us to remember why Israel was created in the first place, or at least why the UN suggested a Jewish state be carved out of the region, and why the international community allowed it to happen, and why they recognized Israel after the ‘48 war–there is no reason to believe that any of that would have happened were it not for the Hollocaust. We have collectively internalized and dissipated the power and strength of that great historic calamity and the anti-semitism that caused it. But Hamas reminded us. And it is a level of violence that is legitimized by Fanon, Sartre, and a depressing number of post-colonial thinkers who are still alive who see Israelis as settlers deserving of death, and Hamas as resistance fighters justified in dealing out that death. To quote Sartre’s preface to Fanon’s grotesquely adolescent The Wretched of the Earth:
There is one duty to be done, one end to achieve: to thrust out colonialism by every means in their power. . . The Native cures himself of colonial neurosis by thrusting out the settler through force of arms. When his rage boils over, he rediscovers his lost innocence and he comes to know himself in that he himself creates his self. . . For in the revolt you must kill: to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time: there remain a dead man, and a free man; the survivor, for the first time, feels a national soil under his foot.
The sentiments of this book and those like it are the intellectual underpinnings of what happened in Western cities and universities after October 7th. If ideas matter at all, and I believe they do, then these sentiments are also the ideas of the new left that has no patience for Thoreau or Gandhi; they believe Civil Disobedience is for fools. This is the attitude that excuses, nay, demands, kidnapping, rape, murder, and using your own innocents as human shields. This is disgusting, immoral, Machiavellian, relativistic, all-against-all horror. This is what two generations of hard leftward secular swing in academia and activism has given us. There is no forgiving, no imagining of history beyond the master and the slave, the dichotomy, the Manichean construction of a good and evil without any tether to the true Good. This is the left without Martin Luther King Jr., without empathy, without love. This is the left without God. Marx would be proud.
The second woman, however, expressed the other interpretation of the slogan. One I think I would have advocated for when I was young. It is a perfectly admissible argument to make: if one nation can live with diversity and guarantee rights for all, then another can, and that it is the responsibility of those peoples, peaceably, to make that a reality. A United States of the Levant, I expect we’d have to call it. At first, when I heard her say it, I laughed, as I am no longer young and full of hope as I once was, but I did have to reconsider it. It may happen, life is long, humanity exists through long stretches of time in societies that war on each other and then make peace, so who's to say it won’t? Who would have thought that England and France would have joined sides against Germany after warring on each other for half a millennia? Who would have considered it possible at the height of the fire-bombings of Tokyo, that the United States would rebuild Japan and then become her closest ally? What fantasist would have proposed in the 1840s that Ireland would gain independence, or that the Good Friday accords would finally take the gun out of Irish politics? Time hurries on, hatreds die, prosperity can work wonders to alleviate resentments. It’s all possible.
However, we have forgotten how hateful men can be, how depraved, how monstrous, and the scars left on the Israeli people will last a long time to come, because Hamas has reminded us of what darkness lurks in the hearts of men. Maybe someday that sweet young kid at Oxford with her heart in her hand won’t sound so terribly and desperately naïve. I hope so, but I doubt anytime soon.
6. “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
Who has the legitimate claim on the land, and when does History begin? I don’t honestly know. I wrote last time that a few truths exist that we need to acknowledge that are deeper than abstract claims of lands framed by invisible lines. They bear repeating:
The state of Israel exists as a Jewish-majority state.
The state of Israel isn’t going anywhere.
The Palestinians exist.
The Palestinians are a Muslim-majority people.
The Palestinians also aren’t going anywhere either.
These truths are so much stronger than any claims of land. There are maybe a few thousand Palestinians who left/were expelled in 1948 that still remember “their” land when it belonged to the British Empire, and none who remember it when it belonged to the Turks. There are maybe a few thousand Jewish Israelis who remember the Holocaust and the fresh promise of the Jewish State deriving in part therefrom; or who remember the original UN partition agreement in ‘47, and the war the future Israelis, abandoned by the West, fought to make that outline a real state in ‘48. There may even be a few Jews left who remember the massive influx of Jews to British controlled Palestine in the ‘20s and ‘30s. There may be a few hundred Israelis and Palestinians who were born in British Palestine in the ‘20s to families that trace their lineage back beyond records, to where memory is no more. They will die, the memories will die with them, but the past will not die. It will remain with us, haunt our present, define our future. It is hard to remember that the Romans did not succeed fully in removing the Jews from the Levant, just as it is impossible to know when the first ancestors of the Palestinians arrived in the Levant. From the river to the sea there is a country named Israel. It was established to be a Jewish-majority state, a homeland for the Jewish people the world-over, down to a quarter of the blood in ancestry, regardless of religious practice. Despite what my colleague wrote a few weeks ago, I don’t believe it will be obliterated by force of arms, and it is absurd to think it will be defeated by one good slogan.
And ultimately, there is another truth that matters more than these: history begins now, and memory doesn’t matter.
I own land. I bought it with money my wife and I earned through our labors. It once belonged to a man named Fred, who built the house on it. And another before that, back in time to the founding of our town in the 18th century, and before that the Cowasuck Abanaki who likely took it from some other tribe whose name is forgotten. The only Abanaki man I’ve met is a bearded guy with blue-eyes who drives a Subaru–my guess is he isn’t 100% Abanaki (just a guess). Not that it would matter to me if he was; this isn’t his land. It is mine, and I am not giving it up. I plan on being buried here. This is my land, my town, my state, my country, and if someone tried to kick me off that land I would fight them with everything I have. These may be the ways of the past, but they are profound, deep ways that have a magic that runs hard in the marrow of humanity. These feelings I understand in my gut somewhere rough and angry and primal and violent–somewhere Fanon was trying to reach and strum, somewhere Sartre endorsed. This feeling created these problems, these feelings I share with Israelis and Palestinians.
However, there are better feelings. If I and my children were kicked off this land in an act of terrible injustice when I am old, what would/should my grandchildren do? After the ‘48 war, those Jews who were already in Israel were waiting. Those who were from Europe and came to Israel after escaping annihilation had the choice to make, what to do now that nearly all was lost? They had their homes taken, their wealth stolen, their people murdered in the millions, driven almost to extinction, and they responded by coming to that same little strip of land–a desert, really, with earth made of mostly dust, sand, and dried blood–and they tried to make a new home. They did not demand, and have not demanded anything but recognition from Poland, France, Austria, Hungary, Romania, Germany, and the dozen other countries where they were nearly annihilated. Then after making a home for themselves, they made a home for hundreds of thousands of more of their people whom they had not known for thousands of years, whose language and skin color and customs were wildly different from their own. These newcomers were brutally expelled from Syria, Egypt, Algeria, Yemen, and a dozen other countries where they had lived for almost two thousand years; they had homes taken, their wealth stolen, and many were murdered and raped in these expulsions. They came to Israel and the Israelis made a home for them on that same strip of blood-stained desert. They never demanded anything of the countries that aided in their expulsion, not Syria, not Egypt, not Yeman or Morocco, or the dozen other states. I like to think that if my children were kicked off this land in an act of terrible injustice, wherever they ended up, they would emulate the Israelis inasmuch as they would see their new land, even if it were a place of dust, sand, and dried blood, and make it bloom.
Because a full view of History dictates that none of us are from where we live. People move, change, drift, adapt, and history is never ending in its modulations. Once the fight was lost for my land, I would hope I could say to my children, “we came from there once, but now we are here. It doesn’t matter how we got here, here is where we are, and we need to live here, now.” This is the hard conclusion. The people of Gaza had a vote once, and they voted against that. I wish they could vote again. Instead of building Gaza into a paradise, instead of making it bloom, Hamas bent all towards violence, hate, and self-destruction.
The people of Gaza, and Palestinians in general, have been told by many that they live in a state of constant injustice. That because the world was taken from them, the world owes them. Those who tell them that, as Sartre repeats over and over, “read Fanon” and believe that all manner of evil taken upon one's soul is justified; that the stain of evil is worth the land under the feet of the “settler” the “occupier” the “colonizer;” that resentment and violence are the only pathways to the future. You who march for Palestinians who tell them this are not helping. You are not their friends. Your ideas are destroying their future. Post-colonial thought gives aid to murderers, justifies rapists, and passes the knife to the torturer. It feeds the kidnapper, and lights the match for the immolator of the innocent.
The Israelis took a different path. There is nothing easy about this, and the Israelis know that better than anyone. I have no name for this ideology, except that it involves letting go of the idea that history begins and ends. Every “people” that claims lands that are long gone–be they Lakota, Abanaki, Jew, Palestinian, Basque, Kurd, Assyrian, Pict, Trojans, Caananites, what have you–needs to let go of history. To not accept your own life in the present reality, to look to a history that is always selective, never complete, without beginning or end; that is the way of misery, resentment, and a kind of existence that may not mean death, but isn’t really life–it is an anti-life philosophy.
There are generations that can live in history, and others that need to make a choice to start a new history. Not everyone gets justice, not everyone can right the wrongs of the past. This is a hard lesson. This is the “suck-it-up” theory of building a future, and it is unsatisfying. However, accepting this is the only way to build a new history. The Palestinians need to make a new history, because those truths I wrote about above aren’t changing. The Israelis will not leave, they will not bend, and they will not die. In Gaza, the Palestinians are now made up of the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of some of those who were expelled from a strip of desert, and whether it was just or unjust does not matter. What matters now is that the leaders of these people in Gaza have brought them nothing but pain, their brothers in the surrounding countries have not helped them, the United Nations has not helped them, and are unlikely to do so in the future, and the Westerners that are the Palestinians supposed allies have not helped them, either. Most of the aforementioned leaders, organizations, and allies have actually hurt the Palestinian people’s ability to make a future for themselves where they are. They need to help themselves first by thinking differently enough that their leadership changes. And they need to accept what they have to work with, the land they currently have is what it is, and they need to say goodbye to the claims of a history reaching back into the dim past, say goodbye for the last time to the graves of their grandfathers that are now in a different land, and make their new land bloom to live in peace.