This article was originally written on 5 March 2012 and published on blog.luxzenburg.org. It is republished here as a historical document and reflects the author’s ideas at the time of writing.
A well-written article about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, by an American scholar on Al Jazeera. He argues why the debate over whether a Palestinian nation exists is nonsense. The Palestinian nation is just as invented as the Israeli nation.
Judging by the scholar’s name, he appears to have a Jewish background. If so, his contribution to the dialogue is all the more valuable: people who bridge the ‘camps’ — that is ultimately where peace must come from.
Not from the Newt Gingriches of this world, who think in boxes, take sides and deliver rhetoric that some far-right figures in Europe would not yet dare to voice.
The core of the argument is simple but powerful: both ’nations’ are, in the modern sense of the word, constructs. Palestinian identity as a national category was largely formed in response to the Zionist project. Israeli national identity was formed by the return of diaspora Jews to a land that had never been a single coherent Jewish state. That makes neither identity ‘fake’ or less valid — but it strips both parties of the argument of historical exclusivity.
Whoever recognises that nations are made and not found can perhaps also recognise that they can be remade — in a way that leaves room for more than one story.