“Remember there was no Palestine as a state,” says Newt Gingrich, current frontrunner for the Republican Party’s US presidential nomination (“Gingrich Describes Palestinian People as ‘Invented,'” Fox News, December 10). “It was part of the Ottoman Empire. And I think that we’ve had an invented Palestinian people …”
First, credit where credit is due: Gingrich is right.
Throughout recorded history, the region known as Palestine has been a football kicked between empires (Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, various Caliphates, the Ottomans), its inhabitants usually denied anything resembling a “national identity.”
That began to change in the early 20th century. Local Arab leaders, responding to the succeeding waves of Jewish aliyah (“ascent,” return to their historic home) and hoping to cut a new state out of the territory instead of acquiescing in absorption by existing Arab regimes, attempted to counterpose a Palestinian national identity to incipient Israel.
Had those existing Arab regimes succeeded in quashing the new Jewish state, that’s likely the last we’d have heard of “Palestinians” (except in the sense in which the term was used prior to 1948 — referring to Jews born in the region). Those Arabs would have become Jordanians or Syrians or Egyptians whether they liked it or not, and that would have settled the question for a long, long time.
It was Israel’s victory in the 1948 war which allowed a Palestinian national identity to emerge and harden in exile, nurtured by Arab “leaders” who’d missed their chance to absorb and crush that identity and now found it a useful propaganda instrument.
All collective identities of this sort are invented, not least that of Israel, which its citizens self-assembled in less than half a century, operating from the dream of Austro-Hungarian journalist Theodor Herzl.
“Americans” were British colonists seeking “the rights of Englishmen” until, in the second year of their revolution, Thomas Paine convinced them to invent themselves differently.
Germany and Italy didn’t come into existence as cohesive nations until they were forcibly united by men like Bismarck and Garibaldi in the 19th century.
Look at any of the imaginary lines drawn on the ground by politicians around the world — “borders” — and you’ll find that those lines started with invented identities, upon which power-seekers piggybacked their pretensions. Gandhi’s India and Jinnah’s Pakistan, Bolivar’s Gran Colombia — you name it. Nations invent themselves constantly and spontaneously, after which they’re boxed in and drained of their inventive energy by their own emerging political classes.
To condemn Gingrich for taking notice of this fact is to both miss his point and gloss over his real failure of imagination and character.
Minimized in most accounts of his statement is the fact that Gingrich supports adding yet another Westphalian nation-state — based, like all such states, on parasitic exploitation of invented identity — to the map.
That parasitic exploitation, statism, is no solution to social ills. In fact, it exacerbates those ills and prevents those who identify with each other from finding real solutions.
Political government inhibits the constant, natural process of invention and re-invention, attempting to freeze social and ethnic identities in place and channel their energy for the benefit of parasites. Parasites, like, in a word, Gingrich.
The first step toward peace — in Palestine as everywhere else — is abolition of the state.
Translations for this article:
- Portuguese, Newt Gingrich e a Invenção da Política.
Citations to this article:
- Thomas L. Knapp, Newt Gingrich and the Invention of Politics, Hernando [Florida] Today, 12/13/11
But that does not imply that the term Ozarkian only applied to a subset of people associated with the Ozarks, and it is irrelevant whether or not “Palestinian” was self-applied as a self-identification, only whether it was applied. But if it would be convenient for you to consult different sources, try the Palestinian Mandate reports to the League of Nations, e.g. the 1927 one containing: “601 Palestinians made the pilgrimage to Mecca”. I think that is a clear pre-1948 reference to Palestinians that does not mean Jews; if anything, it seems to exclude non-Muslims of all sorts.
I suspect you have bought into the Zionist narrative, in which only their descriptions count.
Collectivism, nationalism, racism, theism: It's time for libertarians to once more oppose these vigorously. We used to, but others argued that these are either not as bad as the State; more absurdly, that such fictions actually protect the weak little individual from the State.
Fact is, that the State could not survive very long without the aforementioned; fair from protecting individuals, it weakens them. They are the State's acts of fraud. To anarcho-syndicalists and anarcho-communists who may be reading, I am not opposed to solidarity; solidarity is not the same thing as collectivism. Solidarity is voluntarily, while collectivism is imposed.
Never a Gypsy or Basque state, AFAIK. Or a Wendish state. Or a Provencal state, unless you count the Albigensians. What we call "dialects" would be national languages in many cases, if the absolute monarchs had run out of money a little sooner. And many "national languages" are basically just dialects (e.g. Russian and Ukrainian are just dialects of a larger East Slavic language, and southern Russian dialects are closer to Ukrainian than standard Russian).
The Israelites differentiated themselves from the rest of what amounted to a Greater Hebrew people (Edomites, Midianites, Moabites, Canaanites, Phoenicians, etc.) based on a conversion to Yahwism (I believe there's a credible argument that the tribe of Judah was of Midianite origin — see Jethro the priest of Yahweh in Midian, who converted Moses). The language spoken in most of those west Semitic areas was essentially the same. Sounds a lot like the Yugoslavs, who call themselves Serbs or Croats based on whether they write the same Serbo-Croatian language in an alphabet invented by Catholic or Orthodox missionaries, and which church they stay home from on Sundays.
My recent post New Book in the Works
No. “Palestine” was in use as a term to describe the geographical region at least as early as the early 19th century, as we can see from Macaulay’s essay on “The Civil Disabilities of the Jews”; Palestinian was the generic adjective from that and so included anyone from there, not simply Jews.
Non sequitur.
There's a region of the central United States generically referred to as "the Ozarks." Most people from that region, however, do not refer to themselves as, or claim membership in a chosen collective identity as, "Ozarkians" (most of them call themselves "Americans," "Missourians," "Arkansans," etc.).
Yes, there is a region which has been called "Palestine" since time immemorial. However, pre-1948, the only people who were referred to with any regularity, by themselves or anyone else, as "Palestinians," were Jews native to that region. The Arabs living in the region, when they self-identified beyond the tribal Bedouin level, were generally called, and called themselves, "Egyptians," "Syrians," etc.
Actually the term Palestine goes back to the Romans. It is the Latin version of the word "Phillistine" which was an ancient Phonecian people inhabiting the region then known as Canaan.
And I suspect you're trying to re-write history to create an identity which didn't exist until it was invented (like pretty much all identities).