NOVANEWS
There’s a lot to say and get pissed off about in Jamie Stern-Weiner’s recent interview with Norman Finkelstein. Some of it will definitely be taken up by others. Finkelstein no longer strikes me as very radical, nor does he strike me anymore as very thoughtful, or, better, reflective. His concern for Palestine has always had a diamond-hard outrage at its core, but it is also aging into a resigned pragmatism. His prose and his thinking both lately have these machinic cadences, and I wonder where the man is who called Hezbollah heroes for fending off the Israeli army, and captivated me into caring about this conflict on a more intense level with his own intense moral clarity and his harsh Spartan judgments, “incensed that history should even have versions.” Jamie asks and NF answers:
I guess they’d respond that they’re trying to build as broad a movement as possible, and so as far as they can, they try to avoid specifying their preferences for a final settlement so that people who disagree about that can still unite to achieve more immediate goals.
Yes, but it also turns a lot of people away because they want clear answers before they’re willing to join in. You know, they say they oppose “Zionists” — “Zionism” is the epithet du jour — but what does that mean? You’re against Richard Goldstone? You’re against Noam Chomsky? I don’t know what it means. Richard Goldstone is the enemy? I don’t see that.
Zionism is the motive force of the conflict, the reason Israel can’t stop settlement-building without causing massive internal damage to its own society, why it can’t and it won’t stop the occupation until external forces compel it to do so. When those massive external forces–fucking us!–are in a position to compel a resolution on terms approximating justice, why should we settle for a two-state solution? The Palestinians don’t want to, and one state vs. two states is not so relevant to the the short-term political horizon, although clearly, as the Palestinian left and Matzpen insisted for decades, two-states is both unrealistic and immoral. So what’s Finkelstein getting at? Does he or does he not support condemning Hamas for “war crimes”? Does he or does he not support institutionalizing irredentist religious nationalism, AKA Israel on the ’48 armistice lines? Does or doesn’t Finkelstein think that American support for Zionism is premised on the perceived usefulness of a state running amok, sowing chaos in the Middle East, scaring up arms sales, scaring up oil prices, working well for the Israeli stock market, mostly high-tech with a huge side-business inarms-development? Does or doesn’t Finkelstein think materialist analysis matters? He does think ideas matter: justice is an idea, morality is an idea, international law is an idea. And Zionism is an idea. Problem is, Zionism’s metastatic, it’s a cancer, it grows and gobbles land and starts wars, that is its nature. Zionism is an idea that’s being practiced. That doesn’t mean those condemning the idea and its practice are a bunch of hipsters indulging the latest bohemian fad.
American elites won’t abandon Israel because of a pragmatic, realist case that such support is against American elite interests–or at least, I don’t think that’s the way it will play out, although others do. Elites will abandon Israel when a social upsurge, with one of its many planks being concern for Palestine, renders that support way too costly, when threatened “interests” include threats to the maintenance of domestic stability or stability in the Arab dictatorships. Certainly, those elites don’t want what we want. They don’t want justice for all the people in the Middle East. What I think could happen is the maintenance of some kinds of support in the context of security arrangements for a bi-national state. That’ll be easier when most of the Israeli Jewish populace abandons Zionism, pressed by the threat of being turned into a nation of pariahs and tired of sending their children to brutalize and be traumatized to defend an ethnocracy internally stratified along ethno-national lines. Anyway, doesn’t it seem like the secondoption is more likely than the first one, and in fact a very good sop to throw to a radical universalist anti-Zionist anti-capitalist movement, since the Empire of Capital can absorb the loss of Israel as a Middle Eastern client state (not that we should settle for that sop when it comes)? Suppose we as a movement suddenly have the power to press for our goals: why accept such truncated justice? And if we don’t have such power, Zionism has simply woven itself too tightly into the Empire. Finkelstein’s pragmatism forgets to take account of reality, both the Lobby, capitalist interests, and the way the Lobby functions as a shield for those interests.
In any case, when two- and one-states are equidistant from the present catastrophe, there’s a facile convenience in choosing the course currently more amenable to sectors of domestic elite opinion: the two-state solution, a la Geneva. There’s a bit of posturing going on, double-posturing, because it’s posturing that pretends not to posture. There’s something abrasive and condescending about choosing for the victims what sort of justice is appropriate for them. There’s something slippery about side-stepping the way Zionism, economics, capitalism, and imperialism braid to sustain the conflict, and focusing instead on a notion of “consensus” from the world community, as though world opinion matters, as though the consensus on so many other issues is easy to transmute into policy. There’s something nearly naive about the focus on “international law,” when international law’s implementation basically reflects power relations in the real world–which is not to say it doesn’t matter. Finkelstein is free to sidestep power, and he is free to promulgate this sort of analysis. Of course he is. But that tint of superiority coloring this turn to pragmatism is quite annoying, and I can’t imagine I’m the only one getting a little annoyed. Others are getting worse than annoyed–they’re getting alienated. Legacies are in constant construction. Is there a good reason to tarnish a legacy with this kind of gratuitous destructiveness?
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Technorati Tags: Israel, Norman Finkelstein, Palestine,Zionism
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