Towards a Genealogy of the Question of Palestine

On November 2, 1917, 97 years ago, the British Foreign Minister, Arthur James Balfour, wrote a short memo to Lionel Walter Rothschild, one of the leaders of the Zionist movement.  In it he suggested that 'His Majesty's Government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people'.  Zionism was not a new phenomenon, having achieved institutional and political expression in the 1880s and 1890s, but the 'Balfour Declaration' represented what the movement's leaders had long desired - the positive support of one of the great imperial powers.  That great power - Britain and its vast and rich empire - was at this time at war with the Ottoman Empire, which controlled Palestine.  Zionism hoped to benefit from the likely defeat of the Turks, as the 'sick man of Europe' collapsed and its various Middle Eastern and Levantine territories and provinces came within the British sphere of influence.

The 1919 Paris Peace Conference brought the decision to award control of the territory of Palestine to Great Britain, under the terms of a 'mandate' of the newly-formed League of Nations.  Balfour, attending this conference, was well-aware of the contradiction between supporting Jewish-Zionist nationalism, and the support that had been given to the Arabs during the First World War in their struggle against their Ottoman masters.  Palestine was still at this time an overwhelmingly Arab-populated region.  Balfour wrote at this time that 'the contradiction between the letter of the Covenant [of the League of Nations] and the policy of the Allies is even more flagrant in the case of the "independent nation" of Palestine… For in Palestine, we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country'.   And so, he concluded, 'The four Great Powers are committed to Zionism.  And Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far greater import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land'.   From this central and founding position of European imperialism has flowed much of the conflict that has stricken the region ever since.

The Institute of Palestine Studies, to mark this anniversary, is providing on its website a 'special focus collection' of materials pertaining to the Balfour Declaration, for the month of November.   Included in these documents are the text of the Declaration, demographic maps of pre-Mandate Palestine, and no less than ten articles on this topic from past issues of the Journal of Palestine Studies - a fantastic resource for anyone wishing to examine the roots of the present situation.

Special Focus collection around the Balfour Declaration and the effects of British imperial power

Conor

Marina Warner quits Essex - The University in Ruins

Nearly twenty years ago, a young professor at the Universite de Montreal named Bill Readings was killed in an air crash. Friends and colleagues spoke of a brilliant career cut off abruptly and tragically.  But Readings left at least one very fine book.  The University in Ruins was and remains one of the most interesting books on the fate of the humanistic Western university in the postmodern or late modern age.  Readings was writing long before the economic crash, and long before the apotheosis of managerialism as we know it in Anglophone universities now.  He was writing at the end of what in the United States were called 'the culture wars', the series of heated public debates about the nature of cultural education that had begun in the wake of the Vietnam War.  These debates - about the place of matters of class, sex/gender, and race/empire in thought about culture - were often seen as taking place in a sharply polarized landscape, divided between radicals, equipped with the weapons of 'theory', who were intent on storming the citadels of traditional high culture, and their conservative opponents, who were intent on preserving an Arnoldian idea of culture as 'the best that has been thought and said'.  The strength of Readings's book was that it did not observe this divide, but rather reached beyond it.  For Readings, the western university had, under the influence of nineteenth century German thought (Humboldt, but also many figures from the great flowering of German philosophy in the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century had formulated ideas about the workings and functions of a university), been long thought of as the intellectual gearbox of the nation-state.  In a world of globalization, of massive multinationals, and of large international blocs or agencies of power (the EU, the WTO, the IMF), the 'national university' had lost its function as the motive force of national culture.  Those who accused literature professors in hock to Derrida's deconstruction of 'western metaphysics' (for example) of destroying the 'traditional' humanities were missing the point, Readings was showing us: the real threat to humanistic education came from neoliberalism, which with its assaults on state education, on values of the social or national good, and its will both to bureaucratise and commodify learning was the real danger.

Two decades on, we can see the outworking of the situation described by Readings in much greater and often more alarming detail than he could have anticipated.   In America, university education is now so expensive that the accumulation of debt that has funded university attendance over the last couple of decades constitutes another financial 'bubble', ready to burst and cause lethal damage to the world economy.  In Britain, the Brown reforms have resulted variously in a huge spike in university fees, in the abolition of student grants, and in the arbitrary destruction of superb academic units (the Philosophy Department at Middlesex University - one of the best 'continental' philosophy programmes in the Anglophone world, with an exemplary record of research and intellectual advance - was simply abolished, in the face of student protests and petitions from some of the world's greatest living philosophers; fortunately, it has since been 'reconstructed' at Kingston University).  In Ireland, an enormous increase in student numbers and levels of university participation over the last 15 years has continued in spite of huge slashes in state funding for universities during the crash.  The 'Haddington Road' (properly, and more aptly, called 'Beggars Bush') agreement on public sector jobs and wages has brought with it very considerable collapses in staff resistance to various kinds of bureaucratic and managerial 'reform'.  The Higher Education Authority, which oversees the Irish universities and institutes of technology, now takes its advice from Ernst and Young and distributes surveys to staff seeking to estimate the 'impact' of research, and to devise ways for the 'leveraging' of this activity in 'innovation' - a ludicrous Disneyland rhetoric of corporate managerialism dominates the discourse of higher education, so detached from anything to do with learning or teaching that it's hard to credit how senior university administrators, once themselves teachers and scholars, have the faintest idea of what they are talking about.

In this dire context, Marina Warner's story of how she decided to leave the University of Essex is exemplary of the effects of what is now called 'reform' and 'innovation' on even the most brilliant of scholars and intellectuals.  From the London Review of Books, as so often:

Marina Warner
Why I Quit

 

Conor

Colonial Economics

Most of the time we read about Israel and Palestine in political-military terms: military incursions, separation barriers, 'terrorism', useless diplomacy.  But day to day life is, of course, primarily about ordinary survival and people trying to make a living.  We do learn, sometimes, about how closures, or the wall, or checkpoints, affect Palestinian economic activity.  But within the economic sphere itself, the world of production, distribution, policy formulation - here too we find the struggle reproduced in the terms of this action and discourse.  This is Robert Wade, from the London Review of Books website, reflecting on a recent visit to the West Bank.  Wade is a professor at the LSE, and a winner of the 2008 Leontif Prize in Economics:

The Economic Occupation of the West Bank

 

Conor

Cockburn rakes the muck on Wiesel

The prominence of Elie Wiesel is a mystery.  We are often told that Night, his first book (published in French in 1958), which purports to be a memoir of his time in Buchenwald, is the founding text of 'Holocaust literature', but even the status of this work is open to question.  Meanwhile, Wiesel is better known for his work promoting 'peace', which apparently has included support for black South Africans in the apartheid era, Bosnian Muslims, the Kurds. 

But preeminently, Wiesel's support has been for Jewish and Zionist causes.  He has declared that the Holocaust was a genocide incomparable to other murderous 'cleansings', notably the Armenian genocide.   He has supported the Kadima party founded by Ariel Sharon and led by Ehud Olmert.  He has criticized the Obama Administration for its pressure on the Netanyahu government to cease settlement construction in East Jerusalem, and since 2011, he's served as chair of the Ir David organisation, which seeks to create a Jewish majority in that part of the city.

During Operation Protective Edge, Israel's murderous bombardment of the Gaza Strip last summer, Wiesel was at it again, publishing an advertisement in Ha'aretz celebrating the increasing Jewish population of East Jerusalem.

How all of these positions amount to support for 'peace' is unclear.  This makes Alexander Cockburn's stinging attack on him, originally published in Counterpunch's  print edition in 2006 and now republished on Counterpunch's brilliant website, all the more apposite and enjoyable.

Truth and Fiction in Elie Wiesel’s “Night”


Conor

The ends of university education

Nicholas Canny is a distinguished Irish historian who, in the tradition of DB Quinn and Nicholas Mansergh, has been willing to locate the processes of Irish history and Irish relations with England over the last 500 years within the frameworks of colonialism and empire.  Canny, a former head of the Royal Irish Academy, is well-placed to offer a reasoned liberal defence of humanistic university education in the Irish third-level system.  In a situation of shrunken state funding, political cowardice about requiring the Irish middle-class constructively to contribute to their children's university years, and a complete absence of thoughtful public debate about the purpose and strengths of our universities, such a defence is well-needed.  Here Canny reviews a book about the (even worse) situation in Britain, for the Dublin Review of Books:

The Utility of Inquiry

In most ways, the travails of the Irish or American university - bureaucrats colonising an ever-expanding administration, and corporate values encroaching on the proper purposes of research and teaching - seem, while unfortunate, mild in comparison to those of Palestinian universities, which are regularly attacked by the IDF in both Gaza and the West Bank, and which suffer greatly under the routines of Israeli occupation, with students and staff held up or sometimes attacked at checkpoints, campuses invaded, and infrastructure bombarded in the Strip.   But the question of Palestine and the neoliberalisation of the Western university sometimes coincide, to damaging effect.   Here is Joseph Massad (a true survivor of the post-9/11 assault on academic freedom in America), on this particular conjuncture - from Electronic Intifada:

Academic civility and its discontents

 

Conor

Islam - A Secular History

Tariq Ali is one of the great figures of the British New Left.  A lifelong leftwing activist, Ali was removed from Pakistan in his teens by his parents, fearful because of his protests against the-then Pakistani government.  A former president of the Oxford Union, redoubtable campaigner against the Vietnam War, participant in the Russell Tribunal, monitor of the trial in Bolivia of Regis Debray and a major figure in British Trotskyism, Ali is a gifted orator, journalist, film-maker and all-round public intellectual.

In the context of current Western panic about the Islamic State (always referred to in Irish news reports as 'the so-called Islamic State'), and general ignorance about Islam, Ali's essay on the history of that religion is worth reading.

A Secular History of Islam


Conor

Always Looking on the Bright Side - Slavoj Zizek, cats and revolutionary unhappiness

Slavoj Zizek must be one of the most popular philosophers working in the Anglophone world.  The Slovenian, who burst on us with The Sublime Object of Ideology in 1989, has a capacity to get work out on a scale and with a rapidity that puts even Terry Eagleton to shame.  Further, Zizek's books are rarely the witty primers that, it must be said, Eagleton can probably write in his sleep and spends half his time producing: they are fat and complex melanges of Hegel and Lacan (pre-eminently) that happily discuss an astonishing range of philosophical, cultural and political phenomena.  Colin MacCabe once famously said of Fredric Jameson that 'nothing cultural is foreign to him', and one could say the same of Zizek, who cheerfully engages in film-making, public discussion of almost anything under the sun, and developing the largest body of jokes by any intellectual I know of in recent times - a collection of them having recently been published.  Not for Zizek Adorno's mandarin melancholy, though he shows some of the same mordancy in the interview linked below.  In a different - simpler - way from Adorno, too, Zizek is a provocateur - rehabilitating Lenin, to the horror of his liberal or soft-left admirers, or saying nice things about Stalin just to make everyone nervous; performing astonishing feats of public lecturing (for the Irish, it would be fair to say that Zizek in full flow is a bit like Christy Moore: a storm in a t-shirt) combined with physical tics that would make you want never to sit beside him on the bus; and a bracingly dialectical willingness to contemplate the whole world in terms of its opposites.  Like Adorno, however, Zizek has not always been so clear-eyed about Israel and Palestine: one notes his support for the academic boycott in the interview below, while he is also desperately anxious to say he does not believe in some kind of blanket boycott of Israel (whatever that would be).  Further, in regard to the politics of the former Yugoslavia, he is sometimes troubling, having supported the bombing of Serbia by NATO.  Like Adorno, too, Zizek is happy in his unhappiness, and the web-conversation recorded on the Guardian recently captures much of the fertility of his wit and knowledge.

"I'd tax cats. Heavily" - Slavoj Zizek

 

Conor