"He who has the power uses it": another hopeless platitude. Some rulers have despoiled their subjects, especially those acquired by conquest, and some have bestowed citizenship and given value for taxation. Some nations, for example, the Czech Republic, are content to have a modest presence in the world, because they wish to preserve their ethnic culture, without imposing on others. They find comfort in playing a role in multi- lateral institutions that augment their influence, but they have no aspirations to great power status.
Whether it was Lincoln's desire to have a number of American Republics, it was more or less the desire of those loyal to their states above the Union, conceiving of themselves in Czech terms, not Roman. I have no doubt that the Moroccans, the Algerians, the Egyptians, the Syrians, and so forth would decline to vote themselves into a unified republic. The United Arab Republic, consisting of Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, ostensibly mobilized by Ba'athism, was practically DOA.
Divorce, literal or metaphorical, frequently is ugly, as rights are sorted out and insults are bandied. Unity can be as peaceable as the Swiss Republic.
Even the Zionist right wing did not want infinite expansion, but a filling out of the historical Zion. The Zionist left, which dominated most of Israeli history, aspired to far less. It was not a case of the arbitrary expression of power, but of an ethnic identity built on repatriation to an ancient homeland, and misgivings about the security of the Jews in Europe, especially in the East. That such misgivings were not bizarre is demonstrated by the fact of the Holocaust.
The aim of the Yishuv, the Zionist presence in Palestine, was peacefully to acquire territory through immigration and purchase, not through conquest. As the situation in Europe deteriorated, a sense of doom led to greater militancy, and the fact that many Arabs sympathized with the NAZIs and opposed immigration at crucial points where lives might have been saved exacerbated inter- communal violence.
I think I will stop here. My main point is that there is a specific history, and that things need not have been so hostile. |
