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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (22593)	3/29/2002 8:59:55 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

I agree, Hawk, I was hoping for better. Anderson puts some very debatable statements out as fact, I suppose they are part of the received wisdom for the Left. For example, From the start it was a settler society without a home country—a colony that never issued from a metropolis. Rather, it had a proxy imperialism behind it. British colonial power was the absolute condition of Jewish colonization. Without the mailed force of the British police and army, the Arab majority—90 per cent of the population—would have stopped the Zionist build-up in its tracks after the First World War. Zionism depended completely on the violence of the British imperial state for its growth. This assertion assumes several questionable points. First, that if the British had not been in Palestine then the Turks, who agreed to the Zionist settlement, would no longer have been their either. Second, that the Hashemites, who also agreed, would not have been in power either. Third, that local Arab politics in Palestine would have developed in the same no-compromise, shoot collaborators, fashion it did under the Mufti, who was himself a British appointee. If the Palestinian Arabs had developed a functional political system and organized their society, lots of things might have turned out differently. Fourth, British policy turned against the Jews by the late twenties; it is not at all clear that the Jews were helped overall by a Mandate that kept their militias underground and blocked off immigration. In short, just because there were more Arabs around is hardly conclusive of any particular result. Most of the Arabs were illiterate fellahin who were eager to get jobs building the new settlements. And why not? They had spent their entire lives as peasants in mud hovels without glass in the windows. The much more interesting question is, how would the educated parts of the society have organized themselves politically absent the British? Anderson provides no answers here.

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (22593)	4/1/2002 3:38:02 AM
From: tekboy	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 281500

those comments from Perry Anderson were barely interesting I disagree. I think they were deeply flawed, both by the determined effort to place everything Zionist in a bad light and by a near complete overlooking of anything bad ever done by the Palestinians and other Arabs, but I still found them worth a look. Some of the early observations regarding Israel as a settler colony struck me (unlike Nadine) as more right than wrong, for example. Also, I thought it was striking, and depressing, evidence about how even today some extremely intelligent and ostensibly well-intentioned people can actually be passionately anti-Zionist. Makes you understand why the Israelis don't trust the Europeans an inch, by and large. Anderson, in case people don't know, is an extremely prominent and highly regarded intellectual on the academic left. He's also the brother of Benedict Anderson, by the way--author of the brilliant Imagined Communities and perhaps the leading theoretician of nationalism around. Regarding your question about what makes somebody a Palestinian, I suppose it's the same as most other communal identifications--a strong feeling of belonging to some particular group, combined with some common history, traditions, etc. I'm not sure Palestinian "national" identity is more sneer-worthy than, say, its Canadian counterpart. To me, as a good liberal (small "l"), these things are inevitably questions of rather arbitrary emotions rather than anything else, and historically quite evanescent and even malleable... tb@toomanyposts,toolittletime.com