Nation or state as foe? The case of Israel

Comment published on New York Times blog, in response to opinion essay by Matti Friedman, “There is no ‘Israeli-Palestinian’ conflict,” January 16, 2019:

No one can deny the reality and importance of this broader perspective focused on statecraft and avoiding (or winning) wars. It is also important to be reminded that the Palestinian people do not constitute the principal possible threat to Israel and its people. Even if this cause is cynically misused by other state actors.

Many Israelis will talk only about other states when the question of the Palestinians is raised. They may at the same also insist on calling the Palestinians "Arabs," to suggest that they are a race or perhaps even a religion (in fact, the latter name truly groups a people by language) . When of course their proper name identifies them with a contested territory.

But what perhaps calls for the most attention is the way the military occupation of the West Bank is one of many neocolonial practices found globally that are deployed to control or eliminate populations of people deemed unwanted. Though of course there is no quantitive similarity of things like the exclusion of immigrants today, China's incarceration of 1 million Muslims to reeducate them to national values, or prison complexes as vast and horrible as that of the US, qualitatively there are similarities here to horrors from the recent past. "Never again" is an ever-repeated slogan that is misread. It cannot mean the support for a nationalism (combining liberation and defense), for it calls for, among other things, a critique of such thinking, and not least because is to something that is not established but refused and avoided.