The annexation of Palestine, and the protests against violent policing of blacks in America

There is a direct relationship between Israel's current plan to annex much of what remains of Palestine, and the current protests in America.

Two nations with enormous wealth, built on both great ideas, the determination to find and build a place to live free of oppression of one’s national or religious group, and the exclusion of other peoples found or brought there, to be subjugated, eliminated from the territory, or both. Both are defined by what they greatly include, and what they shamefully continue to exclude, and of course by violent force. Two armed camps.

Maybe that all is lacking is a high wall, instead of just bodies of water, around Manhattan. The poor people living in the outerlands both are needed (to work, or perform the services of a “reserve army of laborers”) and not needed (to be permitted better lives, or in some cases, to live at all. What differs is the configuration of the two peoples: the American blacks are a distinct group but reside in the same polity. That makes solidarity with them easier. And it means that many people will doubt, if it is brought to their attention in all its horror, that the policing of these suspected impoverished outsiders may be conducted as a war.

Such are the destinies of peoples and territories that come to be constituted through inclusions that exclude. Marginality becomes oppression when a group of people is included as excluded. They are then regarded as properly both belonging and not belonging, in an ambivalence that can be so troubling that it contributes to murderous nationalisms such as that in Europe which ended only 75 years ago, and with ethical and political consequences that are still widely not fully understood and recognized.

In 2013 when I first moved to the Bronx, I was almost immediately mugged on my way home. The mugging was almost staged in a way: the man threw his bicycle at me as, walking home at night, I reached a street corner. It tackled me, and then he came to stand over me. A tall, thin, black man with a face mask (remember when someone wearing a mask was fearful? When it signified crime or policing only and not compliance with the government’s minimal efforts to protect all its citizens, at least until normalcy can be asserted and business return as usual, even while workers continue to die. I recall then seeing newspaper pictures of dark-skinned young men in masks, just like this one, a bandana covering his mouth and nose from below. I saw these pictures in news sources discussing riots in Palestinian lands. Then it hit me: someone thinks, or “wants” us to think, perhaps in the kind of wanting particular to what Foucault calls “strategies without strategists,” spontaneous ways in which happens is organized, — “someone might think (or say)”—later, when I was being harassed by the NYPD, a police officer said this precisely: “Has anyone said you are schizophrenic?” (I’m not schizophrenic, whatever my sins, faults, diseases, dispositions, or liabilities; but that is not what he mean; he meant precisely that this might be said. Which would be all that matters, along with what can be done), — it hit me that some newspaper editors at least are suggesting an analogy between American Blacks and Palestinians — as violent criminals, whom we need to have policed.

Similar are: the lives and forms of life of the people of Palestine, and the police violence in the United States that especially (but of course not only) targets black people, now meeting massive rejection in this country and around the world. 

Police states police populations based on the sovereign authority's decisions on who and what is normal, proper, or belongs, and who and what does not: inclusion linked to exclusion. 

The United States is a police state partly because of a history that combines relative extreme ideas of liberty with a system that involved property in persons. And it is a police state a great many of whose people are coming to cease wanting it to be. Israel is a police state founded on the exclusion of non-Jewish Arabs living in a divided and contested territory (whose singularity both sides acknowledge). 

A person cannot free if their neighbor is oppressed in their name.

If Israel proceeds with an annexation, that will leave the Palestinian people and their leadership with only two options: another terrorist war or intifada that no one wants, revolting against an impossible situation, that would indeed merit comparison with Apartheid South Africa; or to pursue, with international support, a one-state solution. Obviously, such a state will be secular and democratic, with predominantly Jewish and Arab political factions and parties, and, whatever population distributions are encouraged (mainly by allowing or not allowing the return of -- "too many?"--many descendants of Palestinians displaced in 1948, since the ability of Jews to immigrate, especially under present conditions in America and Europe where most Jews live comfortably and with very little overt oppression directed explicitly at them for their nationality--of the one million Jews in New York City, few have any desire to move to Israel and that is unlikely to change--though history does encourage us to fence our hopes with caution). In a one-state solution, with that nation-state called by whatever name, there will be millions of Jews living not far from each other. If you want that, no need to don funny clothing and move to Brooklyn, where 18th century Lithuania has been recreated beyond the wildest dreams of builders of theme parks. But what about the problem of places like former Yugoslavia, you ask. States must be national, not multinational, as the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, the Austrian and Turkish empires, Napoleon's aborted European project, or in different ways, the EU and the US. The Hatikvah, the Israeli national anthem, admonishes each Jew to recall and be faithful to the idea that his deepest inner desire, as in romantic nationalisms, is to return to the soil of his legendary homeland, deed titled by God himself at Sinai. More than one nation or people sipmly cannot live together. Americans know that, or many think they do, on the basis of the example of the blacks, whom many non-black Americans still have trouble recognizing, since they are in some ways not only very similar but also very different, an explosive combination absent some more political and less blood-defined and bloody, national idea. 

The new state will be unable to promote the irresponsible sentiments of romanticist Oedipal nationalisms. That is the key to what peace will look like, and to how it will be achieved. The moment it begins to consolidate its victory, nationalism becomes a bad solution to the problem that, in the form of the national liberation movement, it was invented to solve.   

That was Hitler's great lie, separating peoples who were historically certainly different but not, and certainly not then, truly separate.  German-language society was different in goyish neighborhoods than Jewish ones, to be sure, but its high culture was a shared one, to which its greatest Jewish thinkers and writers belong, whatever else they also belong to, just as much as its greatest goyish writers and thinkers do, and with passage between them uninhibited.    Nationalism led to two world wars and millions murdered in the camps. not separated, their destinies linked as theirs and others are today.  Maybe its alternatives lie in the world of the arts and ideas, which no one owns (“Excuse me, Mr. Bellow, but the Bantu Tolstoy is—Tolstoy”), and a politics still to be constructed and made effective beyond the defense of closely guarded properties against the greater world of non-billionaires.

The same people today who will speak of the purity and uniqueness of their identity as secured by an oppression that is far less unique than the responses of many of them and others to it,
are also the ones who declare themselves living in a state of exception to European cultural history and modernity.  Often they are in search of an imaginary outside, as with the New Age popular among many American Jews today on the liberal right.  

You say, but that's easy for you to say, you don't live there. That's true.  But here in America, I know that I can be threatened by all kinds of intolerance. My own connection to Jewish tradition teaches me much about that. But the intolerance I can and sometimes do suffer is not due to nor curable by an identification that is either religious or nationalist. It usually winds up being about either politics or my personality or how I tend to think. All qualities that would be both under- and over-determined by any demographical identity.

The lives of post-colonial subjects matter. And policed societies always also constrain the lives of the included on the safe and happy side of the walls and barbed wire. A more Jewish Jewish society will be one that defines its identity and that of its people by Jewish values, and not counts of bodies, living or dead or both.

Key to this is the recognition that identities are not anymore tightly bounded. This place can be mine and yours. Our possession of the territory then would be both intersecting and overlapping Jews especially cannot want to live in a fortress state or armed camp in which it is impossible to welcome the stranger. 

The person who lives the life of permanent war in an armed camp fighting those who must be excluded, finds himself reduced to the state of a fearful person constantly watching for intruders.  The defense of property and the rights of those who hold it, by policing and its always implicit and often explicit violence, reduces to the permanent war against the violence of the thieves they must live to fear.