The Palestinian Question
There is nothing new under the sun. I will never stop marveling at the brilliance of Ecclesiastes. It is preemptively anti-Hegelian, and forever in opposition to the Satanic allure of “progress” via dialectic — starting with the Socratic dialogue between the naḥaš and the woman in Genesis 3 and culminating in the dialectical struggle between the prophet Samuel and the Israelites over the institution of a human king (1 Sam. 8:4–22). Both ended in unmitigated disaster. Hegel would tell us that the chrismation of Saul (ša’ul, “asked for”) was a sign of progress. Even more would he be excited about the construction of the Jerusalem palace-temple complex, and he would be in full agreement with David when he said,
רְאֵ֣ה נָ֔א אָנֹכִ֥י יֹושֵׁ֖ב בְּבֵ֣ית אֲרָזִ֑ים וַֽאֲרֹון֙ הָֽאֱלֹהִ֔ים יֹשֵׁ֖ב בְּתֹ֥וךְ הַיְרִיעָֽה׃
See, I myself dwell in a house of cedar, but the ark of God dwells among the tent curtains. — 2 Sam. 7:2
David “graduated” from shepherd to king, so why hasn’t God progressed from Tabernacle to full-blown temple? If you’re a Hegelian, you celebrate the movement from the pastoral to the urban; from bedouin to monarch. I am reminded of a poem written by the bedouin Maysūn bint Jandal and directed towards her husband Mu’awiya I, the founder of the Umayyad dynasty:
لبيت تخفق الأرواح فيه أحب إلي من قصر منيف
A tent blown over in all directions by the wind is much more likable to me than your huge palace.
Bint Jandal was sane, and yet the dunyā (world) will perpetually be in shock and awe at her wisdom — as is the world astonished that the Palestinians continue to fight for their existence after a century of progressive ethnic cleansing and replacement.
I have seen several videos, internet threads, and comments from political figures who can’t seem to figure out why the Palestinians don’t just give up, or integrate themselves into Israeli society. Ignorance really shows with those who suggest that Gazans should just migrate to another “Arab” country, because after all, what difference is there between a Palestinian and an Egyptian? Or a Palestinian and a Jordanian? Some have even suggested that Jordan is the most reasonable abode for the Gazan survivors, due to their shared history. After all, per the Balfour Declaration (1917), the original proposal for the “Arab” side of Palestine was to be the “Transjordan”, i.e. the territory east of the river. The land west of the river would be occupied by the proposed Zionist state, a favor of the British government to the increasingly influential Rothschild family (not a conspiracy theory by the way, this is public knowledge.)
The obvious double standard made by those who make the suggestions above is that Jewish repatriation to the “Holy Land” and their willingness to fight for it is admirable, while the Palestinians are seen as terrorists when they resist the colonial reorganization of the land they’ve cultivated for generations. The difference is that the Western mind just views land as real estate, able to be bought and sold and used for capital gains. The non-Western mind sees the land as something to tend to affectionately, as a grown son cares for his elderly mother who bore him. There is something deeply prophetic about the Greek myth of Europa, who was a Phoenician (i.e. Semitic/ Canaanite) princess whose beauty struck the fancy of Zeus, the mighty storm deity of Mount Olympus. According to the myth, Zeus took the form of a bull, won the affection of Europa, and then proceeded to abduct and rape her. Thus her Semitic name 𐤏𐤓𐤁𐤄 ‘arbh became the namesake for the Occidental continent, Europe, when it was transmigrated into the Greek Εὐρώπη, likely drawing on the Greek words εὐρύς (wide) and ὤψ (eye). Unsurprisingly, the Semitic root ayin-resh-bet has the sense of “growing dark”, which instantly calls to mind the setting of the sun in the West. It is also indicative of the desert, and the migratory behavior of shepherds, giving us the name “Arab” which is etymologically very similar to 𐤏𐤁𐤓 ‘abr — to cross, whence we get “Hebrew”. A story about a Greek deity coming in unannounced and abducting a woman named 𐤏𐤓𐤁𐤄 for his own selfish purposes makes such a striking parallel that I don’t even feel I need to comment further. Mythology is more intelligent than modern people appreciate.
When land is just real estate, the potential for capital gain knows no shame. An example that hits close to home for me is the discovery of the Waconda hot spring in north-central Kansas by European explorers. The “Waconda Spring” was a holy site of pilgrimage (not too dissimilar to Mecca) of local tribes such as the Pawnee, Kanza, and the Osage. For them, it was one of the five lodges where Tirawa (the Great Spirit) would send his spiritual messengers, the nahurac, to make intercession for the tribes. For the Europeans, however, it was a rare oasis in the otherwise barren, grassy plain. By the late 19th century, a health resort was established there where greedy businessmen would sell spring water for its “medicinal effects”. Nowadays, the Waconda Spring doesn’t even exist anymore and now sits at the bottom of the state’s largest reservoirs.
These examples came to mind in light of Donald Trump’s recent comments about his plans to remove the present Gazan population, and then turn the strip into a beachfront resort. His comments about how “wonderful” the potential in the Gaza Strip would be for that purpose are exactly what I imagined when I read that myth about Europa and Zeus. Given also Trump’s lauding of the Gilded Age presidents, it doesn’t take very much imagination to assume his intentions. Far from being novel, Trump is the Platonic ideal, the Hegelian realization of not only “Americana” but the modern Occidental legacy. I say modern because he doesn’t have even the faux sophistication of the classic Occidental heavyweights, but he definitely actualizes the base carnality of its lowest common denominator.
What I find even more upsetting is the nonchalant dismissal of the Palestinians as 1) a non-identity and 2) as a problematic population, unable to peacefully exist anywhere. I have seen this sentiment in several places online, but the most notable has been the comments of Conservative political commentator Dennis Prager whose rhetoric about the Palestinians echoes 19th and 20th-century antisemitism to such an unmistakable degree that it’s almost comical.
Answering the question of why neighboring Arab countries don’t accept Palestinian refugees, he says “Wherever the Palestinians have gone in the Arab world, there has been massive bloodshed as a result”. He then proceeds to blame the Lebanese Civil War on Palestinian refugees, he blames the Black September massacre on their “disruptiveness”, not so subtly insinuating that they “had it coming”. Later in the video, with visible disgust in his eyes, he quips that they are simply “not an impressive people” because in his words, “the legacy of terror by Palestinians exceeds that of any one group”.
Does this not sound exactly like the antisemitism around what was called the “Jewish Question” in the 19th and 20th centuries? The basic premise was that Jews cause problems wherever they live, sparking violence and regional upheaval. A variety of reasons were given for this. Some said it was because they were “nomadic”, and therefore put their Jewish interests over the states they happened to reside in, causing tension with their neighbors and governmental authorities. This also fostered distrust after the emancipation of the Jews across Europe in the 19th century, where they were now allowed to be elected in public offices and parliamentary roles. Would they prioritize, for example, the interests of the British Empire or of Judaism? Related to this, was the problem that many pointed to, which was their perceived idiosyncratic and deeply tribal behavior which culturally clashed with the outsiders. And then of course there was the simple reality that the Jews were not Christians, and were therefore not sharers in the same “value system” the rest of the European population upheld. To many an antisemite, the Jews were also an “unimpressive people”. They killed Christ, took advantage of Gentiles by charging them high interest, were greedy, and all around despised the rest of their Christian European neighbors and were secretly conspiring among themselves to destroy Europe from the inside and make them slaves of the Jewish elite. Thus we have the basic premise of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, which scapegoated the Jews, blaming them for the societal changes that were occurring in Europe at the turn of the century due to industrialization, the revolutions against monarchies, and the materialist doctrines of capitalism and socialism. Alas, there is nothing new under the sun.
There were many proposed solutions to this “Jewish Question”. Karl Marx, himself a Jew, bought into the antisemitism of his day linking capitalism to Judaism, essentially arguing that the abolition of capitalism would necessitate the abolition of Judaism (and religion generally). While he didn’t take the genocide approach of Hitler, he saw that the basic issue was both cultural and material.
Once society has succeeded in abolishing the empirical essence of Judaism — huckstering and its preconditions — the Jew will have become impossible, because his consciousness no longer has an object, because the subjective basis of Judaism, practical need, has been humanized, and because the conflict between man’s individual-sensuous existence and his species-existence has been abolished. The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism. — (Final paragraph of Marx’s “On the Jewish Question”, 1844)
And then there was the solution proposed by Theodor Herzl, the father of “modern Zionism”, who saw the answer to the Jewish Question in the establishment of a Jewish state. As he writes in Der Judenstaat (1896):
No one can deny the gravity of the situation of the Jews. Wherever they live in perceptible numbers, they are more or less persecuted. Their equality before the law, granted by statute, has become practically a dead letter. They are debarred from filling even moderately high positions, either in the army, or in any public or private capacity. And attempts are made to thrust them out of business also: “Don’t buy from Jews!”
Attacks in Parliaments, in assemblies, in the press, in the pulpit, in the street, on journeys — for example, their exclusion from certain hotels — even in places of recreation, become daily more numerous. The forms of persecution varying according to the countries and social circles in which they occur. In Russia, imposts are levied on Jewish villages; in Rumania, a few persons are put to death; in Germany, they get a good beating occasionally; in Austria, Anti-Semites exercise terrorism over all public life; in Algeria, there are traveling agitators; in Paris, the Jews are shut out of the so-called best social circles and excluded from clubs. Shades of anti-Jewish feeling are innumerable.
These issues form the basis of his overall thesis. Getting the Jews out of Europe and into their own sovereignty was, to him, in the best interest of both Europe and the Jews. His solution is, oddly, similar to Hitler’s Final Solution: expel the Jews from Europe. During the Second World War, this devolved into full-on extermination. From the proceedings at the Wannsee Conference in 1942:
Another possible solution of the [Jewish] problem has now taken the place of emigration — i.e., evacuation of the Jews to the east…Such activities are, however, to be considered as provisional actions, but practical experience is already being collected which is of greatest importance in relation to the future final solution of the Jewish problem.
It is very difficult not to see the glaring parallels between the antisemites of the past and the antisemitism of the present — the present antisemitism being levied not against Jews, but against Palestinians. The Jewish Question has been superseded by the Palestinian Question, and the powers at be are all too happy to oblige their removal and extermination.
What Marx, Herzl, and Hitler all had in common was their influence from Hegel. For Marx, it was the ideal of the working class, for Herzl the Jewish nation/ race, and for Hitler, the German “Aryan” race. I wrote more about this link at length in a previous article. Of course, this idealism is simply just a rebirth of Plato’s forms which continue to haunt the “functionalist” populations in the Orient. From Hitler’s exceedingly Platonic Mein Kampf:
Since true idealism, however, is essentially the subordination of the interests and life of the individual to the interests and life of the community, and since the community on its part represents the pre-requisite condition of every form of organization, this idealism accords in its innermost essence with the final purpose of Nature. This feeling alone makes men voluntarily acknowledge that strength and power are entitled to take the lead and thus makes them a constituent particle in that order out of which the whole universe is shaped and formed. (Chapter 11)
While I mourn for the unrepentant continuation of the horrific events of the 20th century, I take refuge in my God from Satan the accursed. The words of the Apostle Paul in his stunning and unmatched letter to the Romans impact my ears and puncture my heart with every revisit I undertake. He says first of the Gentile (Greek) world:
Ἀποκαλύπτεται γὰρ ὀργὴ θεοῦ ἀπ᾽ οὐρανοῦ ἐπὶ πᾶσαν ἀσέβειαν καὶ ἀδικίαν ἀνθρώπων τῶν τὴν ἀλήθειαν ἐν ἀδικίᾳ κατεχόντων
For the wrath of God is uncovered from heaven upon all wickedness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness — Rom. 1:18
The beauty of Romans is his twofold presentation of “bad news” on the one hand and “good news” on the other. The “bad news” is that Jews and Gentiles are both equally yoked under the wrath of God. The “Good News” is that they are likewise both equally yoked in his mercy, through the viscerally graphic image of his humiliated and crucified locum tenens to whom Paul pledges allegiance as his slave-master, inviting both Jew and Gentile alike to be slaves of the crucified Christ. In chapter eight, he powerfully undercuts the mechanisms of Platonism that give mankind the illusion of control, by placing the members of God’s elect within his providence:
Oὓς δὲ προώρισεν τούτους καὶ ἐκάλεσεν· καὶ οὓς ἐκάλεσεν τούτους καὶ ἐδικαίωσεν· οὓς δὲ ἐδικαίωσεν τούτους καὶ ἐδόξασεν
And those who he predestines1 he also calls, and those who he calls he also declares righteous, and those who he declares righteous he also glorifies. — Rom. 8:30
In other words, no one has the right to determine whether they or their neighbor is truly a member of God’s elect. The Jew cannot exclude the Gentile, and the Gentile cannot exclude the Jew. The elect will be revealed at the end when Christ, at his Father’s right hand, separates the sheep from the goats based on how they treated the lowest among them. This is the practical wisdom of Paul, that he inherited from the scriptures he (and more precisely his school of thought) lived and died to uphold.
Glory to God in the Highest. There is no god save He.
In this verse, I translated the Aorist verbs according to their “gnomic” sense which do not connote “past time” but simply state a generic, habitual fact. The exact function of the Aorist in the indicative mood is a debated topic. Another example of this happening in the Bible is James 1:11. That being said, I think a reading of this verse with the gnomic Aorist makes the most sense according to the context, especially with the presence of the verb ἐδόξασεν which describes an event (i.e. the Judgment) that Paul is not “looking back on” but looking forward to (Rom. 8:18). If Paul indeed is referring to past time, which I doubt, then my point still stands either way.