Your "Order" is built on sand. By tomorrow the revolution, to your horror, will rise once more to the heavens with a clatter and proclaim with trumpet-blasts: I was, I am, I will be!
--Rosa Luxemburg, Die Ordnung herrscht in Berlin
The intifada proclaims, "I was, I am, I will be." The Palestinians proclaim, "We were, we are, we will be."
The State of Israel, the only state I've encountered whose citizens--well, those from the privileged grouping--refer to it un-self-consciously as "The State", as if its very existence were a Hegelian-type realization of the Absolute Idea, says, "You never were, you are not, and we will not let you become anything at all." On its side are its own riot police and soldiers, of course, its hate-filled demagogic windbags, and an overwhelming portion of its own citizenry, not to mention the capital and war materiel, measured in units of billions, from the U.S. But also the Egyptian Army, blocking the march to Gaza, also Khaled Meshal, political leader of Hamas, urging Egyptians to stand down, and thus implicitly also his guardian and sponsor, Bashar al-Assad, engaged in his own bloody crackdown on the people he rules.
The Party of Order is marshaling its ranks, which always makes for some strange juxtapositions. On the opposite side, with nothing to lose, are the great majority of Palestinians, battling against their ongoing, ever-mounting dispossession.
Yet what has had me dumbstruck for the better part of a week is how much of the so-called left can stand somewhere off to the side, nitpicking in the name of internationalism. The moment of shock came at that Historical Materialism conference when someone (my policy in talking about the conference will be name podium speakers, but not speakers from the audience unless they are public figures by virtue of their publication history) made the jaw-dropping statement, "There are no oppressed nations." In response, I pointed to the Palestinians as just one example of why this was an absurd statement, that fundamentally confused nations with states. However in the speakers' closing statements, Arya Zahedi solidarized with the claim, arguing that nations were formed by states as part of the process of capital accumulations, etc., etc.
At which point my only thought was, "What planet are you from?" As if the national consciousness of the Palestinians, their oppression by the State of Israel, or the national character of that oppression could be conjured out of existence by way of definitions or syllogisms.
Nations are indeed formed by states, yet often in ways that cannot be comprehended by scholasticism: The State of Israel, through the trauma of the Nakba, gave the experiential basis for the felt, shared sense of Palestinian nationhood. And yet its defining ideology, Zionism, in presenting the State as the state of all the world's Jews, negates the very possibility of an Israeli nation, as pointed out by the Internationalist Socialist League (scroll down to the section entitled "Are the Israelis a Nation?"). A paradox? Only for a scholastic, not a Marxist.
I came to an understanding of the significance of the struggle for Palestinian self-determination through autobiographical contingency: Like many Jews of my generation, there was no way I could attain to internationalist consciousness without negating Zionism. And given the depth of my former, infantile Zionism, that could not take place without significant historical study and a deep understanding of Marxist approaches to the "national question." Yet it has a universal significance as a standing refutation of any scholastic, definitional approach to understanding the politics of class struggle. In a nutshell, as the "Russian question" once was (and still is in some respects), the "Palestinian question" is a standing counterexample to most of what passes for Marxism, a living example of its ideological (non-scientific) status. If a "Marxist" cannot proclaim, without reservation, discomfort, stipulations or footnotes, "Palestine will be free," he is no Marxist. And if he can, but has no functional strategy for how Palestine will be free, then he still is no Marxist.
For the better part of a week, in the midst of an unusually brutal set of workday concerns, I have also been agonizing over how to speak of the peculiar absurdity mentioned above. The Palestinian masses, with what seems to be shaping up into a third intifada, are once again pointing out the way.
To translate Luxemburg's proclamation in a different way, into a different language:
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