Reconquista

I have a suspicion that in a few hundred years the idea and creation of Israel (as a homeland for expatriated people of many different ethnicites sharing a common class of religious behaviours categorized as “Jewishness”) will be recognized as very closely paralleling the creation and development of the Ghettos in late medieval society.

These were a social innovation to the “problem” of dealing with increased migration, immigration, and multiculturalism resulting from Europe’s increased trade links during that era. It’s noteworthy that the first ghettos were instituted in Northern Italy to corral German traders and craft workers. Coralling people on the basis of religion was a later “innovation”. Thus social engineering, new urban construction technologies, and military coercion combined to create an enduring apartheid system that inaugurated the Early Modern Era and increased the nationalistic momentum leveraged by the emerging nation states and their absolute rulers.

The slightly increased vogue for ethnic and religious ghettos in the modern post-Colonial Era is self-evident. The 20th century, especially the latter half, was a period of radical “ethnic cleansing” and the dismantling of the idea of multicultural Empires and pan-ethnic hegemonic alliances. Paradoxically, considering what change a naive contact hypothesis might have predicted from omnipresent media, we live now in an Era of Celebrated Difference where every ethnicity, culture, sub-culture, faction, sect, and mutation demands its own Bantustan.

The idea that many people in Israel today would willingly construct for themselves one of the largest Jewish ghettos in history would have struck earlier observers as fantastic. That they would enable countries all over the world effectively to remove or reduce their Jewish populations and send them to one of the more dangerous, infertile, and unstable parts of the world seems almost Machiavellian, and very apropos. That some in Israel seem determined to voluntarily build around their national ghetto a Wall of enduring lethality and permanence just adds insult to injury.

Because of the effective elimination of the native inhabitants of North America, the expansionary United States always seems to have favoured Year Zero and other segregationist approaches over integrationist approaches when it comes to building socialities. This probably arises from the former widespread availability of “open canvases” upon which to write new, similar communities. This commonality probably accounts for the relatively high sympathy of many in the US to the idea of Israel as a separate living space for people identified as Jews. After all, the Mormons got Utah. What could go wrong?

The difference is that Europe and the Middle East have been very densely populated relative to North America for several hundred years. Instead of displacing a few minute, scattered remnants of the former masters of the land, Israel found itself embedded in the middle of a demographic explosion. In the Middle East, demographics have usually won out over the long run – just ask the Northern European citizens of Edessa, Antioch, Tripoli, Jerusalem, Jaffa, or Galillee.

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