Always Dangerous To Get Into Arguments With Fundamentalists

I wrote something, and someone responded with:A dramatic new approach would be for you to lay off Said and pick up a book on the origins of Judaism, the Jewish diaspora, its connection to Israel and Zionism. For best results, start with something reputable and maybe even sympathetic, then read the critics all you want.

I’m Irish so I’m somewhat familiar with the effects of colonial and post-colonial administration and the deployment of religious and cultural differences to create instability within client states. The Catholic Irish were hunted like animals, exterminated as vermin, sold into slavery, forcibly dispossessed from their lands and their culture destroyed. This created within Irish culture a significant desire for revenge and an acceptance of the use of violence to achieve political ends.

Latterly, in the 19th century native and Diaspora Irish evolved a notion of a separatist ideology (similar in timing and character to Zionism) that coupled a mystical-religious attachment to national territory with a rediscovery of “ancient” essentialist cultural roots that validated their actions. Of course, the required ethnic cleansing also required the expulsion of “interlopers” – conveniently situated others (the Scots Irish) against whom all internal dissent could be projected.

Thankfully, and despite the long financial and political support for terrorism by Diaspora Irish abroad, especially within the US, modern Southern native Irish have generally renunciated the expanionist ideology and abandoned their demands for “re-integration of the national territory”, ie, Northern Ireland.

Ireland and Israel were born around the same time, created by the same generation of UK diplomats. I am therefore unsurprised by the UK’s Palestinian governer’s statement in the 1920s that creating Israel meant forming for England a ‘little loyal Jewish Ulster’ in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism’.

I think one major difference in the evolution of the two countries is that Ireland learned to abandon its principles of Catholic fundamentalism and religious apartheid. It wasn’t easy and it took time, but it did marginalise the religious and political extremists.

The creation of Israel as a receptacle for the re-interpretation by some Jewish people of their cultural origins proceeded from a definite historical process that mirrors the politics of many other post-colonial societies. There are many ways to understand the “origin” of the politics in the region.

One could say that in the politics of the modern “settlement” movement we are witnessing simply the understandable tensions resulting from the colonisation of territories by an impoverished underclass from Eastern Europe, forced into marginal, native territories because of the inability of the larger Israeli state to provide adequate resources for its burgeoning population.

Personally, I like looking at the situation from many angles. I’d like to know what you think of genetic findings of Ariella Oppenheim and others that Muslim Arabs are descended from Christians and Jews who lived in Israel and the Sinai. Sadly, the conclusion I draw from this is horribly psychoanalytic, that newly-returned Jewish people dispossessed their relatives to seize the territories of Israel, and currently are engaged in a war of extinction and an epic denial of commonality against their relatives and descendents in Gaza and the West Bank.

Some refs:
Hammer, M.F., et al. “Jewish and Middle Eastern non-Jewish Populations Share a Common Pool of Y Chromosome Biallelic Haplotypes.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 97 (2000): 6769-74.

“High-resolution Y chromosome haplotypes of Israeli and Palestinian Arabs reveal geographic substructure and substantial overlap with haplotypes of Jews” (Human Genetics 107(6), December 2000, pp. 630-641), Ariella Oppenheim, Almut Nebel, Dvora Filon, Mark G. Thomas, D. A. Weiss, M. Weale, Marina Faerman.

“Jewish and Middle Eastern non-Jewish Populations Share a Common Pool of Y-chromosome Biallelic Haplotypes”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 97:12 (June 6, 2000)