Ariel Beery had a very interesting piece in Haaretz yesterday. It describes a new movement among Israelis– and key friends of Israel like Dennis Ross— to fashion a new concept of a state.
Instead of this state being a nation-state, that is, a project that includes all those who live inside its borders, this new kind of state would be what Beery calls
- a node-state – that is, … the sovereign element chosen by narrative and collective will at the center of a global network.
Immediately before he introduces that concept he notes this:
- The State of Israel… was doubly special – first because it claimed to be the state of the Jews even as the majority of the Jewish nation still lived outside its boundaries, and second because it had no desire to integrate other, non-Jewish groups among its citizenry into the Jewish nation. Israel has thus been criticized for not behaving like a classic nation-state.
Beery indicates that when Ehud Olmert was still prime minister, he strongly supported this reconceptualizing of Israel:
- Ehud Olmert set out to transform the conceptual and practical relationship between the state and the Jewish Diaspora. He began doing so last summer, when, in a speech before the Jewish Agency’s board of governors, he said that, “We must stop talking in terms of big brother and little brother, and instead speak in terms of two brothers marching hand in hand and supporting each other.”
For me, as a US citizen, an even more important part of what Beery writes comes next. He tells us that,
- To translate thought to policy, his government tasked the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute (JPPPI) with developing a new strategy for the state to involve itself with the Diaspora both fiscally and programmatically, in order to strengthen Jewish identity especially insofar as it is connected to Israel.
The JPPPI is, of course, the institute that was headed until just a few weeks ago by Dennis Ross, now Sec. of Sate Clinton “special adviser” on the affairs of a swathe of countries, including Israel’s current big nemesis, Iran.
We already knew the JPPPI had a close connection with some international Zionist organizations like the Jewish National Fund. But now we learn that Ross also received a direct “tasking” from the Israeli prime minister to engage in a far-reaching reconceiving of the nature of the Israeli state and its relationship with world Jewry??
How can anyone in the Obama administration think that this man has the objectivity to have any say at all– even if only as an “adviser”– in the fashioning of our country’s Middle East policy?
As another footnote we should, of course, zero in on the fundamentally anti-democratic nature of the “herrenvolk” concept that lies at the heart of the transformation of the idea of Israel from being a nation-state to being a “node-state.”
Israel’s 1.3 million Palestinian citizens, and their friends and allies among the country’s Jewish citizenry, all call unequivocally for the definition of Israel to be the state of all its citizens, with no privileging of one group of citizens over others based solely on grounds of religion or ethnicity.
The idea that Dennis Ross, a Jewish person who has stable (and very influential) citizenship in a prosperous western democracy, should have more say in defining what the nature of the Israeli state should be than, say, a Palestinian-Israeli Knesset member or even just an regular–and fully tax-paying– Palestinian citizen of Israel truly boggles the mind.
Israeli diplomats told to take offensive in PR war against Iran
“…The goal, according to a senior Foreign Ministry official, is “to show the world that Iran is not a Western democracy” in the run-up to the country’s presidential election on June 12.
About a week ago, the head of the ministry’s Task Force on Isolating Iran sent a classified telegram to all Israeli embassies and consulates, titled “Activities in the Run-up to Iran’s Presidential Election.” It detailed things Israeli representatives should do before, during and after the election….
In a nutshell, the goal is to “blacken Iran’s international reputation….”
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1089463.html
Helena – From what I hear, the plan is to offer Israeli citizenship and voting rights to any Jew regardless of what country they live in. I don’t know what percentage of the diaspora will take Israel up on it’s offer but it’s likely to be several million. This is Israel’s answer to the demographic problem they face in annexing the West Bank. My understanding of the plan is to forget Gaza, either Egypt takes it or it continues to be quarantined as an open air prison.
Sorry — that wasn’t want the article intended at all. The State itself would benefit from the network, but a co-located Palestinian node-State would have equal access to the Diaspora Palestinian network.
The fact of the matter here is that the only way for there to be self-determination amongst both peoples is for the Nation-State concept to be left in the wastebin of history.
More, Dennis Ross’s interests are no less patriotic than the Midwesterner who is dealing with States who produce cotton or wheat; that is, more money goes from the US treasury towards agricultural subsidies than towards funding Israel, and yet we rarely question their interests in foreign affairs. Why is that?
I would offer that the Midwestern politician concerned with agricultural subsidies is part of a different yet overlapping network as the North Eastern urban politician interested in free trade. The Federal system recognizes this — and that is why Federalism has survived so long (it moderates interests of networks through a compromise, two-level voting assembly representing the nodes).
Ariel, that was my reading of your article – that this is the next step in the evolution of the nation-state into a “one-world” global society.
It’s odd, but I would have expected that this model would be something that Helena would have embraced with both arms, given her attachment to the UN and world government. Further, I was quite taken aback by her reluctance to accept the idea of a Jewish diaspora taking part in a “nodal-state” seeing as she has recently been reminding us of the five million strong Palestinian diaspora.
It’s an intriguing idea that you put forward. I am sorry to say, however, that I am skeptical.
Beery’s use of the conflicting interests within a federal structure is interesting.
The Free Trade/ Protectionism issue was a primary cause of the split between North and South resolved, by the Civil War, in favour of the protectionist cause.
The case of a, notional, citizen of the United States who sees himself as equally a citizen of Israel, Ireland, Laos or anywhere else, is not new. Nor is the way with which US traditionally deals with such conflicts.
The usual precedent is to be found in the cases of those who saw no conflict between their loyalty to the Soviet Union, (which they saw as a harbinger of a better world for all and the node of an international movement of peace)and their ability to function as US citizens, sometimes as Federal employees.
Or have I missed something?
Its definitely a concept befitting the mythology of a God’s chosen people. I mean in a world of some 7+ billion people only “la creme de la creme” or some 16 million “elite” can claim a world citizenship above and beyond the rable In India, China, Russia, Japan, even North and South America as well as specifically [yech] the 1.7 billion Arabs and Muslims.
Is this Dennis Ross’s quest to emulate Noses’s “let my people go”? Or to Hitler’s Duetchland Uber Alles solution?
“it had no desire to integrate other, non-Jewish groups among its citizenry into the Jewish nation. Israel has thus been criticized for not behaving like a classic nation-state.”
This is from a comment on the Haaretz article: “Wrong on the classic nation-state: its founding assumption, in fact, was that the state was to be the instrument of its national group. Countries like France and Italy are an exemption — for more typical examples see Armenia, Bosnia, Czech Rep., Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Japan, Kyrgyzstan, Lithuania, Malta, Netherlands and so forth. Including, well, Israel, which is nothing if not typical.”
So what do you think?
In other words, any Jew could commit crimes anywhere in the world and then flee to Israel to avoid prosecution? That’s the bottom line of giving Israeli citizenship to any Jew anywhere in the world.
http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/7719/israel-extradition-law-offers-help-to-alleged-criminals/
Talk about a chosen people!
(Of course, not all crimes automatically receive Israeli government protection, so a criminal would be advised to check it out first.)
a node-state – that is, … the sovereign element chosen by narrative and collective will at the center of a global network.
Logically therefore not a democratic state. The secret is in the expressions ‘narrative and collective will’. The last is very fascist.
Beery’s use of the conflicting interests within a federal structure is interesting.
The Free Trade/ Protectionism issue was a primary cause of the split between North and South resolved, by the Civil War, in favour of the protectionist cause.
Yes, and….?
The case of a, notional, citizen of the United States who sees himself as equally a citizen of Israel, Ireland, Laos or anywhere else, is not new. Nor is the way with which US traditionally deals with such conflicts.
Which is….?
Alger Hiss operated in secret because he knew that this would be a violation of his terms of employement with the Federal government (just as did, BTW, Jonathan Pollard). I don’t see how this makes him a “citizen of a nodal-state”.
Including, well, Israel, which is nothing if not typical.
Well, Michael W., the smallest, smidgeonist, minor, difference between Israel and those other countries you mention is that the others are not trying to steal other people’s land. It’s very simple really.
Ariel, hi.
You write: Dennis Ross’s interests are no less patriotic than the Midwesterner who is dealing with States who produce cotton or wheat; that is, more money goes from the US treasury towards agricultural subsidies than towards funding Israel, and yet we rarely question their interests in foreign affairs.
This contains a minor factual inaccuracy, in that I and many others have certainly questioned the role of the US’s Big Ag lobby in influencing both domestic and foreign (especially ‘aid’-giving) afairs.
But more to the point, it’s a completely inappropriate analogy. Big Ag is a US domestic actor that seeks–very often misleadingly and/or disastrousy– to protect the interests of a certain subset of the American citizenry. Of course one can– and in my view should– question the ‘patriotism’ to the interests of the US citizenry of a person is also on the payroll of a foreign government.
Regarding your point that within the US different sectors of the country of the country have different interests, yes that is true. But within the US we also have (a) a common citizenship that makes the same claims on all of us, and (b) a whole set of laws and institutions that mediate and regulate the differences between the different interests.
The case of competing interests between a recently Israeli government-paid Dennis Ross and the rest of the US citizenry is in no ways analogous to this.
JES, your argument that the claims of the Jewish and Palestinian diasporas are analogous is quite specious. Members of the Palestinian diaspora have longstanding claims on the land and resources of the state of Israel under all portions of international law including private property law. Those claims must be addressed in a fair way. Members of the Jewish diaspora have no such claims. Moreover they all have stable citizenship elsewhere; and by this time just about all of them who might have wanted to go take part in the Zionist colonization venture have, like you, done so.
Why on earth should anyone in the world accept a formula that allows one set of people two (or more) active citizenships and gives many members of another group, as of now, no citizenship at all? Does the concept of statelessness, as suffered by a large proportion of diaspora Palestinians for > 60 years now, ring no bells in Jewish history?
Alex,
Japan didn’t try to steal other people’s land while maintaining, to this day, exclusivity?
The fact is that they are stateless mainly by the will of the Arab states, except for Jordan, while the fact that the Jews of the Arab world were absorbed by Israel and largely Western assimilationist democracies is responsible for the citizenship of the vast majority of Arab Jews who involuntarily changed citizenship in the 50s and 60s.
Why Palestinians in Diaspora with permanent claims on Israel which are incompatible with its continuing existence as an other-than-Islamist state should have primacy over 3 generations of Israeli Jews born in the land is explicable by the fact that Jewish Israelis are Jews, the world’s quintessential rootless, rightless other, and the world intends to instrumentalize Palestinians in returning Jews to the world’s concept of their rightful place.
The fact is that they are stateless mainly by the will of the Arab states,
Eurosabra, this is a lie.
Arabs states did not gave them citizenship because the had land and state, their state was stolen/Gifted by British colonist to homeless landless stateless people from around the world on claimed of 2000 years old dream.
No Salah. They are “landless and stateless” because the Arab League and their leaders rejected the UN Partition plan and chose instead to invade Israel. Israel and Jordan are the only countries in the region that, following the war, gave the Palestinians citizenship. The others have preferred to maintain them as “landless and stateless” refugees rather than integrating them into their societies (as Israel did with, for example, the Iraqi Jews).
JES, your argument that the claims of the Jewish and Palestinian diasporas are analogous is quite specious.
Where have I made such a claim? If you go back and read what I wrote, you will see that I was referring to your claim.
Why on earth should anyone in the world accept a formula that allows one set of people two (or more) active citizenships and gives many members of another group, as of now, no citizenship at all?
Because, Helena, this (as presented by Beery) is an evolutionary step toward being a “citizen of the world” (hence Beery’s reference to Herzl’s Altneuland as Altneuwelt). Further, as Beery has indicated to you, the same would apply to Palestinians with citizenship in Jordan, in the US and in Israel: they would maintain their citizenship as well as being considered “citizens” of the “nodal-state” of Palestine.
I don’t agree with the practicality of that, but frankly I am surprised that you don’t either because it fits in so nicely with the universalistic values that you express here all the time.
The secret is in the expressions ‘narrative and collective will’. The last is very fascist.
Yet both “narrative” and “collective will” are used often by a variety of Palestinian political and militant groups, as well as Palestinian intellectuals. I believe that Edward Said coined the term “narrative” in relation to the Palestinians. Does this mean that he was a fascist?
I propose resettlement of Israelis on Neptune, provided that the Neptunians (if there are any) consent. That way, Israelis wont interfere any more with the affairs of us earthlings
Only problem with settling Israelis on Neptune is that I have it on good authority that the anti-semitic peoples of Jupiter have an active nuclear weapons program posing an existential threat to the future setters. The Knesset will get around to dealing with this existential threat as soon as it has run out of existential threats here on Earth…
You should be able to read about the seriousness of the Jupiter threat on a daily basis in the New York Times in about 2050. And you can expect urgent calls for Israel’s protector state at that time, China, to take out Jupiter on Israel’s behalf.
Hey JohnH, don’t give up your day job!
Only problem with settling Israelis on Neptune
who knows read this:
Halley’s Comet appeared in the sky when Mark Twain was born in 1835. The comet moves in a seventy-five or seventy-six-year orbit, and, as it neared Earth once again, Twain said,
“I came in with Halley’s Comet… It is coming again … and I expect to go out with it… The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.'”
Sure enough, he died on April 21, 1910, just as the comet made its next pass within sight of Earth.
If anything, with the journeys of various Israeli-Palestinian MKs to Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt to participate in the narrative struggle against Zionist Israel, Israel is already a nodal-state of ARAB nationalism, with its Israeli-Palestinian-non-Diaspora acting as agents of Syrian, Lebanese, (and less so) pan-Arab Palestine-in-Place-Of-Israel nationalism.