We're All Fictional People

Martin Peretz married into money and bought a magazine; he now thinks he is better than this man.

I'm bringing this up due to a recent piece by Martin Peretz in TNR in which he calls the Palestinians a "fictional people," about which I have nothing pertinent to say except that Peretz can have his married-his-way-into-wealth-and-status ass savaged by a pack of starving dogs. I doubt this is going to matter to anyone who takes the "Palestinians are a fiction" argument seriously, but there's a deep irony to the argument that seems nonetheless worth pointing out.

There's more than that. There's the extreme totalitarian mindset underlying the argument: because Palestinian people- human beings, remember, not just "Palestinians"- didn't exist in a modern nation state at the time of their ethnic cleansing, they are not entitled to make any claims to human rights and dignity. Thus, people only have value as human beings insofar as they exist in a state. Mussolini would love that one; TNR, ostensibly, is not supposed to.

And the argument could be used, without any changes at all, to justify colonial slaughter in Africa or North America: because the natives did not constitute a nation, you can drive them from their lands, kill them, etc. It's sort of a white man's burden argument by way of modern state realism: the savages haven't reached a high enough stage of societal development- the nation state in this case- therefore they must be swept away by the winds of progress. Same with MLK's black nationalism: African-Americans never existed as a nation, so they have no right to control their own communities. None of this makes even superficial sense; the fact that it has such monstrous precedent makes it all the worse, and I'm not sure why people make it in public, where other people can read it.

The irony part is this: the organizing of a disparate people into a nation-state to ensure the protection of their human rights was the principle motivation of Zionism. Norman Finkelstein has done sterling work on this in some of his earliest scholarship: basically, he argues, Zionism was a kind of romantic nationalism whose proponents argued that as long as Jews existed as minorities in other states, the states would never belong to them, and they would be accordingly persecuted. This Holocaust gave quite some weight to this argument, and immigration en masse to Israel began, and resulted in its founding in 1948.

Now, when the Palestinians wish to do the exact same thing that the Zionists did- set up a state to protect themselves from the abuses of a state that will never belong to them ("the state of the Jewish people," remember)- they are- what? Fantasists? Cynical political opportunists? Agents of the Jordanians and "the warrior Arab states," in Peretz's words?" One could argue that the Jews are a fictional people for not having a state prior to Israel; let's see Peretz and anyone else in mainstream journalism make that argument and watch what happens. (The closest anyone in the mainstream came to making a claim like this may have been Helen Thomas, as Think Progress points out; look what happened to her.) And, of course, we were all "fictional people" at one time, Americans included.

Anyway, you can drop this on a pro-Israel apologist if he makes the argument, especially since you're likely to see it being raised more and more as that particular camp runs out of arguments. Anyone still left in the hardcore of that camp, though, is likely to be without shame and/ or completely full of shit like Peretz, so I'm not sure you're gonna get anywhere.