The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict as a Clash Between Nationalisms

Alessandro Cavalli
Professor of Sociology at the University of Pavia, Italy 

Ernesto Galli della Loggia is right when, in the editorial published in the "Corriere della Sera" on November 23, he states that the presence of the State of Israel produces ideas and attitudes of unease and anxiety in Europe. I acknowledge it. But my reasons for discomfort and anxiety are different from his.

For him, “Israel is deeply disliked by many in this part of the world, […] it arouses in many of us here a feeling of annoyance, of dull rejection. They don't like Israel." I don't know on what basis he can ground these statements, perhaps there are data and empirical findings that I don't know about. But this is not the point. Rather, it is the interpretation he provides of this "dull", and perhaps even "mute", antipathy towards Israel that arouses, at least in me and perhaps also in others, a certain dismay. “With its very existence – he writes – Israel reminds us Westerners of what we are not, what we no longer want to be, or cannot be”. We in Europe would lack the feeling of unity, of cohesion, of community, capable of getting over religious, cultural, ideological, social and political fractures. In essence, for Galli della Loggia what is missing in Europe, or no longer exists, is a strong idea of nation, from which derive solidarity, civic sense, "the propensity to personal sacrifices [...] which become apparent in a peculiar way in relation to a war”.

In the words of Galli della Loggia emerges an admiration for the ability of the State of Israel to put aside domestic conflicts, even profound ones, and form a common front against the enemy represented by Hamas, and a sort of nostalgia for an era in which even in Europe people were willing to sacrifice their lives for their homeland: “the war brings into play ancestral traits of human identity to which it is difficult not to attribute a value, elementary maybe, but still crucial: courage, the feeling of solidarity with the people at our side, self-sacrifice”.

It sounds like a sentence written between the 19^th and the 20^th century, before the two world wars. After 1945, there have been the wars of the former colonial powers, the war in the Balkans and now in Ukraine, but a significant part of Europeans have first repudiated and then removed these “values”, transforming them into dis-values. The fact that today almost the entire population of Europe has never experienced such a long period of absence of war can only be a source of hope, not of nostalgia.

Perhaps if the State of Israel does not arouse in Europe the enthusiastic support that Galli della Loggia would like to see, it is also because European history evokes a past which there is no desire to go back to. After all, the State of Israel would probably never have existed if anti-Semitism had not reached its maximum expression in the nationalist phase of European history.

Anti-Semitism is an ancient phenomenon, it was born together with the diaspora. After the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem and the massacre of the Jews by the Roman legions in the year 70 AD, the survivors began to disperse and create settlements in the Mediterranean area, including North Africa. Sometimes they were welcomed, sometimes tolerated, sometimes persecuted and expelled, or forced to convert. In the modern era the diaspora extends from West to East, from the Iberian peninsula to Italy, France, Germany, Poland, Ukraine, Russia and Romania. Jewish culture takes form and adapts depending on the contexts it has to live in. The reasons are religious, cultural, economic, political.

There is no doubt that the “Jewish question” arises from the claim of each population believing in the one and only God that their own is the "only true one”, while that of the others is a "false" divinity. This explains how the most fierce religious wars, as explained by the great Egyptologist Jan Assmann (The Price of Monotheism, Stanford University Press, 2010), were fought between peoples of monotheist religions. The Jewish question arises from the clash between different monotheisms, which, however, find their common origin precisely in the Jewish religion.

But religious reasons are often a pretext to cover up conflicts of another nature. A minority, religious or otherwise, in addition to being forced to carry out functions that are precluded to the majority, such as usurious loans, can be taken as a scapegoat to expel the evil that a community cannot accept within itself. Collective conscience, solidarity, the “us” always require a “them” to struggle with. Jewish identity and anti-Semitism have supported each other. I'm not saying that without anti-Semitism the Jewish identity would have dissolved, but it was an important component of its survival. How much anti-Semitism contributed to the survival of the Jewish identity is a question that deserves to be taken up again. Collective identities emerge when they define the “not us”, the “others”, they are born in a relationship of contrast. On the topic Marx, Martin Buber, Sartre, Elias and many others up to Edgar Morin have written illuminating pages.

However, when the national state was established starting from the French Revolution and the idea of people was based on and confused with the idea of nation, a problem arose, because history has fragmented the Jewish identity into a plurality of different nations., often hostile to each other. It is not a simple historical coincidence that at the end of the nineteenth century, in the culminating phase of European nationalisms, the Zionist movement was born, which wanted to give a territory and a state to a population scattered throughout the world but in particular on the European continent. The demand for a return to the land of the fathers (the homeland) begins, Jewish settlers settle in the countryside, in the villages and then in the cities, the movement spreads but remains fundamentally a minority, until anti-Semitism reaches its extreme expression in Germany, in  National Socialism and in the Shoah. The "fault", if we can speak of fault, lies not only with Germany, but with all of Europe. Zionism and the creation of the State of Israel in the land of Palestine are difficult to imagine without anti-Semitism, fueled by nationalism, of which racism is an extreme form. It is not, therefore, a question of antipathy towards Israel on the European side, but rather of a poorly concealed sense of guilt for having been at the origin of the emergence of that question. Nationalisms have forced a people that historical events had made naturally cosmopolitan to desire to constitute itself as a nation-state.

This is the reason for the unease that I, but perhaps many others too, feel these days in the face of what is happening in the "promised land": the clash between two nationalisms, one that has managed to establish itself as a national state, and the other that pursues the same goal, a clash from which nothing but anger, hatred and violence can emerge, with the risk that all this will extend in space and time to generations to come. The Zionist movement is the Jewish version of European nationalism.

European Jews had enjoyed (so to speak) the uncertain "privilege" of maintaining their own identity as a people, despite having different "homelands": they were at the same time "citizens" but also "foreigners": Italians, Germans, French, Spaniards, Poles, Russians, etc., but always “Jews”. In a certain sense, we can say that the Jews could have constituted an original nucleus of a European people in formation, if the European nationalism had not forced them to become nationalists themselves.

The Palestinians, on the other hand, have been part of the Ottoman Empire for centuries. Like all empires, which were political organizations that tended to be supra-national, the Ottoman one also was granting a wide autonomy to the provinces. Following the dissolution of the Empire after the First World War, the British Mandatory administration in Palestine took over; but it is only after the birth of the State of Israel, with the famous and contested United Nations Resolution 181 of 1947, that a movement (the PLO) was formed that claimed the creation of a Palestinian State.

Today, the only solution capable of quenching the conflict seems to be the construction of two states, on which, however, only an agreement between ultra-reliable, steely guarantors at a global level will be in a position to impose the peace. A desirable solution, but frankly unlikely. Aside from the difficulties associated with the inevitable displacements of people of the two ethnicities, the two-state solution would trigger strong opposition both within Israel and among Palestinian factions. The concern arises because it is difficult to see how the great powers can converge in attributing the power to impose peace to the UN (or another global body). Two sovereign states behind and in support of which coalitions and alliances will line up at the international level risk increasing the chaos in one of the most dangerous areas of the planet.

What Galli della Loggia seems to me is not considering in his nostalgic exaltation of the values of the nation and war, is that it is not a question of choosing which side, Israel or Hamas, one should take. In war there are atrocities on both sides. It is the war that is atrocious, not the combatants. There are good reasons to defend the existence of the State of Israel, and good reasons to consider legitimate the Palestinian aspirations to have a state. If we want to save the planet from the risk of a Third World War, we would need a solution involving two federated states under the guarantee of the UN and the European Union: a solution that is frankly unlikely, although not entirely impossible. Both within Israel and among the Palestinians there have been signs that dialogue is not impracticable. Signals that can be weakened, but also strengthened. After all, Europe, after the tragedy of its nationalisms that have been fighting each other for a century and a half, has demonstrated that ancient enemies can indeed coexist peacefully. Unfortunately, this is a lesson that Europe itself seems not to have finished learning, demonstrating that it does not possess yet the moral authority to pass it on to others.