Zionist Timing
Zizek makes a valuable point in the article Let's be Realists, Demand the Impossible!:
The foundational crime of the establishment of a nation-state is an act beyond good and evil - but given enough time, the amoral interlopers become the rightful natives. The Turks may have once been migrant hordes, but they've settled in Anatolia long enough to make it Turkey. The human rights violation is not the original act of invasion: the human rights violation is now asking the Turks to leave. As the song goes, "Why did Constantinople get the works? That's nobody's business but the Turks."
So why isn't Palestine nobody's business but the Jews? As Zizek alludes to, it's partly their own fault. The Zionist enterprise is perfectly justifiable in terms of the Nietzschean will to power, but in large part thanks to the efforts of Jews, might is no longer seen as equivalent to right. Ironically, the Muslims, sitting on land they conquered from others, castigate the Jews for moral failings in Judeo-Christian terms. They do so because Islam was built on the principle that might makes right, and thus if they followed their own religion's logic, they'd have to concede that the Jewish God has proved himself more powerful than the Muslim God and convert to Judaism! Mohammad's proof of divine writ was in the pudding, the pudding being military success. Perhaps Muslims should hail Ben-Gurion as the divinely anointed?
Ideally, the state of Israel should have been reestablished in the seventeenth century by Sabbatai Zevi. If Zevi had been able to pull that one off, the state of Israel would be just as well-established today as Holland or Mexico. Furthermore, impressionable Arabs (including the inchoate "Palestinians") might have been impressed enough by his success to convert en masse to Judaism. Unfortunately, Zevi lacked the fortitude of a Mohammad or even a Joseph Smith, and pre-modern Zionism was stillborn. By the time modern Zionism came about, messianic nation-building was passe, Europeans were internationalists and Muslims had learned how to speak in human rights code. The crime of Zionism is the timing!
Many political theorists, from Blaise Pascal to Immanuel Kant to Joseph de Maistre, have elaborated on the ways in which nation-states have manufactured heroic national mythologies to replace and ultimately erase their "foundational crimes," i.e. the illegitimate political violence necessary for their creation. With regard to this notion, it is true what has often been said: The misfortune of Israel is that it was established as a nation-state a century too late, in conditions when such "founding crimes" are no longer acceptable (and-ultimate irony-it was the intellectual influence of Jews that contributed to the rise of this unacceptability!).
The foundational crime of the establishment of a nation-state is an act beyond good and evil - but given enough time, the amoral interlopers become the rightful natives. The Turks may have once been migrant hordes, but they've settled in Anatolia long enough to make it Turkey. The human rights violation is not the original act of invasion: the human rights violation is now asking the Turks to leave. As the song goes, "Why did Constantinople get the works? That's nobody's business but the Turks."
So why isn't Palestine nobody's business but the Jews? As Zizek alludes to, it's partly their own fault. The Zionist enterprise is perfectly justifiable in terms of the Nietzschean will to power, but in large part thanks to the efforts of Jews, might is no longer seen as equivalent to right. Ironically, the Muslims, sitting on land they conquered from others, castigate the Jews for moral failings in Judeo-Christian terms. They do so because Islam was built on the principle that might makes right, and thus if they followed their own religion's logic, they'd have to concede that the Jewish God has proved himself more powerful than the Muslim God and convert to Judaism! Mohammad's proof of divine writ was in the pudding, the pudding being military success. Perhaps Muslims should hail Ben-Gurion as the divinely anointed?
Ideally, the state of Israel should have been reestablished in the seventeenth century by Sabbatai Zevi. If Zevi had been able to pull that one off, the state of Israel would be just as well-established today as Holland or Mexico. Furthermore, impressionable Arabs (including the inchoate "Palestinians") might have been impressed enough by his success to convert en masse to Judaism. Unfortunately, Zevi lacked the fortitude of a Mohammad or even a Joseph Smith, and pre-modern Zionism was stillborn. By the time modern Zionism came about, messianic nation-building was passe, Europeans were internationalists and Muslims had learned how to speak in human rights code. The crime of Zionism is the timing!
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