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Nakba '48 manifesto

This is the manifesto for Nakba '48 which I drafted along with the assistance of other members. It addresses many of the common questions and misconceptions.

Who are you?
We are a diverse UF student organization of Americans, Palestinians, Arabs, Christians, Muslims, and Jews who all agree on the universality of unconditional equal human rights. We strive to raise critical awareness of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by engaging the community through dialogue, a student journal, charity, speakers, films, performances, and working with other groups in the Student Coalition against Injustice. Membership is open and encouraged for all who are interested in learning about Israel and Palestine and working towards a just peace for all people in one of the most important and unfortunate conflicts of our time.

What does Nakba '48 mean?
Al-Nakba, translated from Arabic, means "affliction" or "catastrophe" and refers to the creation of the state of Israel, which has caused the plight and struggle of the Palestinian people against Zionist occupation and oppression. The '48 refers specifically to the 1948 mass expulsion and exodus of around 1 million non-Jewish Palestinians following numerous massacres and demolitions of over 400 Palestinian communities in order to form the Zionist state of Israel. The Palestine Remembered Project has more details, testimony, and figures on the ethnic cleansing which was required to establish a Jewish demographic majority in the region of Israel.

What exactly is Zionism?
Zionism is the ideology that the Jewish people are a "tribe" who must have a "homeland", in the form of a nation-state, because of the historical injustices they have suffered. Jews, as an ethnic group, must be the majority population in the given area of this nation-state. Through working with the European colonial powers, this ideology came to material fruition in 1948, when the Jewish land "by birthright", later renamed to Israel, was established in greater Palestine.

What is wrong with that? Don't the Jews deserve a homeland?
There are some inherent problems with Zionism that prevent not only a "homeland" for the Jews, but for anyone else in the Middle East region. Peace is one of the basic characteristics of a home, and that simply cannot take place by replacing co-existence in Palestine with a state that elevates Jewish rights over those of non-Jews. This logic of ethnic nationalism (constructing a "nation"-state with the idea of elevating the rights of a particular ethnic community) has actually been the guiding ideology oppressing Jewish peoples and other minorities across the world historically for centuries. In a nation-state, the rights of minorities are always secondary to the majority (whether by population or power) population which constitutes the nation. Most notably apartheid South Africa, Nazi Germany, and even the Jim Crow-segregationist United States all attempted to use this logic of national ethnic superiority with extremely disastrous results. Creating a Jewish nation-state is a replication, rather than a reversal, of the original problem that has haunted Jews across the world. Upholding the rights of all people equally, universally, and unconditionally is impossible in the framework of the state of Israel, where the explicit purpose of the state is to maintain a demographic majority of one particular ethnic group at all times.

But isn't Israel a democracy? How does it not respect the universal rights of all people?
While the parliamentary system of Israel appears just like any other liberal representative government, there are a few major perceptible differences. In order to create a Jewish demographic majority, around one million non-Jewish Palestinians in 1948 had to be "transfered", i.e. forcefully expelled or coerced to leave. While any Jew regardless of their birthplace is granted automatic citizenship and allowed to settle in Israel under the "Law of Return", Palestinians are denied their right to return to their homes, which is a basic right enshrined in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Geneva Conventions and other international law treaties. Imagine if Native Americans forced your whole community one day to leave so they could construct their own "nation"-state, and never compensated or allowed you to come back (using checkpoints, missiles, tanks, and barbed-wire walls to drive home the message).

Additionally, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are denied citizenship, even though their lives are in the hands of the Israeli government. They live under military occupation facing curfews, incursions, affluent Jewish-only settlements overlooking their pitiful refugee camps, Jewish-only high-speed, nicely-paved roads, military checkpoints and institutional harassment like the requirement to obtain permits from Israel to travel anywhere outside their community.

As has been proven by minorities all over the world, citizenship itself is not a guarantee of fair treatment. Exacerbated by Zionist policies to maintain an ethnic Jewish majority, Non-Jews inside the formal borders of Israel face widespread discrimination, harassment, and poverty even with their Israeli citizenship. For example, many indigenous communities are refused official recognition by the state of Israel, particularly in the Negev which has a low demographic concentration of Jews. These "unrecognized communities" are denied access to water, electricity, roads, schools, and other basic services in an attempt to encourage them to leave. For numerous other examples, see the Israeli Arab Association for Human Rights.

Why are you singling out Israel? Why not focus on the rights of minorities in other "nation"-states, women, blacks, LGBT, or other groups facing persecution?
Our purpose is not to pick on anyone, but to bring attention to the inhumanity of Zionism, which is the root cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict, a geopolitical nightmare that has cost tens of thousands of lives, billions of dollars, and exacerbated global anti-Semitism (directed at both Jews and Arabs alike, since both are Semitic peoples). The Zionist state of Israel currently receives widespread economic, military, and political support, especially from the US government (maintaining a sphere of influence in the resource-laden Middle East), to violate universal basic human rights in their project of ethnic-nationalism in Palestine. Many of us work with other groups, and we actively seek to form coalitions with student organizations committed to upholding universal human rights. To that end, we have co-founded the Student Coalition against Injustice and created a semesterly journal, Human Liberation, that focuses on struggles for social justice worldwide. To repeat, Nakba '48 supports the rights of all humanity; there is no inconsistency in our message of universal, equal human rights.

How are Jews supposed to co-exist with Arabs who are anti-Semitic, do not respect Jews' right to life, and constantly resort to terrorism?
Firstly, there are many Arabs and Palestinians who are themselves Jews. They have peacefully co-existed in Palestine and the greater Middle East for thousands of years, sharing a common Semitic heritage with Arab Muslims and Christians in the region. While this co-existence was certainly not perfect, Palestine was often considered a haven for Jewish exiles who had suffered horrific injustices in Europe.

The context of the current conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is often framed, especially in the Western press, as two equally-equipped warring sides engaging in a "cycle of violence". Actually, the "conflict" is extremely asymmetrical, with Palestinians struggling to survive under Israeli military occupation and suffering disproportionate collective punishment (see If Americans Knew for more details). Those who are simply defending their community against Israeli military incursions are killed as "terrorists" by the Israeli state and demonized posthumously as "militants" in the press.

However, we should not become nihilistic as there is a vibrant joint Palestinian-Israeli nonviolent civil disobedience movement, which often goes untold in the press. Israeli military officials have attacked these peaceful demonstrations (see Gush Shalom and the Independent Media Center-Israel) and even admitted to using undercover agents for provoking violence (see Ran HaCohen's report). The website of the International Solidarity Movement contains a wealth of information and updates on this movement.

Isn't this goal of working to end Zionism and the state of Israel pretty unrealistic?
Of course this goal is not easy, nor a simple or quick fix, but real lasting change hardly ever comes without hard work. The model of ending apartheid in South Africa definitely provides inspiration for the collective triumph of humanity over seemingly insurmountable odds. Grassroots awareness and divestment campaigns surfaced in places like Gainesville to demand that higher institutions, like universities, churches, city councils and eventually the US government, end their support for ethnic nationalism.

What can I do?
You can increase your awareness of the plight of the Palestinian people and the tragedy of Zionism by coming to the table of Nakba '48 (every Monday and Wednesday at Turlington Plaza), signing our petition for the basic human right of return for the Palestinian people, supporting our divestment campaign against the Zionist state of Israel, joining our organization, and most importantly speaking out against injustice in your daily life wherever you are or whatever the context.

On the Palestinian Question

Note: This an updated version which was published in the Spring 2006 issue of Human Liberation.

“You should work... as man for the emancipation of mankind; and you should feel the particular form of your oppression and shame not as an exception to the rule but rather as its confirmation.”¹

Over 150 years ago, in the Christian state of Prussia, Jews faced discrimination as official state policy simply for having a different religious/ethnic identity than that of the majority population (and most importantly, those in power). The inability of the Jewish people to comprehensively resolve this “Jewish question” manifested in a geopolitical Zionist movement whose goal was the construction of a Jewish-majority state in Palestine. This movement has culminated in Israel, an officially “Jewish state” whose existence is predicated on maintaining a demographic majority of persons with Jewish religious/ethnic identity. Ironically, the Jews, who once sought freedom from the Prussian state, are now being asked to grant freedom. The preexisting majority population of non-Jews living in Palestine, struggling against the necessary occupation and oppression in order to maintain a Jewish majority, symbolizes the tragic consequences of an incomplete resolution to the Jewish question.

Within this historical context, Karl Marx's ideas on human liberation remain highly relevant to the contemporary predicament of the Palestinian people. I will argue that Marx’s proposed resolution to the Jewish question can ultimately help resolve the Palestinian question, as well as actualizing the emancipation of all other oppressed peoples worldwide. I will demonstrate this by practicing Marx’s theory on a contemporary writing on the Palestinian question by Joel Kovel.

Bruno Bauer, who belonged with Marx to a group of German philosophy students known as the Young Hegelians, wrote a number of articles dealing with the question of equal rights for Jews vis-à-vis the Prussian state. He claimed that a Jew could not be politically emancipated as long as “the limited nature which makes him a Jew…triumph[ed] over the human nature which should link him as a man with others and must separate him from non-Jews.”² For Bauer, the solution was simply to abolish all state-sponsored religion and other official privileges.

Marx’s famous essay “On the Jewish Question” provides a thorough critique of Bauer. In this work, he faults Bauer for falling into contradictions as he narrowly presents the Jewish question as one-sided, as only a problem of Jews in relation to the Christian. Since Bauer limits his examination to the Christian state, he ceases to be critical when it comes to universal emancipation and the state in general. In turn Marx asks, “What kind of state?.. What kind of emancipation is involved and what are its underlying conditions?”³

Marx examines the theory behind, not the practice stemming from, the foremost liberal states at the time—France and the United States. These states boast the embodiment of emancipation, of liberty, justice, equality, and security for all. Yet Marx recognizes that these are determined “just as the boundary between two fields is marked by a stake”. The man presupposed in these “rights of man” is conceived as that of the bourgeois—an atomistic, isolated monad, able to be cleanly separated from the relations of his fellow humans in society.

As such, liberty is not based on the association of human with human, but rather its separation. It is the “right of this separation, the right of the limited individual limited to himself.”⁴ Practically applied, the right of private property emerges as the “right to self-interest” without regard for others, independent of their social relations. Equality is declared as equal opportunity and access to the universality of the state, that is, “all are created equal”. Privileges and ranks are claimed to be abolished yet material differences obviously persist. “All are the same before the law” from the landowner as citizen to the day laborer as citizen. The state thus treats these inequalities as apolitical, separating them from their contingencies since everyone is considered a self-sufficient monad. This is sealed with the right of security as the preservation of the limited individual, his rights and his property—the supreme guarantor of egoism.

To keep these atomistic individuals from the dreaded “war of all against all” and maintain order, the state must become autonomous, given a life of its own through social relations that are abstracted and reified. Individuals are required to find their emancipation through an intermediary instead of each other. Perceived threats to the autonomy of the state are met with hostility and often outright violence, all in the name of “our national security” and the “protection of our society”.⁵ Originally alleged to be a means of emancipation, the state becomes inverted into end in itself.

At the same time, Marx recognizes the futility of efforts to attenuate and limit the liberal state through an expansion of “civil liberties”. While this political emancipation is the best which can be offered in the current context of the bourgeois as the ideal type of existence, such reform ignores the fundamental nature of this existence: individual freedom separated instead of from sociality. It is the freedom to isolated egoism and withdrawn self-interest rather than the freedom from it.

Like Bauer's formulation of the Jewish question, its failure to subject the nature of the state and this political emancipation to criticism translates into the inability to surpass the limited, egoistic individual who finds in others “not the realization but rather the limitation of his own freedom”. Social relations with others remain degraded to mere “natural necessity, need and private interest, the maintenance of their property and egoistic persons.”⁶ This “separation of man from his community, from himself and from other men” forms the basis of the prized “civil” society within the autonomous state.⁷

Most tragically, bourgeois political emancipation prevents the meaningful fulfillment of one's species-being, or the creative and cooperative capacity of humanity-as-community. It is a deformed type of liberation that is employed by the owners of production to further solidify the current social hierarchy within which they are able to prevent unfettered access to the means of production. The liberal state, like the concept of capital, is externalized and purported to be natural and universal in order to deny its assumptions and origins in bourgeois political theory. At this privileged position, these human creations can confront people as alien, controlling them through the justification of an ultimate end in itself.

Since “egoism and selfish needs” are thought of as the essence of human rights, complete human emancipation can not take place within the state and its civil society. The negation of humanity through the concept of alienating individualism must first itself be negated. Only when the human imprint on this abstracted concept of human rights is revealed, individuality is understood as predicated on sociality, and relationships are reorganized to humanity's unique species-being will actual emancipation be able to take place.⁸

Unfortunately, this comprehensive form of human liberation has not occurred historically. Marx and others who helped unveil ideology have been cast aside as dangerous tyrants, ignored by many who seek the divine promised land of objectivity. Incomplete revolutions like those in the Soviet Union have become the favorite whipping boy for apologists of liberalism. These revolutions' failures to negate the reified autonomy of their states combined with the constant threats of annihilation from imperialism produced a hyper-autonomous state with repression on a massive scale in Marx's name. Given the apologists' inability to subject their treasured states and civil society to meaningful criticism, their failure to comprehend these effects of the incomplete revolution is only natural. Ultimately then, despite the radical implications of Marx’s critical philosophy, the same old political emancipation employed in the Jewish question of 19th century Europe has become aggrandized, perpetuated in the form of international law. Consequently, a number of unresolved “questions” continue to propagate despite the comprehensive vision for true emancipation outlined by Marx more than 150 years ago.

The Palestinian question is certainly no exception. At this juncture, I will put Marx's critique into practice and demonstrate that even the most prominent champions of justice fall prey to a Bauerian formulation of the Palestinian question. I will do so using “Zionism's Bad Conscience” by Joel Kovel, a notable activist and intellectual.

Kovel justifiably claims that the problem in Palestine is the denial of a common humanity.9 Yet he misidentifies the problem as particular stemming from Jewish exceptionalism in the form of geopolitical Zionism. This is primarily due to the privileging of the Jew in the eyes of the state of Israel over the other invalidates the state's claim to universal emancipation.¹⁰ The state of Israel effectively withholds political emancipation in an unacceptable way, committing human rights abuses in the name of Zionism. As with Bauer, the failure of Kovel to expansively and critically formulate a question he seeks the answer to leads him into contradictions.

As a result, he asserts the state emerged historically to “accommodate the power of the newly emerging capitalist classes” yet the solution is to expand the legitimacy of this state and its civil society.¹¹ Kovel aids these capitalists by occluding their agency in abstracting a particular set of organized social relations to their advantage. He points to the problematic tribalism of Zionism and purports this will be remedied through “strengthening and advancing the notion of universal human rights.”¹² Since “the formulation of a question is its solution”, I shall ask like Marx, what kind of state, what kind of emancipation and what are its assumptions?¹³

The bourgeois emancipation Kovel puts forth is based on the limited individual, separated from his community. It produces not only mere tribalism when one is confronted with something alien, but atomism on a truly sickening scale. When the individuals is thought as isolatable and separated from others, where social relations are considered an external framework which limits the individual through reification, actualization of a common humanity is impossible.
The question of the Palestinians as well as others will continue to fester as long as the philosophical turns made by Marx and others are ignored. A radical, fundamentally different re-conceptualization of emancipation and social relations is necessary to negate the negation of humanity by the illusory restrictions imposed by bourgeois political theory. True human liberation can emerge when these limits of the current framework of political emancipation within the state are superseded. In other words, humans will only be able to experience true freedom when they flourish in the uniqueness of their species-being.

This requires an adoption of Marx's “ruthless criticism of everything”.¹⁴ Even the most sacred concepts, like the state, its civil society and emancipation, must be considered apocryphal and doused with criticism. Most importantly, their particular assumptions must be constantly exposed, never allowed to remain hidden or dressed up under the guise of nature, universalism or the metaphysical.

Furthermore, this can only be realized through Marx's example of praxis—the simultaneity of concrete action and reflexive theory. The contemporary imagined dichotomy between the two must be broken down. Armchair and ivory tower theorizing about inert concepts leads to hollow action, while its complement, the increasingly pragmatic form of activism, lacks the critical reflection and theoretical analysis to embody effective human liberation.

Therefore, it is more relevant than ever to apply the lessons learned from Marx’s analysis of the Jewish question. To summarize, Marx expands Bauer's original critique of the Jewish request for equal rights in civil society to include a critique of the liberal state and the “human rights” it protects. He demonstrates that bourgeois civil society is predicated on presupposing humanity's species-being as individualistic self-interest. Due to such alienating assumptions, political emancipation within the framework of liberalism leaves the Jewish question unresolved. This deformed emancipation resulted in geopolitical Zionism and the atrocities committed in the name of Israel. Ultimately, a new Palestinian question emerged which suffers from the same presuppositions as the original Jewish question.

The solution is not to further the final form of political emancipation in the current context of the society of limited individuals like Kovel's writings put forth, but to engage in limitless criticism and negate the original negation of humanity by bourgeois theory. Activists and scholars alike cannot successfully re-conceptualize social existence and supersede the current alienating order unless the false dichotomy between radical action and critical theory is collapsed. Only when the stagnant state of praxis today is reinvigorated with the idea of species-being can love and empathy bring down the social hierarchies that corrupt the human spirit, including the geopolitical Zionism that has caused such pain and suffering in the Middle East.

References
1. Marx, Karl. [1843] 1994. Karl Marx: 1818-1883. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, pg 2.
2. Ibid., pg. 16.
3. Ibid., pg. 5.
4. Ibid., pg. 16.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid., pg. 17.
7. Ibid., pg. 10.
8. Ibid., pg. 21.
9. Kovel, Joel. Zionism’s Bad Conscience. http://www.joelkovel.org/zionism.html. Accessed December 20, 2005. pg 1.
10. Ibid., op. cit., pg. 3.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Marx, Karl. “On the Jewish Question”. pg. 3.
14. Marx, Karl. [1844] 1978. The Marx-Engels Reader. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., pg. 12-5.