Re: world systems & "Israel"

<<What world systems research say about "isreal" and
its role in the contemprarory world system? Are  there
any writings about the subject?>>

Kodetalah asks a good question.  I apologize for my
immodesty here, but this is how I would answer such
questions.  At the end of this long winded reply,
you'll find some useful readings that tackle your
question head on.  

--Khaldoun Samman

Before we can talk about Palestine, we need to say a
few general things.  Muslim defeat at the hands of the
"West" had occurred long before modern western
penetration in the 19th century, when most of "Dar al
Islam" came under European control.  Sicily and Spain
too had been lost to the West.  Indeed, before the
modern period Islam’s greatest threat came from the
east.  The Mongol invaders were able to bring to an
end one of Islam’s most enduring Caliphate, the
Abbasid, destroying its capital in Baghdad and
disrupting the eastern trade routes.  But none of
these encounters were able to arrest the long process
of Islamic decline vis-à-vis the European powers of
the modern era.  Old invaders took slices of the
Islamic Empire, but leaving the remaining body in
tact.  

Modernity, however, attacked its central nervous
system and spread throughout the body like a cancer,
and in the process leaving no organ untouched.  It
restructured every aspect of the Islamic world, from
its class make-up and trade patterns to its formal
political structure.  What is unique about modernity
is that invasion doesn’t limit itself to slicing up
territory and redistributing it to a new ruler.  It
swallows it whole, and upon digestion breaks down the
properties into unrecognizable waste.  

The process of restructuring was a long and
complicated one, with its beginning only having
superficial effects upon Islamic civilization. 
Stretching from Vasco da Gama’s rounding of the Cape
of Good Hope in 1498 to the British defeat of the
Ottoman Empire in WWI, European colonization and
penetration would end in a total destruction of the
Islamic Ummah by the beginnings of the 20th century.  

Britain, which already had a protectorate in Egypt,
established Mandates in Palestine, Transjordan and
Iraq while France likewise administered Mandates for
Syria and Lebanon.   By 1920, therefore, most of the
Islamic world was either under direct colonial rule or
under some form of internationally recognized European
“protection”.

The most enduring impact of this colonization is the
formal political structures it would leave behind. 
Everywhere the Europeans established their colonies,
they demarcated territorial jurisdictions, insisting
on demarcating or making permanent territorial
boundaries.  Before the modern period, under the guise
of an Islamic Empire, territorial boundaries, within
the empire, had been either non-existent or constantly
shifting.  Now territorial regions had been clearly
defined, frozen and demarcated, with armies and
checkpoints clearly separating one region from
another.  Henceforth, that large structure we referred
to as an Islamic Empire was no more, literally hacked
to pieces beyond recognition.  In its place stood
multiple territorial states.  

Modernity, if you could pardon the simplification,
would by this account have a negative effect on the
Ottoman principles of social organization.  It
shattered the political superstructure of the empire
and radically transformed the old political, social,
economic, and religious social networks that resided
within it.  Even though previously the empire poorly
integrated its regions it was able to at minimum
provide some semblance of unity across space by
pulling the elites, be they Janisaries or tax farmers,
bureaucrats or prebend holders, together to acquire
translocal interests and links.  
  
Interjecting itself into the Ottoman Empire in the
nineteenth century, modernity would dismantle this
symbiotic world by destroying the linkages local
elites needed to maintain their alliances with the old
imperial center (Istanbul).  In the process, even
after a concerted effort by Istanbul to negate this
fragmentation in the Tanzimat period, local notables
were increasingly freed from their ties to the center.
 In its place new links were procured to new centers
outside of the traditional patterns of the past, most
often away from Istanbul and towards the new centers
of power and wealth in Europe.  This had a major
destabilizing effect on the classical "ethnic" and
religious social organizations (the so-called
millets), simultaneously weakening the central
authority while encouraging the rise of local ethnic
and particularistic forces.  

The increase in trade with Europe provided new found
strength to the merchant classes against the center,
especially for the Christian population who had
special cultural and religious privileges granted to
them by the European powers (known as Capitualtions). 
 

As a result, the Islamic Umma became disjointed both
materially and politically, causing “a drastic
transformation in the structure, philosophy, and
identity of the non-Muslim millets . . . who broke up
into smaller groups in which ethnic and religious
affinity became outwardly the basis of identity.”  
The Greek revolt of 1821 would signal the beginning of
this process.  Arab nationalism, beginning later in
the nineteenth century and coming into maturity only
after WWI, would also continue this trend towards
fragmentation.  Dar al-Islam was slowly and surely
being hacked to pieces and in its place we begin to
see the rise of Greek, Arab, Turkish, Kurdish,
Armenian . . . nationalists. 

This brings us to the issue of Palestine. Nationalists
do not believe in intertwined cultures.  The conflict
over Palestine today is partially the product of a
century old project of nation-building, the
intervention of modernity’s desire to create a tidy
world to a region still in the grips of a past in
which such neatness was far from the case.  In the
world of the past, as we just saw, identities were not
so neatly boxed up as they are today, but rather
criss-crossed one another in no neat fashion.  To act
as though we could simply unwound them, straighten out
all the curves, and separate each and every one of
them from one another like we unravel a ball of
knotted strings, is a vision of a lunatic only
modernity can fashion. 

One serious question we have to ask: How did the
Palestinians and Arabs become to be seen as distinct
from the Jews of the Middle East, both in need of two
separate “homes”?  What were the repercussions of this
dismemberment for that Land we call Holy?  For in the
process of becoming two peoples, Arabs and Jews would
be pulled and tugged from both sides, each claiming
Palestine as their own.

This is not unlike what we discussed above, where
through capitulations and other measures the millet
system was radically impacted by the encroaching
capitalist system.  In the case of Palestine, however,
it was not the change in the local Jewish millet that
would effect the course of history.  Indeed, the
Jewish millets in the Middle East were less affected
than their Christian counterparts.  The change came
more from a European Jewish development, stemming from
the “Jewish Question,” than it was something
originating in the Ottoman Empire.  It was in Europe
that Jewish nationalism developed and became a force
in Palestinian history.  Zionism starts by seeing the
Jew as separate both from Christian and from the
various nationalities of Europe; it is only later that
Zionism considers the issue of Arab/Muslim/Ottoman/ as
different from Jew/Israeli.  As such, “Jew” and “Arab”
would be envisioned by these nationalists as “standing
in a kind of permanent, irreconcilable opposition to
each other, representing two entirely different
cultures, ways of life, temperaments, mentalities,
sets of values, and aspirations.”   A statement of
this sort would have made little sense in Palestine
anytime before the late nineteenth-century.  The fact
that it would become to be viewed as true by millions
after 1948 gives us good reason to analyze how the
Zionists have been able to pull it off in late
nineteenth-century Europe, where the idea of distinct
cultures blossomed.  From this it becomes obvious that
we need to trace historically the process by which
Zionists and Arab nationalists have been developing a
discourse that is highly at odds with the cultural
symbiosis of traditional Palestine.

In this way, what would become the State of Israel was
represented by the Zionists as a floating space in an
ocean of barbarism, one that is somehow geographically
located in the Orient but yet remaining in Europe. 
Even though it lay and is embedded physically in the
hard and tough soil of the east, its geist is somehow
oblivious to this environment, belonging instead to
“Western Civilization.”  David Ben Gurion’s statement
that “the State of Israel is a part of the Middle East
only in geography” recalls the image, as G.H. Jansen
argues, “of the hydroponically-reared plant, its roots
floating in a chemical solution, not embedded in the
earth.”   The point, however, is that she is on earth,
just not in the Orient and in its racist, imaginary
mind of the Zionist.

There is more to the story, of course.  Land
appropriation by Zionist settlers is central to this,
where Palestinian labor is being undermined by Jewish
settlements through land grabbing and theft.  Gershon
Shafir (listed below) does a nice job explaining this
and placing it in a world system's perspective.  But
for now I'll leave this for another discussion.

Khaldoun Samman

-------------------------------------
-------------------------------------

I recommend these readings:

If you only have time to read one book, I find this
one quick, dirty, and very effective:
Lance Selfa, The Struggle for Palestine (Common
Courage: 2002)
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1931859000/qid%3D1044813119/sr%3D11-1/ref%3Dsr%5F11%5F1/102-4195649-2496122

Other recommendations:

Berkowitz, Michael, Zionist Culture and West European
Jewry before the First World War, Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press (1996).

Farsoun, Samih, Palestine and the Palestinians

Gershoni, Israel, Rethinking nationalism in the Arab
Middle East, New York: Columbia University Press
(1997).  Check out the chapters on Palestine.

Hourani, Albert, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age:
1798-1939, London & New York: Oxford University Press
(1967).

Keyder, Caglar, State and Class in Turkey: A Study in
Capitalist Development, London and New York: Verso
Press (1987).

Karpat, Kemal, “The Ottoman Ethnic and Confessional
Legacy in the Middle East,” in Milton J. Esman and
Itamar Rabinovich, Ethnicity, Pluralism, and the State
in the Middle East, Ithaca and London: Cornell
University Press (1988).

Khalidi, Rashid, Palestinian Identity

Owen, Roger, Studies in the Economic and Social
History of Palestine in the Nineteenth and Twentieth
Centuries.

Rejwan, Nissim, Israel’s Place in the Middle East: A
Pluralist Perspective, Gainesville Tallahassee:
University Press of Florida (1999).

Said, Edward, The Question of Palestine

Selfa, Lance, The Struggle for Palestine

Shafir, Gershon, Land, Labor and the Origins of the
Israeli-Palestinian Conflict




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