Re: world systems & "Israel"

Khaldoun's discussion of Israel and the world system is quite interesting.  It 
focuses on transformations that made the Ottoman Empire into something much 
more like the rest of the world system--a set of separate nations.  There is 
also the question of the history of Israel and the west, which transformed the 
Jewish community from the major cosmopolitan integrators of Europe into a 
transnational community defending a nation in a state of permanent struggle 
with its neighbors, allied to the US and (much more uneasily) the rest of the 
West, a thorn, seemingly, not only in the Arab world but in the entirety of the 
South.

Jews position as embattled minority in Europe was definitively constituted not 
in the age of nationalism but in the Medieval era, as the papacy consolidated 
control.  The two great expansive thrusts of pre-modern Europe--the crusades 
and the 'reconquest' of the Iberian peninsula frequently turned into 
anti-Jewish attacks.  When, in the modern era, Europe fragmented into 
nation-states, Jews (at least the most privileged portion of the community, 
mainly in the West) found a new role--as transnational universalists, who would 
integrate Europe economically (the Rothchilds) and politically/culturally, 
through the embrace of the universalist principles of the enlightenment, 
largely abandoned by the non-Jewish intelligentsia.  The most famous Jewish 
socialists--Marx, Bernstein, Luxemburg, Trotsky--barely scratch the surface of 
the ways in which Jews largely ran the socialist newspapers, party chapters, 
etc.  Nor should we fail to note the dramatic presence of Jews in more liberal 
versions of enlightenment universalism--Freud, Durkheim, Mauss, Wittgenstein, 
Proust, etc.

As nations struggled to protect themselves against the self-regulating market, 
the transnational Jewish community became an easy target.  Although socialism 
was one of the forms of self-protection, the more socialism became a 
mass-national political project, the more irrelevant became the Jews 
(eventually culminating with Stalin's anti-semitism).  In this context, Zionist 
arguments that the Jews should have/produce a modern nation state of their own 
gained in plausibility--and this plausibility multiplied with the full-scale 
demolition of the Jewish community by the Nazis, and the failure of liberal 
nation-states to protect them.

Following World War II, the Zionists succeeded in having their state recognized 
by the international community (the UN/US hegemony).  Meanwhile, in the US, 
Jewish refugees provided many of the organic intellectuals of US 
hegemony--disenchanted with radical versions of modernity, they nevertheless 
possessed universalist notions not prone to develop in native US soil and were 
not particularly sympathetic to the explicit racism that characterized much 
white Protestant American thought.  The victory of Israel in 1967, and the 
global challenge to the US in 1968 drove these communities together.  An aura 
of pessimism developed in liberal Jewish circles in the US (the African 
Americans no longer appeared to want their help, students didn't seem to care 
about culture, etc), and the embattled Jews of Israel started to seem more like 
comrades.  The Vietnam war, which gave the US psyche a fresh wound to lick, 
generalized this sentiment across the US political spectrum (excluding, for the 
most part, the African American community).  These days, the Israelis are the 
'front lines' of a resentful and fearful US hegemony.

Steven Sherman