Israel and Palestine: self and other, positive and negative; 2023
9 Nation
FIRST DRAFT (5 pages)
Distance dependence: knowledge, value and power
Conceptions of nations
Israel: conceptions of the national self
Israel: a conception of the nation from outside
Israel: other conceptions of the national self
The global structure of local size distributions
Palestine: others’ conceptions
Palestine: conceptions of the national self
Postscript: today’s Observer
Distance dependence: knowledge, value and power
“a faraway country … people about whom we know little”
Chamberlain addresses the nation, 1938:
BBC https://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/chamberlain-addresses-the-nation-on-his-negotiations-for-peace/zjrjgwx ;
Institute of World Politics: https://www.iwp.edu/articles/2023/04/18/a-quarrel-in-a-faraway-country-between-people-of-whom-we-know-nothing/ ;
Chamberlain’s remarks prompt a hypothesis that:
knowledge decreases with distance …
… and the associated hypotheses that:
value decreases with distance; and
power decreases with distance.
This is Boulding’s loss-of-power gradient. Indeed there may be a relationship between the three hypotheses to the extent that value brings power and power brings value.
Conceptions of nations
Consider two nations, A and B. Nation A has a conception of itself and also a conception of the other nation B. Likewise nation B has a conception of itself and also a conception of the other nation. For each nation there is the nation’s conception of self and also the other nation’s conception of it. So there are two conceptions of each nation …
… indeed there are more than two conceptions – there are many conceptions of a nation. Within any nation there are perhaps many conceptions of itself and many conceptions possessed by other nations of the first nation.
… a single conception of a nation is likely to be multi-faceted. So we might think of a conception of a nation is being represented by a point in a multidimensional space. The set of different conceptions of a nation can be represented by a distribution of points in the space. For example the answers to an opinion poll about a nation can be thought of as such a distribution.
The distribution can be characterised in various ways a typical conception defined using mode, median or mean.
Separately from their distribution in space, different conceptions have different strengths, be of different power and it may be that there is one dominant conception – at least within a social location.
Different conceptions place different values on the nation, positive or negative to varying degrees. One type of conception places positive value on the self and negative value on the other …
… we might refer to this as a value gradient, a loss-of-value gradient. Particularly so if there are several others at varying distances from the self.
… see previous section:
“Distance dependence: knowledge, value and power”
Israel: conceptions of the nation
Pale of Settlement, 1791-1915/1917
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_of_Settlement
Sholem Aleichem
Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich, ‘Sholem Aleichem’,
born in 1859 in Pereiaslav and grew up in the nearby shtetl of Voronkiv, in the Poltava Governorate of the Russian Empire (now in the Kyiv Oblast of central Ukraine).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sholem_Aleichem 1859-1916
…
Tevye and his Daughters (or Tevye the Dairyman) 1894
“the expulsion of the Jews from their village by the Russian government”
Stage production 1919
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tevye
1939, 1968, 1971, 2017 (Yiddish, Hebrew, English, Russian)
Tevya (film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tevya_(film)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Perl]
…
Fiddler on the Roof
Set in the Pale of Settlement of Imperial Russia in or around 1905:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiddler_on_the_Roof 1964
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiddler_on_the_Roof_(film) 1971
Third Reich to British Cyprus to British Palestine, 1945 to 1948
Exodus, Leon Uris, 1958
Book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exodus_(Uris_novel)
Film https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exodus_(1960_film)
“Ceasefire supporters fail to understand Israel. The film Exodus underlines how Jews won’t rely on others and why calls by Sadiq Khan and others are pointless…. Now Jews would secure their own land and ensure their safety …” Daniel Finkelstein. Nov 1, 27.
Finkelstein provides an insightful account. While sympathetic to the aspirations of the Jews, he is also alert to the opposing wishes of the Palestinians.
.(1) “This is Israel’s founding myth.” “The book is a romantic tale of the foundation of the state of Israel, centring on the buccaneering exploits of a [fictional] Jew, Ari Ben Canaan …” “a simplistic account with the legitimate claims of the Palestinian Arabs almost entirely and wrongly ignored.”
.(2) The role of the British Empire. In the early period the British were ‘controlling’ the movement of Jews to Palestine. But at various times before and after, the British Empire was supportive:
[An aside. In 1956 I recall the excitement of my classmates at morning assembly asking our young PE teacher whether he was going to be called up. In reality Israel, Britain and France were at war with Egypt. At home we listened as the plug was pulled literally on the radio programme, “Any Questions”.
https://journals.openedition.org/rfcb/6992]
Israel: a conception of the nation from outside
I had talked to Richard only that week and I thought about the other Jews (not so many) that I knew. I thought about the letters and articles written by Jews in The Times and in The Observer. I thought of the Jews I had encountered in books, television and film – even Fiddler on the Roof! Their family history was in Europe and indeed in many cases the survival from the holocaust. In summary, the locations I have encountered in my life have not had many Jews, but all the Jews I have encountered have been Ashkenazi Jews (of European origin).
None of my locations have had Mizrahi Jews (of Middle Eastern origin).
Israel: other conceptions of the national self
Last Saturday’s Times … it was a photo of people in the interior of a bus. The caption said: ‘The forced exodus of Middle Eastern Jews to Israel after 1948, including Iraqis …’.
I had just been writing about Israel and here was a group I had not mentioned and indeed was mainly ignorant about. I had talked to Richard only that week and I thought about the other Jews (not so many) that I knew. I thought about the letters and articles written by Jews in The Times and in The Observer. I thought of the Jews I had encountered in books, television and film – even Fiddler on the Roof! Their family history was in Europe and indeed in many cases the survival from the holocaust. In summary, the locations I have encountered in my life have not had many Jews, but all the Jews I have encountered have been Ashkenazi Jews (of European origin). None of my locations have had Mizrahi Jews (of Middle Eastern origin).
An aside: the global structure of local size distributions
See next section.
I now return to the photo in last Saturday’s Times. It was in an article challenging some of the ideas in recent debates. However my interest here is not on these debates but rather on the Middle Eastern Jews. My interest is in the third paragraph below which refers to the focus on European Jews and the neglect of the Middle Eastern Jews … and specifically to the reference to the local size distribution in Israel and how it has changed: Mizrahi Jews are “nearly half” and that there are “fewer Ashkenazi Jews in Israel than there are Mizrahi Jews”.
“Take the idea that Israelis are white. It is highly doubtful that Ashkenazi Jews, who hail from Europe and have been exterminated in their millions because the Nazis considered them a racial underclass, are simply “white”. (As some have pointed out, there is a bitter irony to the fact that Ashkenazi Jews are perceived as being “insufficiently white” by the far right even as they are increasingly seen as “too white” by the far left.)
The assumption that Israelis are white becomes absurd when you realize there are now fewer Ashkenazi Jews in Israel than there are Mizrahi Jews. After all most Mizrahis, whose ancestors hail from the Middle East, have skin no lighter or darker than the average Palestinian; the same, of course, is true of the hundreds of thousands of Ethiopian Jews.
… And while debates about the Middle East usually revolve around European Jews who fled to Israel in the wake of the holocaust, nearly half of Israel’s Jews came to the country in very different circumstances. They have, since 1948, been violently expelled from Middle Eastern countries such as Iran, Iraq, Egypt and Morocco.”
Note that my interest here is in different conceptions of Israel and its people, and the contrast between those of European origin and those of Middle Eastern origin. My general point is that there are different conceptions of the national self.
… the global structure of local size distributions
This prompts a few broader principles:
.(1) locations in world society vary in terms of the presence or absence of every social group;
.(2) locations in world society vary in terms of the percentage presence of every social group;
.(3) the percentage presences in a particular location I refer to as the local size distribution.
.(4) different locations have different local size distributions.
I now consider my ignorance. My knowledge is based on the locations I have encountered. If these locations are in some way unrepresentative then my knowledge is likewise unrepresentative. When I encounter another person the overlap between myself and the other relates to the overlap in the locations we have separately encountered.
Palestine: others’ conceptions
There is not much here – I have chosen to say not much here - I have chosen to make a virtue out of my defect. Echoing Chamberlain, for me Palestine is a nation about which I know little. I am not able immediately to bring to mind thoughts about Palestine. I do not go around the house singing some song from a Palestinian “Fiddler on the Roof”.
I imagine that some others are in a similar situation to myself. Some others in Britain and in the West. Indeed some others amongst Jews and in Israel. Finkelstein above notes that the book Exodus provides “a simplistic account with the legitimate claims of the Palestinian Arabs almost entirely and wrongly ignored”.
Palestine: conceptions of the national self
Other sections of my own book here do contain information about Palestinians’ conceptions of the national self - notably so in the section on history and in the sections reporting on the opinion surveys of Palestinians by Palestinians.
Postscript: today’s Observer
The two main weekly Jewish newspapers in the UK (2013 ?):
50-55% about Israel
40-45% about attacks on Jews: antisemitism, Holocaust, attempts to ban cosher food and so on
5-10% for the entirety of Jewish culture, Jewish history, Jewish life
Raymond Simonson
“How a Jewish culture hub reacted to the darkest day … with its first panto.”
The Observer, January 7th, 2023: 13. Harriet Sherwood.
Israeli TV:
“Horror in Gaza – but you wouldn’t know it from watching Israeli TV.”
The Observer, January 7th, 2023: 10-11. … contains:
“There is an ignorance and lack of willingness to hear Palestinian voices for many years, certainly since the second intifada.” Meron Rapoport.
Local Call: https://justvision.org/localcall