Killing democracy

One of the reasons why the America and Israel are so close is the similarity of their foundations. Religious refugees fleeing Europe settled on native lands, expropriated the local inhabitants and made war on them. In America, the invaders were helped by contagious diseases, such as smallpox, chickenpox and tuberculosis, against which Native Americans had no inbred resistances. In Palestine, this did not occur, and most of the original inhabitants and their descendants are still around. The destruction of tribal America lasted almost three centuries, and left just a few survivors. The destruction of tribal Palestine has been going on for a century, and there are millions of survivors. But, though the death tolls cannot be compared, the cultural destruction can be. Tribal communities are structured around their common land tenure. When that is taken away, the community falls apart. Common ownership creates ties and obligations, and is extremely stable over time. Tribal property goes back to prehistoric times, perhaps to the dawn of humanity. Its main opponents have been urban societies, where a few own a lot and many own next to nothing. It is that urban hierarchy that destroyed tribal America and is destroying tribal Palestine.

America sees Israel through the lens of its own past, fighting heathen hordes with god on their side, the god of temples, cities and power. The crime of genocide is transmuted into a heroic combat of good against evil. Having rewritten its past, America applies the same method of reading to Israel’s present. And, just as in America the population that is not white enough does not have equal rights, so it is in Israel for those not Jewish enough. Israel has declared itself a Jewish nation. Will America follow and proclaim itself a white nation, not cryptically but openly like Donald Trump. America has supported Israel unconditionally since its creation in 1948, as an outpost close to the world’s major oil fields. But this strategic approach has grown in intimacy over time to become a common identification. The armed colonisation of America was reflected in the armed colonisation of Palestine, which reflects America’s armed colonisation of the world.

America cannot criticise Israel without questioning its own not so distant past. And both nations have constructed themselves on the Old Testament Bible, the manifest destiny of god’s chosen People. Success, wealth and conquest are signs of his approval. In linking modern capitalism to Protestant ethics, Max Weber brought up the notion of “a calling”, a secret voice, a sign, a presence, a personal conviction that the path followed is the right one. America was “called” to be what it is. And all the horror and misery of that becoming was just collateral damage, hardly worth mentioning. Genocide, slavery, Jim Crow segregation, mass incarceration, homelessness and the treatment of immigrants are hidden by a façade of fanfares and glamour. And America’s imperialist footprints around the planet are said to bring democracy, which has given that concept such a bad name that no one wants to hear about it anymore. Similarly, the 1948 Nakba, the Arab wars of 1956, ’67, ’73 and ’82, the blockade of the Gaza ghetto, the treatment of occupied territories and Arab Israelis, and the right of might, are glossed over with democratic paint and argued with the old narrative of god’s Promised Land. America and Israel are as close as possible, and their storytelling is intertwined. By pretending to represent democracy, they have tainted it irremediably.