'Palestinianism' & The Readymade: A Study in Mass-Marketed Identity-Theft

Marcel Duchamp, 'Fountain,' Arafat

Early last century, Duchamp notoriously spoofed modern art with a new form that he named the 'readymade.' A found object - an objet trouvé - became 'art' at his hands simply through the act of christening. The artifice of the artist was shown to be, given the right cultural-institutional conditions, almost alchemical. Warhol then took things a step further - in effect showing, without apology to Walter Benjamin, that even mass-production and wide media-dissemination needn't dim, but under some social conditions could actually brighten, the same illusory aura given the found object by artifice.

'Fountain' - a urinal merely named 'Fountain' - is probably Duchamp's best-known example of the effect. 'Soup Cans' or 'Marilyns' likely are Warhol's.

The strange ideological formation that Einat Wilf has identified and dubbed 'palestinianism' does with post-Westphalian nationalism much of what Duchamp and Warhol did with modern art. It turns out on inspection to be a 'readymade' pseudonationality, cobbled together in permanent 'refugee' camps out of what we might call the 'identités trouvés' - the 'found identities' - of others, principally the Jewish people. Once 'fashioned,' in turn, it has come to be mass-marketed and made part of mass-culture through mass-media channels.

And, as with Duchamp's found objects and Warhol's indefinitely iterable silkscreens, so with palestinianist 'found identity' ... the result carries all of the features of parody.

Assuming I haven't already frightened you off, please note now before you proceed, if you proceed: 'palestinianism' as ideational pathology no more afflicts all residents of former-British-'Palestine' than does islamism all Muslims or 'christian nationalism' all Christians. Indeed, after the last several years' mayhem, even many who once were afflicted seem now to be recanting and recovering. What follows, then, pertains more to hamasniks, fatahniks, and their cosplaying useful-idiot edge-lord friends in their parents' basements in the West than to anyone else at the moment.

And now back to our program ...

To begin with, there was never a 'palestinian people' before the late 20th century. There was not even a legally or politically, let alone full-on ethnically, demarcated geographical territory bearing that name. Not, anyway, apart from the brief 28 year interval (1929-48) during which Britain was assigned the task of helping to form new Jewish and Arab statelets or states in a sliver of what for the half-a-millennium prior had been the much larger Seljuk, then Ottoman (modern 'Turkish') province of South Syria.

Britain, demonstrating its humble self-image as successor to Rome, took the name 'Palestine' from the Romans, who in ethnically cleansing Judea of its indigenous nation - the Jews - two thousand years earlier had elected to add insult to injury (they were good at this) by renaming the land after the Jews' ancient nemeses the Philistines - a Greek people.

The new 'British Mandate Palestine' that thus came into intendedly temporary existence in 1920 was a once-dense and flourishing, now largely depopulated territory of inland desert and coastal malarial swampland punctuated by a small number of cities and towns with illustrious Jewish pasts - Jerusalem, Haifa, Hebron, Jaffa ...

Disease and infant mortality rates were astronomical, especially in the coastal and desert areas, and life expectancies were correspondingly short.

Jewish inhabitants of the Mandate territory who had never left lived primarily, though not exclusively, in the mentioned old towns, especially in their ancient capital of Jerusalem.

Arab inhabitants there before Britain, descended from settler colonists who had flowed in in train of the islamist conquests some 700 years after the Roman ones and 400 before the Mongol and Turkish ones, lived largely in small clan-ruled villages and towns such as Nablus and Gaza (the latter, like its near-namesake Giza, originally an ancient Egyptian, not Arabian, city).

In the four decades preceeding the British Mandate (about 1880-1920), Jewish refugees fleeing massacres in the multinational Romanov Empire ('Russia') began trickling in to Ottoman South Syria. They settled mainly in inexpensively purchased, uninhabited  malarial coastlands, where they formed largely Marxist-inspired agricultural communes (kibbutzim), drained the uninhabitable swamps, purged the malaria, produced and then prospered.

(Look at any map of the originally proposed Jewish state during the Mandate period, and you'll see at once that it is nearly identical to any earlier map of the officially designated malarial zones of Ottoman South Syria.)

The pace of change quickened during the British Mandate era. Britain brought in Arab labor from adjacent British territorial possessions to work on construction projects, while ethnic Arabs from other precincts and regions flowed-in seeking work in now-burgeoning Jewish enterprises. This is why most 'Palestinian' names to this day are from neighboring presentday countries - from Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Saudi, and Iraq in particular, but also from as far away as Muslim Kosovo and Bosnia in Southern Europe.

None of this is surprising in economic or demographic terms... With prospering Jewish communal enterprise and intensifying British infrastructure investment, opportunity - along with rising income and health measures - 'knocked.'

Nor is what happened surprising in cultural terms ... The concept of 'nation state' and 'national identity' were quite alien to the Arab world and to the multinational Ottoman empire that ruled over it prior to the British Mandate. Identities sounded in clan, religion, and ethnicity - in that order. One was first 'a Hosseini,' e.g., second 'a Muslim,' and third 'an Arab.'

Literally no one was 'a Palestinian' until the British re-introduced the word in 1920 - ironically, as a term for the Mandate's Jewish inhabitants. (Arabs called themselves simply called 'Arabs,' and the British then followed suit.) This is ironic not only in light of the word's (mis)use today, but also because, unlike all others in the region, the Jewish people were the one people who did have a sense of distinct national identity - one reaching back nearly 4,000 years.

Violence against Jews both before and then during the British Mandate period, then, had nothing to do with any 'nation's' being 'colonized' either by the land's continuous Jewish inhabitants or by its later Jewish refugee immigrants. The Jews were the ones who'd been repeatedly colonized, ethnically cleansed, and genocided, after all. They were the downpressed 'indigenous people.'

Read up on the class structure of Ottoman society, then of the Jim Crow American South. Turks and a few favored Arab tax-collecting families ('effendi'), not unlike the earlier Rome-favored tax-collecting 'publicani' so resented in the Judea, Samaria, and Galilee of the Christian Gospels, were the envied and oft-resented plantation class, Arabs the 'poor whites,' and Jews the 'blacks.' The British Mandate was the Union Reconstruction, and the masked hamas terror cult is to this day still the Klan.

No, acts of Arab violence - the pogroms of 1921, 1929, 1936, 1947-48, and ever since - weren't about nationhood, at least not in any sense other than DW Griffith's nearly Mandate-contemporaneous film 'Birth of a Nation,' on the 'glorious' rise of the KKK in the American south under 'Northern Occupation' during the Reconstruction.

It was the religion, stupid.

It was the Levantine version of lynching and cross-burning.

Islam and islamism (the latter then being developed as an Egyptian rendition of newly developing European fascism), like Christianity, of course grew out of Jewish tradition as heretical reform movements. When the custodians of the original Tradition, the Pharisees followed by the Rabbinate, rejected the proposed internal 'innovations' of these movements, they were of course labeled 'stubborn,' 'obdurate,' even (in a particularly insulting twist) 'pig-headed' by the self-proclaimed prophetic reformers - first the early Christians, then the early Muslims 700 years later.

While erstwhile 'Christendom,' exhausted by religious wars nearly 400 years ago, has long since more or less secularized and hence largely (though not wholly) dropped the offensive old trope of 'the obdurate Jew,' this hasn't yet happened on nearly the same scale in the Islamic world, which still is so far from secularized that it is hard for modern Westerners even to imagine it in its reality - unless they directly encounter it. (All who are able should visit the region before 'posting' inflammatory assertions, rather than honest questions, about it.)

And this is what all of the violence routinely perpetrated against the Jews of the Ottoman Empire, the British Mandate, and now Israel is and has always been about.

We just don't tend to 'get' this because we have forgotten medieval theology.

Many Muslims have not.

And certainly they hadn't in 1920 - or 1948.

We know what happened thereafter. 'Jihad' was declared against UN-authorized Israel in 1947 even before Mandate's end and Israel's official founding in 1948, followed by invasion from seven Arab countries as the British departed. There then began a 'refugee problem' that, unlike much larger such problems in Europe and Korea, never got solved, thanks to ... someone else's obduracy.

In the meanwhile, as this unsolved problem has festered and underwritten one primitive act of bloodlust 'jihad' after another, the descendants of those 1948 refugees (we're at the fifth or sixth generation now) have (a) continued unremittingly to reject Jewish self-determination of any kind in the land of the Jewish people; (b) continued to insist on 'Muslim sovereignty' over all Jewish religious sites as well as ancestral sites; and (c) continued to teach their children that murdering Jews is a sacred obligation and redeeming sacramental act.

But that is not all...

... which takes us back to the readymade:

In order to repackage their medieval mission in garb comprehensible to secular Westerners, the palestinianists have concocted the aforementioned readymade 'national identity' out of the stories and spare parts of others.

Jewish indigeneity thus became (fictitious) 'palestinian' indigeneity. Jewish national identity thus became (fictitious) 'palestinian' national identity. The Jewish shoah ('catastrophe') became the (self-generated) 'palestinian nakba' (yep, 'catastrophe' - in this case the failure of yet another attempt at ethnically cleansing the Jews).

This nationhood identity-theft of course follows the pattern of earlier religious identity-theft of the kind hinted at above in connection with Islam's and early Christianity's relations to the Judaism from which they descend. Indeed, to a massive extent the two thefts both merge: the 'Palestinian Authority's' new 'constitution,' after all, declares Jerusalem - Jerusalem, the 4,000 year Jewish capital! - to be both exclusively Muslim, and exclusively 'Palestine's' 'national capital'(!).

Of course, identity theft is much easier - and more complete - if you can dispose of your victim while at it. This is notoriously what led Mark David Chapman, who had appropriated John Lennon's identity, to murder his idol in New York in 1980. And, true to form, we see the same pattern now among palestinianists and their suckers. Jews must be not only murdered, but 'erased' if your identity is a readymade lifted from them.

If you doubt this, please have another look at the aforementioned PA 'constitution,' which luxuriates in extravagant mentions of 'Muslim holy places' all over Israel and yet never once uses or mentions the words 'Jewish' or 'Jew' or 'Israeli.'

Or watch Arafat 'informing' prime-time American television viewers in 2000, days before the 'second intifada,' that 'archeologists' have 'now shown' that there is 'no Jewish history' near ... the Wailing Wall(!).

Or listen to any number of the palestinianists' new crop of 'revolutionary'-identity vibing dupes who are here to announce their discovery that the Israelis (apparently even the 60% who are Sephardi or Mizrahi) are 'actually Polish.'

This is disposal of the body. The body whose identity you've tried, Mark Chapman style, to make your own.

What then are we to conclude? What now? What's to be done with this narcissist-miscreant artifice, this misbegotten identity-misappropriation, this hamasnik found-object rechristened a 'fountain' of blood and psychopathy, then 'silkscreened,' Andy style, and propagated ad nauseum via the channels of mass social media?

Three things, I think.

First (1), all peoples have rights to their own languages, cultures, and affective identities, including the Arab clans living in and near Israel.

Second (2), in the latter case, 'national' identity has never been 'a thing.' It was a gerrymandered identity-heist from the get-go, an awkward attempt at translating alien religious bigotry into a modern 'national liberation' story for Western mass-media consumption. It doesn't stick because it was never real. And you see this in both the hamas charter and the aforementioned PA 'constitution.' (Hence, what national 'partner for peace is there here?)

Finally third (3), in light of both (1) and (2), the clearest path forward from here, amidst a still ongoing multifront war, seems to be that proffered by forward-looking Arab families in Gaza and the territories just west of the Jordan, involving the establishment of new emirates in the territories possibly to be joined ultimately to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) themselves.

The emirate plan would offer the advantage both of (a) being a truly indigenous form of political organization (would-be modern Westphalian Arab 'states' don't seem to work anywhere, let alone Gaza and the west-of-Jordan territories), and of (b) uniting the Arab neighbors of Israel to what is by far the most healthy, progressive, forward-looking, and successful political formation that the Arab world has yet developed in its history.

That would be an authentic identity, not a 'readymade,' purloined, then mass-marketed one. It is on that account also a plausible one - at least once Israel's 'hilltop youth' problem, worsened by the perception that Israel will be condemned just for existing no matter what it does, is at last seriously solved.

More on that soon.