This post is part of Marc H. Ellis’s “Exile and the Prophetic” feature for Mondoweiss. To read the entire series visit the archive page.
The news today that Secretary of State John Kerry is in Israel to jump-start the peace process brings to mind Santiago Zabala’s short essay on the logic of democracy recently published by Al Jazeera – and Kafka’s castle.
The cover photo for Zabala’s essay is none other than Stephen Hawking. Hawking just struck a blow for democracy by refusing to cross the BDS Israel/Palestine picket line.
Interesting, yesterday Al Jazeera backtracked on its censorship of Joseph Massad’s article on Israel as the last bastion for anti-Semitism writ large. Whether you agree or disagree with Massad’s interesting and controversial twist on the definition of anti-Semitism is less important than allowing him to be heard.
I doubt Al Jazeera acted simply because it realized the mistake of censorship. Most probably it was feeling the reaction heat. So, as with the Church of Scotland revised but still standing report, “The Inheritance of Abraham,” the force of censorship is being struggled against successfully.
The reason Hawking’s picture fronts Zabala’s essay is his declaration that philosophy is dead precisely because it holds on to absolutist anti-democratic ideas about the universe that science has discredited.
Sounds a bit like the Jewish establishment, Hawkins just tweaked. Just substitute international law for science.
Appearances notwithstanding, is the Jewish establishment in its death throes?
Santiago Zabala is a high flying intellectual, young, born in 1975, who already has published books with titles like The Hermeneutic Nature of Analytic Philosophy, The Remains of Being and, most recently, Hermeneutic Communism. Zabala is the ICREA Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of Barcelona. He’s also a contributor to a book on deconstructing Zionism which I have contributed to. That’s how I wound up on his email list.
Here’s how he starts his essay:
From a political point of view people still believe in nostalgic and dangerous ideas like “objectivity” “reality”, “truth” and “values” as a precondition for democracy. But believers in absolutes forget a crucial lesson borne out of the historic record namely, that the tide of secularisation is irreversible and remains inextricably bound-up in the human condition. This reality necessarily checks and harnesses the search for fanatical, absolute truth-claims that, we maintain, are contrary to the very nature of democracy.
Zabala continues:
Indeed the demand democracy places on us is therefore a commitment to maximising critical, open dialogue whilst maintaining a minimal peaceable solidarity among different social and political actors. We thus submit the need to dispense with arrogant notions of truth opting instead for more temperate and humble philosophical programmes, ones that, for example help nurture a larger more volatile discourse of human flourishing.
The secularization Zabala writes about has a horizon beyond the present moment. It is a movement that deconstructs truth claims – as does the deconstructing Zionism project he’s is working on. Operating outside of truth claims – and the power that enforce them – human beings form networks of solidarity to promote life and flourishing.
Democracy is a way of working through the issues we face as human beings. Minimizing collective identities and causes or at least depoliticizing them, it is easier to cross borders and boundaries that make societies more livable and just.
Democracy becomes a way of being in the political world. In Zabala’s vision, former enemies become friends. Road blocks give way to open avenues. It’s like the French Revolution without the royals, the autocrats and the barricades. A European Union gone global.
“The discourse of human flourishing” – we seem very far from Zabala’s ideals. Is the “tide of secularization” inevitable? The answer to the obvious question of how we’re doing in relation to Zabla’s ideals is not very well.
The Middle East is an example of regression on almost every front imaginable. But then again Middle East regression is enabled and sometimes sponsored by the “advanced” democracies that, though flawed, are much closer to Zabala’s sensibility.
These advanced democracies – along with the old and rising imperial dictatorships like Russia and China – are in league with all the regressive players of the Middle East like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. All in all, it seems that the global political and economic powers – the G-7 and G-20 nations – form a regressive club of sorts. Drinks all around!
I include here Israel with the usual caveat – as the only *regressive* democracy in the Middle East. The asterisk needs a bit of slicing and dicing. Can democracy be regressive?
If you’re wondering how I can make such a statement check out Israel’s latest from Amira Haas published in Haaretz over the weekend. Haas reports that since the beginning of 2013, Israel has “forbidden tourists from the United States and other countries to enter the territories under Palestinian Authority control without a military entry permit.” The problem is compounded by the fact that the Israeli authorities haven’t explained the application process.
Over the years, Israel has been making it more and more difficult for those seeking to work with Palestinians and document the occupation. The rationale is to cut Palestinians off from the outside world. But, then again, has this previous access of NGO’s and church people also enabled the occupation to continue as if it was temporary and benign?
All in all, Israel is making Kafka’s castle seem easy to access and navigate. But, then, Palestinians already live in a Kafkaesque world where their appeals to democracies and dictatorships end up in the same garbage can.
Since we know that democracies can be imperial and colonial powers, democracies can likewise be regressive and enablers of regressive politics on distant shores. “Can likewise be” sounds theoretical so let me rephrase: In our time, major democracies around the world are thinly disguised imperial and colonial powers.
Israel may be a democracy for Jews but it increasingly acts like the only regressive democracy in the Middle East.
With the help of the United States, of course, and every nation who wants to play a “constructive” role in the endless Middle East peace process.
Speaking of the Kafkaesque world of Israel/Palestine, imagine what Palestinian leadership must feel as they receive John Kerry after his meetings with Israeli officials. After President Obama’s visit a couple of months ago, where he embraced almost every issue that consigns Palestinians to a truncated and ghettoized existence, it seems that Kerry has very little to offer Palestinians.
I doubt that Kerry has the keys to Kafka’s (Middle East) castle. The question is whether he lost them or if they even exist.
Someone’s calling the shots, though we can’t be sure who it is.
We know it isn’t Palestinians.
We also know it isn’t about justice.
Democracy would be nice, but America has been delivered into the undemocratic hands of the very rich — individuals and corporations — who assure that “we have the best Congress that money can buy” to say nothing of the best mainstream media, ditto.
Kafka, yes, democracy, not so sure. Look at Keystone XL Pipeline, Fracking, global warming. Look at Koch and others who control larger and larger chunks of media. Look at big banks (and the Goldman Sachs endowed chair in perpetuity as Secretary of Treasury).
And then look at Israel/Palestine, a subsidiary matter, indeed, tho important to us.
Israeli “democracy” is limited. Not just by the fact that millions who are under Israel’s jackboot cannot vote, buy also by the fact that all politicians must follow the tenets of zionism. That automatically means a supremacist state, just as it also means an expansionist state determined to swallow up as possible of the land of Palestine. Anyone wishing to enter politics who does not follow both those ‘rules’ would not be considered acceptable to the majority of the electorate, or to most of the parties (I expect the charters of many parties claim occupied Palestine, just as Likud’s does), and is doomed to failure. Those two tenets in particular are simply non-negotiable in Israel. Both those areas should be part of the political space, but are not, and those who would dare to contest that are completely marginalised.
If memory serves, Obama told an audience when he was in Israel last that he was powerless to do anything towards peace in the I-P Conflict without people influential enough having his back. I guess he learned that from his Cairo speech, eh? I think it was to the selected young Jewish Israeli student audience. Has he ever gone to a single meeting of, or addressed even one organization or group in the USA that’s been working for a more balanced approach to Israel and Palestine than AIPAC and the Jewish Establishment? Has he even ever referenced one such organization or group in public, as praise-worthy? Not that I am aware of–he acts like they don’t exist.
As for only democracy in the Middle East, what about Lebanon and Turkey? Does Egypt count now after the “Spring” there?
And I guess Cyprus, Ethiopia, and the Caucus countries are not in the Middle East, but Morocco is?
RE: The news today that Secretary of State John Kerry is in Israel to jump-start the peace process brings to mind Santiago Zabala’s short essay on the logic of democracy recently published by Al Jazeera – and Kafka’s castle. ~ Marc Ellis
FROM WIKIPEDIA [The Castle (novel)]:
SOURCE – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Castle_(novel)
[TO BE FOLLOWED BY POSTSCRIPTS ELABORATING ON HOW THE PLIGHT OF THE PALESTINIANS IS SIMILAR TO THE PLIGHT OF ‘K’ IN “THE CASTLE”]