This gets eerily good… (around the middle of 2/8):

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In a desperate bid to get what’s become a (mostly) minor case of Zizek personality-worship out of my system, here’s a compilation of some of his more recent internet-born appearances:

Videos:

Slovenian Philosopher Slavoj Zizek on Capitalism, Healthcare, Latin American “Populism” and the “Farcical” Financial Crisis — 15 October 2009

World Renowned Philosopher Slavoj Zizek on the Iraq War, the Bush Presidency, the War on Terror & More. — 12 May 2008

Addressing Google:

First as tragedy, then as farce (1 of 6):

What does it mean to be a revolutionary today?:

The ‘monstrosity of Christ’ (1 of 8):

Environment, identity and multiculturalism (starting from 2 of 10):

…(3 of 10)…

…(4 of 10)…

Violence and the Left in Dark Times (in NY with Bernard Henri Levy):

…see the whole thing here.

And some oldies but goodies…

On Love:

On the racism of the Sound of Music:

Is Hussein Ibish a level-headed pragmatist key to Palestine’s future, or a Washington socialite unwittingly co-opted by an intellectually bankrupt mainstream? I don’t know…it’s a loaded question, but it got you reading. In any case, he does a impressive job of distinguishing bewteen a one-state ’solution’ (potentially desirable) and one-state ‘outcome’ (unthinkably disastrous). From Jeffrey Golberg’s blog via Juan Cole:

Hussein Ibish, a senior fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine, which is the leading American group advocating for an independent Palestine alongside Israel, has a new book out, “What’s Wrong With the One-State Agenda?” which does a comprehensive job of demolishing the arguments made by those who think that Israel should be eliminated and replaced by a single state of Jews and Palestinians. He has performed an important service with this book by noting one overwhelming truth about this debate: Virtually no one in Israel wants a single-state between the river and the sea. It’s useful to remember this salient fact when listening to the ostensibly reality-based arguments of the one-staters.

I spoke to Ibish about his arguments last week, shortly after he spoke at the J Street conference. Here is an edited version of our conversation:

Jeffrey Goldberg: What were your impressions of the conference?

Hussein Ibish: It was impressive as a first step. My impression is that there’s still quite a bit of message-cohesion and message-formulation to be done. It seemed to me to be an insufficiently coherent group of people. The range of people was so large.

JG: You mean on the Zionist spectrum?

HI: I mean people ranging from the sort of centrist-center left, all the way to post-Zionists, anti-Zionists, who were there, too. It’s not ultimately a group that’s going to form, I think, a functional coalition. Right now, they’re finding their feet. This is normal, it’s inevitable — but at a certain point, I think they have to clarify what they are, who their constituency is, what they stand for, who they are, who they’re not. They’ve been more successful in creating a space for themselves as a new voice that is compelling, but at other moments it’s looked like where they were simply positioning themselves as the alternative to AIPAC. And my sense of things is that, initially, that they would look too much to their rivals. But sooner rather than later, they’re going to have to just move on and start to define themselves in a much more coherent and pro-active way, not just in contrast to the traditional Jewish organizations but also to distinguish themselves from people in the Jewish community whose criticism of Israel makes them anathema to the mainstream of the community. They can’t go there and I think they’ve tried not to go there.

JG: You can’t be Zionist and non-Zionist at the same time, in other words.

HI: Exactly. I think it’s essential for them. For us, it’s not important.

JG: Well, isn’t it important to have a pro-Israel, pro-two-state organization in Washington that’s credibly Jewish?

HI: It is. But I believe that all of the mainstream organizations are moving in that direction. I think begrudgingly, without enthusiasm, I think they’re all getting there, because I think ultimately the only organization that I can think of that is absolutely opposed to a two-state agreement are on the far right, the Zionist Organization of America, which is in favor of the occupation without reservations and, on the left, Jewish Voices for Peace, which is a one-state group all the way and without reservation. It seems to me everybody else occupies some space in the middle without being one-staters and without being flag-waving pro-settlers.

Now, the question is, from our point of view, what’s really important is that the Jewish community have a range of dynamic organizations that are effective in advocating for peace based on two states, number one. And number two, that we can work with everybody who is in favor of a two-state solution without any other preconditions. I mean, we don’t want to get involved in intra-Jewish rivalries. We want to work with everyone who wants peace based on two states. It’s as simple as that. We don’t have a huge stake in where J Street ultimately positions itself, but I will say this: The more mainstream it can become, the more powerful and important it will be. I think they should be as mainstream as possible, they should avoid the impression they sometimes give that they’re perhaps not being sensitive to fears about Israel’s security. There’s a real appetite for a more robust, more aggressively pro-peace organization in the Jewish community. But from our perspective, the only people we don’t want to talk to are the one-staters and the pro-occupation groups.

JG: But the one-staters are a very marginal group. I think one of the interesting things you do in your book is show very coolly, calmly, the essential ridiculousness of one-state advocacy based on the simple fact that in order to have a successful one-state plan, you need Israeli Jews to want it, and today, not even one percent of Israeli Jews want it.

HI: You could put all of them in a small auditorium.

JG: I don’t think you need an auditorium. Talk about these guys, the Tony Judts –

HI: I don’t want to be too hard on Judt. Judt put out this argument and then he immediately admitted that it was utopian, that it wasn’t serious and he was just doing a thought experiment. And since then, he basically has more or less withdrawn from the conversation Judt has not been a person who suggests that this is a realistic plan and a serious proposal for the future.

There are two fundamental flaws with pro-Palestinian strategic thinking that focuses on the idea of abandoning two states and going for a single state. The first is the question of feasibility, and it’s hard to argue with that. Obviously anyone who is familiar with this sees the difficulty, and I would be the first to say that success is not assured by any means. Even a two-state agreement looks, at the moment, like something of a long shot. The difference between the two-state solution and everything else is that yes, it’s a long shot, but it would work. And if we could conceivably get it, if we did get it, it would solve the conflict.

The fundamental argument that the one-staters seem to be making, which is that we can’t possibly get Israel to end the occupation and relinquish their control of the 22 percent of Palestine (the West Bank and Gaza) but we will inevitably succeed in getting them to relinquish one hundred percent of the territory under their control. This is a problem of logic. The second thing is that once you’ve realized this, obviously what you’ve done is set yourself the task of convincing Jewish Israelis to voluntarily do this.  The idea of coercing the Israelis into this through military force is absurd, and it could only really be done through voluntary persuasion. What the one-staters argue, actually, is that they don’t have to do that. What they’re going to do, they say, is bring the Israelis to their knees.

JG: South Africa style?
HI: Well, South Africa style, except we don’t have a South Africa equation here.

JG: But they believe they do.

HI: They believe that through the application of what they call BDS – Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions – globally that they can crush the will of the Israelis and break the Zionist movement. To me, even if you believe that boycotts were plausible, which I don’t, certainly I don’t think the American government and institutions and corporations would participate.

JG: You have to move from the American consensus that supports supplying Israel with the best weaponry to not just a military cutoff but a complete cutoff and boycott. It’s very hard to picture.

HI: Anyone who thinks that is plausible in the foreseeable future doesn’t understand the nature of the American relationship with Israel. The commitment of the U.S., not just the government but American society, is to the survival and security of the Israeli state. And then there’s another aspect, which is the extent to which Israeli institutions, organizations and corporations are interwoven at a very fundamental level with many of those in the U.S.

JG: Right, Intel and Google –

HI: I’m talking about corporate, governmental, intelligence, military, industrial, scientific ties. The point is that you can only take talk of boycott and sanctions seriously if you really don’t understand any of this. And if you don’t understand any of this, then you’re living in a fantasy world. So here’s the thing: Obviously the only real task for one-staters is to convince Jewish Israelis to agree to their solution. But instead of trying to do that, they engage in the most hyperbolic discourse about the badness of Zionism, the badness of Jewish Israelis, the rightness and primacy of not just a Palestinian narrative, but the most strident traditional Palestinian narrative, and the most tendentious Palestinian narrative, the one that places lame for the conflict entirely on the side of the Israelis, that casts Israel as the usurper and what they call in one-state circles now the “temporary racist usurping entity.”  These are the ones, by the way, who won’t talk about my book. There’s a refusal to acknowledge or read my book. I’ve nicknamed my book “the temporary racist usurping book.”  …

These people are trapped in the language of the Fifties and Sixties. You’re talking about a worldview is anachronistic in the most fundamental sense. It doesn’t recognize any of the changes that have taken place since then. For example, the strategic situation that’s emerged in the Middle East, where the Arab states and the Arabs generally have a lot of other things to worry about other than Israel. This is a world in which a lot of Gulf states are extremely concerned about Iraq, and where there are Arab states — Jordan and Egypt — that have treaties with Israel, where Syria has a motive to be civil with Israel that is unpleasant but completely stable, and where it’s a very different environment than simply the Arabs and Israelis are enemies. The other thing that they’ve missed completely, and this is sort of the amazing thing, is the total transformation in American official policy toward the Palestinians over the past 20 years. Twenty-one years ago, there was no contact ever between the U.S. and the PLO. No contact, zero, and no Palestinian statehood is the consensus American foreign policy and it is a national security priority under Obama. People in the House, key positions like the chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Howard Berman, chair of the Subcommittee on the Middle East, Gary Ackerman, Nita Lowey on Appropriations – all of them Jewish American members of Congress, stalwart supporters of Israel, and all of them committed to peace based on two states. And all of them, by the way, who were on the host committee of the American Task Force on Palestine gala last week.

JG: You’ve reached the Promised Land.

HI: Except that we haven’t achieved the results.

JG: Yes, there’s that. But you’re on the road.

HI: Exactly. The transformation in American attitudes is almost mind-boggling, an official American attitude on ending the occupation, which has been the traditional goal of the Palestinians. And at this very moment, a group of Palestinians turns around and says, ‘Sorry, not good enough, we want it all. Not only is a single Palestinian state not achievable, it’s not desirable, it’s not acceptable, it’s not enough, we want it all.’

JG: Who are the leaders of the movement?

HI: People like Ali Abunimah, Joseph Massad, Ghada Karmi, Omar Barghouti.

JG: And you think they’re succumbing to fantastic dreams. This is the traditional criticism of Palestinian politics over the past sixty years, that it’s very hard to separate out the dreams from–

HI: It goes back further than sixty years. It’s an article of Palestinian nationalist faith that is almost one hundred years old, which is that demography is destiny, demography is power. This notion that if we just sit here, on the land, have children, are steadfast and don’t agree to anything, then political power ultimately will flow to us. In the twenties, they believed if we do that, then, just by virtue of our presence in the land, our numbers, our demography, Israel will never be established. After Israel was established, it was just, “Well if we’re steadfast and we don’t agree, then Israel will be reversed.” Then it was, “Well if we just do this, then independence will come in the occupied territories.” Now the latest version is if we’re just steadfast, we can create a South Africa-like model and we will reverse the war of 1948 at the ballot.

JG: But I have to tell you that for people like me, this is a real worry. This goes with the argument that the settlements are the vanguard of one-statism.

HI: Now there is some truth to this. I think it’s useful for people like (Ehud) Olmert or people like yourself to point out that with the occupation going the way it is, there won’t be a Palestinian state, and then Israel will be in a situation where it is neither meaningfully Jewish nor meaningfully democratic. I think you could claim that already, if you talk about the de facto Israeli state rather than Israel in its normally perceived borders, that is already the case and it will be increasingly so. Now here’s the thing: The alternative, though, is not going to be a single state in the foreseeable future. It’s possible we could get there, but it won’t be a solution, it will be an outcome. There’s a big difference. An outcome of a horrible, brutal, bloody civil conflict that drags on for generations, because even though this demographic issue and the legitimacy issues are crises for Israel, I don’t think they result in the dissolution of the Israeli state

JG: In other words, most Israeli Jews would rather have a Jewish state than a democratic state.

HI: Yes, it’s obvious. And I think that what you would get is a protracted civil war that is essentially an intensification of the civil war we’ve had. So I do say the single state is a potential eventuality, but it would be the outcome of a horrible scenario. Look, the idea that if the current round of talks breaks down and Obama gives up and the U.S. gives up and we all give up, then the alternative is a Gandhian non-violent struggle of sanctions and boycotts that will somehow bring Israel to its knees, that is not the way it’s going to go. We know the way it’s going to go.

JG: Each intifada is more violent than the last.

HI: And more religious. You’ll end up with two sets of bearded fanatics on both sides fighting over holy places and God. It will be a complete disaster. And I think the Israelis will end up ultimately dealing with forces not only beyond its borders, but beyond its comprehension in the long run. This has the possibility of turning into not an ethno-national war but a religious war between the Muslims and the Jews over the holy places with the whole concept of Palestine gone and the Jewish population of Israel in a very unenviable situation, protected in the end only by its nuclear weapons. It’s a nightmare.

JG: So you have three scenarios. One, the one-state solution: Somehow the Jews and the Arabs decide, even though their narratives completely contradict each other, that we’ll be like Belgium, where we don’t have to really like each other but we’ll be fine. The second alternative is the one you described of basically endless war. The third is the two-state solution. But, sorry to say it, we don’t seem that close right now. You have an Israeli government who seems extremely hesitant to pull down any settlements, you have a Hamas government in Gaza, just for starters.

HI: What you do with Hamas, in my view, is you make the situation such that Hamas has to choose, and you do this by creating progress and by creating momentum – and there are two ways of creating momentum. One is diplomatically, which right now, seems difficult. The other is through the Fayyad plan, which is state building in the occupied territories. That would have a very powerful effect. It is extremely important that we use that idea as a means of gaining momentum, that the Israelis do not block it, that the U.S. protect it politically, and that the Arabs, Europeans and the Israelis support it technically and financially. This is a way of really moving forward in a manner that is complimentary and not contradictory to the diplomatic process, and I think people who suggest that this is some kind of capitulation or some kind of collaboration are dead wrong. This is a very powerful way of effectively resisting the occupation without doing anything violent. Israelis may fool themselves into thinking that this is just economic peace, but it’s not; it’s Palestinians preparing for independence.

…read the full interview here.

Wow, this is fun.

This is a new kind of post where i have no idea what it is i want to say, other than that i need to say something. I just finished watching yet another brilliant Slavoj Zizek talk, so brilliant that i find myself uncomfortably close to deifying the man. I don’t know how to post the talk up here, since it’s not widely available. That said, let the rambling thoughts begin.

What i like about Zizek is that he’s constantly reminding us that life as we know it *is*, inescapably, a contradiction. A series of contradictions leading up to one big contradiction. I can’t help but try, in my own groping way, to see my own ever-adapting worldview reflected in this man’s genius.

To my mind, so long as we experience subjectivity–that is, an only *partial* experience of what *is*–contradiction is inevitable. So to be really truthful is to actually embrace that. Of course, these inherent contradictions… the inevitable product of experiencing reality on the temporal scale, on the ’secular’ scale in the original meaning of the term… can be found everywhere. The contradiction that ‘i’ exist yet that there is really only one transcendent reality… the contradiction that no matter how hard we try to ‘acheive,’ let’s say, ‘justice,’ it will never be a fully accomplished project… the fact that any system that tries to explain everything *must* fall short somewhere… the contradiction that when i reassure someone i love them, even i don’t know what kind of love i mean, let alone whether i mean it.

This is the ‘differance’ of Derrida, the ’separation’ of Rumi, the ‘dialectic’ of Hegel or whoever. The pursuit of truth (or rather, the fundamental submission to it) means refusing to pretend that the world as we see it isn’t broken, that everything is, or will be, OK in the secular sense… It won’t! It can’t be! That’s ideology, i think. Or i think that’s the inner truth of what Zizek means when he talks about ideology, anyway, whether he thinks he means that or not. Difference, distinction, language, constructs… these all entail incompleteness, a violence against the whole. An inevitable violence. Stop trying to pretend it’s not there! Just accept it, damn it, don’t pretend! Submit! Submit! Lament! Long for it! Don’t accept lies that tell you you don’t have to!

Hmm… that feels a little better. I don’t think that really does it justice (ha!), but maybe someone somewhere someday will read this and just go *yes* … *exactly*. That would be cool. I’d be lying if i pretended i didn’t care. But i don’t really care that much.

Apropo the previous post, there are precedents for fully administering contested areas via multilateral UN institutions. The crucial precedent that hasn’t yet been broken is establishing a permanent UN arbiter in a contested zone.

For inspiration to be drawn and, perhaps more importantly, lessons to be learned, see East Timor.

Here’s a copy of ‘How about, let’s stop deifying the nation-state‘ … Phil Weiss’ post of my own answer to his question: how to offer readers a forward-looking solution in Israel-Palestine…

Life in fortress-Israel can be a comfortable buffer to reality. But reality has an awkward habit of crashing the party. Reports from places like Gaza and East Jerusalem, Bethlehem and the wider West Bank, remind us that the current situation mere kilometres away from Israel’s cosmopolitan heart is an abject human tragedy. This state of affairs is the result of complex, myriad factors with which we’re all familiar. For the purposes of this piece, however, I’m going to single out one phenomenon as especially culpable for today’s mess: the deification of the nation-state. The golden calf of the 20th century.

The ideas of both ‘nation’ and ’state’ are relatively new human constructs. Their marriage is just one of an infinite number of ways to organize a society. That said, the nation-state model has become so entrenched in our worldview that, today, it’s virtually unthinkable for us to conceive of a regional politics, let alone a world system, structured any other way. We’ve mistook the medium for the message. It’s what the nation-state represents that matters: justice, identity, security, independence. These values are indispensable. The nation-state isn’t.

Therefore, I argue it’s high time to talk seriously, and pragmatically, about other arrangements for creating and maintaining lasting justice in Israel-Palestine. Here, I plan to do just that. After painting a quick picture of what life outside the box could look like, I’ll refute the inevitable counterargument–that this all just wide-eyed hippie fluff–by wrapping-up with some concrete actions we can take now, to help change the rules of the game for the better.

First, let’s remind ourselves of what we’re dealing with. Both the arguments for, and against, the two-state and bi-national one-state ’solutions’ alike are premised on the idea that the only legitimate unit of politics is the territorially contiguous, wholly sovereign state, governed by the majority, for the majority.

But this is a self-perpetuating myth.

In fact, the ’state,’ let alone the ethno-nation-state, is a political entity entirely foreign to the Middle East (let alone the rest of the post-colonial world). Rather, it’s the vestigial remnant of an outdated Western European construct, forged in the aftermath of bloody medieval Christian wars, then exported by force to regions, and imposed on peoples, for whom the concept was totally contrived. It’s an invasive species, as they say in ecology.

In contrast, before the First World War, what’s today called the ‘Middle East’ was then the Ottoman empire. At that time, the region was governed by the ‘millet‘ system, whereby a central imperial aribter (the Turkish-speaking Ottomans) ruled over multiple ethnic and religious communities at arm’s length, maintaining a fairly stable status quo. Under this system—and completely unlike neighbouring Europe—each ethno-religious community was entitled to its own set of devolved cultural and legal authorities, so long as it paid tribute to the imperial peacekeepers via local landed-elites.

The Ottoman system was painted retroactively by its Western conquerors as a decrepit, crumbling empire. But today it’s clear that this arrangement was far better than its subsequent colonial inheritors’ at maintaining peace and stability in the diverse eastern Mediterranean. Just look at the tragic history of 20th-century Lebanon. And we’re all familiar with the tale of post ‘48 mandate Palestine.

The imposition of a political logic that demands ethnic and religious homogeneity on this otherwise mixed bag of cultures, traditions and communities is a misguided historical idiosyncrasy, to put it nicely. To be blunt, it’s flat-out stupid. But hindsight is 20/20. Moreover, this early-modern misstep is by no means irreversible.

In fact, in Israel-Palestine, demographic change and settlement patterns seem to be sealing the fate of nation-state logic day by day. A two-state scenario seems increasingly distant and imbalanced: any Palestinian state-to-be would be a weaker, smaller version of an uber-militarized, hyper-ethnocentric Israel. While nominally ‘independent,’ Palestine would be de-clawed, subject to the military and economic whim of its heavily armed neighbour. Kind of like pre-war Germany. If this were to work in a durable manner, so be it. But it seems increasingly unlikely.

At the same time, i think there is a very warranted fear that a ‘unified,’ democratic bi-national state in Israel-Palestine would rapidly degrade into continuous low-grade ethnic, religious and class-based warfare. South Africa, with its appalling rates of violent crime, is by far a best-case scenario model for such a state. It’s also incredibly optimistic: do you really think Jews and Arabs could peacefully contest one-person, one-vote, majority-wins-type elections when the demographic balance between the two groups is so close, and so hotly contested? Without some sort of neutral arbiter that maintains a monopoly on violence, this seems quite unlikely.

To my mind, it’s pretty clear that no peaceful modus operandi will be possible until all sides feel justice is being served, and convincingly perpetuated, by the institutions in place. Yet, no existing set of institutions comes close to fitting the job description! This is why it really is time for a drastic re-think.

Here’s one idea at least worth contemplating. We all recall that the current situation was first made legitimate by a nascent UN, back in an era when the self-determined nation-state was virtually the only acceptable form of sovereign political entity (note, United ‘Nations’). With that in mind, I argue now’s the time for the UN to take responsibility for what its earlier incarnation helped create, and instead begin to foster a grounded alternative to the nation-state in Israel-Palestine. Seriously. Nothing else has worked, and it would set a fantastic precedent for other regions.

So, what would a functional, non-nation-state polity in Israel-Palestine look like? What kind of institutional characteristics could it feature in order to fit the job description above? To recap, however the system’s structured, its number-one requirement would be to provide a long-term, robust sense of justice, resilient to demographic change and other systemic shocks. With that in mind, I suggest a non-nation-state framework combining the following features:

A) a reinvigorated Ottoman-inspired millet system that explicitly devolves religious and ethnic matters to the level of community (not a huge stretch, as some of these Ottoman laws still exist in the Israeli legal code today);

B) a system of constitutional federalism among communities, mildly akin to the EU; and,

C) a widely-acceptable, culturally-neutral supreme arbiter, with a clear monopoly on violence (e.g. a permanent, militarily- and judicially-empowered UN presence).

Such a system could allow people to identify with an ethnic or religious group of their choice (or, instead, adopt a secular, non-ethnic ‘UN citizen’ marker), while not being forced to conflate that identity with their greater political or civic allegiances. The day-to-day politics of the region could be run by a series of intercommunal multistakeholder groups, each allowed its own election rules. Meanwhile, the greater regional system (e.g. information-and-resource sharing, defense, public order, intercommunal relations, vote counting, etc.) could be maintained and arbitrated by the empowered, permanent, UN presence i mention above. This is a radically different model of democracy–regionally devolved rather than forcefully centralized, shaped around managing shared resources rather than politicizing identities, neutrally moderated versus self-auditing.

While unfamiliar, such a system would be far more compatible with regional demographics. It would also set a fantastic global precedent. An eventual network of such locally nuanced ‘Special UN Administered Regions,’ if you will, would make it far easier in the long-run to coordinate globally on important issues of growing transboundary concern (e.g. sharing of common resources such as water and air, international trade, human migration, collective security, etc.).

Call it absurd, fine. Today, it might appear so. But this kind of system is no less crazy, far more just and far more adaptive, than the current state of affairs. In time–and i argue sooner than many of us think–a network of internationally-administered, culturally pluralistic regional systems like this will likely seem far saner than the present anarchic struggle amongst would-be ‘homogeneous’ nation-states for recognition, arms, and resource-monopolies. This is especially true in the hyper-interconnected 21st century.

What it takes to actually get from here to there is some concerted effort at imagining and articulating pragmatic-utopian alternatives like the one i’ve sketched out above. To get ourselves out of the box, we have to show each other that there are bigger and better things to realistically be had. Here are a few ideas on how to begin change now, not later. Some may work better than others, but, if you had the misfortune to be born in, say, Gaza City, none is less sane than the current status-quo:

1) Call for the Palestinians to be granted some form of provisional UN ‘citizenship.’ Giving Palestinians a set of internationally recognized civil rights–even symbolic ones–under UN administration will have an effect on Israeli military policy, and help change the rules of the game. (Apparently, this was briefly done for Kuwaiti-resident Palestinians in the aftermath of the first Gulf War. In order to facilitate their receipt of Iraqi reparations, the UN acted formally as Palestinians’ state. It was a temporary arrangement, but successful.)

2) Call for an international (e.g. UN) peacekeeping presence in eastern Palestine to be phased in to replace the Israeli military, at the very least while the PA trains and strengthens. It’s best if other Muslim countries can play key roles in the new multilateral force. Turkey is a prime contender, here: Prime Minister Erdogan has already expressed his willingness to put troops on the ground.

3) Help raise awareness around a key, less-recognized driver of Israeli settlement construction: control over the aquifers (i.e. natural stores of groundwater) located under the West Bank. Push for UN-administered, joint Israeli-Palestinian teams to be set up to manage resources like water in a shared and equitable manner. The creation of a series of functional multistakeholder management bodies like this can help lay the foundation for a future UN-administered, multibody, multistakeholder political system. Such a system opens up all sorts of new avenues for a more robustly democratic polity.

4) Zionism doesn’t have to be painted as a complete mistake, nor does the Nakba have to be relived each year as an increasingly insulting tragedy. Rather, if given a half-decent opportunity to think outside the box, many proud Jews, Arabs and Muslims alike can agree that the nation-state idea is just unhelpfully foreign to the region, and not particularly adaptive to it. It’s time to move beyond the old constructs, while preserving what people truly value: a sense of justice and security, identity and coherence. Start building consensus around a post-nation-state system. The time is ripe–people need to hear it said in order to imagine it.

5) Non-nation-state (or even innovative one-state) solutions, though, won’t be seen as viable tools for realizing people’s values until those of all political and religious persuasions can imagine how they might work. With that in mind, let’s get to it. We need to discuss the need for this sort of political and institutional innovation openly; get it out into the public sphere. Digital media seems a logical place to start–popular TV and print news the holy grail. In the meantime, make your ideas visceral: maps, images, and videos. We have a growing cornucopia of tools at our disposal. Why not use them?

6) Take people’s religious beliefs seriously. They matter. Demonstrate how a non-nation-state solution can complement multiple groups’ religious values. E.g. for Judaism, moving past the intellectual confines of the nation-state–a European notion responsible for so much Jewish suffering, the Holocaust included–can be construed as a sign of ‘tikun olam’ (world-fixing); being a true ‘light unto the nations.’ With respect to Islam, the Muslim ideal does not distinguish between people based on race or ethnicity. This sense of egalitarianism under one transcendental law far predates Western emancipation movements, and is arguably quite compatible with non-state-based, more imaginative versions of democratic governance. The millet system itself is a Muslim creation. Muslims can help imbue it with new life, re-crafting it as a key institution for the new modus operandi. Getting rabbis, ‘ulama and devout constituents from various religious factions on board is key. The more irredentist they are at first, the better. We may be surprised at our results. Even amongst the seeming hardest of hard-lines there are cracks.

Maybe you found this thought-provoking. Maybe you thought it was drivel. Regardless, the main point is this: if blind committment to the nation-state model isn’t helping, why hold ourselves and our children hostage to it? On the most fundamental level, it’s not the construct that people care about, it’s what the construct helps fulfill: a sense of identity, justice, security and coherence in a bafflingly complex world. These are basic human needs. If our goal is lasting peace, they cannot be dismissed. Period. We therefore need political arrangements that fulfill these needs in a more dynamic, adaptive way. This is quite obvious. To my mind, what seems most promising for Israel-Palestine is an innovative process of internationalization, combined with thoughtful de-centralization. But dynamic solutions like this can’t come about about unless we start imagining. To steal wantonly from an anonymous predecessor: Be realistic, demand the impossible. Put another way, declare war on obsolete ideas–but have thoughtful replacements at hand. This is the only way forward. We owe it to each other.

Following up from a previous post, one of many interviews with a solider who participated in Operation Cast Lead:

What does it mean when the state itself sanctions this kind of cosmic-scale, theological rationale for destruction? Is this the 21st century? If so, maybe it’s time for some new mythologies, some new modes of making sense of the world.

… the earlier google vids link is down. You can access a Quicktime version here.

From a description of the audio:

An exhilarating journey into the mind and spirit of a remarkable man, a legendary teacher, and a masterful storyteller, conducted by TV journalist Bill Moyers in the acclaimed PBS series….

2.The Message of the Myth

Campbell compares the creation story in Genesis with creation stories from around the world…

Because the world changes, religion has to be transformed and new mythologies created. People today are stuck with myths that don’t fit their needs.