What Would Kojeve Say About The Right To Return?
One of the oddest and most intractable issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the Right to Return. Since 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled/were expelled by Israeli forces/left at the urging of their leaders, there has been this massive, intractable refugee problem in Israel and the surrounding Arab countries. Now, it’s not uncommon for there to be large refugee and population flows in a postcolonial war: just look at most of Africa or India and Pakistan; what’s weird about Palestinian refugees is that they’ve remained refugees for so long. That’s because Arab states – like all states – have generally not wanted to take them in. The country that took in the most – Jordan – had a huge Palestinian terrorist problem in the 1970s, and Lebanon also has had to deal with Palestinian refugees turning into another armed group in their seemingly never ending civil war. One also has to consider that Arab states have something to gain from the festering of the refugee crisis – it makes Israel look a whole lot worse then them for refusing to take in these refugees.
Although it’s true that the refugee problem is a common one for states that emerge from the wreckage of imperial empires, the durability of the Palestinian crisis is unique. And it will continue. Even though one can imagine a world in which Israel allows for and recognizes a sovereign Palestinian state, one can not imagine a world where they let three to four generations of Palestinian refugees into Israel’s pre-1967 borders. And so this seems like a great injustice/political problem – what are we to say to those Palestinians who still have the deeds to their homes in Haifa? – will continue on perpetually. In other cases, these types of post-colonial expulsions and what not have been resolved by two things: the creation of a state for those expelled and some recognition of what happened.
This all brings me around to Daoud Kuttab’s Washington Post Op-Ed claiming that the priority for Palestinians is a state, not return to Israel. Kuttab argues that Palestinians want Israel to realize that while they (and their American Zionist supporters) celebrate 60 years of statehood, Palestinians recognize 60 years of Nakba, Arabic for “The Catastrophe.”
Palestinian refugees who have lived away from their homes for 60 years have established themselves elsewhere. Few have a sincere desire to live in today’s Israel. Respected Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki found in 2003 that only 10 percent of Palestinian refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza Strip were willing to move to the areas that today constitute Israel.
What Palestinians want is for Israel to admit its historic and moral role in creating the refugee problem and its moral responsibility to them. Such an admission by a courageous Israeli leader would satisfy, and neutralize, many Palestinians who hold their keys and demand the literal right of return. As part of a bilateral agreement, surely Israel would allow divided Palestinian families to reunite with relatives who stayed in what became Israel after 1948.
This is quite similar to what many displaced peoples expect from those that have displaced them. In Turkey, another post-Ottoman state like Israel, what minorities who suffered massive repression and even genocide in its creation (Kurds and Aremenians) want is not for Turkey to give them money or let them resettle, but instead recognition that what the Turks did to them was wrong. Thus all the Armenian activism surrounding the recognition of the genocide as well as the Kurds’ struggle to be able to speak their own language. Also, the massive expulsion of Jews from their generations-old communities in the Arab and Muslim World (Baghdad, Cairo, Yemen etc) is not really talked about more, and is thought to have been “dealt with” by the creation of a Jewish state.
The struggle by the Palestinians, Kurds and Armenians for “recognition,” as opposed to specific restitution, should not surprise anyone who has read Kojeve, and especially Kojeve-as-read-by-Fukuyama. Kojeve posits that the driving force behind History is man’s desire for recognition. The reason why liberal democratic capitalism will ultimately win out is that it, compared to monarchy or socialism or any other political-economic arrangement, best allows man to be recognized. I think what we’re seeing among the Palestinians is a vindication of Kojeve’s thesis.
Not only do they not have a state, they are also regularly told that they aren’t a “real” people and that their victimization is mostly their fault. It doesn’t matter whether or not these claims are “true” (the Palestinians are just as imagined as most imagined communities), it matters because this desire for recognition is a powerful one, and unless it can be channeled into something productive and cooperation (like a state) many more Palestinians and Israelis will die.
Kojève also saw that the era of nation-states was over, and any notion of a Palestinian state would be precisely a nation-state in the true sense of the term. I think Kojève would have favoured a single state where everyone is recognized equally as human, fitting in with this concept of an “empire” where various cultural traits become melded together to create a more universal whole.
Interestingly enough, the major obstacle preventing a single state (which is the only real way the right to return problem could be solved) is another thing Kojève predicted, the “Japanization” of man at the end of history. That is, a falling back into snobbish culture, and wanting to be recognized not as an equal, but as a superior. So both Israelis and Palestinians are so caught up in their respective religions that recognizing the other as an equal is impossible to them, because they’re brought up to believe they are superior. When you have the one true God on your side who tells you to kill the unbelievers, or the notion of being a chosen people is deeply rooted in your theology, there is no possibility for mutual recognition, only the desire to be recognized as superior.
Trevor
May 20, 2008 at 9:56 pm