Existential Anxiety

For the last few weeks I have been mulling over this phrase: existential anxiety.

I remember when I first learned of the word ‘existential’—I was sitting outside on the quad at Denison, in my first couple weeks of college, and in Dr. Eisenbeis’ class we were reading The Idea of the Holy and discussing its contents. It was a sultry early September afternoon, and our venerable Dr. Eisenbeis had taken us outside to discuss the points in Rudolf Otto’s book. I will admit, this was a difficult book for me. It didn’t have a plot, or a chronology, or even concrete, salient facts. Some hotshot freshman kept making the point that the book was “really existential.” He sounded so smart. And in that knowing way he kept dropping the word ‘existential,’ and others nodded. I was impressed. I didn’t really know what the word meant, and later that day, I checked in a dictionary. Oh. It really means pondering your existence. Okay—I can understand that.

Existential anxiety is a great phrase on a number of levels. One of the levels that has captured my attention in 2009 is back to the topic that never ceases to fascinate in my new home of the Middle East: Israel and Palestine.

In December and January as Israeli troops encircled Gaza Israel’s Defense Minister Ehud Barak promised “a war to the bitter end” to defend their existence. But as we have seen over these sixty years the application of force does not extinguish militants’ ideological fervor. Then I went to Jerusalem in March, as several blogisodes captured, where I saw how Israel treats Palestinians at/in its borders (by the way, President Jimmy Carter is on record as having said time and again, “they are treated like animals.”) and I got to know two students from Gaza who came to KA in January. These two young men, kind and gentle Muhammad and Omar, needed to leave a day early from school last week because the border was opening that day only and they wouldn’t be allowed in for two more weeks if they waited.

In the last month Isareli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proposed a peace plan that probably sounded like a chord of hope had been struck.

But then if you read Netanyahu’s speech, and if you have seen what I have seen, and heard what I have heard in the last two years, you sigh, and ponder and fear and cultivate a new existential anxiety.

PM Netanyahu arrived in Washington, D.C. about a month ago desiring a “fresh approach” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. President Obama has endeared himself in the Arab world by promoting a viable Palestinian state and he has said time and again that a comprehensive peace must grapple with what many in the international community have been saying since 1967: the Occupation must come to an end.

As I read Netanyahu’s speech from an on-line news agency, the prospect of peace seemed dimmer than I could remember. While Netanyahu used the words “two-state solution,” the details of how he envisioned it seemed insidious. As I understood his plan, peace is possible once Palestinians and Arabs become committed Zionists. It is only the failure of Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular to commit themselves to the Zionist cause that has caused conflict since 1948. But there is more! Netanyahu explained that “there must also be a clear understanding that the Palestinian refugee problem will be resolved outside Israel’s borders.” In other words, Palestinians must agree to help Israel complete what can only be called ‘ethnic cleansing’ since it began in 1947-48 by abandoning the right of return. The plan is ingenious: to have peace, Netanyahu argues, Palestinians would share the Zionist ambition that Palestine be emptied of Palestinians to the greatest extent possible.

But even the self-ethnic cleansing isn’t enough to secure peace according to hawkish Netanyahu. For the millions of Palestinians living inconveniently in their native land, Netanyahu’s peace plan involves a complete “demilitarization,” which is simply an unconditional surrender followed by disarmament.

If the Palestinians are not cowed yet, they will be squeezed more into ever smaller ghettoes so that Jewish colonies can expand and grow. And in line with their heartfelt Zionism, Palestinians will naturally agree that “Jerusalem must remain the united capital of Israel.”

Then, as PM Netanyahu explains, conflict will disappear.

I looked at this speech from two perspectives. One, as an American, it sounded so great, Here was an Isareli guy, a noted right-winger, endorsing a two-state solution and explaining how peace could happen. Before the fall of 2007 I would probably have welcomed this speech and looked at it as a credible roadmap to end the annoying conflict in the Middle East. I read that many American talking heads welcomed Netanyahu’s speech as “a big step forward.”

But if I have learned anything in the last two years, one should look a little more closely, and just think about the tenets and points and promises and how others would react to the words. From my new perspective as a visiting resident in neighboring Jordan, I wanted to dismiss Netanyahu’s speech as a ludicrous joke. But—and again, this is from this perspective sympathetic to the entreaties and hopes of ordinary Palestinians—Netanyahu’s perspective is not just a zealot or extremist fringe, it is a dangerous racist, violent, ultra-nationalism fueling a religious fanaticism running a government. Palestinians are viewed as only violent and/or inferior by which they must be expelled or caged or starved, like the 1.5 million in Gaza.

I used to teach a great book by Deborah Lipstadt about the dangers of Holocaust denial, and it has saddened me to realize in my time in the Middle East that Israel has emerged as a society with a virulent anti-Arab racism and a denial of Palestinian expulsion. Is there any hope for an existence of Palestine? Doesn’t that anxiety extend to how much longer Israel itself can keep up its existence?

President Obama recently visited Cairo (and by the way, everywhere I went in Cairo two weeks ago, Egyptians were excited by the hopes that Obama’s attention to the region offered) and stated that the United States is committed to “the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own.” Are these just buzzwords? In Jordan, people shook their heads and wondered, ‘when will people refer to inalienable Palestinian rights?’

Where in international law or United Nations resolutions can Palestinians find definitions of “dignity” and “opportunity”? Such infinitely malleable terms incorrectly reduce all Palestinian history to a demand for vague sentiments and a “state” instead of a struggle for liberation, justice, equality, return, and the restoration of usurped rights. It is, after all, easy enough to conceive of a state that keeps Palestinians forever dispossessed, dispersed, defenseless and under threat of more expulsion and massacres by a racist, expansionist uber-power.

Peace. After my trip in March I wondered if it was possible. I thought so before I was in the nexus of the children of Abraham. Last week as I bade good-bye for the summer to my students, especially to Muhammad and Omar, Netanyahu’s speech and vision for peace seems to do anything but usher in peace.

Jimmy Carter was in the region again, lamenting the “Zionist fortress mentality” that has retarded the hopes of co-existence for decades. He despaired that the international community has not pressured Israel more effectively to end the expansion of Jewish settlements and created a Palestinian state.

Jordan and Israel signed a treaty 15 years ago that signaled that peace and a solution to the core problems in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was imminent. But again, in Netanyahu’s speech he spoke that Israel wants Jordan to solve the problem it created when it expelled Palestinians from their homes and lands in 1948, and then occupied the rest of the Palestinian territories in 1967 shows only how bankrupt and anxious Israeli attitudes towards Israel’s historic responsibility, as well as international law and existential norms.

There are ultimately only two acceptable solutions to this conflict: Palestinians and Israelis agree either to share or to divide historic Palestine. It would not be easy, nor would it happen overnight, but it could be worked out. But according to Netanyahu’s speech, he is unwilling to commit to such a framework. Netanyahu urged that if Palestinians, and Arabs, recognized Israel as a Jewish state, all would be okay. But what about the fact that approximately 25% of Israel is non-Jewish? It is simply not a Jewish state.

Israelis and Palestinians are led by what many of us would call extremists. How to rein in the extremist tendencies? How to imagine a new kind of state? Maybe that is the answer, or rather the problem? We need new conceptions of states, new ways of thinking (thank you Dr. Eisenbeis for encouraging that in me!) This conflict comes from the bowels of a centuries-old European conception of a nation-state, a conception that only caused the kinds of horrors and wars that one would expect Jews, of all people, to fight tooth and nail against.