Huckabee The Pan-Arabist
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Spencer Ackerman and Josh Smilovitz note that Huckabee has already stated publicly that he doesn’t believe that Palestinians exist as a nation. Ackerman also professes amazement that a high-profile major party politician can say these things. He concludes:
If ever anyone started to make dubious historical arguments to deny the historical roots of Zionism — let alone that ludicrous historical assertions undermine the right of Israelis to live in their own state — as a plot against the Arabs, he would be run out of the political discourse. In this country, he gets a Fox News TV show and a shot at the GOP presidential nomination [bold mine-DL].
Well, no, not exactly, and I think Ackerman understands this perfectly well. When someone makes dubious historical arguments to deny the rights and national identity of Palestinians, he gets a FoxNews TV show and a shot at the Republican nomination. Of course Huckabee denies that Palestinians are a nation. This is such a commonplace on the right that I have lost track of how many times I have read it. It is of a piece with the standard, Mark Twain-quoting, “Palestine was empty” nonsense that circulates freely among “pro-Israel” conservatives. The rejection of Palestinian nationhood ironically relies on all of the standard assumptions of 19th century ethnonationalism, according to which a given modern nationalist movement is merely reawakening or restoring an ancient people to its rightful place. In this view, if a distinctive Palestinian identity does not predate the last century or two it doens’t count, and in any case its claim must be trumped by the older, more authentic claim of the descendants of previous inhabitants.
The idea that national identity is something that comes into existence at a particular moment in time is utterly foreign to people who say these things, and even if they acknowledged the existence of Palestinian nationhood they would still say that the recent construction of this identity renders it insignificant. In the process, Huckabee and those like him who make arguments that take for granted an undifferentiated, united Arab nation are endorsing claims from an old pan-Arabist ideology that scarcely any Arabs still accept, but they are doing so to achieve the opposite of what the pan-Arabists desired, which was the political unification and empowerment of Arabs against foreign interference and domination. Huckabee here is dusting off an old fiction of a single Arab nation to help make sure that a particular group of Arabs remains disenfranchised and without power. More to the point, he is using this argument to defend the status quo, even though this is barely threatened by Obama’s slightly firmer line on settlements.
In practical terms, Huckabee is just demonstrating the extent of his support for maximally hawkish policies in Israel-Palestine. As with Cantor, whose remarks about “Judeo-Christian principles” informing U.S. policy in the region caused a small stir earlier this summer, Huckabee happens to be giving voice to what a huge number of Republicans believe and frequently say among themselves and put into print. One could come away from this with an even stronger conviction that the leaders in the GOP are incapable of intelligent foreign policy thinking, but I’m not sure what else is so amazing about what Huckabee said. Appalling and ridiculous, of course, but it is anything but amazing. It is the standard reckless rhetoric unmoored from reality that passes for foreign policy discourse on much of the right.
Filed under: foreign policy, politics
I wonder how far Huckabee (or any other Republican) could go along this line and still be considered respectable figures in the US political/media complex? How close to extermination can they go? During the 2008 Gaza war, I recall commenters suggesting that Isreal would be justified in treating Gaza the way the Russia treated Chechnya, with the implication that the destruction of Grozny during the Chechen wars is an appropriate model for Gaza (and perhaps the West Bank).
I am not crazy about Huckabee nor do I agree with him on this issue, but I’m not sure why a conservative is supposed to look suspiciously on the the idea that nationhood is related to common heritage and not just a matter of where often somewhat arbitary lines are drawn on a map. The former is the older concept, the latter the more modern.
I don’t get if this is supposed to be a comment about Huck or Palestinian nationalism, maybe a little of both. In any case, I hope you’re not trying to argue that opposition to the establishment of a Palestinian nation-state is socially unacceptable. I for one oppose it, apparently Huck does too (not that I am a fan of his). To put it another way, the United States has officially been in favor of Palestinian nationhood for several decades now, under Presidents of both parties, and I can’t see as how it’s done anything for us.
Btw, George Gilder has a new book out on Israel. I haven’t seen it yet, but from what I’ve heard it seems to be pretty close to the explaining the pro-Israel position from a mainstream conservative pov. Have you seen it yet?
Excuse me, but what possible relevance does the question of whether “the Palestinians exist as a nation” have in any conservative universe? In a democracy, political rights do not depend on membership in a national collective. Whether you classify the Palestinians as “Palestinians”, “Arabs”, or simply “non-Jews”, that has no legitimate bearing on the question of their individual political rights.
This post says more about Larison’s deep confusion about nationhood than it does about Huckabee’s comment. I’ll point out a few of Larison’s mistakes.
First of all, as far as I can tell from the URLs, Huckabee didn’t use the word “nation.” He said, “there’s no such thing as a Palestinian.” That obviously refers to some (allegedly nonexistent) group, but it may or may not refer to nationhood, however Huckabee defines it.
Second, the concept of nationhood is famously contentious (I disagreed with Larison about it once in Takimag.com comments). Usually, arguments about whether X is really a nation are really arguments over the definition of nationhood.
Third, Larison’s claim that the denial that Palestinians are a nation “relies on” a 19th-century belief that nations are “ancient,” is obviously absurd. One can accept that nations are artificial constructs that come into being and disappear, and still deny that the Palestinians are an instance of such a nation.
One thing that’s missing is a charitable reading of Huckabee’s remark. Even assuming that he was referring to nationhood, the claim is generally that Palestinians have been and are racially, religiously, linguistically, and culturally indistinguishable from Syrians, and that the specifically Palestinian identity is newly-created (I think we all agree on that) and still superficial. That claim is not obviously false.
Finally, I’ll note that the question of Palestinian nationhood is pretty irrelevant to the whole conflict. As Michael Neumann points out in The Case Against Israel, what matters is that the Palestinians, or at least those in Judea and Samaria – whether or not they’re a nation – are ethnically distinct from the Jews, lived there before Zionist settlement began over a century ago, and reject Jewish rule. It’s also relevant that the Palestinians, whether or not they’re a nation, are a self-conscious political entity. So I think the best response to Huckabee’s claim would be, “So what?”
If the question of Palestinian nationhood were irrelevant to the conflict, those interested in denying Palestinian rights wouldn’t go to the trouble of claiming that it doesn’t exist. Huckabee is clearly drawing on the idea that “Palestinian” is not a legitimate national identity, which is why he says that there is no such thing as a Palestinian. I would agree that it shouldn’t matter one way or the other when the relevant questions are how these people should be treated. We can’t pretend that there aren’t two nationalist ideologies at work competing with one another, and we can’t ignore that denying the status of either side’s existence as a nation is a key part of undermining the claims of the people in question.
Rejecting Palestinian statehood isn’t “socially unacceptable,” nor am I interested in creating a different version of the taboos imposed by “pro-Israel” advocates. It is just phenomenally short-sighted policy, and it happens to be bad for Israel’s long-term survival. It also puts the U.S. on the side of an unjust colonial occupation against a group of people that has not actually done us any harm. If you want to defend such a bad position, you are welcome to do so.
Daniel is just plain right on this issue, without equivocation.
Whether or not one agrees that a two-state solution is the best way to go about finding a peaceful resolution to the conflict in Palestine, denying the idea that Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories represent an actual, coherent political group with interests of their own they are pursuing with great zeal, and that outsiders to that group can impose or deny their notions of “nationhood” upon them just flies in the face of reality. Once a people decide that they represent a nation unto themselves, it’s not possible for outsiders to stop them, and efforts to do so only reinforce that internal sense of nationhood. The Jews themselves are one of the best examples of that, and Zionism is exhibit A in how that works. Pretending it’s valid for Jews, and not for Palestinians, is an exercise in the very kind of repression that has fueled the drive for Palestinian nationhood, as well as Zionism itself.
It is beyond me why it is in the interest of the US to provide a single dollar, a single bullet, or a single veto to the Israelis.
And when Obama got 78% of the Jewish vote, why the GOP falls into the trap of supporting the ultras among the Zionists is beyond me. Does the dispensationalist heresy of the Plymouth Brethren have that big a following?
In terms of rights and such, I think we can avoid the problems about nationhood with a little pullback about self-determination. It seems to be that we can (and ought) to maintain that we support in general the self-determination of peoples, but not to the exclusion of all other things. It’s obviously those other things which lead us to oppose Palestinian statehood.
And, if we agree that Palestinian statehood is not something that we are morally obligated to support, I can’t see why it’s in our interest to do it.
To Daniel Larison: You’re right that the question is not completely irrelevant to the conflict as a whole, because it has been used as a claim to statehood. That was back when the argument was as much *for* a Palestinian state as it was *against* the Israeli “occupation.” It hasn’t been used much recently, now that statehood is a familiar idea and the focus is on ending the “occupation.”
That’s why, on the other side, practically no one today who supports Jewish rule over Palestinians in Judea and Samaria does so on the grounds that the latter are not a nation. There are a few out-of-the-loop American supporters of Israel who are still recycling the words of Golda Meir, but it is simply not a part of the argument today, Mike Huckabee notwithstanding. You’re right that it would be relevant to an argument based on a strict Wilsonian principle of national self-determination, if anyone were making that argument. There are few if any people who would both support such a statehood argument in principle *and* say that the Zionist occupation is legitimate *if* the Palestinians don’t meet the criteria of nationhood. So in practice, the question is irrelevant.
One clarification: the point I credited to Michael Neumann wasn’t formulated exactly the way he said it in the book.
On the actual question of Palestinian nationhood, here’s one way of looking at it without getting into the mess of definitions. Suppose Judea and Samaria were annexed or otherwise joined politically to Syria, the Israeli settlers expelled, and the Palestinians granted full Syrian citizenship with a large degree of local autonomy, all this with the full consent of the Palestinian leadership. Would you really start referring to Syria as a binational state, like Belgium? Would the Palestinians themselves?
“First of all, as far as I can tell from the URLs, Huckabee didn’t use the word “nation.” He said, “there’s no such thing as a Palestinian.” That obviously refers to some (allegedly nonexistent) group, but it may or may not refer to nationhood, however Huckabee defines it.”
And this is better? Considering the fact that he’s not saying this in the sense of there not having been a sovereign Palestine for several decades, but that a certain people are denied existance as a people, in order to steal their land and exile/oppress them.
There are other factors to consider when dealing with creating a Palestinian Nation. As of now, creating a nation would be a direct threat to the national defense of Israel. As long as rockets continue to come over the Gaza borders, assigning them nationhood would simply be irresponsible. It would just give them a false legitimacy for their claims of Jihad against the Jews. Historical and Sociological aspects aside, you don’t give the right of nationhood to a people that have stated unequivocally that they desire the destruction of the State of Israel. That much has to be obvious.