That Corbyn fella...

So, this intervention by London Palestine Action is quite interesting to me:
https://twitter.com/LondonPalestine/status/1037348127509032965

It's obviously inflammatory. But it's the kind of thing that people on the left could easily say about many countries. Many years ago when I was studying political theory, I'd happily talk about how all states are exclusive and exclusionary constructs whose legitimacy depends on a shared social identity whose corrolary is prejudice against whoever is defined as the 'other'. It's just how these things seem to work. There's lots of empirical evidence supporting the analysis. I don't think it's analytically controversial.

But it is hugely politically controversial, because people with nationalistic feeling generally don't like to be told that they're just part of a feelings machine that legitimises state power. That doesn't really satisfy their (often honestly held) deep feelings of attachment to their chosen group. But at the same time, we do admit of the possibility of changing groups (naturalisation), so we can conceive of the idea that these identities are malleable. We just don't like to pull on the thread much.

So, to Israel. Israel is, like any other nation-state, biased in favour of those it wants to be its citizens, and against those it wants to exclude. Everyone does it.

And the discourse around Israel, around Zionism, and around Jewishness conflates the three concepts. Israel has always defined itself through the other two concepts, and in recent years has started to severely limit alternative narratives of Israeliness. Meanwhile Israel has been quite keen to emphasise the idea that Jewishness and Israeliness are somehow linked, as a) they want to attract more non-Arabs to the country, and b) frankly, sometimes the Israeli state plays the antisemitism card to block legitimate criticism of the state.

This has all crept into a popular political discourse that is already going through a bit of a paroxysm of self-redefinition after all the old certainties (East vs West) fell away in the 1990s. The idea that Jews should have a safe place (justifiable) that is Israel (again, justifiable) has somehow become conflated with Israel's definition of itself (which is a function of state policy and so should actually be up for political discussion). This has translated both into people who disagree with the Israeli government attacking the idea of Israel itself (sorry, but it's there and that's a fact we do have to accept), and also of people seeing attacks on Israel as being attacks on Jewishness.

And of course, there are some people in both camps who want these kinds of crossed wires to exist, because any increase in polarisation increases support for their more extreme positions on the situation.

Where do we go from here? I don't know exactly. I think Gordon Brown's speech the other day did a good job of showing that it is possible to oppose Israeli government policy without opposing Israel's right to exist, and that it is possible to recognise - as all countries must - that not everything a country has done to become what they are today was good and just. I don't see that kind of self-awareness in Bibi's politics - if anything, he is whipping people up the other way. And Corbyn has basically spent most of this debate trying to keep his head down and hope that it'll blow over, when he must surely be aware that some of his past rhetoric could be used against him. I don't think he's an anti-Semite. But I agree with the line that the FT and others have taken that it speaks poorly of his ability to lead - he didn't think of a way to get out ahead of the wedge issue and control the narrative: he just battened down the hatches.