In both places, we saw a yearly ritual of dissent swell to atypical proportions, as the human rights crises in these two parts of the world have seemingly reached a political nadir. The marches in Gaza were held in recognition of the annual Land Day -- a day of protest against the occupation that comes each March 30. The caravan of Central American asylum seekers currently making its way through Mexico, meanwhile -- the frothy-mouthed coverage of which on Fox News apparently inspired Trump's most recent act of political theater (the "theater of cruelty" we might say) -- also occurs annually.
Despite happening every year and being primarily peaceful demonstrations, both protests were also of course soon cast rhetorically by their respective governments as an invasion. The Israeli military dropped leaflets inside Gaza in the days leading up to the march declaring that anyone who strayed within a 300 meter radius of the boundary risked being shot -- effectively creating a "free-fire zone" such as the U.S. military declared in certain areas of Vietnam and Southeast Asia. The meaning of such an order is that any civilian -- woman, man, or child -- within a geographic area can be fired upon on sight -- that they are to be considered not only presumptively guilty, that is, but a legitimate target for extrajudicial killing.
In a way, I almost think it's right that Israel is not investigating the details of individual shootings in the most recent massacre, as the true outrage is not the actions of particular soldiers, but the orders they were given by their government. According to B'Tselem, speaking of the creation of so-called "No-Go" zones around the fence at the boundary of the Gaza strip:
"To enforce this access ban, the military has introduced open-fire regulations that permit firing at Palestinians found inside the zone – even if they pose no threat to anyone’s life. The implementation of these regulations has resulted in the death of 83 Palestinians who did not take part in fighting from the time the Disengagement Plan was implemented in September 2005 until September 2017, excluding rounds of fighting. Of these casualties, 39 were killed when they were in these zones as part of their daily routine, including local residents and farmers. Twelve more people were killed when they approached the fence, planning to cross it in search of work inside Israel."One shouldn't waste one's breath arguing the finer points of the case against a military order that essentially greenlights the murder of unarmed people. Brian Barry put it best: "[T]here are, I believe, occasions when an emotional response is the only intellectually honest one. The concept of a 'free fire zone' [...] could appropriately be the subject of black comedy or bitter invective but not dispassionate analysis."
Trump, for his part, predictably seized upon the image of hundreds of Central American asylum seekers traveling together as a chance to turn the peaceful Caravan into a bogey -- much as he bizarrely managed to transform the once-innocuous demographic term "chain migration" into a dog whistle. It became an opportunity to add fresh travesties to the steady undermining of the human rights of asylum seekers and immigrants in the United States.
In both places, the protesters were saying in effect: we cannot escape you, in our daily lives, so we will not allow you to escape us. We will confront you with what you seemingly most fear -- the simple fact of our existence. We live each day with the consequences of your actions. We will make you see, if nothing else, what those consequences for us have been. In Gaza, they are the fruits of seventy years of occupation and exile -- and nearly a decade of blockade and attrition. In Honduras -- with has supplied the majority of the asylum seekers in the caravan this year -- those consequences include U.S. support for military death squads in the 1980s, a 2009 coup that the Obama administration ultimately failed to challenge, a disputed election and ghastly crackdown on the rights of protestors that has met with a reverberating lack of condemnation from the Trump administration, and a steady influx of U.S. military funding and training to the same security forces currently implicated in the worst of the recent human rights violations.
Israel and the U.S. have made themselves inextricably part of the history of each of these places -- Gaza and Central America -- even if they would now prefer to put up walls to forget this fact. The protestors in Gaza and in the migrant caravan are echoing, in effect, the words of Langston Hughes: "perhaps you don’t want to be a part of me. Nor do I often want to be a part of you./ But we are, that’s true [...] although you're [...] somewhat more free."
It is also the reason why -- once a nation is launched on the persecution of some religious or racial "other" -- it is so rare that it reverses course, before the worst comes. The continued existence of the "other" becomes itself a reminder of the injustices one has committed against them -- thus of the intolerable aspects of oneself, of the evil of which one is capable. The attempt to stamp out this self-knowledge leads to the projection of still more violence onto the other, which increases the guilt, and the cycle gathers momentum.
As a convincing psychological profile of Trump published in The Atlantic last year suggests, Trump's fundamental metaphor for the political and social realities he inhabits -- and over which, far more distressingly, he now has actual influence -- derive from his disgust with what he feels to be unacceptable aspects of his own and others' humanity. "Trump appeals to an ancient fear of contagion," writes Dan McAdams, "which analogizes out-groups to parasites, poisons, and other impurities. In this regard, it is perhaps no psychological accident that Trump displays a phobia of germs, and seems repulsed by bodily fluids, especially women’s. He famously remarked that Megyn Kelly of Fox News had 'blood coming out of her wherever,' and he repeatedly characterized Hillary Clinton’s bathroom break during a Democratic debate as 'disgusting.'"
The effects of projecting such an inner psychic conflict onto the political word is what we have already seen above: the use of violence against those who remind one, through their suffering, of one's own crimes, of one's own ugliness. This is the internal mechanism of all human sadism -- the reason why those who are most helpless are so often subjected to still greater violence. "Their cries to one another or perhaps their visible frailty seemed to incite something in Glanton," as Cormac McCarthy writes in Blood Meridian -- speaking of the leader of the gang of war criminals at the center of the novel, as he stands regarding a village in the moments before he orders the slaughter of its inhabitants.
Or, as Orwell quotes an English Anti-Semite, upon being shown photos of the Nazi death camps: "Don't show it me, please don't show it to me. It'll only make me hate the Jews more than ever."
Thus we get Jeff Sessions declaring yesterday an ostensibly new policy of "zero tolerance" for unauthorized entry of the U.S., for anyone apprehended at the border. Even though it is hard to imagine in what way this population could be rendered even more helpless than they already are -- what greater absence of tolerance for asylum seekers and migrants could be attained, when this administration is already applying criminal penalties to people who exercise their lawful right under U.S. statute and international conventions to request asylum; when it is separating children from their parents so the latter can be prosecuted and jailed; when, thanks to Operation Streamline, harmless immigration violations like "illegal entry" already made up the majority of federal criminal prosecutions nationwide, long before Trump and Sessions arrived on the scene.
Jailing and deterring people who ask for asylum because they fear for their lives is itself an illegal act. The U.N. Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol -- to which the U.S. is a signatory -- expressly forbid the application of criminal penalties related to border crossing to asylum seekers (Article 31); and U.S. law states in plain English: "Any alien who is physically present in the United States or who arrives in the United States (whether or not at a designated port of arrival and including an alien who is brought to the United States after having been interdicted in international or United States waters), irrespective of such alien’s status, may apply for asylum in accordance with this section[.]"
Sessions and Trump are the ones in violation of the law. Perhaps it is for this reason in part that they have such an obsession with criminalizing the actions of others. On some level, a person -- even Trump, even Sessions, even Avigdor Lieberman -- is ashamed of the harm they cause others. They feel guilt in the presence of the sight of the other's suffering. But for those who are weak in spirit, this emotion is not one they can bear through and resolve. It must be banished by force -- by exiling those who remind them of their past misdeeds, or the misdeeds of their nation.
This conflation of one's own moral purity with the fantasy of ethnic homogeneity is -- again -- perhaps the most dangerous of any human error. It is the psychic original sin that makes possible all ethnic cleansing, and ultimately genocide.
Yet, for all its toxicity, this conflation keeps on appearing in human affairs-- even in the ideology of those who defend minority rights, who care about forestalling the violence being visited on "the other." Orwell wasn't lying when he said that the disease of nationalism transcends any one faction or country.
On the Left, the fact of persecution against an ethnic out-group often comes to be seen as a kind of moral contamination of what might otherwise have been a pristine social democracy. Leftists and liberals may oppose the persecution, in that case -- but they also then come to view the presence of an ethnic "other" as inherently a kind of problem -- a moral difficulty. This is the logic that made it possible for many a 19th century reformer to both favor the abolition of slavery -- yet also to support the mass deportation of Black Americans to Africa in various colonization schemes.
We see this logic as well in the theory often heard among Old Left labor historians about why a genuine working class movement never attained real political power in the United States -- it is because, the theory goes, in this country the working class was pitted against itself by divisions of race.
This, at first glance, is an admirable way to approach the problem -- it seemingly condemns racism and inequities of class in a single go. But within it is an implied contrast with societies that ostensibly didn't face such sharp divisions of race, because they were more homogenous. We have rearing its head again here, then, the fantasy of ethnic purity.
Sometimes, the implied contrast is with European social democracies, in which their working classes were supposedly able to achieve their political successes because they were ethnically and linguistically undifferentiated. Other times, the implied contrast is with a fantasized version of early American history. Thus, one finds the conflation of moral purity and racial homogeneity even in someone as committed to the destruction of racism as W.E.B. DuBois. As he writes in a memorable passage of Black Reconstruction:
"America thus stepped forward in the first blossoming of the modern age and added [...] a vision of democratic self-government [...] What an idea and what an area for its realization -- endless land of richest fertility [...] and self-reliant pioneers. [....]Obviously, this is a display of DuBois's profound command of images and rhetoric -- not something intended literally as history. But the idea here is still that the United States would have had an easier shot at establishing a genuine equalitarian democracy along Jeffersonian lines -- if it hadn't been for the fact of our racial diversity.
And then some unjust God leaned, laughing, over the ramparts of heaven and dropped a black man in the midst."
Much the same idea underlies the liberal or Left Zionist position. Unwilling to abandon the notion of establishing a state that is defined -- in some way -- by maintaining a Jewish ethnic majority, they are also unable, rightly, to tolerate the fact that there is a massive group of people in the occupied territories whose lives are daily impacted -- and in many ways controlled -- by the Israeli government, without being recognized as citizens of that government. The only solution to such an impasse is to retreat into the notion of a smaller, but still Jewish Israel -- one that falls within narrower national boundaries. Once you'd limited the country to the Jewish areas, the thinking goes, then you could have an equalitarian liberal democracy that nonetheless maintained a Jewish majority-- a Jewish democracy that would be unsullied by the fact of millions of other people living without rights in that society.
One senses that something similar underlies the particular kind of regret and disappointment that so many Western liberals express over the escalating ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya minority in Burma, despite the country's partial democratic transition. Obviously, this response is partly a reflection of the disillusionment that almost inevitably would have to follow -- at some point -- the human rights community's excessive idealization of Aung San Suu Kyi -- in which I participated in my humble way as well. (Timothy Garton Ash's "Beauty and the Beast in Burma" is an all too typical example -- though I'm not sure anyone else ever devoted quite so much lavish prose to the subject of Suu Kyi's personal appearance. "First things first," he says, to preface this section... why is this first?) The danger of hero-worshipping any political figure is that you never really know what any government, individual, or party is going to do once it holds the whip hand.
But it's possible to detect in this liberal nostalgia as well a hint of the fallacy of purity. If only the borders of Burma had never been drawn in such as way as to include so many ethnic minorities, it could be advancing today along more genuine progress toward democracy and human rights.
One certainly encounters this fallacy as well in the sorts of facile would-be leftist critiques of imperialism (well debunked by Nick Danforth in the Atlantic back in 2013) that blame colonial administrations for drawing supposedly "artificial" national boundaries. "Artificial" in what way? Because they include more than one ethnic group, it being seen as in some way "unnatural" for different linguistic communities to live together under a single government -- such at least is nearly always the implication.
The problem with such lauding of idylls of ethnic homogeneity -- even in their more palatable, liberalized forms -- is that they are an historic and sociological myth (and a dangerous one to boot). There never was such a thing as a homogenous working class, in any nation, because ethnic and racial categories are defined to reflect economic function -- not obvious human traits.
Of course, there are in fact differences between human communities -- differences of language, culture, appearance, etc. But there is an infinity of such differences at any given time. Ethnicity is not "constructed" in the sense that it invents differences, but that it makes a seemingly arbitrary choice of which differences it is going to regard as the significant, definitive ones. Thus, if a particular society does not have a black/white "racial divide," it will nonetheless select some other of the innumerable distinctions among human beings to be the most salient marker of difference -- a Scots accent, say, or an Irish Catholic background.
Thus, there is no working class in history that was not composed of ethnic "others." Moreover, the working class is always a migrant population, specifically, because the basic mechanism of capitalist development is to displace alternative modes of life. This places people in traditional industries on the move -- generally against their will. The first working class in England was composed of paupers driven from the countryside by the practice of enclosure, and these certainly were seen as an invading horde -- much as immigrants from other "nations" are rhetorically cast today.
So too, the 19th century working class in France and Germany might be "white" according to our contemporary categories, but in their own terms they would have been Silesians and Bretons, etc. They were subjected to economic displacement very similar in essence to what Central American and Mexican workers in traditional industries have been experiencing for the past few decades. And they were met with distrust and hostility in the places in which they were forced to seek work.
Heinrich Heine was not expressing hostility, merely reflecting a fact of universal proletarian existence, when he titled his poem about the working class "The Wander Rats."
The idea that European societies were previously ethnically "homogeneous" dates only from the period in which large numbers of non-white immigrants began to migrate to Europe, following decolonization. In an important sense, then, Europe didn't become "homogenous" until there were many non-white people living there. Prior to that, nobody in Great Britain would have said, say, "Well, we're all white here." They would have been worrying over Irish migrant workers and the Welsh and the Italians. In A.J. Cronin's The Citadel, a certain Doctor Gabell is described as "coloured" -- because, it seems, he is in some way Southern European ("olive-skinned buck" is another of Cronin's choice phrases.)
For Americans obsessed with the construct of white vs. black -- because it is our nation's central moral disease -- it is often astonishing that there are ethnic and political conflicts in other parts of the world that would select any other traits as the most salient. How can those uniformly "white" Irish people be at each other's throats over the distinction between Protestants and Catholics? How can they talk about one another like they belong to difference races?
There is a scene in Ken Loach's Looks and Smiles (1981) in which the protagonist's friend in the British army talks about Catholic neighborhoods the same way American GIs once talked about the Vietnamese -- "you don't know what they're like -- they live like pigs," he says. He describes nighttime home raids on Catholic houses in retaliation for children throwing stones at British soldiers that sound like they are straight out of the contemporary Palestinian occupied territories.
Caroline Blackwood, in her essays about her childhood in Ulster, describes what amounts to an apartheid society, in which rumors of Catholic invasion and of the presence of secret Catholics swirl constantly. "'Wouldn't you think that people might be less bigoted in this day and age?' English people keep on asking me that," she notes in her essays "Memories of Ulster," included in For All I Found There. "'You would certainly think so,' I answer. And immediately I find myself doing a double-take. 'Why would you think that they might be?' I wonder. 'What reasons are there for thinking so?'"
Likewise, today's "white" working class in the United States is only white as defined in opposition to Black and Latino workers. In former times, they were defined as ethnic others and migrants themselves -- whether they were the Appalachian people who migrated to major cities in the 20th century, Okies seeking work in California, Midwestern teenagers forced to leave the family farm, or European immigrants.
The ability of complex human societies to attach social meaning to arbitrary distinctions between people -- for the purpose of creating a hierarchy of economic function and status -- is essentially unlimited. In the last resort, one's caste can always be defined simply by whether or not one's parents belonged to it, even in the absence of any physical identifiers. It becomes a circular definition in which one knows one is in a certain caste because one was born into it.
A case in point would be the Burakumin of Japan -- who could only be told apart by ancestry, and whose relative invisibility in society today is maintained through regulations forbidding third parties to inquire into people's family histories. Another instance would be the Cagots of France -- an untouchable caste who, as Elizabeth Gaskell recounts in an 1855 essay -- could not be distinguished from the surrounding population by any visible trait.
There is not now and never has been -- not even that most ostensibly ethnically uniform Japan -- not even that quintessential "nation-state" France -- a homogeneous country. The fantasy of homogeneity is always constructed in order to identify some social group as "in," and another as "out." It is always the in-group that is the "homogenous" one, and the out-group -- even when, as in the case of the Palestinians, they are the numerical majority and indigenous population -- who are the newcomers, the invaders, or at the very least the ones who introduced "diversity" to the society.
Both the in-group and the out-group, despite the bogus terminology, are always already present in the society, by the time this distinction is made.
Homogeneity, ethnic identity, and national identity only exist when someone within the nation, within the society, can be identified (whether by skin color, religion, immigration status, language, dialect, accent, or whatever else) as falling outside of it. They do not exist before that. There is no "before that." There is no complex society that has entirely lacked some sense of ethnic, clan, or caste differentiation.
The notion that the moral problems of human society would somehow be easier to solve, then, if we had less ethnic and racial diversity may then be astonishingly prevent on both Right and Left -- but it is fundamentally mistaken. We would not have an easier time creating genuine social democracies if we splintered off into balkanized self-governing regions, defined by ethnicity -- the reason is that we'd never arrive at any ethnically pure state. There is no ethnically pure state, unless we manage to transcend the division of labor.
We will simply keep on dividing and discovering new markers of difference -- deciding that those are now the most salient ones -- and dividing again.
Never forget that human societies obey a principle that I shall dub the Law of the Infinite Divisibility of Chauvinisms. Today, Scotland may demand its independence from Great Britain. But as Mordecai Richler discovered on his trip to Scotland -- in a piece collected in his Dispatches from the Sporting Life -- the Shetlanders are waiting in the wings to declare their independence from the Scots. And the Orcadians maintain that they are oppressed in turn by the Shetlanders.
Richler knew something about preposterous petty nationalisms, coming from Canada. There is no doubt a reason why one passage that he found in a Kenyan newspaper particularly stirred him -- enough at least for him to quote from it at length in the same collection of writings: "During the recent Commonwealth games in Brisbane, Australia, I noticed that while all countries fielded national teams, the United Kingdom fielded hers on tribal lines. There were tribal teams from England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. What should we expect next time: [...] Quebecois Canadians being fielded as separate teams?"
There is no nation that cannot be subdivided in this way. There is no nation that has ever truly been defined by ethnic uniformity. Even the medieval Icelanders -- despite being an almost wholly isolated linguistic group -- managed to war and feud against one another on the basis of clan. A nation -- any nation -- is what Nately's old man in Joseph Heller's Catch-22 says it is: "a piece of land surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually unnatural."
You will thus never be able to exclude enough people that you are left at the end of the process with moral purity or social justice. It is the exclusion itself that is the essence of the injustice -- the root of the moral impurity. It is the human tendency to sort into in- and out-groups that creates every great wrong in this world. Even if Israel retreated to its pre-1967 borders-- instead of extending equal citizenship and the vote to Palestinians in the Occupied Territories -- the Jewish majority government would soon find itself fretting (as it is already) over what to do with non-Jewish migrants and asylum seekers entering the society, or with population growth among non-Jewish citizens of Israel.
We won't manage to achieve social justice until we stop this sorting of people into in-groups and out-groups to start with. In order to do that, we will likely need some sort of economic system that does not depend so much upon displacement and differentiation of function. I doubt that a system that perfectly eliminates the ills of human nationalism is attainable, but I do believe we can move much closer to it than what we find in the world we currently occupy.
To do this, however, will require creating forms of human society very different from any we have seen before. We are all going to have to stop believing, therefore, in the idyll of some past and forsaken moral purity. You were never pure. I was never pure. And neither was our society. We have all come into this world sullied by history and division. The only way forward is to understand this, and to recognize in turn that the guilt and fear we project onto other people is merely our reaction to the buried, bitter, and tainted truth about ourselves.
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