Raymond Klassen – Ideals and Identities

The Palestinians lack any practical freedom. Why is that? Simple answer? The Israelis are oppressing them through old school colonization and apartheid methods. But it’s more complicated than that, because unlike the Ukraine and the Bosnians before them, the Palestinians have not had the support of democratic countries to intervene. So we might need to ask a more important question: how is it that they don’t have any practical freedom? And if we can find an answer to that, might we also connect the methods of depriving their freedom with the infrastructure of contemporary Western societies? Could their lack of freedom be an indicator of the general retreat of freedom throughout the West? 

Second fact: the Palestinians are returning to northern Gaza, the place they were evacuated from for their so-called safety. Well, going to the south was pointless because they could not go out through the Rafah Gate into Egypt, and the aid that finally trickled in was not merely enough. Many said, “If we are going to die, we might as well die in our homes.” Why would they make this choice? Why would they head toward a more likely demise?

“The disappearance of the unique individual corresponds to the loss of freedom – and the avatar is its technique.” With this, I summarized the argument about how authenticity is the key to not only understanding history and how human identity function, but also acts as buttress to any practical sense of freedom. The leverage in that argument was that the mass social technique of creating avatars of people and groups, as opposed to the nurturing of authentic individuals and grassroots groups, creates objects that can be manipulated and made to do what those in power want. For example, as a result of the Abraham accords, the United Arab Emirates and Israeli governments foresaw an avatar-based exchange that would allow, for the first time in history, Israeli tourists inside Emirati shopping malls in predictable and economically exploitable ways. Aside from geo-political events, these avatars are most familiar to us in terms of targeted advertising on social media. Personal information is used to form objectified avatars that can be easily manipulated. A.I., in the hands of powerful state and corporate actors, will exponentially accelerate the use of the avatar, and it will increasingly limit the appearance of freedom in the public world. In other words, the caricatures of individuals and of groups of people serve not only to scapegoat individuals and demonize these groups in the eyes of outsiders, but they can also undercut the ones who are caricatured. It is an incredibly effective tool of technocratic rationality which is the hallmark of mass society.

Returning to Palestine / Israel, we notice, in the most violent and despotic actors, the increasing use of the avatar in their characterization of their enemies. Hamas leaders have said things such as: “The Jews are the most despicable and contemptible nation to crawl upon the face of the Earth, because they have displayed hostility to Allah.” The avatar is that all Jews are despicable and detestable and have displayed hostility toward God. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has said in regard to Israel’s Arab neighbors: “We must defend ourselves against the wild beasts.” The avatar is that all Arabs are beasts. The acceptance of the avatars not only dehumanizes the ones the avatar was to represent, but also dehumanizes the one who accepts the avatar without dispute. What seems to be evident, from this admittedly small sample size of examples, is that the use of avatars has some correlation to what have been called “terrorist” actions – such as Hamas-orchestrated Al Aqsa Flood, the Israeli repeated bombing of Gaza, the apartheid state that Israel has always been, and the collective punishment of the blockade. Possibly, even our use of the word “terrorist” is a kind of avatar itself.

In the temptation to work with, accept, and believe the avatar, humans as individual persons are NOT easily manipulated because they are best understood in their uniqueness which is generated at a particular moment in history, and as manifesting a particular community spirit; humans-as-avatars are easily manipulated because they have been isolated from the living community in which they have emerged and then caricatured as beasts, as despicable, or as majority white males, or what have you. In certain spheres of academia, for example, “toxic masculinity” has been frequently attributed to the avatar of every Caucasian, male, heterosexual. As such, each member of that class must work themselves out of that hole, so to speak. It becomes obvious that every human person will be eradicated as a human person in the face of powerful despots and companies who turn them into avatars. 

What the Palestinians are going through is of a much worse degree than the avatar-type group identification in academia. It is important that we remember what the Palestinians are doing: many Palestinians, beginning on October 18 and 19, have practically asserted their freedom at risk of safety and life and in so doing, manifested the following truth: we draw on our uniqueness in time and place to live, by returning to our homes, and our land, and our communities as if those things were worth living and dying for.

Until now, many people had difficulty drawing a lot of connection between the struggle of coming-of-age university students to the mammoth political struggles in Palestine / Israel, but we can now see them as importantly connected. The Palestinians have returned to their homes, to their land, and as communities because those are the things worth living and dying for. 

Authenticity – who people really are – is undercut by avatar-creation. Authenticity is served by embracing the identity-forming characteristics of home, land and community. Authenticity, as the Palestinians are manifesting, invests in home, in land, and in community instead of ideological notions of a “Zionist” state, the inbred nationalism so common in Eastern Europe, in Trump’s America, or in certain branches of the Canadian Conservative Party. 

Authenticity is not so much an idea as it is the content of practical freedom. The is why the Palestinians moved home, and that is why we all need to pay attention to this conflict. Human rights can be negative measures… by which we can measure the deprivation of human life and freedom; authenticity is what we can indeed strive for and can be felt in the human heart.