Raymond Klassen – Ideals and Identities

If you haven’t read Part 1 of “Inadequate Political and Moral Categories in Palestine and Israel,” I encourage you to read it first.

Part 2

The more the number of rightless people increase, the greater the temptation to reduce attention our attention on the deeds of persecuting governments than to the status of the persecuted. The first glaring fact is that these stateless people, though persecuted under some political pretext, are no longer, as the persecuted have been throughout history, a liability and an image of shame for the persecutors. If a Palestinian were to claim that they are not to be considered enemies, and don’t even pretend to be active enemies of Israel they would appear to be nothing other than “human animals.” Their innocence, from every point of view, and especially that of the persecuting government, is their greatest misfortune. Innocence, in the sense of a complete lack of responsibility, is the very mark of their stateless condition, and a seal of their loss of political status.

It may seem that there is a need to reinforce human rights; however, human rights only barely touch the fate of authentic political refugees. Unlike what is about to occur in Palestine / Israel, political refugees are few in number, and that limit permits them to enjoy the right to asylum (as I argued in Part 1). The right of asylum acts, in an informal way, as a genuine substitute for national law. Asylum is meant for political refugees, but not for millions of people who are stateless.

One of the surprising parts of our experience with stateless people who benefit legally from committing a crime is that it is easier to deprive a completely innocent person of legality than it is someone who has committed an offense. Jurists are so used to thinking of law in terms of punishment, which indeed always deprives one of certain rights, that they find it nearly impossible to recognize that the deprivation of legality, i.e., of all rights, no longer has a connection with specific crimes. This is underscored by the Palestinians in Gaza who, though not connected to Hamas’s exercise of the illegal Al Aqsa Flood operation, have had their rights removed altogether. In other words, all rights were deprived not based on what they did or thought, but because of who they were.

The calamity of the rightless in general, and the Palestinians in particular, is not that are deprived of life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness, or of equality before the law or freedom of opinion – formulas which were designed within certain communities – but that they belonged to no community whatsoever. Much less than being unequal before the law, Palestinians have no law which exists for them; not that they are oppressed, but that no one may even want to oppress them. Only in this last stage of a rather lengthy process is their right to live threatened. This is exactly the stage which Hamas has rightly recognized as being the result of the 2020 Abraham Accords and the normalization talks between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Hamas saw that a grand economic agreement and normal diplomatic relationships between the former enemies of Saudi Arabia and Israel would spell the Palestinians’ doom. They have realized the Palestinians were in danger of becoming “superfluous.” If nobody can be found to “claim” them, their lives will indeed be in danger. The Jews knew this very personally in the Holocaust, and it applies again here. In the current situation in Palestine / Israel, the negotiations with the Egyptians are crucial. If Egypt were to open up a portion of the desert that is the Sinai Peninsula, it would certainly save the lives of the Palestinians. Yet, the Egyptians seem to be in no mood to “claim” the Palestinians.

In Germany, the Nazis started the extermination of the Jews by first depriving them of all legal status, and cutting them off from the world of the living by herding them into ghettos and concentration camps. Only then did they set the gas chambers into motion. The Nazis had first tested the ground and found out that no nation would claim these people. The point is that a condition of complete rightlessness was created before the right to live was challenged. The parallels should seem obvious.

Ironically, the right of freedom, which is often to be considered the very essence of human rights, is a fool’s gold should the Palestinians actually escape Gaza. No question that freedom of movement is granted to those outside the pale of law, and is greater than is granted to a lawfully imprisoned criminal.  No doubt the stateless enjoy more freedom of opinion in the internment or refugee camps of democratic countries than they would under ordinary despotism, not to mention a totalitarian country. But neither physical safety – being fed by the UN – nor freedom of opinion changes their fundamental situation of rightlessness. The extension of their lives is due to charity and not to right; for no law exists to force the nations to feed them. Their freedom of movement gives them no right to residence, which even a jailed criminal enjoys as a matter of course. Their freedom of opinion is a fool’s freedom, for nothing they think matters anyhow.

These last points are crucial. The fundamental deprivation of human rights is primarily manifested in the deprivation of a place in the world which makes opinions significant and actions effective. Something much more fundamental than freedom and justice, which are rights of citizens, is at stake when belonging to the community into which one is born is no longer a matter of course. In the Palestinian case, one is further harmed by the fact that not belonging is not a matter of choice. It is being forced upon them. This extremity is the case of the Palestinian people who are deprived not of the right to freedom, but of the right to act; not of the right to think whatever they please, but of the right to an opinion.

We become aware of the existence of the right to have rights. (And that means to live in a framework where one is judged by one’s opinions and actions) and a right to belong to some organized community only when millions of people emerged – as the Palestinians are about to do – who lost and could not regain those rights because of a global political situation in which there were no countries who would claim them. The trouble is that this Nakba, this catastrophe, arose not from any lack of civilization, backwardness or mere tyranny, but, on the contrary, that it could not be repaired because there is no longer any “uncivilized” place on earth. Whether or not we like it, we really have begun to live in one world. Only with a completely organized humanity could the loss of home and political status become identical with expulsion from humanity altogether.

The Significance of Al Aqsa     

Al Aqsa, the East Jerusalem Mosque, considered to be the most important holy site for Muslims in Israel, and a sight known as the Temple Mount by Jews, is key to understanding not only the continual conflict between Palestinians and Israelis, but also to understand the substance of the disagreement. It goes beyond the usual twentieth century way of classifying political conflict which is colonialism and occupation and a trampling of human rights. Of course, colonialism and occupation are essential components to the conflict, but the first and second intifadas, and the Al Aqsa Flood of October 7, 2023, were all triggered by the desecration of the Al Aqsa compound itself. Why is it so significant? Ask a Palestinian – and I did. The biggest risk in Israel’s political direction isn’t just overlooking the Palestinian people; it is also the imposition of a society which no longer holds the sacred places of its population, well… as sacred. We should probably understand Al Aqsa Flood, in part, as an expression of religious outrage that a secular military exercises security control over a sacred site. 

Without the sacred, what we are left with are the weak concepts of humanity and human rights.

Before the new situation of totalitarian governments in Germany and the Soviet Union in the first half of the twentieth century, what we call a human right today is a general characteristic of the human condition which no tyrant could take away. Its loss entails the loss of speech (and Aristotle defined “man” as commanding the power of speech and thought), and the loss of all human relationship (Aristotle also thought of “man” as a “political animal” – i.e., by definition, as living as a part of a community). In other words, and as we have found out, these rights can be taken away because they are some of the most fundamental characteristics of human life. Incidentally, the reports that social media platforms are banning Palestinian stories from being told is exactly an execution of the right to speech. The accounts of Palestinians and their supporters on LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), Facebook and Instagram having their accounts terminated are not because they are spreading misinformation, but because they are telling the truth. The right to speech and thought can be easily removed.

Aristotle never counted slaves as being human. But slavery’s fundamental offence against human rights is not that it took liberty away, but that it excluded a certain category of people even from the possibility of fighting for freedom. Palestinians, under the condition of tyranny, could still fight for freedom, but they can’t under the conditions of a concentration camp, which is what Rafah now is, and is also the slaughterhouse that Gaza has become. Slavery’s crime against humanity did not begin when one people conquered and enslaved another, although this is bad enough. Slavery’s crime against human rights is when slavery becomes an institution in which some persons are born free, and others are born slaves. It becomes a crime against humanity when the sanctions for the crime were attributed to nature and not to deeds.

Considering the forced migration and the concentration of the Palestinians of Gaza in the south of Gaza, it is possible to say that even slaves belonged to some sort of human community; their labor was needed, used, and exploited, and this kept them in the pale of humanity. To be a slave was, after all, to have a distinctive character, a place in society – more than the abstract nakedness of being human and nothing more. It is not the loss of specific rights that is the real Nakba, but the loss of a community willing and able to guarantee any rights whatsoever. Human beings can lose all so-called inalienable rights without losing the essential quality as a human being, one’s dignity. Only the loss of a polity itself expels one from humanity.

When inalienable human rights were first proclaimed in the eighteenth century they were regarded as being independent of history and the privileges that history had accorded certain strata of society. The new independence constituted the newly discovered dignity of human beings. The ambiguity of this newly discovered dignity was there from the beginning. Historical rights were replaced with natural rights, and “nature” took the place of history. It was assumed that nature was less alien to the nature of human beings than was history. The very language of the Declaration of Independence (US), or the Declaration of the Rights of Man (France) – “inalienable,” “self-evident,” and “given with birth” – implies the laws of growth that accompany the individual and from which rights and laws could be deduced. However, now it is not only the human aspect of nature, as it were, that has become questionable to us. Ever since human beings have learned to master nature that the destruction of all organic life on earth by human-made instruments has become not only conceivable and technically possible – but increasingly likely. Nature now has a sinister edge. How could one deduce laws and rights from a universe that apparently knows neither law nor right?

Human beings of the twentieth and twenty-first century have become just as emancipated from nature as eighteenth-century human beings were from history.  History and nature no longer provide the categories that help us understand humanity’s essence. Humanity, by contrast, is no longer the regulative idea of the eighteenth century; instead, it is now an inescapable fact. Humanity now has taken the conceptual place that used to belong to history and to nature. In the context of Palestine / Israel, humanity should be the guarantee of the right to have rights, or the right of every individual to belong to humanity, should be guaranteed by humanity itself. It is by no means certain whether this is even possible – and it seems that the Palestinians know this. Hamas rebelled when they recognized the reciprocal relationships and treaties which constitute international law were being applied in the Abraham Accords between Israel and Saudi Arabia. For the time being, a sphere that is above nation-states does not exist – and this is why Al Aqsa is so significant.

They have recognized what Hannah Arendt enumerated in the Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951: “The crimes against human rights, which have become a specialty of totalitarian regimes, can always be justified by the pretext that right is equivalent to being good or useful to the whole in distinction to its parts.” You can tell this by the language being used in the so-called justification for the Israeli military operation now underway: “Israel has the right to defend itself.” But how about Palestine? There is no language for Palestine because Israel divided Palestine up in 1967. There are not only the Palestinians of Gaza, and the Palestinians of the West Bank. Palestinians have no national protection. They are only a loosely named ethnic group. The Palestinians know that this utilitarian conception of law and right that Israel uses will remain ineffectual so long as older traditions that are still effective within constitutions are effective at preventing it. Al Aqsa represents the sacred which acts to mitigate the totalitarian distortion of rights. Israel’s conception of law, with American support, is such a totalitarian distortion of rights.

A conception of law which identifies what is “right” with the notion of what is “good for” – for the individual, for the family, or the people, or the largest number – becomes inevitable once the absolute and transcendent measurements of religion or the law of nature have lost their authority. And this predicament is by no means solved if the unit to which the “good for” applies is as large as humankind itself. For it is quite conceivable, and even within the realm of practical political possibilities, that one fine day, a highly organized and mechanized humanity will conclude quite democratically – namely, by majority decision – that for humanity as a whole, it would be better to liquidate certain parts thereof. Perhaps Plato was right to say: “Not man, but a god, must be the measure of all things.”