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01/26/2006:
"The Palestine Question: Zionism's Zero Sum Game"
By Yerach Gover, PhDwish to start by trying to distinguish between different concepts of modern nationalism and to speculate on how Zionism has established its own trend. How is it that we have gotten to the catastrophe that we are facing today?
As we know, "political emancipation" was conceived by the emerging bourgeois classes in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century and began to be applied practically after the French Revolution. The new bourgeoisie demanded the abolition of monarchy and feudalism while it established bourgeois citizenship and state. Following other Renaissance principles, however, the new bourgeois nation-state was also secularized. This new structure of the state provided, at least nominally, greater participation in terms of class, ethnic, and religious minorities in civil affairs. One could say that on the whole, and specifically in Western Europe, a somewhat greater sense of democratic representation was achieved.
Nevertheless, colonialism at the turn of the twentieth century was at its height, with Great Britain as the world's biggest power. Orientalism, the ideology of colonialism as defined by Edward Said, rationalized colonial domination through "an attitude that posits the Orient as a constellation of traits, assigning generalized values to real or imaginary differences, largely to the advantage of the West and the disadvantage of the East, so as to justify the former's privileges and aggressions"-while at the same time maintaining a "flexible superiority," which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relations with the Oriental, but without the Westerner ever losing the relative upper hand (Said, Orientalism, 1978).
axisoflogic.com
