Seumas Milne is a very good guide to things. I mean, he's a good guide to how a certain section of the left - not to put too fine a point on it, the regrettable section - thinks. His column yesterday provides an example of what I mean. It gives us the pure form of a contemporary leftist trope. It is worth examination for that reason - for representing a set of rhetorical moves that has become rather general amongst anti-Zionists.
After telling us that the takeover of Palestinian land on which Israel was founded was a phenomenon of colonial rule, Milne writes:
Israel was, of course, also born out of idealism and genocidal horror in Europe and can boast remarkable achievements. But it was the tragedy of the Zionist project that Jewish self-determination could only be achieved at another people's expense. Israel's independence and the Palestinian nakba are not just different national narratives, but diametrically opposed experiences which make one-sided tributes to Israeli nationhood seem so brutally galling in the Arab and Muslim world and beyond.Employing a kind of shorthand, one might say that this has the following rhetorical structure: yes, the Holocaust; but the nakba. If you study the overall argument within which that 'yes-but' is placed, however, what you will find is that the 'yes' carries no legitimating force at all and that the 'but' lays claim to all of such force. In saying this, I do not mean that Milne is undismayed by the thought of what happened to the Jews of Europe. What I mean is that in terms of what he's willing to allow it establishes by way of Jewish rights, it establishes nothing. The 'but' of the nakba, on the other hand, gives serious legitimating grounds. It allows Milne to talk of Palestinian 'national dispossession and suffering' and, correspondingly, of Palestinian 'aspirations to self-determination'. Furthermore, we know that he takes Palestinian self-determination seriously, because he's now thinking the chance for a two-state solution - accommodating the national rights of both peoples - may have 'slipped away', leaving instead the goal of 'one state for both peoples' as the only 'realistic option', an option being looked to, he thinks, amongst Palestinians. In this, Milne is more cautious than many others from his general precinct. For them, a one-state solution has always been the preferred solution, the two-state business resting, as they see it, on a historical usurpation. But whether in the bolder or the more cautious version, the one-state option amounts to a denial of the right of Israeli Jews to self-determination, for unless they themselves accept it, it isn't a form of self-determination.
Within this framework of assumptions, therefore, what 'Yes, the Holocaust, but the nakba' actually means is 'Holocaust, schmolocaust - yes, the nakba'.
Now, turn it round. Imagine that a supporter of Israel were to say 'Yes, the nakba, but the Holocaust'. And imagine they were to mean by this, not that the Palestinians have a right to national self-determination and their own state, and not that the occupation of the West Bank should be terminated, the Jewish settlements there wound up and a peace agreement negotiated, recognizing, however, the national rights of Israelis alongside those of Palestinians; but rather that the Holocaust gave the Jews rights which in effect cancel out the rights of the Palestinians. Imagine they were to mean, when you come right down to it, 'Nakba, schmakba'. I don't think it's extravagant to suggest that their saying this would be taken as a form of brutal arrogance if not of outright anti-Arab racism.
It's a mystery, is it not? The tragedy of one people - the Palestinians - may be invoked, and regularly is, on the anti-Zionist liberal-left as one way of pressing the national rights of that people. Here is a wrong to be made good. But the tragedy of another, now linked, people is not thought in the same quarter to generate any national rights, it does not carry force as a wrong the (partial) making good of which would be undone if Israel's existence were forcibly terminated. How does this work? Such tragedies either do give some weight to the case for national self-determination for the people in question, or they don't. It cannot be, can it, that the Palestinian tragedy generates a kind of right that the Jewish tragedy does not?
Here one must anticipate a side-step. It's not because the Palestinians have suffered a tragedy that they have a right in this matter which the Jews lack. It's because the land was (and therefore still is) theirs. That's how the side-step would go. Notice, first, that if we are to take this seriously, it's not the occurrence of a national tragedy that's relevant any longer - and so we should forget the nakba in this context? - it's the connection between peoples and particular geographical spaces. But few, including among anti-Zionists, truly believe this. Not in the sense of a sacred, unvarying tie. There are no movements in that political neck of the woods to restore the Americas, or Australia, to their indigenous peoples. There is no movement on the left that I know of to get Europe to find a national homeland for the Jews - in Europe - to make good the way in which European Jewry was ripped from its places of abode, robbed of its possessions, ghettoized, transported, tortured, massacred. These are not projects of a politically practical nature. So practicality does a certain amount of work here, in some cases altogether eclipsing hypotheses of a sacred tie between this people and this land. And if it comes to that, the Jews, like the Palestinians, do have a historical tie with what is present-day Israel. It's one thing or it's the other. But, whichever it is, the rhetoric alone won't do it for you. There's no 'yes-but' about it; there's just 'yes' and 'yes', both.