Palestine-Israel | The fragmented ecumenism

However, we must understand, research, and engage with it as historians, especially as people from the region who care about this history and don't want to deny it. On the other hand, we must also acknowledge that after this massacre, all sorts of people condemned it and wondered how to ensure that such events never happen again.

The events of 1860 are often understood as a rejection of the possibility of interdenominational coexistence.

Yes, many saw the massacre as confirmation that we are enemies along religious lines—that Muslims and Christians, for example, could not live together. The point, however, is that the vast majority of people at that time insisted that we can indeed live together and are one people. They decided that the way to prevent similar outbreaks of violence in the future was to advocate for new forms of education, especially new forms of ecumenical education.

In order to prevent similar outbreaks of violence in the future, new forms of education, especially ecumenical education, were advocated.

Therefore, after 1860, schools were founded by Christian and Muslim Arabs who were committed to the idea of ​​belonging to a national community. They saw themselves as members of a community and wanted to educate others to respect other religions, but also to integrate them into a larger national Syrian or Ottoman community. What is remarkable is that there were no further massacres of Christians in Damascus after 1860.

But there was a different reaction to the massacre of Jews in Iraq in 1941.

Yes, and there was also a different reaction to the Adana massacre of Armenians in 1909. The point is that 1860 was an exception to the rule of coexistence. While this massacre has been orientalized into the main characteristic of the people of the Middle East, it actually became the catalyst for an exceptionally modern culture of national coexistence based on the idea of ​​equal citizenship. That is the difference between the period before and after 1860. After 1860, there were increased efforts to find a common identity as Syrians, Arabs, and Ottomans in the Mashriq, while also striving for a conscious coexistence as equal citizens.

The difference between the 1941 massacre in Iraq, the 1909 Armenian massacres in Adana, or the Armenian genocide during World War I is that they were major ruptures. The question, then, is why one type of massacre, namely the one in 1860, became the catalyst for a culture of coexistence, while these other incidents ended a very long history of coexistence.

It is clear to me that in the Arab or Syrian case there was no ethnic-religious nationalism, but rather a common ecumenical form of national belonging.

And that wasn't the case in the other cases?

Yes, for example, Zionism, which was supported by British colonialism in Palestine, was a colonial settler movement dedicated to transforming multi-religious Palestine into an exclusively nationalist Jewish state. Ottoman Turkish nationalism, in turn, in the case of the Armenian massacres and subsequent genocide, also portended the final collapse of Ottoman pluralism and the beginning of another, far more sinister and ruthless nationalist approach to dealing with difference in the age of Western imperialism.

You also address this in connection with Zionism. In your book, you point out that Zionism does not emerge from the social fabric, reality, lived experience, or the history of the Mashreq, nor from the history of coexistence. Could you explain this a little further?

It was quite the opposite. Zionism emerged from a European history that bears no relation to the dynamics, history, and culture of the Arab Mashrek region—it is antithetical to it. Zionism emerges as antithetical to the Arab-Jewish history in the region, as well as to the Christian, Muslim, and Arab affiliations to this region. It is antithetical to all of these things because Zionism did not emerge in dialogue with or as a response to the history of the Mashrek. Rather, it emerged in Europe as a response to European anti-Semitism and European nationalism.

So he proposed a European nationalist solution. Where? Overseas. How? Through colonization. Zionists considered other locations, but ultimately, in 1897, they settled on Palestine for obvious historical, metaphorical, and religious reasons. Ultimately, however, the leaders and theorists of Zionism were all European Ashkenazi Jews responding to antisemitism and thinking about how to address and solve the problem overseas.

In academic circles, in Germany and beyond, there are ongoing debates that seek to defend certain forms of Zionism, such as cultural or liberal Zionism. Do you believe your research contributes to these debates?

First of all, whoever tells you this in connection with the genocide in Gaza probably wants to deny it or distract from it. Yes, of course, there have been different forms of Zionism. Remember that Zionism does not represent Judaism . It emerged at a very specific moment in mid- to late 19th-century Europe and did not have hegemony among Jews, because Jews are diverse, like all other people. Whoever conflates Judaism with Zionism denies the plurality of Jewish history, which is far richer than Zionism alone. The reality is that Zionism is ultimately a nationalist project. It began as a fantasizing about how to imagine a Jewish state in different countries, spaces, and societies.

Once this project was brought into politics and Palestine, initially with British colonial support—i.e., the Balfour Declaration of 1917—it transformed into a colonial practice that was ultimately inherently and explicitly violent toward the Palestinians. Thus, there may be many forms of Zionism: as theory, as abstraction, as fantasy. But in reality, there is only one main form of Zionism, as Edward Said put it decades ago: Zionism from the perspective of its victims.

In practice, Zionism became the ideology of the State of Israel, which is profoundly and inherently anti-Palestinian at every level: ideological, political, military, cultural, and social. Today, there is only one relevant form of Zionism, and that is the hegemonic form.

To use just one analogy from the United States, however imperfect, one cannot talk about white culture in the Southern United States during the era of slavery or Jim Crow without considering how it affected Black Americans. The same can be said about virtually every other form of hegemonic nationalism toward various minorities in nationalist spaces. European nationalism in the late 19th century in countries like Russia, Poland, Germany, and Austria, for example, is linked to the rise of nationalist European antisemitism.

Another way to think through the interrelated contexts might be to understand the 1920s and 1930s as a period in which both Zionism and fascism were materially strengthening. How does this relate to our present day?

Many scholars have written about the dialectical relationship between Zionism and antisemitism. Zionism arose as a reaction to antisemitism. But it also sought to refute antisemitism by saying, "We are like you Europeans; we belong, like you, to this idea of ​​'civilized' Europe. But we will become you outside of Europe." This more or less corresponds to Theodor Herzl's proposal. The entire Zionist project is ultimately one of supposedly modern civilizers in a supposedly backward, primitive part of the world. Zionism as a political and colonial project is a coercive project based on denying, ignoring, and imposing itself on the native population.

The entire Zionist project is ultimately one of supposedly modern civilizers in a supposedly backward, primitive part of the world.

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For this reason, the Zionists in Mandatory Palestine needed British colonial control to oppress Palestinians. And this is why Chaim Weizmann, the leader of the Zionist movement in Palestine, wrote a letter to Arthur Balfour (who drafted the infamous Balfour Declaration) in 1918 explicitly stating that democracy was not an option in British-occupied Palestine. His argument was that Palestine could not have democracy because, if I remember the phrase correctly, "brutal numbers are against us."

In other words, the vast majority of Palestine's population was Palestinian. Democracy was therefore impossible, because otherwise Palestinians would have remained the vast majority of the population, and the Zionists would not have been able to create a sovereign state. Therefore, the decision was made to suppress the natives and democracy. When you suppress democracy, you suppress the will of the people. You suppress democratic representation and impose what sounds to me like colonialism. This is what Zionism in Palestine has in common with virtually every other settler-colonial movement. They are all based on the negation and disavowal of the native population.

I think that the connection to fascism is a rather current problem in the sense that the Israeli state, its political parties, and political discourse are now no longer just openly contemptuous of Palestinian life, present, and future, but, as we see in Gaza, de facto genocidal. The alliance between the Zionist Israeli right and the fascist or racist ultra-right in Europe and the United States is evident today. The irony is that the alliance between these actors is based on support for an ethno-religious nationalism.

The Jewish-American journalist Peter Beinart recently published the book “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza.”

Peter used to be a very liberal Zionist, but he has changed over time. Today, he is horrified by what has become of the State of Israel. In his book, he says he is saddened by the realization that many Zionists he knows believe in the idea of ​​a Jewish state, even though it dominates and subjugates millions of non-Jewish Palestinians. He believes in an ethical practice of Judaism that includes the liberation of Palestinians.

Beinart's ethical call arises in the context of a vibrant Jewish community in the United States, flourishing under conditions of a secular state in which everyone, regardless of religion, should theoretically be equal, despite the long history of structural and pervasive racism in the United States. Jewish communities in the United States have thus flourished in a state that is fundamentally different, legally and ideologically, from the explicitly discriminatory ethno-nationalist state of Israel.

In this context, it's clear to Beinart (and to me) that the growing number of fascists and supremacists who hate Muslims, Arabs, Black and Latinx Americans, and non-white immigrants also hate Jews. Beinart says it's wishful thinking to believe otherwise. Allying yourself with fascists shouldn't make you think you're protected from fascists. Once they've eliminated Palestinians and the rest of the easily marginalized, like visa holders, protesting students, and supporters of Palestine, they'll move on to the next generation. Because these people are, ultimately, ethno-nationalists.

Fascism and Zionism are closely linked. Does this mean they are mutually dependent?

As scholars and historians, we need to understand that Zionism formed a strong alliance with liberalism long before fascism. I think we tend to repress this fact. People like Eleanor Roosevelt, one of the signatories of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and other liberal politicians after World War II were very enthusiastic supporters of the idea of ​​Zionism. The "restoration" of the Jewish people to Palestine, in other words, was an idea that found support among many liberal figures in the West. So, it wasn't just fascists who supported the anti-Palestinian state of Israel. Rather, Zionism also has this liberal genealogy. This is extremely important because, as I understand the German case, this is what leads people in Germany to think that they must support Zionism to be anti-fascist. But the history of liberal Zionism is ultimately based on denial and systemic violence against the Palestinians.