This was, of course, self-serving nonsense. But it has a kernel of truth that makes it sound plausible. Palestinian identity clarified and intensified as a result of the threat posed by Jewish immigrants arriving from Europe, claiming the Palestinian homeland as their own.
As the saying goes, you don't always fully appreciate what you have until you face losing it. Palestinians had to sharpen their national identity, and their national ambitions, faced with the threat that someone else was claiming what they had always assumed belonged to them.
SUPERIOR VALUESSo how does all this help us understand our own tribalism in the West?
Not least, whatever the anxieties being encouraged in the West over the supposed threat posed by Russia and China, the reality is that the West's tribalism - sometimes termed "Western civilization," or "the rules-based order," or "the democratic world," or, even more ludicrously, "the international community" - is by far the most powerful of all tribalisms on the planet. And so also the most dangerous.
Israel's tribal power, for example, derives almost exclusively from the West's tribal power. It is an adjunct, an extension, of Western tribal power.
But we need to be a little more specific in our thinking. You and I subscribe to Western tribalism - either consciously or less so, depending on whether we see ourselves as on the right or the left of the political spectrum - because it has been cultivated in us over a lifetime through parenting, schools and the corporate media - TWEET.
We think West is best. None of us would want to be Russian or Chinese, any more than Israeli Jews would choose to be Palestinian. We implicitly understand that we have privileges over other tribes. And because we are tribal, we assume those privileges are justified in some way. They either derive from our own inherent superiority (a view often associated with the far right) or from a superior culture or traditions (a view usually embracing the moderate right, liberals and parts of the left).
Again, this echoes Zionist views. Israeli Jews on the right tend to believe that they have inherently superior qualities to Palestinians and Arabs, who are seen as primitive, backward or barbarian-terrorists. Overlapping with these assumptions, religious-Zionist Jews tend to imagine that they are superior because they have the one true God on their side.
By contrast, most secular Jews on the left, like the liberals of Meretz, believe that their superiority derives from some vague conception of Western "culture" or civilization that has fostered in them a greater ability to show tolerance and compassion, and act rationally, than do most Palestinians.
Meretz would like to extend that culture to Palestinians to help them benefit from the same civilizing influences. But until that can happen, they, like the Zionist right, view Palestinians primarily as a threat.
Seen in simple terms, Meretz believes they cannot easily empower the Palestinian LGBTQ community, much as they would like to, without also empowering Hamas. And they do not wish to do that because an empowered Hamas, they fear, would not only threaten the Palestinian LGBTQ community but the Israeli one too.
So liberating Palestinians from decades of Israeli military occupation and ethnic cleansing will just have to wait for a more opportune moment - however long that may take, and however many Palestinians must suffer in the meantime.
NEW HITLERSThe parallels with our own, Western worldview should not be hard to perceive.
We understand that our tribalism, our prioritizing of our own privileges in the West, entails suffering for others. But either we assume we are more deserving than other tribes, or we assume others - to become deserving - must first be brought up to our level through education and other civilizing influences. They will just have to suffer in the meantime.
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