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2 I told you so,
essentially By Spengler
Iran's puppies of war in Gaza and their
counterparts in Lebanon are a mixed blessing for
their sponsors in Tehran. In Western capitals, the
case for military action of some kind against Iran
has become far more compelling. I continue to
believe, as I wrote on May 30, that Iran will fight rather than
compromise with the West. Tehran may
have Hamas and Hezbollah on a leash, but it is the
master that is dragged forward now, rather than
the dog dragged back. But these are things that
the casual newspaper reader
knows
by now.
Speaking of Gaza, it is a general
rule that countries that have no business being
there eventually find ways to disappear. The
Andean countries of South America are a case in
point; sundry warlords carved them out of the
Spanish viceroyalties after the break with Spain.
A correspondent on this writer's discussion
board observes that 40% of legal
immigrants to Spain now come from Colombia,
Bolivia and Ecuador, with the last-named
contributing 2 million people, or a third of its
working-age population. The population of the
Andean countries is clever enough to understand
that there is little reason for them to be there,
and therefore leaves at the first opportunity.
That is an exercise in what postmodern
scholars deride as "essentialism", by which they
mean the view that a people or country displays
"essential" characteristics that it can change no
more than a leopard can change its spots. Sigmund
Freud liked to say that long-suppressed problems
in history eventually force themselves to the
surface, referring in this case to the fault line
between Roman and tribal Germany along which the
Catholic-Protestant divide occurred during the
Reformation.
"Essentialism" also informs
racial and national stereotypes, which is why
postmodernists reject it as a colonialist
ideology. National humor by its nature is
essentialist. If Scotsmen weren't stingy and East
Frisians weren't stupid, we wouldn't have jokes
about them. One should be cautious in ascribing
essences, to be sure, but in some cases nothing
else makes sense.
For the past five years
I have analyzed Palestinian affairs according to
an "essentialist" standpoint, which amounts to the
simple observation that the Palestinians, rather
like the Andean countries, have no reason to be
there, and so eventually will not be. Like the
Bolivians, many Palestinians do emigrate, but the
rest of the world will not have them (Kuwait
expelled 400,000 of them during the first Gulf War
in 1991).
The means by which the
Palestinians have chosen to disappear are
unappetizing, but no less effective. The essence
of what we euphemistically call the "Palestinian
people" is self-destructive, because it is not a
people at all, but the artificial construct of
Arab politics and Western relief agencies. After
last week's debacle, just this once, I am going to
indulge myself in an extended "I told you so".
How quaint, we tell ourselves, that
stone-age peoples still dwell in the Amazon, and
we wonder: What are they doing in the modern
world? Yet no one asks what 3.5 million
Palestinian Arabs are doing on a small patch of
land on the west bank of the Jordan, not to
mention the 400,000 or so in camps in Lebanon
and yet more in Jordan. They are an agrarian
rather than an urban people, ill at ease with
the economic pursuits of the modern world.
Mechanization of agriculture, rather
than Zionist political aims, began displacing
the rural Arab population in the 1930s, as a
number of historians observe. This led to the
1936-39 Arab uprising against the British
Mandate and Jewish settlement. Rather than
disperse gradually like other agrarian
populations, the Palestinian Arabs found
themselves in refugee camps after 1947. Thanks
to the relief efforts of the United Nations they
obtained access to medical care and education,
lacking in their old villages. The 700,000 Arabs
who fled or were driven from Israel quintupled
their numbers in two generations. For half a
century they have nursed the dream of returning
to a world that vanished long ago.
To
become a nation, I advised President Mahmoud
Abbas, would require a civil war, which, if not
accomplished quickly by the
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