American presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich recently claimed that the Palestinians are an “invented people.” That resulted in essays, blogs and commentaries to prove that Palestinians were not invented. In reality, said many, it is the Israelis who are the invented people. Israel displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1948 to form the state of Israel and enclosed millions of others in outdoor prison-like conditions where they still remain, despite universal condemnation by the UN member states — except for Israel and the United States. Israel’s manifest destiny is comparable to that of its closest ally, America, which massacred Native Americans and rounded up the rest in reservations to construct its homeland.
Genocide of indigenous people is a common strategy employed by groups of people trying to lay claim to land and/or form a nation state. The Australians did it to the Aborigines. These nations all effectively defined themselves through a process of elimination of the Other.
What is missing from criticisms of Gingrich’s claim that Palestinians are an “invented people” is not so much a dialogue with the negative aspects of “inventing”; what we need is more of a dialogue with the great potential in viewing groups of people as social constructs. If identities are invented, then they can be reinvented.
Most people have a vision of identity as something that is real — as if being American or Israeli or Palestinian is something you either have or do not have. People hold a fixed vision of identity rather than seeing it as always being constructed. The writer Benedict Anderson coined the concept “imagined communities” to refer to the phenomenon by which people of a nation perceive themselves to be a part of the same group, even though they may never have even met.
Anderson explains that the concept of the nation was formed in a historical era of revolution, when people “were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, hierarchal dynastic realm.” The French Revolution in the late 1700s, for example, was a period of upheaval in which protesters demanded that all people in a society should be treated the same. Peasants took to the streets to overthrow the notion that privilege is accorded by blood and descent, or in other words, that the monarchy, aristocracy and religious authority had a natural and unquestionable right to power. The idea of the democratic republic, born as a result of the Revolution, is that communities are held together because people decide to be together. Blood and descent are not the defining factors of citizenship. This means that anybody can enter or leave the community based on his/her consent.
Nineteenth-century French philosopher Ernest Renan, in his essay “What is a Nation?”, said that consent is people’s desire to live together and their agreement on a shared past. Suffering together in past struggles trumps even race and language as unifying factors for a society. There is nothing natural to belonging, as it is a social contract.
Unfortunately, in our modern-day world, we seem to have forgotten the very values upon which our rights to equality were founded. In France today, politicians like Marine Le Pen see immigration as threatening the identity of the nation, which in her eyes exists as a block that cannot be modified. It is pure fiction to think that certain people belong to a community and other people do not. In the case of Israel, there are no more dangerous words than that Jews are a “promised people” because this implies that privilege to be a part of the Israeli community extends from a God-given (or unquestionable) right.
Since communities are invented, our challenge is not to trace the origins of one group or another. Our challenge is to reinvent our identities so that we feel more attached to the identity of being human than to a particular group we call American, Australian or French. Our shared past is our shared struggle to come to terms with the fluidity of identity. It is time to blur the lines between what is real and imaginary because all identities are imaginary.
My friends Ayman and Hadeel who live in Palestine had twins last month. Ayman wrote of the news: “Finally, the great twins have come. They are very beautiful. But they are trouble makers; they always have their own melodies.” In one picture he emailed me of the newborns, the girl had a blanket resting over her body with her little head sticking out the top. On the blanket, and perfectly corresponding to the shape of her body, was the figure of a miniature violin player (minus the head, which had been folded over). The image was of the baby girl playing her melody of life. Flesh and blood are not the sole markers of what constitutes this newborn Palestinian child. Imagination allows her to be part of an orchestra, an orchestra called humanity.