During the height of the Algerian revolution against French rule, Albert Camus, the celebrated writer, philosopher, humanist, and tenacious foe of fascism, was asked why he did not forcefully condemn the atrocities committed by OAS ultras and French military torturers against Algerian Muslims. Camus was a pied noir—born and raised among the European settler community in Algeria. “I love justice,” he answered, “but I love my mother more.”
Camus’s response shocked his admirers on the left, who felt their hero had failed them. Politically their disappointment is understandable, but Camus was making a profoundly important point. There is a difference in kind between attachments to principles, images, doctrines, or large, and necessarily abstract, groups—however passionate—and attachments to particular things or particular people.
If I lose my mother, the pain of that loss is not assuaged by the availability of another woman of her approximate age. My attachment was to a particular woman, not to “motherliness.” On the other hand, the pain of injustice “there and then” can be lessened by justice “here and now” because the abstract attachment to the principle of equity entails a wide set of equivalent attachments spread over time and space.
Camus loved his mother as a peasant loves and is organically attached to the place he inhabits. It is a particular and quintessentially personal attachment. Camus loved justice in the abstract way an ardent nationalist loves his “patria”—the territory of his nation—most of which he has never, and will never see or know in any personal way. Both attachments can be deep. Both can lead to enormous sacrifice, but they are different.
Understanding the Palestinian-Israeli conflict means, among other things, understanding how these two peoples come to their attachments to the same land from very different directions. Consider a peasant’s attachments to places in his world—to the ancestral burial ground, the mountain whose silhouette shadowed all below it, and the stream with familiar tendencies to flood at particular times. Such ties were deep, so deep that separation from “home” or one’s home village, could hardly be experienced as anything less than death. But these ties were not political. They did not register, for most of human history, as relevant to the political order—usually vast and imperial—within which these “places” were organized. These attachments did not inspire those who held them to “imagine” larger political communities than those who also shared, in an immediate way, the same place of habitation. Nor did they produce an honored or iconic “map image” of a territorial space attached to hundreds of thousands or millions of other human beings to whom the bearers of these feelings could feel kindredness.
Attachment to a particular place can do much to satisfy—or make miserable—those who can preserve them or lose them, but they cannot, themselves, be the basis of what Rupert Emerson called a “terminal community”; that is, a group of people too large to be known individually but which nevertheless is considered worthy of the ultimate sacrifice.
Nationalism and national states require a kind of abstract empathy that, it turns out, humans are quite capable of, but that capacity became apparent only relatively recently in human history. Nationalism requires people to shift much of their emotional investment from personal attachments to a place to abstract attachments to a space. Indeed they must learn to experience those abstract attachments as so important that for them they would be willing to sacrifice, as the saying goes, their “lives, their fortune, and their sacred honor.” The process of transforming attachments to place into attachments to space is a long and difficult one. This is what “nation-building” entails.
For masses in both Europe and the Third World, processes of industrialization, urbanization, education, and marketization, as well as immensely destructive and dislocating wars, “socially mobilized” huge populations, throwing them into new, disorienting, and difficult circumstances. But they made those populations available for this new abstract kind of attachment. From the 17th to the 20th century Jews, and in particular European Jews, experienced these processes with a vengeance. They witnessed the utter destruction of a medieval order that had both sheltered and oppressed them for centuries. But regardless of the strength of their attachment to traditional rabbinic authority, Jewish alienation and exclusion in Christian society made them more prepared for this “modern” world of abstract political loyalties than their non-Jewish contemporaries.
As both Marc Chagall and early Zionists pictured the situation, Jews were “luftmenschen,” floating in the world, unattached to gentile institutions or the fundamentally foreign places over which they hovered. The Jewish strategy of constant migration from erstwhile refuge to possible shelter was directly related to this sociological and psychological condition. All this meant Jews did not experience an attachment to specific places as intensely as ordinary folk around them. More than that, their own cultural celebration of a not-actually-known-or-remembered land—the Land of Israel—gave them centuries of practice in the cultivation of an abstract attachment, not to a “place” of irreplaceable individual meaning, but to a “space” of collective, abstract, empathic focus.
Zionism, as a nationalist movement seeking to mobilize a dispersed population and move it to a land inhabited by others, faced more challenges than most. But a typical problem that Zionism did not face was overcoming the highly parochial attachments traditional peasant and village society developed in its laboring masses. The huge task of assimilation into a Jewish “nation” that Israel faced when confronted with hundreds of thousands of Jews from very different countries and classes, and speaking different languages, was not unusual for states seeking to build nations. But Zionism did face one unique problem. It needed to make the new country, so alien for most of its Jewish inhabitants, feel familiar. This meant great emphasis on mapping the terrain of the “Land of Israel,” marking and hiking trails, and exploring as much as possible about its springs, mountains, caves, small rivers, wadis, flora and fauna. It meant changing thousands of place names to invented Hebrew designations as well. All this activity can be understood as a strong effort to establish some sense of “place” to complement the ideological attachment to the “space” of whatever parts of the country could be acquired.
The Arabs in Palestine faced a very different challenge. They sought to rouse their countrymen as members of the “Palestinian nation” to defend, not the villages and locales that were the intimate framework of their lives, but a “space” called Palestine carved out of the Levant by the outcome of battles between European and Ottoman imperialists. This was a more typical assignment for a nationalist movement; one that in Europe and elsewhere took generations if not centuries to accomplish.
When the nakba destroyed the settled life of the 950,000 or so Arabs living in what became Israel in 1948, hundreds of thousands of refugees huddled in forests, fields, and makeshift camps. Whether in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, or Jordan, they did not yearn to return to the “space” of Palestine, but to the “place” of their village, their farm, their fields, and their homes. The keys they treasured were to the doors of their actual houses, not talismans of a space promised and celebrated but unremembered. Unlike Zionist immigrants, these refugees needed no maps of where they lived or how to get there. Indeed one reason why tens of thousands of refugees were able to surreptitiously return and remain in Israel is because they knew the back roads and trails so well. Maps are for unfamiliar spaces, not for homey places.
Although the “two state solution” may well never be achieved, its emergence as a plausible target for a negotiated settlement entailed a difficult struggle among Palestinian nationalists to transform attachment to place to attachment to space. This required considerable finesse, along with a good deal of deception and disingenuousness. On the one hand, Palestinian leaders evoked the heartbreaking stories of refugees expelled from their homes and the homes of their ancestors, and then refused permission to return. On the other hand, those committed to the “Palestinian state” option set about transforming the Palestinian pathos into a nationalist ethos focused on “Palestine” as a space, with indistinct borders encompassing parts but not all of the country. That meant using the phrase “right of return” ambiguously, to mean—perhaps, but only perhaps, and only for a very tiny number–return to places, to specific homes, fields and villages. For most it would mean return from spaces that were not in Palestine to locations in a “space” by that name– a space that would not contain “places” of actual, original, attachment.
This is a difficult political task for any nationalist movement. But it was particularly difficult for the Palestinians, because the spaces involved are so small, and therefore where the distances to specific yearned-for places, so near and yet so inaccessible, are so tantalizingly short. From the Israeli point of view, the continued evocation by Palestinians of the “places” they were forced to abandon signals either their adversary’s inability to be satisfied with a Palestinian “space” as a basis for resolving the conflict; or their dishonesty in pretending to accept partition while actually expecting that to be a stage toward eventual liberation of all the “places” in historical Palestine.
Indeed, we may use this analysis to gain a fine appreciation of one of the most difficult points in the seemingly endless and almost certainly fruitless negotiations that have been going on between Israelis and Palestinians. When Palestinians accepted the “two state solution” they did not explicitly accept it as corresponding to two peoples—Jewish and Palestinian. In their eyes that would have been equivalent to recognizing the right of the Zionist movement to have dispossessed Palestinians from their homes and their country. Instead, a Palestinian Arab state would live, side by side, with an Israeli state, containing an “Israeli people” comprised of both Jewish and Arab citizens. This position has been softened to the extent that Palestinians have offered Jewish settlers in the West Bank the opportunity to remain as law-abiding citizens of Palestine.
Meanwhile, however, Israel has escalated its demand. Originally no Israeli leader asked for or ever expected to receive Palestinian or Arab recognition of Israel’s “right to exist as a Jewish state.” But beginning with Ariel Sharon’s premiership, this became a constantly repeated demand. It is now often identified by top Israeli officials as the single most important requirement before Israel can make its own “painful compromises” for peace. Palestinian leaders and negotiators have objected to the opening that acceptance might give to Israeli policies of persecution or even expulsion of Arab citizens. They have also objected to the injustice and emotional impossibility of Palestinians, as victims, granting approval to their own historical victimization. But another obstacle to Palestinian acceptance of this demand also looms large. To name Israel as a “space” that is “Jewish,” would categorically foreclose the dream of re-establishing Palestinian refugee attachments to places in that space by confining Palestinian political ambitions, now and forever, to the “space” of the pieces of whatever mini-state of Palestine emerges from the agreement.
Because of the different trajectories that brought both national movements into collision, most Israelis can literally not imagine the pain of giving up attachments to places as part of building an attachment to a space. At the same time, most Palestinians can only understand the Israeli demand that such attachments be explicitly abandoned as reflecting the brutality and inhumanity they have come to associate with Jewish power in the space of Palestine.
This is an updated version of “Places vs. Spaces for Palestinians and Jews,” Perspectives, Spring 2014.
Professor Ian Lustick is the Bess W. Heyman Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a past president of the Politics and History Section of the American Political Science Association and of the Association for Israel Studies, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.