People carrying Palestinian banners and flags to join a pro-Palestinian march from Place de la République in Paris towards the European Council in Brussels (Anadolu Agency)
Whoever believes that what is happening in Gaza today is a local matter related to a narrow geographical area is delusional. Or just passing events that do not extend into the future. The genocide and cleansing that the Palestinian people are being subjected to, in full view of a world that stands unable to intervene, calls us to pause for contemplation to clarify the major meanings that explain the reality of the conflict taking place today between a defenseless people clinging to their right to survive and exist, and a state that persists in insisting on depriving them of this. Right.
It is not easy to think about the greater meanings that enable the mind to penetrate into an image of a reality other than the reality of the bloody daily details and the numbers of innocent victims falling around the clock in Gaza. The bottom line is that the conflict, in its essence, is a conflict over meaning. It does not only bring together Palestinians and Israelis, as it appears on the surface, as much as it brings together two intellectual cultural systems, each of which is independent with its own outlook on power and existence. Palestine and Israel, upon investigation, are nothing but spearheads in the struggle over meaning between two discordant worlds.
This is what emerges from the talk of Israeli officials themselves, as they keep repeating, from Herzl until today, that their state will stand as an impenetrable fortress against brutality and obscurantism. Service to civilization and enlightenment. This saying includes apparent and hidden meanings, simple and complex. It is sufficient for us here to point out one meaning that we consider to be explicit and implicit at the same time, which is that Israel, since its right to exist is represented as a historical right, is calling upon the most modern means of force available to the modern West to defend this right to exist.
Since its inception, Israel has been trying to build the legitimacy of its existence on two elements: history and modern Western culture, which justifies and justifies colonialism. This is in contrast to Palestinian society, which derives the legitimacy of its right to exist from the land.
The more people become immersed in abstract worlds, the easier it is to uproot them from their cultural environment and the easier it is to throw them into a financial economic system governed by capital controls and market values. It is also easier to extract them from their historical narrative and attach it to the narratives of others.
Palestine, unlike Israel, is not a historical narrative that people from the ends of the earth are calling upon, or an idea carried on the back of modern Western material power. Rather, Palestine is a people living on a land; A people whose existence undermined the basic meaning on which the colonial culture tried to build the legitimacy of the establishment of the State of Israel, the meaning that Palestine is “a land without a people for a people without a land.”
From this we conclude that there is a difference related to meaning-making between Israel and Palestine. If Israel invokes history and the power of material modernity to create the meaning that indicates its legitimacy to exist and survive, then the Palestinians emanate from their affiliation to the land and their presence on it to benefit from the meaning of the right to resistance. Thus, we emerge from the narrow circle of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, into a larger conflict, a conflict between historical narratives that invoke the power of material modernity, and narratives based on interaction with the land as the original home of existence.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has manifestations in the world of meanings. This conflict does not stop at narrow geographical borders, but rather extends to include the entire world. This is because it combines two different views of the world: As for the first view, its proponents start from an expansionist idea that urges them to extend their power and control over the land, the entire land, even if that requires stripping peoples of their affiliation to their places; As for the second view, its owners cling with all their strength to their right to remain on their land.
If the conflict over territory takes an explicitly armed form in the Israeli-Palestinian context, it takes on symbolic and cultural forms the further we move away from the geography of this conflict. Upon investigation, we find that the peoples of the entire region - if not the peoples of the world as a whole - are subjected to the most horrific process of undermining their existing relations with their land. The world has become flat, as Thomas Friedman says in the title of his book: (The World is Flat).
One of the manifestations of our flatness is that wherever you turn, you find strange creatures that have no connection to their original culture, stemming from the interaction of generations and generations with the land.
It is enough to take a quick look at the radio and television entertainment programs reproduced in the Arab and Islamic world, in order to verify what is happening in terms of ignorance and displacement of minds from the world of their original meanings, to worlds of abstract meanings, drowned in triviality, mediocrity, and absurdity.
It is known that the more people are immersed in these abstract worlds, the easier it is to uproot them from their cultural environment and the easier it is to throw them into a financial economic system governed by capital controls and market values. It is also easier to remove them from their historical narrative and attach it to the narratives of others.
you can say; Gaza represents the last stronghold of the Arab and Islamic world’s steadfastness in the face of a civilizational system that sees geographical expansion as an inevitable destiny and a responsibility dictated by religious moral duty, as was common in American society during the nineteenth century through the saying: “inevitable destiny” or “manifest destiny” ( Manifest Destiny).
After Gaza, the Arab and Islamic world will be forced to fight one of the fiercest wars of meaning to regain the sense of belonging to the land, this sense on which their cultural system is based.
Many poets, philosophers and thinkers in the history of the West, since the nineteenth century, have realized that modernity has established a culture based on abstracting meanings from its relationship with the land, the original home of existence. It is as if we are looking with a keen eye at what the world will become, under the command of this modernity, in terms of abstract cultures with the tightening grip of the Anglo-American utilitarian doctrine, and then with the victory of the technological system that establishes virtual worlds and creates a reality above reality.
When we consider Walt Whitman's poems that he composed in his poetry collection, Leaves of Grass, we find that they are an attempt to rid the emerging American culture of the weight of a narrative based on the logic of appendageal development, which aims to move the worlds out of their geographical boundaries towards a promised existential horizon.
It is enough to contemplate the title of the collection, “Leaves of Grass,” to realize the meanings Whitman aspires to, which call for basing cultural life in America on examining the small details of the earth. He declares in one of his poems included in the collection that he “sings the melody of the earth.” That is, in its forms that inspire the true meanings of existence.
The trend that called in the American context to be satisfied with the land as a home for existence did not win, but rather the pragmatic trend that employed material force to achieve heights in the land prevailed. A request to impose a universal culture devoid of multiple and diverse geographical particularities.
It is not surprising - in this situation - that Israel finds support for itself in America and, in turn, is geographically superior to the peoples of the region, declaring that it has a Western and not an Eastern identity, and boasting that it is the only entity that can embody in the land of the East the universal values of the West.
This is the essence of what Bernard Lewis and his followers seek to install in the Western imagination. Lewis finds no embarrassment in calling on the Arab and Islamic world to rid its culture of its sense of connection to the land as a condition for entering the global era of Western modernity.
The more one rereads his book on the tense relationship between Islam and modernity (What Went Wrong), the more certain he becomes that Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians is of the type of conflict that combines two meanings: the meaning of creating your cultural identity in interaction with the land, and the meaning of seeking elevation in the earth as a way to create... culture.
The Israeli settlers and the extremists behind them are waging a war against the simple Palestinian farmer. You find them uprooting his olive trees and destroying the foundations of his existence. We find in this behavior evidence of the depth of Israel's existential crisis. You want to replace a settler with a farmer, a settler who comes on the back of a tank, instead of a farmer who emerges from the core of the land.
If the Arab and Islamic world accepts the systematic demolition of the foundations of the Palestinians’ existence on their land, it will inevitably accept the systematic demolition that affects the foundations of their existence as entities that derive their cultural specificity from a long interaction with the land, the source of meaning and the home of existence.
When we consider what journalists, intellectuals, academics, and clerics have come to demand of trivial heroism on social media sites, and they are on par with misfit people, we tend to say that absurdity has tightened its rings around culture in the Arab world, which will make it difficult to enter the world of authentic meanings. Necessarily.
However, despite all this, there are many signs that indicate a growing awareness that what is happening in Gaza inevitably inaugurates a new phase in the history of the relationship between the West and the Arab and Islamic peoples, if not between the West and the peoples of the entire earth.
The bottom line; Anyone who seeks meaning for the existence of Israel as it is and for the crimes it commits against the Palestinian people will not find any meaning. The meaning - as is no secret - indicates the meaning of the direction that a person takes in the natural, innate, sensory world of meaning.
The existence of Israel and what it does has no meaning except in an abstract world in which the powerful monopolize the creation of meaning in order to force it on others.