On the Palestinian Question
Robert Heck
"You should work... as man for the emancipation of mankind; and you should feel the particular form of your oppression and shame not as an exception to the rule but rather as its confirmation."1
Over 150 years ago, in the Christian state of Prussia, Jews faced discrimination as official state policy simply for having a different religious/ethnic identity than that of the majority population (and most importantly, those in power). The inability of the Jewish people to comprehensively resolve this "Jewish question" manifested in a geopolitical Zionist movement whose goal was the construction of a Jewish-majority state in Palestine. This movement has culminated in Israel, an officially "Jewish state" whose existence is predicated on maintaining a demographic majority of persons with Jewish religious/ethnic identity.
Ironically, the Jews, who once sought freedom from the Prussian state, are now being asked to grant freedom. The preexisting majority population of non-Jews living in Palestine, struggling against Israeli occupation and oppression that attempts to uphold a Jewish majority population, symbolizes the tragic consequences of an incomplete resolution to the Jewish question.
Within this historical context, Karl Marx's ideas on human liberation remain highly relevant to the contemporary predicament of the Palestinian people. Marx's proposed resolution to the Jewish question can ultimately help resolve the Palestinian question, as well as actualizing the emancipation of all other oppressed peoples worldwide. In this paper, Marx's comprehensive theory of emancipation will be applied in order to critique contemporary writings on the Palestinian question, including the anti-Zionist work of Joel Kovel.
Bruno Bauer, who like Marx was a member of a group of German philosophy students known as the Young Hegelians, wrote a number of articles dealing with the question of equal rights for Jews vis-a-vis the Prussian state. He claimed that a Jew could not be politically emancipated as long as "the limited nature which makes him a Jewtriumph[ed] over the human nature which should link him as a man with others and [not] separate him from non-Jews."2 For Bauer, the solution was simply to abolish all state-sponsored religion and other official privileges.
Marx's famous essay "On the Jewish Question" provides a thorough critique of Bauer. In this work, he faults Bauer for falling into contradictions as he narrowly presents the Jewish question as one-sided, as only a problem of Jews in relation to Christianity. Since Bauer limits his examination to the Christian state, he ceases to be critical when it comes to universal emancipation and the state in general. In turn Marx asks, "What kind of state?...What kind of emancipation is involved and what are its underlying conditions?"3
Marx thus examines the theory behind, not the practice stemming from, the foremost liberal states at the timeFrance and the United States. These states boast the embodiment of emancipation, of liberty, justice, equality, and security for all. Yet, the man presupposed in these "rights of man" is bourgeois manan atomistic, isolated monad, conceiving himself to be essentially divorced from social relations with his fellow humans. As such, liberty is not based on the association of human with human, but rather its separation. It is the "right of this separation, the right of the limited individual limited to himself."4 Practically applied, the right of private property emerges as the "right to self-interest" without regard for others, independent of their social relations. Equality is declared as equal opportunity and access to the universality of the state, that is, "all are created equal". Privileges and ranks are claimed to be abolished while material differences are allowed to persist. "All are the same before the law" from the landowner to the day laborer. The state thus treats basic class-based inequalities as apolitical, separating them from their contingencies since everyone is presupposed as a self-sufficient monad. The rights of bourgeois man are sealed with the right of personal security, meaning the preservation of the limited individual, his rights and his propertythe supreme guarantor of egoism. To keep supposedly atomistic individuals from the dreaded "war of all against all" and maintain order, the liberal state must become autonomous, given a life of its own as an abstracted and reified social institution. Individuals are required to find their emancipation through an intermediary instead of in relation to each other.5 Perceived threats to the autonomy of the state are met with hostility and often outright violence, all in the name of "our national security" and the "protection of our society". Originally alleged to be a means of emancipation, the state becomes inverted into end in itself. At the same time, Marx recognizes the futility of efforts to attenuate and limit the liberal state through an expansion of "civil liberties". While this political emancipation is the best which can be offered in the current context of the bourgeois as the ideal type of existence, such reform ignores the fundamental nature of this existence: individual freedom separated, rather than emerging from, sociality. It is the freedom for the individual to egoistically isolate and withdraw into self-interest rather than the freedom to actualize open and limitless social relations with humanity. Bauer's formulation of the Jewish question thus fails to critique the nature of the liberal state and its limited notion of political emancipation. This failure translates into the inability to surpass the limited, egoistic individual who finds in others "not the realization but rather the limitation of his own freedom". Social relations with others remain degraded to mere "natural necessity, need and private interest, the maintenance of their property and egoistic persons."6 The "separation of man from his community, from himself and from other men" forms the basis of the prized "civil" society within the autonomous liberal, albeit secular, state.7 Most tragically, bourgeois political emancipation prevents the meaningful fulfillment of one's species-being, or the creative and cooperative capacity of humanity-as-community. It is a deformed type of liberation that is employed by the owners of the means of production to further solidify the current social hierarchy within which they are able to prevent the ability of the masses to control their own human destiny. The idea of the liberal state, like the concept of capital, is externalized and purported to be natural and universal in order to deny its assumptions and origins in bourgeois political theory. From this exalted position, the products of human consciousness begin to confront people as alien, controlling them through the justification of an ultimate end in itself. Since "egoism and selfish needs" are thought of as the essence of human rights, complete human emancipation can not take place within the liberal state and its civil society. The negation of humanity through the concept of alienating individualism must first itself be negated. Only when the human imprint on this limited concept of human rights is revealed can individuality be understood as predicated on sociality and relationships be reorganized to humanity's unique species-being. This is the comprehensive idea of human liberation in Marx.8 Unfortunately, this form of human liberation has not occurred historically. Marx and others who helped unveil ideology have been cast aside as dangerous tyrants. Incomplete revolutions like those in the Soviet Union have become the favorite whipping boy for apologists of liberalism. These revolutions' failures to negate the reified autonomy of their state institutions, combined with the constant threats of annihilation from imperialism, produced a hyper-autonomous state with repression on a massive scale in Marx's name. Given the apologists' inability to subject their treasured state structures to meaningful criticism, their incomplete revolutions were bound to fail. Ultimately then, despite the radical implications of Marx's critical philosophy, the same old political emancipation employed in the Jewish question of 19th century Europe has become aggrandized, perpetuated in the form of international law. Consequently, a number of unresolved "questions" continue to propagate despite the comprehensive vision for true emancipation outlined by Marx more than 150 years ago. The Palestinian question is certainly no exception. Even the most prominent champions of justice in the Middle East fall prey to a Bauerian formulation of the Palestinian question. One example is the notable anti-Zionist activist and intellectual Joel Kovel. Kovel claims justifiably that the problem in Palestine is the denial of a common humanity.9 Yet he misidentifies the problem as particular stemming from Jewish exceptionalism in the form of geopolitical Zionism. In other he words, he asserts that state-sponsored privileging of the Jew over all others invalidates a state's claim to universal emancipation.10 The state of Israel effectively withholds political emancipation in an unacceptable way, committing human rights abuses in the name of Zionism. As with Bauer, the failure of Kovel to expansively and critically formulate a question he seeks the answer to leads him into contradictions. As a result, he asserts the state emerged historically to "accommodate the power of the newly emerging capitalist classes" yet the solution is to expand the legitimacy of this state and its civil society.11 Kovel aids these capitalists by occluding their agency in abstracting a particular set of organized social relations (i.e. the liberal state) to their advantage. He points to the problematic tribalism of Zionism and purports this will be remedied through "strengthening and advancing the notion of universal human rights."12 Since "the formulation of a question is its solution",13 I shall ask like Marx, what kind of state, what kind of emancipation and what are its assumptions? The bourgeois emancipation Kovel puts forth is based on the limited individual, separated from his community. It produces not only mere tribalism when one is confronted with something alien, but atomism on a truly sickening scale. When the individual is conceived as isolatable and inherently separable from others, where social relations are considered an external framework which limits the individual, actualization of a common humanity is impossible. The question of the Palestinians as well as others will continue to fester as long as the philosophical turns made by Marx and others are ignored. A radical, fundamentally different re-conceptualization of emancipation and social relations is necessary to negate the negation of humanity by the illusory restrictions imposed by bourgeois political theory and its conception of "human rights". True human liberation can emerge only when the limits of political emancipation offered by the liberal state are superseded. In other words, humans will only be able to experience true freedom when they flourish in the uniqueness of their species-being. This requires an adoption of Marx's "ruthless criticism of everything".14 Even the most sacred concepts, like the liberal state, its notion of civil society, universal human rights, and political emancipation, must be considered apocryphal and doused with criticism. Most importantly, the particular assumptions and historical-political interests underlying these ideals must be constantly exposed, never allowed to remain hidden or dressed up under the guise of human nature. Furthermore, true human liberation can only be realized through Marx's example of praxis-the simultaneity of concrete action and reflexive theory. The contemporary imagined dichotomy between theory and practice must be broken down. Armchair and ivory tower theorizing leads to hollow action, while its complement, the increasingly pragmatic form of activism, lacks the critical reflection and theoretical analysis to embody effective human liberation. Therefore, it is more relevant than ever to apply the lessons learned from Marx's analysis of the Jewish question. To summarize, Marx expands Bauer's original critique of the Jewish request for equal rights in civil society to include a critique of the liberal state and the "human rights" it protects. He demonstrates that bourgeois civil society is predicated on presupposing humanity's species-being as individualistic self-interest. Due to such alienating assumptions, political emancipation within the framework of liberalism leaves the Jewish question unresolved. This deformed emancipation resulted in geopolitical Zionism and the atrocities committed in the name of Israel. Ultimately, a new Palestinian question has emerged which suffers from the same presuppositions as the original Jewish question. The solution is not to further the final form of political emancipation in the current context of the liberal state, but to engage in limitless criticism and negate the original negation of humanity by bourgeois political theory. Activists and scholars alike cannot successfully re-conceptualize social existence and supersede the current alienating order unless the false dichotomy between radical action and critical theory is collapsed. Only when todays stagnant state of praxis is reinvigorated and humanitys species-being supersedes the limitations of bourgeois man can the social hierarchies that corrupt the human spirit be toppled, including the geopolitical Zionism that has caused such pain and suffering in the Middle East. Robert Heck is a political science major at the University of Florida and Treasurer of Nakba '48. His email address is rheck@ufl.edu. 1. 1 Marx, Karl. [1843] 1994. Karl Marx: 1818-1883. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, pg 2.Notes
2. Ibid., pg. 16.
3. Ibid., pg. 5.
4. Ibid., pg. 16.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid., pg. 17.
7. Ibid., pg. 10.
8. Ibid., pg. 21.
9. Kovel, Joel. Zionisms Bad Conscience. http://www.joelkovel.org/zionism.html, pg 1.
10. 10 Ibid., pg. 3.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Marx, op. cit.. pg. 3.
14. Marx, Karl. [1844] 1978. The Marx-Engels Reader. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., pgs. 12-5.
