Jerusalem

"Who... can help saying that the Palestinian camps have increased and multplied? Just as they did before, perhaps four thousand years ago or more, they seem to have sprung up all over the world, in Afghanistan, Morocco, Algeria, Ethiopia, Eritrea. Whole nations don't become nomads by choice or because they can't keep still. We see them through the windows of aeroplanes or as we leaf through glossy magazines. The shiny pictures lend the camps an air of peace that diffuses itself through the whole cabin, whereas really they are just the discarded refuse of "settled" nations. These, not knowing how to get rid of their "liquid waste," discharge it into a valley or onto a hillside, preferably somewhere between the tropics and the equator.

From the sky, from the pressurized air of the cabin, we see quite plainly that while the fortified countries and cities, tied to the ground like Gulliver, made use of their nomads- the privateers, the navigators, the Magellans, Vasco de Gamas and Ibn Battutas; the explorers, the centurions, the surveyors- they despised them too. And it got better and more comfortable still for the banks when, thanks to the gold in their cellars, money could "circulate" by means of bits of paper.

We oughtn't to have let their ornamental appearance persuade us the tens were happy places. We shouldn't be taken in by the sunny photographs. A gust of wind blew the canvas, the zinc and the corrugated iron all way, and I saw the misery plain."

- Jean Genet, "Prisoner of Love", p15

How can it be possible to communicate the virtuality of the situation in Palestine, outside of Palestine? As Israel begins to make written territorial claims the tentative area of Jerusalem which would split an already overwrought and fragile community, the "Israeli government officials insisted that the United Nations vote was a purely symbolic one that had not changed anything on the ground." It is the difference between a world of actual suffering and the virtual realm in which we have the option whether to respon. The greater distance and the less reality that is communicated, the more the situation becomes a much greater statement of how little societies and nations have come to respect the plea of language and the value of a people without a significant presence, whether in terms of state, finance, or significant history.

The Western narrative responds to a plight of Israel and cannot find a symbol or reality in its of territory to protect and alleviate the gradual displacement of an entire people, and this itself opens up a new question: if a people does not appear as "actual" within a paradigm, such as the nation of Palestine remaining an "observer state" within the United Nations, does this mean that they are any less a people, with less presence. Without state and without security, the people become a vulnerable community, disparate and beginning to show signs of the extreme difference that forms of a society regardless. But place pressure and the force of time of these displaced peoples and create a society or a nation which does not given them a voice or an concrete presence and the walls of the state that have begun to replace it seem far more actual; they represent the states in all their formal arrangements and can take part in the affairs of a state. They can be reasoned with like other states, though this situation disguises that despite fluidity and a tentative presence, people still exist between walls and fortifications. That the Palestinians are not useful or in many senses actual, it would be unwise for a solid state to offer sympathy or support though this is in effect the source of a moral conclusion.

This is a universal issue and, looking towards media representation, it becomes very difficult for existence to justify itself. It must have a certain visceral presence in that virtual realm. The description and appearance of the visceral and the actual rather than its actual existence. Israel's difficulties are fundamentally those of the state, of industry, of the violence of development and growth, and a liquid community which it intends to replace can be redirected like a river somewhere else. Contained, yet brimming over with a sense of indignation and capture. Families have disintegrated and the situation in Palestine marks very physically the destructive aspect of a state, of concrete relationships and control. It is no longer a question of a state's "right" to exist and it is irrelevant to trace the obvious usurpation of the original state of Palestine by an incipient Israel; it is far more important to look at the violence of the state apparatus and what the fluid and displaced state of Palestine tells us about humanity itself, and its actual nature.

States themselves do not exist. Within the state of Israel itself is opposition to the treatment of Palestine and a clear sense or moral indignation. In another article Israel is referred to as "creating facts" in order to establish an even more concrete presence and thus rendering a people even more nomadic than they have been; a people of nomads being a people with no other choice but to dissolve into the fate that life itself and not state existence has offered. The state apparatus is a fact machine, a history machine, and an extensive territorialization which relies of the deterritorialization of another state. In order for a state to subsist and expand in an unsustainable and unnatural concrete form another state must dissolve or be reduced by the facts of that superior state. Look at neo-colonialism and the fabrication of a concrete state in more "developed" places with states such as those in the Northern hemisphere; their ability to create facts within a system dissolves the credibility of other states and dissolves them into subservience. This is, of course, not a critique of capitalism, but rather an indication of how territorialization and the affiliation of many individuals under a concrete assemblage does not allow for sympathy to correspond with movement of displacement. Simple example: homelessness. If we begin to identify our presence as concrete then we begin to make people outside of those structures vulnerable; the outer shell becomes more discrete, more inpenetrable.

And this is the fundamental issue: paradigms based on concrete assemblages. The history of Palestine is fluid and it has been the birthplace and crossroads of many fact-makers, cartographers, crusaders, navigators; the point is that this is the actual presence which we ought to be looking at. The rudiments of a new type of political colonialism emerged from a less concrete presence in evaluating, making political arrangements, developing a more firm presence in the Middle- East. An "actual" political presence by mandate of Britain in 1917 came after a century of political maneuvering in the area; in 1840 the British had handled Palestine so that it could make its way towards weakening the Egyptian government and putting Palestine under Ottoman control, knowing that the Ottoman Empire was in decline. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the Zionist movement and the rejuventation of the Hebrew language entered Palestine and Britain's support and mandate soon followed. Now I have studied Europe during the early twentieth century and Judaism was a very segregated and despised part of European life, especially in Eastern Europe where the pressures of industrial change and social unrest were catastrophic to the Jewish populations there. My first encounter with the Russian Revolution introduced me to systemic and government-sanctioned contempt for Jewish peoples and their culture and people as a result (at least in some respects) have become nomadic, searching for a concrete territory as the greater state apparatus makes religion and culture increasingly a source of division and ghettoization or social difference.

Cartographers blandly draw lines whilst the historians and politicians resume with their fact-making apparatus with concrete assembalges which deny them the world in all its painful, excommunicated, dissolved, shattered presence.

A lens grinder named Baruch Spinoza born with Jupiter ascending walks through the ghettos of Holland with a strange sparkle in his soul. Years later writers would say that he invented radical philosophy, and Gilles Deleuze would see in his becoming-woman, becoming-child, becoming-music, becoming-immanence a transcendent  vision with the willingness to see life as it is, and not as we would like to secure it. Forbidden, placed on the Catholic Index of Forbidden Books and givern a cherem by the Jewish religious authorities. A cartographer of spirit, and of immanence, if Spinoza were to walk the streets of Jerusalem he would not admire the ancient religion or the way in which Palestine has been a crossroads and a bridge between cultures, a trading place, a birth of commerce; he would see rather the miracle of Mesopotamia and the fertile crescent. Nor would he see the singularity of humanity, but he would see the infinite flows which make life possible for humanity. In making a concrete state, the world is denied. Its flowing and multiple presence is made redundant, for the state reduces the multiple for the singular in aspect. 

We know the reasons for the need for security, the need for a state apparatus; they apparently hold people together and offer more interdependence. But what if the city in fact had become such a symbol of reality that the nomadic presence within and outwith that city had been rendered into insiginificance? All the flows and sentiments that take place are essential to a sense of life and and ability to change. What fertile crescent would remain fertile in the source of so much change and history were to become a fixed entity, a presence that could not even accomodate the slightest difference?