Why Gingrich and Sand are both wrong

Last Friday Republican Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich told The Jewish Channel -a little known cable television channel in the U.S- how he sees the Palestinian people as invented and that they are really Arabs part of the wider Arab community. Cries of outrage followed and many called on Gingrich to look at Shlomo Sand’s book ‘The Invention of the Jewish People’. However the request is fairly dubious; is it to prove that it is not the Palestinians but the Jews who are an invented people, or is it to show how the Jews are also an invented people.

There are a myriad of opinions of how to define what a nation is. Claiming that one people constitute a nation and the other not can be problematic.

For example, Modernist thinkers claim that all nations are invented, products of modernity originating in the late 18^th Century and the result of urbanisation, the printing press, industrialization together with other factors. Within this argument, each nation is as invented as the other and one national claim is no stronger than another’s. Sand’s argument that the Jews are an invented people is based on such modernist arguments. Sand is open about this fact drawing his main arguments from such modernist thinkers as Ernest Gellner and Benedict Anderson amongst others. If this were so then Sand’s claim that the Jewish people are ‘invented’ would be no big discovery since it would be the natural conclusion of Modernist scholars that this is so.

The fact that Sand picks out the Jewish case to question whether it has ancient roots is in itself antithetical. On the one hand, by rejecting the Jewish case as a legitimate example of a primordial nation, he is assuming that nations can be primordial (with ancient roots).  On the other hand, by using modernist claims to show the Jewish nation is invented, he is acknowledging that all nations are invented not just the Jewish one. This is a tactic that seems to prove that the Jews are an invented people, but blurs modernist and primordialist arguments making it seem that the Jewish case specifically is invented, rather than all cases of nations were invented.  It would be more fitting to call his book ‘The invention of peoples’ rather than the ‘The invention of the Jewish people’.

This brings me on to the second flawed claim, that of Newt Gingrich arguing that Palestinians are an invented people. Firstly I would love to ask the Republican candidate about the origins of the nation of the United States? The fact is, the U.S is as an invented nation as they come and the strong sense of national identity comes more from its focus on civic bonding through the excessive pledges of allegiance, prominence of the national flag and of course the continuous sense of the ‘other’. When Gingrich calls Palestinians an invented nation, what he is assuming is that there are such things as non-invented nations, or primordial nations. However by referring to the Palestinians as part of a wider Arab community, what he is in fact doing is claiming that nations should rather be regarded as part of their status before nations existed, in a world of civilizations. This thought process is similar to that of Samuel Huntington who splits up the world into civilizations based on culture, in which it is a civilization’s culture that is the most important contributor of identity, and thus the defining factor within the world order. If this were so it would be more correct to see Israel as part of ‘the West’ and the Palestinians part of the ‘Arab population’. Doing so denies Israel as much as Palestine with the status of ‘nation’. To argue that one is a nation and independent of civilization and the other not is an inconsistent logic.

Both Sand and Gingrich’s arguments are based on flawed logics that manipulate theories of nations and nationalism to support their political views. For Sand this became clear to me when I heard him speak in SOAS last year on the topic. At the conclusion of his lecture he ended not by saying ‘that is why claims of a Jewish people in antiquity are flawed’ but rather appealed; ‘and so you should all try and boycott Israel’. Sand is no Jewish historian, he is a critic of the modern state of Israel and his book is an attempt to justify his political criticisms with claims that the Jewish people are in fact not a people, and thus have no real claim to nationhood. He projects his political beliefs back into history in order to support his views today.

Gingrich too in his effort to secure Jewish votes, makes a stark claim that questions the Palestinians as a nation. I doubt whether Gingrich has considered what constitutes a nation and whether the Palestinians are any less a nation than that of the American case, for example. Like Sand, in order to further his political aspirations, Gingrich makes a claim that is empty and invalid. This point is even starker when in supporting his claim at the GOP primary debate he asserted, “These people are terrorists.” His claim that the Palestinian people are not a nation is not a historical argument, but a politically loaded outburst that is void of any substance.

The fact is, is that there are two nations staking a claim in one land. Maximalist claims denying the existence of either of these nations are dangerous and unhelpful. Maximalist claims frame the conflict as a zero-sum game and will only continue to damage both nations, or invented nations, depending on whom you ask.