A New Epoch of Wars for Meaning Begins
It is misleading to assume that what is happening in Gaza today is a localized issue with narrow geographical implications, or simply transient events with no future repercussions. The extermination and cleansing that the Palestinian people are facing, under the gaze of a world unable to intervene, calls for a moment of reflection to discern the profound meanings underlying the reality of the ongoing conflict between a vulnerable people clinging to their right to existence and a persistent state determined to deprive them of this right.
It is not easy to contemplate the profound meanings that enable the mind to grasp an alternative reality beyond the daily bloody details and the constant toll of innocent victims in Gaza. The conflict, at its core, is a battle over meaning, not merely pitting Palestinians against Israelis as it may superficially seem, but uniting two cultural and intellectual systems, each with its unique perspective on power and existence. Upon closer examination, Palestine and Israel are not merely combatants in the struggle over meaning, but they represent the clash between two divergent worlds.
This is evident from the statements of Israeli officials, who persistently declare that their state will stand as a formidable fortress against savagery and obscurantism, in service of civilization and enlightenment. This statement carries both manifest and latent meanings, simple and complex. At its core, it signifies that Israel, in asserting its historical right to existence, appeals to the latest means of power wielded by the modern West to defend this right.
Since its inception, Israel has sought to establish the legitimacy of its existence based on two elements: history and modern Western culture, a culture that justifies and legitimizes colonization. This is in contrast to the Palestinian community, which derives the legitimacy of their right to existence from the land.
As people become increasingly drowned in abstract worlds, they become easier to uproot from their cultural environment and assimilate into a financial and economic system governed by capital and market values. Similarly, they become more susceptible to being dislodged from their historical narrative to be subsumed into the narratives of others.
Palestine, unlike Israel, is not a historical narrative to which people from all corners are drawn, or an idea carried on the back of modern Western material power. Rather, Palestine is a people living on the land, a people undermined by their existence, the essential meaning that colonial culture attempted to build the legitimacy of the Israeli state upon – the idea that Palestine was “a land without a people for a people without a land.”
This leads to the conclusion that there is a difference in the construction of meaning between Israel and Palestine. While Israel appeals to history and the power of modernity to construct a meaning indicative of its legitimacy and survival, the Palestinians derive significance from their affiliation with the land and their existence upon it to underscore the right to resistance. This moves beyond the narrow Israeli-Palestinian conflict to a larger battle between historical narratives dependent on the power of modernity and narratives based on interaction with the land as the original homeland of existence.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has ramifications in the world of meanings. This conflict does not stop at narrow geographical boundaries but extends to encompass the entire world. It unites two contrasting views of the world: one driven by expansionist ideas to assert dominance over the earth, and the other rooted in the defense of the right to inhabit their land.
If the conflict over land takes on explicit armed forms in the Israeli-Palestinian context, it assumes symbolic and cultural forms as the context moves away from the geographical setting of the conflict. Upon closer examination, we find that the peoples of the region, if not the entire world, are subject to the egregious undermining of their existing relationships with their land. The world has become flat, as Thomas Friedman noted.
One aspect of this flattening is that wherever one looks, one finds alien entities with no connection to their original culture, drawn into a financial and economic system regulated by capital and market values. They are easily removed from their cultural environment and assimilated into the narratives of others.
Gaza represents the last stronghold of Arab and Islamic resistance in the face of a civilization that views geographical expansion as an inevitable fate and a moral responsibility dictated by the idea of Manifest Destiny, which was popular in American society during the 19th century.
After Gaza, the Arab and Islamic world will be compelled to engage in one of the fiercest battles of meaning to reclaim the sense of belonging to the land, a sense upon which their cultural system is based.
Many poets, philosophers, and thinkers in Western history, especially since the 19th century, have realized that modernity ushered in a culture that separated meanings from their connection with the original land of existence. It is as if they, with their keen insight, foresaw the future under the auspices of modernity, leading to abstract cultures with the triumph of utilitarian Anglo-American doctrine, and subsequently the victory of the technological system that creates virtual worlds and a reality beyond reality.
In reflecting on Walt Whitman’s poems from his collection “Leaves of Grass,” it is clear that he attempted to liberate American culture from the burden of a narrative based on evolutionary progress, which sought to remove the world from its geographical context towards an idealized existential horizon.
A quick glance at the cloned radio and television entertainment programs in the Arab and Islamic world reveals the process of intellectual impoverishment and displacement from their original meanings to trivial, frivolous worlds.
It is widely recognized that the more societies become engulfed in these abstract worlds, the easier it is to uproot them from their cultural environment and assimilate them into a financial and economic system governed by capital and market values. It becomes easier to remove them from their historical narrative and subsume them into the narratives of others.
The fact remains that there are many signs indicating a growing awareness that what is happening in Gaza will inevitably mark a new phase in the history of the relationship between the West, the Arab and Islamic peoples, and the Earth itself, if not all of humanity.
In conclusion, anyone seeking meaning for the existence of Israel in its current form and its crimes against the Palestinian people will find no real significance. The true meaning, as it is evident, signifies the direction one takes in the world of natural sensory reference.
The existence of Israel and its actions hold no meaning except in an abstract world where the powerful monopolize the construction of meaning to forcibly impose it on others.
