On 7 October, the Palestinian militant group Hamas launched a major incursion from Gaza into nearby Israeli kibbutzim and military bases. Israel responded by declaring all-out war, with severe repercussions for Gaza. Since then, Israeli air strikes have killed tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, and the death toll continues to rise rapidly. Fears that this could escalate into a wider war in the region are growing with the Israeli attacks in Lebanon. Israel’s ongoing genocidal assault on the people of Gaza has brought back onto the global agenda the long-ignored demands of the Palestinians for rights and an independent national state, supported by the United Nations since 1947.
Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), set out his views on the protracted Israeli-Palestinian conflict in his handwritten submissions to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), later published in five volumes under the title “Manifesto for a Democratic Civilisation”.
As the Israeli-Palestinian conflict rages on, we look at Öcalan’s analysis of Arab nation-states and the creation of Israel. The following text is an excerpt from the fifth book of his defense writings, which has not yet been published in English.
Excerpt from: Democratic Civilization Solution -V- Kurdish Question and Democratic Nation Solution – Defending the Kurds in the Grip of Cultural Genocide. (Abdullah Öcalan)
One of the main sources of the crisis in the Middle East is the process of co-construction of the Arab nation-states and Israel. When Britain began its operations on the Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the 19th century, it used the Arab sheikhs as battering rams. It accelerated the disintegration of the Empire in the Balkans by using Orthodox clerics of Greek origin to support the building of the Greek nation-state. In the Arabian Peninsula, south of the Empire and strategically located on the route to India, it began to support a similar activity, Arab nation-statism, through sheikhs representing the high hierarchy of the Muslim clergy. In the same period, it undertook similar initiatives in Kurdistan with the sectarian leaders of Sulaymaniyah (mainly of the Naqshbandi and Qadiri sects). It also developed its growing control over the south of the Shah of Iran’s territory. The process, which began with revolts, ended with mandate regimes after World War I and full-fledged nation-states after World War II. In the meantime, the Ottoman Empire was dissolved. A huge vacuum has been or is being created in the region. Unlike what Britain did in India, it did not set up in the region as a direct colonial power. But it left no rival force. It wanted to build the Republic of Turkey in the same framework as the Arab mandate regimes (the main topic of discussion at the Sivas Congress was the British or American mandate) and on the same date (1920). M. Kemal’s radical stance (much like the radical republican outbursts of the Montagnards, Robespierre and their friends against the Constitutional Kingdom designed by the British in the French Revolution) tilted the outcome towards a republic. But nothing essentially changed. The Arab mandate regimes were soon transformed into similar nation-states. Whether they were called kingdoms or republics did not change their minimalist essence as nation-states.
The acceleration of Israel’s birth also coincides with this process. In addition to what has already been stated in the previous chapters on the Jewish tribe, it is worth noting again that the origins of Israel can be traced back to these tribes and their ideologies (Jewish ideology, monotheistic religions and nationalisms). In essence, Israel is a natural product of the wars between nation-states that developed as modern states along the Amsterdam-London line in the 1550s, lasting almost four hundred years and turning Europe into a bloodbath. Jewish intellectualism and capitalism have always played a prominent role in building nation-states. However, it was believed that only with the disintegration of the Catholic, Orthodox, and Islamic Empires would the Jews gain their freedom, and a Jewish-Israeli state would be established based on the Zionist ideals of Jewish nationalism, which gradually developed in the process. Before, during and after World War I, these faithful, conscious and organized efforts bore fruit. Together with the minimalist nation-statism of the Republic of Turkey, which was founded on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, and in the environment created by numerous minimalist Arab nation-states, the Jewish nation-state of Israel was officially proclaimed (1948), which was the goal of the holy ideology of Zion. As proof of its proto-Israeli essence, the Republic of Turkey was the first nation-state to recognize it.
The foundation and proclamation of Israel are no ordinary events. Israel was born as the central hegemonic power of the hegemonism of capitalist modernity, filling the power vacuum created by the transformation of the Ottoman Empire and the Shah of Iran, the last powers to play a hegemonic role in the region, into dependent minimalist nation-states. The foundation of Israel as a central hegemonic power is a very important issue. This means that as long as the other nation-states in the region recognize Israel as a hegemonic power, they will be accepted as legitimate, and if they do not, they will be worn down by wars until they do. Since the Republic of Turkey, Egypt, Jordan and some Gulf countries were among the first to recognize Israel, they were accepted as legitimate nation-states and were brought into the system. The rest continue the war with Israel and its allies and other countries. The wars and conflicts with the Arabs in the framework of the Palestinian question and with other Islamic countries in the framework of the Gulf question are closely linked to Israel’s hegemonic presence in the region. These conflicts, conspiracies, assassinations and wars will continue until Israel’s hegemony is recognized.
Unless we correctly understand the hegemonic construction of capitalist modernity in the Middle East, we will not be able to correctly understand why twenty-two Arab nation-states were founded. The capitalist modernity constructed in the Middle East cannot be correctly analyzed with the right-left, religious-sectarian, ethnicist and tribalist interpretations of the history of petty-bourgeois independence of the nation-states. In this context, the understanding of the Arab question as it really is (as well as the correct understanding of the problems of the Republic of Turkey and other Turkish republics and communities) requires, first of all, a correct understanding of the construction and establishment of the hegemonism of capitalist modernity in the Middle East. On its own, no state and social problem can be understood by mentalities of history and society that mock reality, such as the “glorious foundation of the nation-state” and so on. Therefore, the Arab problem is not only a problem related to Israel, nor can it be reduced to a Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The deeper overriding problem facing Arab societies stems primarily from dividing Arabs into twenty-two nation-states. These twenty-two states can play no other role than that of collective spies of capitalist modernity. Their existence is the main problem for the Arab peoples. In this context, the Arab question is a problem related to the construction and establishment of capitalist modernity in the region. However, they may have a problem with Israel in this context, namely as the region’s hegemonic power of capitalist modernity.
But let’s not forget that the forces that built Israel are the same forces that built the twenty-two Arab nation-states. Therefore, their relations and contradictions with Israel are a camouflage. Since they essentially share the same hegemonic system, these contradictions, though strong, can only make sense if they dare to leave capitalist modernity. Will they continue in the same hegemony of capitalist modernity and not recognize Israel?! Masked and false diplomacy is born out of the denial of this reality. Whether it is radical Islam, moderate Islam or Shiite Islam, all Islamic nationalist approaches that claim to replace capitalist modernity are nothing but a great fraud, for this Islamism is a derivative of the nationalism that has developed under the hegemony of capitalist modernity since the beginning of the 19th century, and is an ideological tool of capitalism specific to the Islamic countries of the Middle East, which has no relation to Islamic civilization. The political Islamisms of the last two centuries cannot play a role beyond being masked spies of capitalist hegemony, for that is how they are constructed and mobilized in the context of capitalist modernity. Their inability to play a role other than delving into the Middle East’s national and social problems over the last two centuries confirms this reality. They are the main ideological and political obstacles to communalism and democratic nationalism. Cultural Islam is a different matter, and defending and embracing this Islam in the context of tradition has a significant and positive aspect.
If they cannot transcend the context of capitalist modernity, the Arab-Israeli and Palestinian-Israeli conflicts cannot help but resemble a cat-and-mouse fight. The result is that for almost a hundred years, the vital energy of all Arab peoples has been wasted in these conflicts with a predetermined outcome. Had these conflicts not been invented, there would have been an Arabia ten times the value of Japan on oil revenues alone. The most important conclusion to be drawn from this statement is that the nation-state system in the Middle East is not a source of solution to the fundamental national and social problems, as claimed, but on the contrary, it is a source of developing, aggravating, deepening and making the problems intractable. The nation-state does not solve problems; it produces them. Moreover, the system itself is a means of exhausting not only the states of the Middle East but also their societies by pitting them against each other to the point of disempowerment. The reality in Iraq confirms this observation very well. In this case, we cannot entirely blame capitalist modernity. The Islamist and leftist (real socialist) ideologies and political organizations, which have emerged as problem solvers and liberators, are at least as responsible as the carrier elements of capitalist modernity (Young Turk, Young Kurd, Young Arab, and Young Persian). For almost a hundred years, none of the methods and programs they have proposed to their peoples have been successful, nor have they been able to play a role beyond that of serving the regional construction of capitalist modernity and being used on this basis. We cannot deny the role of these realities in the context of the ideologies and political organizations of the Arab nation-states.
The Arab problems are not insoluble like the Turkish ones. There are two main axes on which the problems are attempted to be analyzed and solved. The first axis is based on increasing the state’s participation and social actions within the same system and achieving results by creating conflicts to this end. This is what the Arab nation-states, including the Palestine Liberation Organization, have been trying to achieve through the method of confrontation for the past fifty years. With the Camp David-type agreements reached with Egypt, this axis will be completed sooner or later. But this path will only aggravate Arab social problems and force the search for radical solutions. This path may satisfy the Arab oil oligarchs, but it will never satisfy the deep economic and democratic demands of their peoples. The Arab peoples have economic and democratic problems piled up like mountains throughout history. The Arab nation-states, satellites of capitalist modernity, do not even want to utter the name of a solution, let alone solve these problems. Constantly aggravated and disguised by pseudo-religious and sectarian conflicts, the problems evolve to such an extent that they lead either to dissolution, disintegration and conflict, as seen in the example of Iraq, or to the demand for radical national economic, social, cultural and democratic solutions.
The second main axis for the solution of Arab problems can only be based on overcoming capitalist modernity. It is a break with the system. It should be well known that Islamic radicalism or political Islam cannot constitute an alternative modernity. Islam as a culture can only play a role in the life of an alternative modernity to capitalist modernity. The paradigm of modernity appropriate to the historical and social realities of all the peoples of the Middle East is the most powerful and correct option for the Arab peoples. The alternative modernity for the peoples is democratic modernity, which consists of the unity of national democratic, socialist, ecological, feminist and cultural movements that have always struggled against capitalist modernity.
In the context of Arab problems, the second set of problems is linked to the existence of Israel. The vision that Arab nationalism, Islamism and nation-statism have of Israel is, in turn, guided by the hegemony of Jewish-Israeli ideology; it remains within the borders drawn by Jewish-Israeli ideology and the Jewish-Israeli state. As long as it remains within modernity itself, it can only be a plaything of Israeli hegemony, which has a small population. Israel cannot escape being a prisoner of its own invention, capitalist modernity. As long as it sits in the middle of the Arabian Sea, surrounded by forces ready to drown it at any moment, Israel will never stop defending itself with its technological superiority, including atomic weapons. Either Israel creates under its hegemony a balance of nation-states in the Middle East at peace with itself, which has proved very difficult for the reasons we have tried to explain, or if it wants to escape from the captivity of the system it has created, it must risk the transcendence of capitalist modernity. Democratic modernity is the option that constitutes a permanent solution not only to the Jewish problem in the jungle of the Middle East but also to the problem of the Israeli state, surrounded by nationalist and religious atrocities of its own creation.
