African Global Dialogue: Narrative Conditions of Peace in the Middle East

Ivor Chipkin

This short intervention seeks to address the basic question of these dialogues: What would it take to interrupt the longer historical pattern of extreme violence in Israel/Palestine and that has given rise to the current cycle of atrocities? 

As is by now well known, the South African government under President Cyril Ramaphosa recently took Israel to the International Court of Justice. These developments reflect a long-standing identification with the Palestinian people from within the African National Congress and the broader anti-apartheid movement. As Ramaphosa wrote in a letter to the people of South Africa in May 2021, long before the atrocities of 7 October and the subsequent Israeli invasion of Gaza, “as lovers of freedom and of justice, we stand with the Palestinian people in their quest for self-determination, but also in their resistance against the deprivation of their human rights and the denial of their dignity”. This solidarity has only deepened in recent years, though the ANC’s traditional ally, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, has faded in this administration’s affections in favour of Hamas. 

I think Ramaphosa has surfaced a fundamental aspect of the conflict that is widely spoken about but that is not properly engaged with: the politics of self-determination. I would like to reflect on this political idea and its practices.

The politics of self-determination has fundamentally shaped world politics, bringing onto the stage of history dozens of new states, cut from European Empires. More recently, in the 1990s, the politics of self-determination once again re-arranged the global cartography as the Soviet Union collapsed and Yugoslavia disintegrated. The current war in Ukraine takes place precisely in the terrain of such a politics. In South Africa, the politics of ‘self-determination’ underwent an unusual transformation, however. It was appropriated by the National Party, not to bring into existence a free African people, but to justify their expulsion from the body politic. For this reason, is has had an ambivalent reception in South Africa, often associated with reactionary attempts to prevent or delay democratisation. 

In this presentation, I want to juxtapose the politics of self-determination and the politics of national democratic revolution, exploring briefly their origins and also their political objectives. 

After what Erez Manela called the ‘Wilsonian moment’, self-determination, a term first used politically by the Bolsheviks and brought to international attention by Lenin, acquired a meaning in relation to Woodrow Wilson’s idea of liberal internationalism. In this regard, the self– of self-determination was akin to the ‘I’ of the individual, though transformed from a unit of national society into a unit of international society. If societies were composed of individuals, international society was made up of peoples already present to themselves, and able to act collectively according to a self-defined sense of their common interest. At least, this was Wilson’s conception of what European society should be like. It was not how he thought about what Vijay Prashad once called, in his evocative if not ironic phrase, the ‘darker nations’. Self-determination was a politics of ‘popular legitimacy’ based on the ‘consent of the governed’, envisaged for European peoples. 

Lenin’s emphasis was different. In the first place, the term self-determination − in Russian ‘samoopredeleniye’ – was a response to Polish communist proposals for the ‘joint’ determination of peoples under socialism, requiring mutual agreement between the nation seeking to secede and all the other citizens of the state. Lenin thought that this was absurd and insisted on a ‘right to secede’. This right was written into the Soviet constitution, as it was the constitution of the Federal Republic of Yugolsavia. The dissolution of both polities was ultimately provoked by republican elites demanding secession. In other words, the prefix self- (or samo-) did not spontaneously conjure the idea of a people already at one with itself, though Lenin did agree that nations were natural phenomena. Ultimately, both Wilson and Lenin came up against the incoherence of the term, though they drew different conclusions. 

For Wilson, the naturalness of ‘peoples’ as fundamental elements of international society crashed against his racism. He was able to reconcile his liberal internationalism with support for Imperial rule because he doubted the capacity of Black and Brown people to constitute a people, either at all or in the absence of European or American tutelage. Self-determination for Europeans (Serbs, Czechs, Bulgarians, Germans) under the yoke of Imperialism. Imperialism for Black and Brown people. 

Even if Lenin and the Bolsheviks, under the influence of the Austro-Marxists, had come to accept the ‘naturnalness’ of peoples qua nations, self-determination produced recurring theoretical and political contradictions. For one, colonial populations in Africa and Asia were mostly thrown together in Imperial political units without long histories as integrated socioeconomic and political entities, without well-established elites imbued with consciousness of distinct cultural and historical identities. Secondly, even when such elites did emerge, it was far from obvious that they constituted a progressive vanguard seeking to liberate themselves from Imperial regimes. 

After Lenin’s death, support for colonial struggles largely waned in the Soviet Union, as its theorists and politicians came to be suspicious of the progressive character of anti-colonial nationalism. We might recall that Soviet support for Israel in 1948 was based on the idea that Zionism constituted an anti-Imperialist force, whereas Arab nationalism was too entangled with Britain and French Imperialism to be regarded as properly revolutionary. 

What is unavoidable and yet overwhelmingly avoided is that the politics of self-determination constituted a rupture in the flow of history, unexpectedly, radically and fundamentally transforming the language and practice of politics, both in terms of producing new subjects, ‘peoples’ seeking a new political object, and states for peoples. 

After the first world war, the appeal of self-determination animated nationalist movements across Africa and Asia and the Middle East. In the former Ottoman territories of Syria, Arabia and Iraq, the new politics gave force to Arab nationalist movements, wanting to transform Ottoman provinces into an ‘Arab Homeland’. The Wilson moment gave momentum to tendencies in the Zionist movement for ‘autoemancipation’, associating the term now with political independence for a Jewish nation in its own territory. (Earlier Zionists were happy to settle for a Jewish homeland within the Ottoman Empire.) As Shlomo Sands has argued, Zionism from then on came to resemble a conventional European nationalism, with a focus on a state for European Jews. 

By the time the 14 points were announced, however, there was already a substantial Jewish presence in Palestine. Jerusalem by 1860, for example, had a majority Jewish population. Most of those were fleeing persecution and poverty. They were hardly a colonial column as is usually construed by the term. Let me add a personal note. My family were part of that movement of people, though my ancestors ended up here in South Africa (via America on my father’s side) rather than in Palestine. Most importantly, they mostly became Ottoman citizens. This simple yet fundamental fact is hardly ever acknowledged. Two Ottoman populations, one Muslim, the other Jewish, began making claims on the same territory for self-determination. There is a further complicating factor, one not anticipated by original Zionist movements. There were large, ancient, Ottoman Jewish populations throughout the Empire. The Jews of what became Iraq, for example, were the Jews of the original exodus. As the Ottoman Empire broke up and Imperial regions became new, Arab states, so Jewish and other non-Arab populations became vulnerable in their homelands. Many of the wars or sites of conflict of the last 50 years relate to unresolved disputes from this period: the conflict between Greece and Turkey over Cyprus and ongoing tensions in the Aegean, Saddam Hussain’s invasion of Kuwait, the Iran and Iraq war, the recent ethnic cleansing of Nagorno Karabakh by Azerbaijan forces, tensions between Russia and Moldova and so on. 

What I am proposing, in other words, is that the conflict between Palestinians and Jewish European settlers in the nineteenth century was overdetermined by 1) the politics of self-determination and 2) the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. It is worth recalling that the Balfour Declaration was issued just as Allenby defeated Ottoman forces at Gaza and before he entered Jerusalem; in other words, at the moment when Britain was imagining a post-Ottoman world. Zionist assertions of statehood arise in the context of this unprecedented historical and political moment. The second point is that the state of Israel that emerged in reality is not a consequence simply of Zionism. It must be seen in the context of the same historical processes that gave rise to the states of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Jordan, and beyond that Turkey, Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria. 

I would like to think through the political effects of such a geopolitical reorientation. 

South Africa offers a useful negative, counterpoint to this experience in one key respect. The politics of self-determination did not take root amongst those opposing apartheid as a form of colonialism – Colonialism of a Special Type (CST) – and it has played, therefore, a mooted role in the imagining of South Africa as a polity. It was interrupted by an unexpected and somewhat obscure (by comparative standards) political development: the coming to the fore in nationalist, communist and trade union circles of the Theory of National Democratic Revolution. 

The term itself, National Democracy, has a complex provenance in post-Second World War debates in the Soviet Union. At issue was how the Soviet government should relate to anti-colonial struggles in Africa and in Asia and to the new states that were beginning to emerge. Of special concern was that in colonial societies capitalism was poorly developed, that the working class there was small and poorly organised and that anti-colonial struggles were usually led by elements of the local bourgeoise, often working with sections of the local aristocracy. When the Cominform was announced in 1947, for example, communists in colonial, semi-colonial or dependent societies were instructed to avoid alliances with national bourgeoisies, who were deemed in the Imperialist camp. By the 1960s, the Cominform position had proved untenable. Firstly, post-colonial states had not affiliated themselves to metropolitan powers but had remained ‘non-aligned’. Secondly, many pursued far-reaching social and economic reforms. 

By 1956, the Soviet position on the national bourgeoisie in former colonies had changed, seeing in them potential allies with the working class and with communists in the struggle against Imperialism. To describe such states, the term ‘national democracy’ was coined. This was the Soviet equivalent of the term ‘development’ that was starting to be used by US administrations in their relations with the ‘Third World’. The history of the non-aligned movement is key to this shift, notably the Bandung conference of 1955 and especially the Belgrade conference of 1961. 

National democracies were deemed socialist-in-orientation, even when ruled by national bourgeoisies that pursued the expansion of private property. This paradox was solved by a distinction between the national scene and the international one. The theory of National Democratic Revolution transformed the ‘national question’ from one primarily of identity (who was the people?) to a tactical and strategic question about which social group (‘motive force’) was best positioned to advance social revolution. I believe that this goes a long way to explain why post-apartheid South Africa has such a fraught and unstable relationship to the idea of its limit, which sometimes stretches to encompass the world (a cosmopolitan vision), sometimes to the continent of Africa (a Pan-African vision), sometimes to a narrower South Africanism based on an appreciation of diversity (Rainbowism), sometimes based on race or ethnicity. 

Let me try to bring my thoughts to an end and to try to tie them together as a policy-political question, which is, after all, the purpose of these dialogues. If the broad argument above has some merit that the politics of self-determination in the context of a post-Ottoman world is a central protagonist in the conflict, then what would it take to interrupt it? If South Africa is an example of how this could be done, then we have to be cautious that there are no easy solutions. The conditions of South Africa’s politics of ‘non-racialism’ are so contingent; rooted in political developments now almost lost to history. It would require finding intellectual, political and cultural traditions in Israeli and Palestinian society that emphasised commonalities and entanglements beyond that of enemies. If so, then we have to be pessimistic in the short and medium terms of anything other than two states existing side-by-side. Here again there is room for pessimism, not so much in the prospects of recognising an independent Palestinian state, but on the prospects of some kind of peaceful neighbourliness. This leaves some kind of external, international intervention that acknowledges that there are no immediate solutions to it, but that moderates the violence of the conflict and keeps it within human limits – a pessimistic view indeed.