Subject: Re: Now That's a BAD Jobs Report
It's not artificial, or imaginary, or whatever other imprecation you want to label it as.

Imagination isn't artificial or unreal. It is an act of envisioning, and act of creation. Nations, as "imagined communities" are formed through the creative act of envisioning a community and then creating it. The formation of the modern nation state is an act of imagination resulting in a real process of creation. Creating modern nation states around imagined communities of a common "people".

forming a nation-state around the contours of a people in order to effectuate the autonomy and self-determination of that people, as well as to protect them against the all-too-common depredations that are inflicted on the minority members of a community by the majority (in any political structure whether nation-state or no), is not an illegitimate political project.

It is a political project based on imagining who the "people" are and claiming their historical and cultural existence as a common community with a legitimate claim to civil and political rights within a geographically defined space. This imaginative act of creation has led to a lot of violence in our modern world. With very few (if any) exceptions, this process of nation state formation results in violent acts of cultural and linguistic homogenization, forced assimilation, bantustanization, dislocation and ethnic cleansing, and, in the worst cases, genocide. Indeed the only defense against the violence of nation state formation for indigenous and minority communities that are excluded is their own nationalism and claims to statehood. Because there are no essential identities, and no necessary correspondence between claimed national identities and geographic space, we see political fragmentation resulting everywhere. On the flip side, we see neo-nationalist movements excluding more and more people from access to civil and political rights in the countries of their birth because they are not part of "the people".

The problem is that while we might wish that nation states are the expression of the political will of a common people, they cannot provide civil and political rights to all the people without abandoning the nationalism that was the basis of nation state formation. They do not, and cannot in this world, provide "self determination and autonomy" for a common people because the idea of a self determined common people is a myth. It doesn't exist (not even in Denmark). While the nation state may try to juridically define "the people" in its territory, doing so necessarily excludes "not the people" from access to civil and political rights. In most countries in the world today this means immigrants and the decedents of those original immigrants.

Let's be clear. I am not denying Jewish people the right to self determination and autonomy in pointing any of this out. I am saying that this Zionist project, as with every nationalist project of state formation, cannot create the conditions for Jewish autonomy and self-determination without violence, and most recently genocidal violence. This is not a problem of the Jewish state, it is a problem of the nation state. Because the territory of the Israeli state (and I include all the territory over which the state exercises military authority) is full of "not Jews", the realization of the Zionist project must address this Palestinian question. The lack of answers to this question points to the fundamental violence at the heart of the modern nation state.

Ultimately the Israeli state has all the power over the territories and peoples it controls, so it is responsible for the consequences of its policies including the violence inherent in Zionist policies of creating a greater Israel.