Reflection on Palestinian Nationalism, or: The Ontology of the Nonexistent

Every human creation emerges within the tension between consciousness and being.
Consciousness does not create ex nihilo; it gives form to what already operates beyond it. At times the equilibrium collapses, and the mind begins to treat the image it has fashioned as though it were the source itself.
Then the imagined aspires to bear ontological weight — it masquerades as the real.

Twentieth-century philosophy came to celebrate this phenomenon.
If Kant still recognized that human knowledge is bound by the mode through which phenomena appear to us, his successors eliminated the very notion of the thing-in-itself. What we call “reality” gradually became nothing more than representations that refer to no substance — only to the power structures that sustain them.

Consider the evolution of the idea of the nation.
At first stood the classical current (primordialism), which viewed the nation as a natural phenomenon rooted in blood, descent, language, religion, and culture.
Nationalism, in this view, is the direct continuation of ancient affinities among ethnic groups.
Later came another current — epitomized by Benedict Anderson — which held that the nation is the product of a shared imagination: not something that pre-existed, but rather the outcome of modern conditions that gave rise to it.
This imagination, however, rests upon a real substratum — a living language, folklore, institutional traditions, a stable memory, patterns of life.
Here, the nation’s name reveals its body.

Yet cultural constructivism does not stop there.
For it, political imagination itself is a fiction — an attempt to fill an absolute void, to substitute declaration for being.
A declaration may act, but its efficacy depends upon the continual affirmation of a believing gaze.
Faith becomes the substitute for truth. Imagination must fabricate a foundation retroactively; hence it relies on the ceaseless validation of external discourse.

And as if to prove the thesis, the anti-essentialist turn coincided with an invention ex nihilo: the perfect test case — the Palestinian “people.”
Here, instead of the realization of a right to self-determination, we encounter the invention of a right that never existed, whose purpose is to negate one that does.
A play of signifiers at the expense of reality.
Every presentation of Palestinian nationhood rests upon the negation of Jewish nationhood — a cultural plagiarism of name, flag, map, and history.
This ontological theft, buttressed by legal declarations and the sanction of international institutions, serves to conjure ex nihilo a national framework whose sole function is the erasure of Jewish collective existence.
Thus a performative existence takes shape: it acts because it is being enacted — written, spoken, and endlessly reiterated.

The Western fascination with “Palestinianism” embodies a collective fetish.
It is a mechanism that endows the object (the Palestinian) with surplus power, as a defense against an anxiety rooted in the unbearable real — Israel.
A man who develops desire toward a woman’s shoe does not confuse the shoe with the woman; his psychic structure transfers desire onto a substitute object that replaces the real.
The shoe becomes the locus of release, a means of controlling a symbolic fragment of femininity.
So too with European Palestinianization: signs, names, and rituals function as substitute objects charged with moral and political desire.
The third term — “the Palestinian” — appears, enabling the negation of the Jewish collective.
This negation no longer requires Auschwitz; it fulfills itself through appeals to justice and human rights, invoked in the name of national liberation.

Greta Thunberg @ the flotilla

Hence the symbolic order keeps accumulating layers of fictive rituality meant to confirm the existence of what does not exist.
Grandiose declarations, international resolutions, conferences, ceremonies, and now flotillas — all operate as fetishistic rites reinforcing the substitute object.
This is not a crude falsehood but a mechanism of belief that seeks to convert absence into the semblance of a concrete Palestinian reality through the repetition of an invented sign.
In Baudrillard’s terms, it is a simulacrum — a copy that moves and multiplies without an original.
Yet what must be added here is the logic of desire: the endless proliferation of signs is not merely propaganda but a means of channeling European guilt — the repressed desire to kill the Jew — toward an object that offers catharsis.

Man was created with the capacity to endow the nonexistent with reality.
This is an inherent element of culture — its source of power and its temptation.
Philosophy’s task is not to wage war on the imaginary, but to discern when it discloses being and when it conceals its absence.
When the bond between name and body is preserved, culture is born; when it is severed, a fetishistic mechanism of political desire emerges to fill the void.
When imagination detaches from being, delusion is born: gods without divinity, a high-heeled shoe instead of a woman, and a people without existence.
Philosophy does not judge the act of creation, but the integrity of its creator — for even the imaginary bears responsibility.
One may look upon the imagined and say it “exists,” but only he who sustains a living relation between idea and reality touches truth.