The Peculiar Attachment of the Peasants to Locations
The peculiar attachment of the peasants to the locations all over the world served as the basis for the incredible stability of the enormously hierarchical and supremely manipulative governmental institutions. For instance, the love for ancestral graveyards, caves with eerie funny noises, and even streams that naturally flood at certain times of the year contributed to the development of national identities (Zerubavel 12). To put it another way, the colonial centers were able to use systematic techniques like divide and conquer by taking advantage of their relationships with local chiefs, priests, and even elders thanks to a cosmic jumble of particularities. It is through such symbolic places that have made the Palestinians and the Israelites find it hard to co-exist and also discover a solution to their age-old antagonisms. The paper, therefore, explores the foundational responsibility of the symbolic places for the national identities of the Israelis and Palestinians.
Existence of Nationalism and National States
For the existence of the nationalism and the national states, individuals had to learn on how to identify conceptually and to take the abstract connections to the persons they did not know and spaces they were not familiar with so severely that they would fight for their protection. The disorienting procedures of social mobilization affected almost all the masses in the world inclusive of the Jews, more so the European ones, for instance, the wars, and oppression. The Jews' place in the Christian society was of estrangement and segregation, just moving in the world; it had no attachment to the places they visited (Zerubavel 25). Their cultural merriment of their non-remembered land of Israel offered them the practice of the nonfigurative devotion not to a place of exceptional personal significance, but to a space of cooperative, abstract, and categorical focus (Lustick 70).
Zionism and the New Country
Even though there was a massive role in the society with the determination to incorporate the Jews from diverse places, the Zionism still faced a unique predicament, making the new country, different, alien, and unknown for the majority of the Jewish inhabitants, to feel at home. They put more emphasis on the terrain mapping of Israel's land, thus spotting and climbing the traces and exploring the caves, springs, and even altering the names of places to the imaginary Hebrew terms. On the other hand, the Arabs displaced from their country, Palestine, and living in what became the Israel never yearned to go back to their space of Palestine, but to their fields and homes, as it was more valuable to them than the promised and celebrated yet unremembered space. The Palestinians, therefore, had the right of return to their specific homes and villages and also get back from the areas outside Palestine to any locations in the space that was not of actual origin and attachment. They were different from the Zionist immigrants in that they needed no mapping of the areas they once settled in or even how to move back to the ancestral land. Moreover, the majority of the Israel refugees traveled back home and remained there, as they were well conversant with the roads and trails and had attachments to them (Lustick 71).
Disagreement Between Israelis and Palestinians
Therefore, the symbolic places of the Palestinian and Israel national identities have always led to the disagreement between the two groups due to the variance in their trajectories. The bulk of the Israelis cannot afford the detachment from the places they call home as a part of constructing an affection to space. Conversely, the majority of the Palestinians do not comprehend the significance of the attachment of the Israelis to the places they are in, but only see them as cruel and brutal individuals that occupy the space of Palestine against their will.
Works Cited
Lustick, Ian S. Places vs. Spaces for Palestinians and Jews. 2014. https://www.sas.upenn.edu/polisci/sites/www.sas.upenn.edu.polisci/files/Place%20and%20Space%20for%20Palestinians%20and%20Jews.pdf. Accessed 06 Nov. 2017.
Zerubavel, Yael. Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition. University of Chicago Press, 1997.
