How should we understand the vicious violence that the state of Israel is unleashing indiscriminately on Palestinian children, mothers, fathers, hospitals, schools, and places of worship in Gaza? Most importantly, how does this bloodshed relate to our own history of political violence in Uganda and Africa?
To begin with, both Uganda and Israel are nation-states. This means that each of these states exists in the name of a national community that imagines itself in terms of certain purportedly shared biological, or ancestral, or cultural, or religious characteristics.
The state of Israel exists in the name of Jews even if it is important to point out that many Jews have distanced themselves from this state, let alone its apartheid policies and genocidal violence.
Uganda, on the other hand, exists in the name of indigenous communities spelled down in the Third Schedule of the 1995 Constitution. To establish a state in the name of a specific community has often led to much conflict between the national community and political minorities (minority here refers to communities that are not part of the national community regardless of their numerical strength). To minimize these conflicts, nation-states have typically dealt with the political minorities in three ways.
First, by eliminating minorities through mass killing and mass expulsion. This is what the Europeans have done wherever they have settled, from Europe itself to North America and from Australia to New Zealand. Second, by subjecting minorities to systematic discrimination that sometimes escalates into full-scale apartheid, as witnessed in South Africa and now Israel. Third, by tolerating minorities (for example, granting them citizenship rights) without recognizing them as members of the national community.
Israel did not take the route of tolerance. The state of Israel was founded as an exclusive homeland for Jews. To establish such an exclusive homeland for Jews means to get rid of the existing Palestinian population. Indeed, the foundation and expansion of Israel has proceeded with the mass displacement and mass killing of the Palestinians.
It should be clarified that the mere movement of Jews to Palestine is not enough to lead to endless violence between Jews and Palestinians. Rather, this endless violence is rooted in Zionism, an extreme manifestation of the nationalism of the nation-state, which insists that Jews must have an exclusive homeland in Palestine in which non-Jews have no meaningful place. This means that the Palestinians must be eliminated through ethnic cleansing or at least dominated through apartheid.
This is the very ideology that led to the slaughter of Jews in Nazi Europe. The Nazis insisted that Europe belonged to “pure” white peoples, and that the rest had no place there. Nazism and Zionism are rooted in the same logic of the nation-state, which privileges a rigid notion of biology or ancestry or culture as the basis for political association.
The European powers upheld this Nazi logic when they advanced the Zionist aspiration for a separate homeland for Jews. The European powers could have dismantled the logic of Nazism—beyond simply punishing individual Nazis—by exploring ways in which peoples of different races and cultures could coexist in Europe.
Instead, they rewarded the logic of Nazism by supporting the creation of a separate homeland for those who were persecuted in Europe. This never solved the problem of violence; it only reproduced the same in Palestine.
Uganda, meanwhile, has carried out four mass expulsions of non-indigenous communities, including the Kenyan Luos, the Indians and the Banyarwanda.
The logic that leads to the displacement of Palestinians in historic Palestine is the same logic that leads to the expulsion of non-indigenous communities in Uganda. This is the divisive logic of the nation-state of which Zionism is only an extreme, but by no means exceptional, manifestation.
The logic of the identity-based form of political association known as the nation-state pits societies against one another at two levels. First, it pits the national community against minorities, as we have explained. Second, it sometimes divides the national community internally along sub-national lines.
In Uganda, the political community should be conceptualized at two levels. The first level involves the national community, which is an association of indigenous communities as defined in the Constitution. To be considered a full Ugandan citizen with permanent citizenship status, one must prove membership of one of these indigenous communities. Citizens of non-indigenous origin can be stripped of citizenship under certain circumstances. The second level is the regional community, which is composed of the dominant ethnic group of a particular region or district of Uganda. Every indigenous ethnic group of Uganda is assumed to have an ancestral homeland in a particular territory of Uganda. Groups and individuals that live outside of their purported ancestral districts risk forfeiting certain rights like access to land, employment in district-based public offices, district quota university scholarships, and so on. The endless ethnic conflicts in the districts of the Rwenzori, for instance, are based on contestations around which group is indigenous to these districts and which one is not. This kind of sub-national, identity-based contestation is also evident in Israel between the Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jews.
There is nothing new about discrimination based on perceived biological or cultural or religious differences. But there is something particularly problematic about modern nation-state discrimination. Modern discrimination is entrenched in the structure and logic of the state because the state is an identity-based state.
By pre-modern I mean the period before the establishment of the centralized structure of power known as the modern nation-state. This period differs from one part of the world to another. In Africa and the Middle East, the nation-state is a recent colonial creation.
Before the development of centralized power, there were different forms of political powers that coexisted in society. The rulers, whether one calls them kings or emperors or sultans, held one form of political power, which we shall call royal power. In places like Buganda, this royal power could be further subdivided into the power of the kabaka (king), the power of the namasole (queen mother), the power of lubuga (royal sister), and so on.
But there were also other society-based political powers held by the clans, the shrine, the church, and so on. In the lands of Islam, the mufti produced (i.e. interpreted) the Shari’ah (Islamic law), which coexisted with the laws made by the rulers. The mufti’s legal opinion, though nonbinding, informed many judgments in the courts of law. Thus the mufti was an important political authority even if he held no government office. Elsewhere, the church made its own laws that coexisted with the laws of the kings and emperors.
This kind of political arrangement in which power was spread rather concentrated in one entity means that there was no single political authority that determined who should be included in or excluded from the political community. An outsider who was rejected by one clan could be admitted by another. A heretic who was persecuted in one village could find peace in a neighboring village. A cultural stranger who was denounced today could be accepted tomorrow. The terms of inclusion and exclusion were contestable, flexible and abstract. There was no permanent or universal outsider.
The modern state, on the other hand, does two things. First, it centralizes and monopolizes all political power, including the power to determine who is a citizen and who is not. Even if a clan in northern Uganda admits a Somali as its member, the state of Uganda reserves the authority to revoke the citizenship of this new clan member.
Second, the modern state institutionalizes and reifies the criteria for determining who is included and who is excluded in the political community. In Uganda, a full citizen must be a member of an indigenous community that was living within the borders of Uganda by February 1, 1926, as noted earlier.
This makes the nation-state an inherently and extremely discriminatory form of political association with no precedent in history. It seeks to dominate society completely with specific emphasis on marginalizing and colonizing certain sections of society.
To mitigate the marginalization of the minorities, liberals (such as John Locke) introduced the ideas of tolerance within the framework of secularism. The liberal nation-state creates two spheres, namely, the public sphere and the private domain. The private is the domain of religion and other cultural identities while the public is the sphere of reason.
To ensure peaceful coexistence between the national community and the minorities, liberals prescribe that matters to do with religion, culture, and identity should be personal business confined to the private domain. Public principle, including state law, should be based on reason, not religion or any other cultural prejudice. The assumption is that reason is neutral and objective rather than being socially constructed. How can reason and public principle be neutral and objective in an identity-based state? How can an identity-based state produce a law that is detached from the cultural identity of the state?
But there is even…