I've been thinking a lot recently about this book, Swastika Night, by Katherine Burdekin, which I originally read a couple of years ago. It was published in 1937, as WWII was ramping up, and I think it's been unjustly forgotten outside of scholarly circles (although this is almost certainly because it's not that much fun to read). The book is basically a dystopian story about what Burdekin imagined would happen if the Nazis took over the world.

In the Nazi future she imagines, Jews and Christians have been largely killed, and whatever Christians remain have sort of filled the former place of the Jews--they trade, they're exempt from some of the laws of general society, but they also have to wear identifiable crosses on their backs and are excluded from most of the rights of the majority (in this case, the Germans). The Germans are sort of like the UK at the height of its empire--racial Germans are the most important and control other countries as colonies, but people from those colonies can be sort of acceptable (if still second-class citizens) if they adhere to the state religion of Hitlerism and accept the supremacy of racial Germans. But none of these elements are really the focus of the book--what Burdekin really focuses on are gender relations. In a way it's like an earlier and much more polemic Handmaid's Tale. Hitlerist Germans treat women like cattle--they live in their own segregated areas, are required to cut their hair short and wear a common sacky kind of garment. Men come in to sleep with them and create more men. Men can do just about anything they want to them (including, if I'm remembering correctly, trading them)--when girls are born, they're left to their mothers. When boys are born, they're taken out and raised in military cohorts, kind of like (I learned this week) Spartan boys. (Although Spartan women, I hasten to add, were as a result quite empowered, not like the women in this book). Women only leave their enclosures for mandated fire-and-brimstone sessions at Hitlerist churches, where they're yelled at about how terrible and disgusting women are. The history of how things were before WWII has, of course, been distorted or wiped out. The main thrust of the Nazi regime in Swastika Night is not their treatment of the Jews (which we now pay attention to almost to the exclusion of all else), but their denigration of women, and their promotion of an ideal of masculinity based almost entirely on the ability to perpetrate violence.

Katherine Burdekin wrote this book under a male pseudonym, Murray Constance, and people didn't realize she was the one who had written it until a scholar named Daphne Patai figured it out in I think the 80s. But gender was a central concern of hers--I've read a couple of her other books (which she published under her own name or the slightly masculinized "Kay Burdekin," and which are also sort of speculative or dystopian fiction) and they generally revolve about this central question: what does it mean for women to live in a patriarchal society? And, more broadly, what does it mean for a society to teach a whole class of people that it is inferior? How can a society be re-structured so this doesn't happen? A lot of her thinking particularly has to do with impacts on people's sexuality, probably because she herself seems to have been what we'd consider bi or lesbian--she was married to a man, divorced, and then had a female partner for the last 40 years of her life.

In Swastika Night, she has one of her characters say something that I've thought a lot about--that it has to be possible for every person to believe that what they are is the best thing to be. When I initially read the book, I was sort of shocked by this, because it seems to me that she's essentially described a world where one group of people (the Germans) DO think what they are is the best thing to be, and where that's a big problem. If people think this, won't they just try to dominate people who aren't that thing? And if multiple groups of people think this, isn't that just a recipe for endless war? Recently I've been thinking, though, that what she had is a sort of incomplete formulation of another idea, which is that in order for things to be fair and run well, it has to be possible for every person to buy into the central conceit of her society while at the same time believing that it is possible for her to be good as herself, as the things that she is. Meaning, I don't have to be able to believe that it is better to be queer than to be straight. I have to be able to believe in the majority ideology of America while also believing that a lesbian is a good thing to be. That I can be seen as "good" without pretending to be anything else or wishing I was anything else. (It's worth pointing out that this is not always possible, either for lesbians or anyone else who is not a straight white Christian man in the US today). Which, I mean, there's a range involved here, between societies where this is completely impossible for some categories of people to societies where it's easily possible for everyone (although I'm not sure such a place exists).

This is a long wind-up to say that I've been thinking about this book because of Ahed Tamimi, particularly the reactions of Jewish people and writers to her imprisonment for something that under any fair system of law would not carry the consequences that it's likely to carry for her. One Israeli writer got upset at the amount of negative international attention the story is getting and wrote that people should not be thinking that the Tamimi family are "angels," that they are activists against the Occupation and therefore hate Israel and hate the Jews, and that this is why it is totally just to keep Ahed in prison. My first response to this was that if you take that argument apart, it doesn't make a lot of sense--I mean, the law allows for Ahed to be jailed for slapping a soldier because she is a Palestinian. She's not in ostensibly in jail because of what either she or her family thinks about the Occupation, so it doesn't make sense to use that as a rationale. If you think the law that allows her to be imprisoned is fair, you have to be able to argue that it's fair without that element. But then I also started thinking about how this argument is haunted by this alternative character: a Palestinian who Israeli law would treat differently because he or she was not against the Occupation. That character is essential to arguing that the Israeli legal system is fair, because it make it seem that the law allows the punishment of a particular person not because of what he or she is, but because of what he or she does (or thinks).

But if you take that character seriously as a possibility...you come up against Katherine Burdekin and Swastika Night, or at least I do. Is it possible for someone who is Palestinian to buy into the central conceit of Israel, which is that the Jewish State is deserved, laudable, and necessary to maintain and expand by keeping non-Jews out, while still seeing him or herself as "good"? I don't think it is. I just don't. At some point, it may have been more possible than it is now. But to support the Occupation now is to support the rights of Israeli citizens and the Israeli army to literally steal your house while you are living there, to cut off your access to your fields, to openly advocate policies that allow for your living space to be continually restricted or blocked off. In the service of  Jewish state that (openly!) argues that it can only maintain its Jewishness, its most important quality, by keeping you out. How is it possible to buy into that ideology, to support or approve of it, as a Palestinian, without hating what you are? In that story, there is no such thing as a good Palestinian, because fundamentally even a good Palestinian requires a place to live. And that's the Israeli government's problem with the Palestinians, that they exist and have some claim to the land that they live on. The only way the Palestinians can be good is...not to be there. And while I've seen lots of people do lots of things that were harmful to themselves to fit into the mainstream of where they were (women who got married and had children when either or both of those things were dangerous to them, people who abused and hated members of their own racial or religious groups, etc etc), there's always been some kind of incentive for doing so, however small. They could imagine that at some point they would be a good ________ (fill in the blank with whatever category you can think of). Such a character existed for them, no matter how much trying to emulate that character required them to break themselves.

When the central conceit of the societal mainstream is that your very existence is always a problem, no matter what you do or say or believe.....it's just not possible. It's not. And when you argue that people should be able to support that conceit when it has absolutely no place for them, you're arguing that they should be able to live without self-regard or even the instinct for self-preservation--that they owe it to you to do this. At no benefit to themselves at all. But human beings just don't work that way, unless they suffer from pretty extreme mental illness--and usually not even then. To argue, as some Israelis do when the Tamimis are mistreated, that these punishments wouldn't be necessary if only they believed that they didn't have the right to exist or live where they live...it's not any kind of argument. You can't require the inhuman or the superhuman of people and call that a fair system. Would the Jews in the Pale of Settlement, who formed a similar "problem" for the Russians at various times in their history, support the idea that the Pale should be liquidated and its Jews pushed out of the country? Did the Jews in Spain during the Inquisition support the idea that they should be kicked out? Of course not. People want to survive, for the most part. If you're mentally healthy, it's hard to avoid wanting that. No legal or ideological system (and the Israeli system is far from the only one that impacts people this way) should ever feel justified in requiring that anyone give that up.