[Prefatory Note: The original interview on the coup in Niger with Zahra Mizrafarjouyan of Mehr Agency in Tehran was published on Aug. 14, 2023. A lot has happened since then that affects Niger, and how we understand its relation to that country, to West Africa’s Sahel region, to Africa generally, and to the geopolitical war of position that puts the U.S. rivalry with Russia and China in the foreground. I have taken ‘liberties’ with my interview answers to address this awareness of the broader context]
- What was the destructive colonial role of France in West African countries?
As elsewhere, but perhaps more crudely and more deeply, France dominated the post-colonial experience of West Africa that commenced in 1960, politically controlling and ruthlessly exploiting these countries economically whose populations were impoverished despite being resource rich. France more than other European colonial powers sought to replace the indigenous culture, including its language and cuisine, with what it claimed to be superior, which was of course, French culture. In Africa in particular France also created a set of conditions that made the society incapable of stable and equitable governance after formal independence was gained. As a result, a heavier residue of colonialism remained after independent statehood was achieved than in most other countries. Niger’s impoverishment, with an extreme poverty rate of over 40%, is a textbook case of ‘colonialism after colonialism.’ The differences between pre-independence colonialism and its post-independence sequel should be more than a matter of changing the flags and changing the racial features of the ruler, but even in the best of circumstances it is far less for decades than the exercise of the full right of self-determination for reasons long ago provided by Franz Fanon. The post-independence voluntary acceptance of Western military bases is indicative of the governance deficiencies of the native leadership capabilities when it comes to national security. In the case, of encroaching jihadist movements with their own territorial ambitions that have been encroaching on Sahel countries during the last twelve years. Analogous weaknesses, including capabilities, corruption and cooption, help explain the one-sided agreements on the production and marketing of resources is imprudently entrusted to the good will of the former colonizers.
The role of collaborative and corrupted national elites becomes indispensable to make the system of governance enjoy a semblance of political legitimacy that facilitates imbalanced resource related agreements that deprive the home country of its fair share. In the context of Niger, these foreign, non-African actors build further their case for interventions in such countries as Niger by pointing to the virtue of protecting democratically elected leaders against extra-legal coups of the sort that occurred on July 26th. The hypocrisy of the West is revealed when democratic elections produce a political mandate for radically nationalist leaders as with Chavez in Venezuela, or earlier Castro in Cuba and Allende in Chile. As with human rights, such enthusiasm for elected leaders is a selective policy instrument entrenching double standard, not a principled commitment to the rule of law, discrediting ideals that deserve more consistent respect if the peace and justice of the peoples of the world are to be served.
Niger, as with the earlier somewhat similar coups in Mali and Burkina Faso suggest, an important difference that distinguishes the two types of colonialism. It is that the post-colonial state, however beholden it remains in relation to its prior colonial master, has a strong sense of nationalist entitlement among non-collaborationist elites that is often shared with the armed forces and influential sectors of the population, and over time leads to a second anti-colonialism, an anti-colonialism after political independence. Such motivations seem present in the Niger coup leadership despite the fact that many of its members, including its apparent leader, General Abdurahman Tchiani, underwent extensive training by the U.S. armed forces, which usually produces compliant military leadership.
Besides personal ambition and a repudiation of ‘puppet’ leaders, the passage of time after independence leads portions of the elites and masses to grasp the connections between exploitation by the former colonial power and the poverty of the country that is giving away its potential prosperity.
2- It seems that France has kept its colonial role in the regional countries even after these countries gained their independence. What are the tactics that Paris uses to keep its influence in these countries?
The colonial era refused to educate and train an indigenous elite capable of running these West African countries without French assistance in the security, technological sophisticated, and economic policy spheres. When independence was granted in 1960 the French negotiated a series of self-serving arrangements that kept its troops in the country and its favorable and highly profitable and predatory relationship to the natural resources of each of the West African countries that had been its former colonies. Internal conditions prevailed in these countries that resulted in a new unspoken realism that I call ‘colonialism after colonialism.’ It is a way of underscoring the point that the structures of control and exploitation have persisted long after independent statehood, yet in more subtle forms, was achieved in the early 1960s, but without the stigma of ‘colonialism.’ As earlier explained, this process is greatly facilitated by the cooption and corruption of local elites that give a nationalist veneer to this reality of ‘stunted decolonization,’ but if the inequities are too gross a new surge of resistance to foreign exploitation begins to form, and will produce some kind of radical nationalist backlash.
3- What is the political, economic and military importance of Niger for France? Do you think that France whether France will be able to return to the African country?
French interests, also reinforced by Western interests, particularly by the U.S., are especially important in Niger. To begin with, as a spillover from the NATO regime-changing intervention in Libya, an alleged jihadist presence in the country became a target in counterterrorist agenda of the Global North and a pretext for the deployment of Western military forces, and the construction and maintenance of expensive military bases. For France in particular, Niger was a major source of uranium for its nuclear power facilities. It also had gold mines and oil reserves, both controlled by foreign corporations made profitable by low labor costs and pricing well below market values. Niger is also seen as strategically important to ensure that African countries keep aligned to and dependent upon the West as part of its multi-dimensional struggle with Russia and China for geopolitical primacy in the world. Africa has evolved into becoming an arena of this unfolding rivalry that has risen to the surface of global awareness in the course of the Ukraine War of the nuclear dangers of confrontations in the Global North, and offers a semi-peripheral seemingly less dangerous terrain to carry on the new cold war.
4- Some African countries are ready to wage war against Niger in fact to the benefit of France despite the fact that they themselves have been suffering from France colonialism. Why?
On the basis of available information, it is difficult to respond convincingly, especially as various African countries have distinct national motivations in such a complex situation and belatedly faced the fact they lacked the capability to ensure their own territorial security much less take part in an intervention of a sister African country. At the same time seems that many African states have grown worried about their own stability, and do not want to create another precedent of a successful West African coup as occurred in Mali, Burkina Faso. In addition, corrupted elites are fearful of their own vulnerability resulting from the spread of these expressions of anti-Western national radicalism. Part of the reality of colonialism after colonialism are habits of dependence that are difficult to break, especially if intertwined with corrupting incentives and threats to collaborating national elites that act as bonding ties to the former colonial power.
There is also issues arising from non-African interventions by external actors if Africa does not act to reverse the outcome of the coup. There is a growing fear that Africa could become an battleground for the geopolitical rivalry involving the U.S., Russia, and China if a second cold war continues to unfold. As observed, Ukraine War has raised concerns in the Global North about dangers of nuclear war that seem to be giving rise to temptations to shift armed struggles to the Global South as was the case in the Cold War.
So far, various states have acted with caution, with Russia taking the lead in urging non-intervention. The United States seemed at first ready to condemn the coup and suspend economic aid, but later has been sending mixed messages, including refraining
from calling the July 26 takeover of the government a coup despite have the features of a coup. If declared a coup then by legislative mandate, economic assistance would be suspended until civilian government is restored. It raises the question, ‘when is a coup not a coup?’ The answer is simple, a coup is not a coup if strategic interests so dictate.
Such a moderation of pressures may also reflect the position of the new Nigerien leadership which has sent signals that it is receptive to diplomacy and wants a renegotiation not a rupture with France.
5- Do you think that war will be waged in the region?
It is hard to tell, and partly depends on the type of pressure exerted by the U.S. and Europe, and the flexibility of the new civilian leader of Niger, a former Finance Minister, Ali Mawawan Lamine Zeine and the junta. And partly about how worried other African governments are about the danger of coups in their own country or already threatened by extremist insurgencies. Neighboring Nigeria that has been leading the effort to reverse the outcome in Niger is key to whether a diplomatic compromise can be negotiated, or a war erupts.
A central issue is whether foreign troops will be allowed to remain in Niger. A major outcome of the earlier similar recent coups in Bukina Faso, Mali, and Guinea each development provoked by the presence of foreign troops of France and the U.S. Each of these coups resulted in the demands for the removal from the country. At present, there are French, U.S. and Italian bases and detachments of armed personnel in Niger. it may be seen as a victory for the national military that launched this latest coup if these foreign forces are removed, and a humiliating setback if they are allowed to stay, or it may not if national forces are unable to contain the extremist group already occupying national territory.
The deposed President of Niger, Mohamed Bazoumi, is lauded in the West as the first democratically elected president in the country and condemned by the coup leadership as massively corrupt and coopted. There is no doubt that a war in Niger would be a tragedy for the country and the region, given its already impoverished population and the overall low rankings for these Sahel West African countries on the Human Development Index.
5- In case of any war, what will be Russia’s reaction as you know many Russian Wagner forces are stationed there?
The Wagner Group’s role and response is part of the overall uncertainty, greatly accentuated by the death of its leader Prigozhin in a plane crash. So far Russia’s official position have in general supported the coup and opposed intervention from without. Whether the Wagner Group even with a mission of defending Niger possesses sufficient capabilities to alter the relation of forces in Niger or West Africa is unknown. There is a danger of a proxy war, which would prolong the combat and raise the stakes of winning and losing, with dire consequences for the people of Niger, and elsewhere in the region.
Whether the coup in Niger represents the last stage of decolonization or is just one more chapter in the under-narrated story of colonialism after colonialism remains to be seen.
Global Justice in the 21st Century 
The Undisclosed Second Paradox in Michael Walzer’s The Paradox of Liberation
20 JunThere is little doubt that several of Michael Walzer’s contributions to political theory will long remain influential (Revolution of the Saints (1965); Just and Unjust Wars (1977); Spheres of Justice (1983)). Although his work lacks the cumulative weight of a major philosophic presence, the ideas and issues Walzer has been exploring in the last several decades with great conceptual coherence and originality. His work exhibits a consistent practical relevance to the realities of the unfolding world around us. His writing is lucid, well informed, and is mainstream enough to be non-threatening. Walzer’s worldview is congruent with widely shared ethical presuppositions prevalent among liberals in Western society. Added to this, Walzer’s writings are tinged with a socialist nostalgic edge that imparts a now harmless progressive resonance. This is somewhat soothing for all those suffering varying degrees of guilty conscience as we go on as before, enjoying life in non-sustainable consumptive Western societies.
Aside from John Rawls, Jacques Derrida, Jürgens Habermas who enjoy preeminence, only Michel Foucault, Martha Nussbaum, Richard Rorty, and Amartya Sen have had a comparable contemporary influence to that of Walzer by way of philosophic commentary on major public issues. Apart from Walzer’s strong scholarly emphasis on Judaic Studies and ideological support for Israel, it is Rorty who seems closest to Walzer in ethos, philosophic stance, and intellectual style. As I read this latest extended essay by Walzer I kept thinking of the lines from Auden’s great poem “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”:
“Time with that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views
And will pardon Paul Claudell
Pardon him for writing well”
The point being that despite often finding Walzer’s views suspect, I never find his writing dull or his ideas without force and relevance, and that maybe in the end what flourishes through time is more style than substance.
Walzer has been a strong and consistent advocate of Israel and outspoken adherent of moderate Zionism throughout his career. Sometimes his eloquent partisanship has been hidden below the surface of his theorizing, giving his undisclosed messages the status of a sub-text, adored by the faithful and repudiated by the critical. Among critics this Walzer tendency to hide his political commitments beneath his theoretical generalization, creates an impression of a rather sneaky lack of forthrightness. For instance, his influential Just and Unjust Wars can be read (without any acknowledgement from Walzer) as a show of strong support for Israel’s approach to Palestinian armed resistance that is expressed in the abstract language of the ethics of counter-terrorism. Walzer’s tendency to be not straight forward about his ideological agenda is intriguingly relevant to his latest book, The Paradox of Liberation, which sets forth a bold and challenging general thesis—that the distinct secular movements that produced national liberation in Algeria, India, and Israel a few generations ago have each most unexpectedly and progressively yielded their identities to intense religious counter-revolutions. These counter-revolutions have each sought to restore tradition and religious observance in public spaces, including the governing process. This religious turn against the secular came as an unwelcome surprise to the founding generation of national liberation leaders whose successors find themselves pushed aside by more socially conservative elites.
These secularizing movements were rooted initially in the opposite belief that only by breaking with societal traditions can liberation be achieved for a national people that is being oppressed or acutely denied its true destiny. As Walzer summarizes: “The old ways must be repudiated and overcome totally. But the old ways are cherished by many of the men and women whose ways they are. That is the paradox of liberation.” (19) In the Paradox of Liberation: Secular Revolutions and Religious Counterrevolutions (Yale University Press, 2015). Walzer is preoccupied by this paradox, and devotes himself to its explication. He contends that the paradox arises from the tension between the mobilization of a people around the negation of that which the majority society affirms (that is, religious values) and while this negation seems useful (even to many of the religiously oriented) during the struggle against alien oppression, it will itself be negated a generation or so after liberation, a phenomenon of negating the negation that can also be understood as the return of the repressed in the form of religious resurgence. The secularists enjoyed a temporary ascendancy because they were active resisters to oppressive circumstances rather than as was the case with religiously oriented leaderships, which tended to be passive and even deferential to the status quo.
This pattern of secularist victory giving way to religion is reproduced in a nationally distinctive form in each of these specific historical circumstances by the seemingly inexplicable rise and potency of religious zeal. In each of Walzer’s three cases, the political moment of successful liberation by secularists was soon to be superseded to varying degrees by the religious moment, an entirely unexpected sequel. The liberators whether led by Ben Bella, Jawaharlal Nehru, or David Ben Gurion were modernizers who strongly believed that religion was being and should be superseded by science and rationality. This meant that religion was largely a spent force with respect to cultural identity and public policy, and should in the future be confined in its role to state ritual occasions and private devotional practice. Walzer argument explains the central misunderstanding of these secular leaders, and expresses his own hope that the religious resurgence should not be viewed as the end of the national narrative. Also, Walzer would not welcome the Algerian phase three sequel to the religious challenge by way of bloody civil war, followed by military autocracy and renewed societal passivity.
What makes the book challenging is its main prescriptive argument that runs as follows. The secular nationalists made a crucial initial mistake, according to Walzer, by basing their movement on the negation of religion rather than byseeking its incorporation. If their secularist goal was sustainable liberation, which it certainly was, then the adoption of an either/or orientation toward religion and its practice was wrong from the start. Instead the attitude of the secular liberators toward religion should have one of constructive engagement, and not negation. What this means in the context of each movement is not spelled out by Walzer. The stress is placed on a recommended (re)incorporation of religious values into the reigning secular ideology combined with sensitivity to traditional values and practices. Walzer is fully aware that his proposed approach becomes problematic as soon as it is pursued unconditionally. As he recognizes, the traditions in each of these nations denies equality to women, often in cruel and unacceptable ways. Walzer does not want secularists to give up their commitment to gender equality for the sake of reconciliation with religiously oriented sectors of society. What he encourages is a sympathetic awareness of traditional attitudes toward gender while seeking to overcome their embedded biases. As is often the case, Walzer is more persuasive in diagnosis than prescription, delineating the problems far better than finding credible solutions.
One difficulty with the framework we are offered in the book is the failure to consider the discrediting relevance of the corruption and incompetence of the liberators, which amounted to a betrayal of their promises to lead a new and happy society of free people. Whether through corruption or the failure to deliver a better life to a large portion of the population, a post-liberation mood of disillusionment takes hold in different patterns, but they share in common the search for an alternative orientation.
In other words the excitement of liberation is hard to sustain during the state-building rigors of governance, and also in most cases, the personalities suitable for liberation are not well adapted to handle the routines and typical challenges of post-liberation existence. Israel, in particular, was an outlier from these perspectives, as its claims of liberation were at all stages shadowed by doubts as a result of fears, threats, uncertainties, and opposition to its underlying legitimacy claim from within its ethnic ranks and more so from those it sought to subdue by either displacement or subjugation. The anti-colonial liberations of India and Algeria never faced such basic challenges to its core identity.
There is for me a closely related yet more fundamental problem with the misleading comparisons relied upon by Walzer to develop his argument. India and Algeria were genuine liberation movements waged by indigenous nations to rid from the entire territorial space of their respective countries a deeply resented, exploitative, and domineering foreign presence. To place Israel in such a category is to foster several deep misunderstandings—there is the master presupposition that the Zionist movement is being properly treated as a case of ‘national liberation’ even if the Jewish nation was not engaged in reclaiming control over its residential territorial space. Jews were scattered in enclaves around the world when the Zionist movement was launched and most of its leaders relied on biblical claims to Palestine to ground its territorial claims. Although the early debate about whether a homeland in Uganda would fulfill Zionist goals illuminates the distinctiveness of the Zionist quest. Beyond this Zionists became legally dependent upon British colonialist support to carry forward their efforts to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine with the issuance of the Balfour Declaration in 1917. Zionism cannot be meaningfully regarded as a revolt against alien rulership, although in its last pre-state stage it did try to expel Britain from Palestine so as to compel an abandonment of its mandatory administration. Unlike standard anti-colonial movements, Zionism is more correctly perceived as an activist effort to overcome the realities of diaspora Judaism confronted by the persecution, discrimination, and assimilation in an array of national settings.
Given this background, it seems dubious, indeed polemical, to treat Israel’s establishment as an instance of ‘liberation,’ a terminology that obscures the centrality of the ‘dispossession’ experienced by the majority indigenous Palestinian Arab population in the course of Israel’s acquisition of statehood. In passing, Walzer does somewhat acknowledge some of these differences that distinguish Israel from India and Algeria, but regards them as inconsequential contextual issues that do not raise for him any serious doubts about the basic reasonableness of regarding Israel as coming into being as a result of national liberation led by the Zionist movement. Walzer’s focus is rather upon whether Israel fits the pattern of a secularist phase one giving way to a religious phase two, leaving us with a big question mark as to whether there will be a phase three, and if so, whether it will reflect Walzer’s hopes for a belated constructive engagement with religion rather than an Alegerian style relapse into civil strife and autocracy. Although Walzer expresses his personal wish for the Palestinians to have their own sovereign state (53) at some point, this wish is never contextualized or concretized by reference to criteria of equality between the two peoples. The Palestinian national liberation movement is discussed by Walzer as correlative to his main thesis. Walzer notes that even prior to achieving Palestinian statehood, the PLO’s secular leadership has been increasingly challenged and even discredited by a rising Islamist alternative. (53-55)
This reference to the Palestinian national movement is an interesting aside in relation to Walzer’s essential set of contentions relating to the paradox he is depicting, but it fails to engage the issue I find central, which is whether Israel’s establishment can qualify as an instance of national liberation. To be sure Zionism generated an extraordinary international movement that overcame many formidable obstacles that stood in its way, and none more formidable than an indigenous Palestinian Arab majority population that did its best to prevent Zionists from reaching their goal of statehood on behalf of the Jewish people. Although Walzer notes that the early secularist Zionist leaders stressed a commitment to equality when articulating their ideas about the preferred relationship between Jews and non-Jews in the Israeli state. In my view, it is questionable in the extreme whether this idealistic goal ever represented the actual intentions of Zionist leaders. It should be evident to all that such egalitarianism was never expressive of Israeli policies and practices on the ground from even before the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948.
More problematic still, was the dispossession and displacement from the land of most of the indigenous Arab population that had been living in Palestine for many generations. Surely this Palestinian experience is profoundly different in character and consequence from the repudiation of exploitative rule of a country by a foreign, usually European, elite and its native collaborators. Again Walzer’s sub-text, whether consciously intended or not, seems to be the retroactive legitimation of Israel’s claim to be an example of national liberation of the sort achieved by Algeria and India, and hence to be situated in the highest echelon of 20th century state-building undertakings. As many of us realize this ‘liberation’ was for Palestinians a catastrophe, known by its Arabic word nakba.
Overall, this is a peculiar book, developing a general view of religious counter-revolutions against secular movements of national liberation, but due to the inclusion of Israel as a principal case despite not seeming to fit, there is an implicit polemical motivation that involves whitewashing the criminality of Israel’s emergence. Acknowledging such criminality is not meant to be a covert argument for delegitimizing the present state of Israel that has now been in existence for more than 67 years, and is a member state of the United Nations. My critique of Walzer, in other words, is not meant to lay the groundwork for a second Palestinian dispossession, this time directed toward Jews. I side with Edward Said in a commitment to fair future for both peoples based on their shared rights under international law and on diplomacy to negotiate compromises where rights overlap. I do agree with Said that such a jointly conceived future cannot be undertaken without a prior Israeli acknowledgement of the recent past as epitomized by the nakba, and such rituals of redress must include a formal apology to the Palestinian people for the suffering they have for so long endured.
In the end, the paradox that Walzer dwells upon is less consequential than the paradox he ignores: namely, that what is being represented as ‘national liberation’ of the Jewish people by Zionist ideologues is more objectively presented as the ‘national oppression’ of the Palestinian people. This oppression is experienced in different sets of circumstances: as a subjugated minority; as an occupied people; as a nation of refugees and exiles; as a community of resistance aspiring to Palestinian ‘national liberation’; as communities victimized by state terrorism. This second paradox is that what is portrayed as ‘liberation’ for one people serves at the same time as pretext and rationale for the ‘oppression’ of another people. In my view, the second paradox raised life or death questions for both peoples to a far greater extent than does the first paradox that seems to control Walzer’s own Zionist imagination.
Michael Ignatieff, whose political orientation resembles that of Michael Walzer, in the course of a mostly laudatory review of The Paradox of Liberation confirms my suspicion that the undisclosed intent of this book is to connect Israel’s fate with that of such exemplary liberation movements as those that took place in India and Algeria. Consider Igantieff’s revealing language innocently proclaiming this reading: “While Israel remains the central focus of The Paradox of Liberation, Walzer has made a major contribution to the question of what’s happening there simply by arguing that Israel may not be so special after all: the same kinds of problems may be occurring in other states created by national liberation movements. He compares what happened to Ben-Gurion’s vision with what befell Jawaharlal Nehru’s in India and Ahmed Ben Bella’s in Algeria.” [Michael Ignatieff, “The Religious Spector Haunting Revolution,” NY Review of Books, 19 June 2015] In a stunning instance of ‘benign neglect’ Ignatieff never once even mentions the relevance of Palestinian dispossession in his lengthy
assessment of Walzer’s version of Israel’s ‘national liberation’ story. Instead, he makes the opposite point, suggesting that Walzer in an indirect way diminishes Israel by his implicit denial of Israeli exceptionalism. As the language quoted above seems to suggest, Israel is upgraded by its similarities with (rather than differences from) other liberation narratives.
In closing, it is plausible, even morally, to argue that the Zionist cause was in keeping with a variety of attempts over the course of the last century by many nations and peoples to possess a state of their own that is defined by ethnic or religious boundaries that transcend in psycho-political relevance geographic boundaries, which incidentally have yet to be authoritatively drawn to delineate Israel’s territorial scope. Yet what is not plausible is to lump together the Israeli experience with that of India and Algeria just because the founding generation of leaders shared a secular ideology that was later subjected to a religious challenge once the state was established. For India and Algeria their respective anti-colonial struggles each possessed its originality, but without raising doubts about the delineation of the scope of territorial sovereignty and without needing to coercing the native population to submit or leave. This became integral to Zionism in the course of the struggle between opposed nationalisms, with expulsion necessary to ensure Jewish dominance over the development and governance of the country.
If Jewish biblical claims to territorial sovereignty are dismissed, as surely should be a major premise of secular thinking, then the Zionist project needs to be conceived of as essentially one of colonizing a foreign country. The presence of a deeply rooted Jewish minority, less than 5% when the Zionist movement got started in the late 19th century, does not make Palestine any less of a foreign country from the perspective of Jews who settled in Palestine in a spirit of missionizing zeal. As Walzer himself makes clear, Zionists were self-consciously opposed to the Judaism they had experienced in the diaspora that was premised on passivity and deference to the rulers of their country of residence and religiously expressed by the message of patience, the religious duty to wait for the Messiah, the only religiously acceptable experience of liberation. The founders of Zionism, and its current leaders, were determined to reconstitute Jewish life on the basis of assertiveness and even aggressiveness, overcoming the alleged diasporic legacy of passivity, and this feature of their movement has been transformative for even religious Jews. From this perspective, the historic triumphal event was undoubtedly Israel’s victory in the 1967 War, which became inspirational for diasporic Jewish communities identified more strongly than ever with the state of Israel, and questioned their own traditional postures of passivity.
My contention is that Walzer’s paradox dissolves as soon as the claim to categorize Zionism as a mode of ‘national liberation’ is deconstructed, while the second paradox remains to be explained. This second paradox dwells on the moral and political interplay of what transpires when the liberation of the self is organically linked to the dispossession of the other. In a postscript (134-146) Walzer explains why America does not belong with his three cases, which is because America’s original founding never truly embraced secularism. What he might have also said, but doesn’t, is that what the founding of America and Israel have most in common is the dispossession of the native populations, and it is this foundational fact that shapes the state-building experiences of both countries more than either has been willing to acknowledge. In this sense, we might invite Walzer to write a sequel on this second more consequential paradox, but realizing that such an invitation is certain to be refused. Its acceptance would implicitly repudiate the ideological benefits and normative authority of the first paradox that treats the establishment of Israel as if it is entitled to be regarded as one of the illustrious examples of 20th century anti-colonial struggles.
Tags: Algeria, dispossession, India, Israel, Michael Walzer, Nakba, national liberation, Palestine, Zionism, Zionist secularism