Americans Are an Invented People, Too

The sand has not totally settled over a remark that GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich offered a few days back in an interview with the Jewish Channel. (Show of hands: How many of you knew this network existed before Newt gave it an interview?)

Gingrich has one more Ph.D. in history than I do, but it seemed like one of his answers demonstrated a difference between knowledge and wisdom.

Gingrich's answers were all about support for a hardline policy in favor of the Israelis and against the Palestinians. As is his wont, Gingrich made several cogent points. For instance, he emphasized the difficulty of brokering any kind of peace between parties where one side denies the right of the other to exist.

But then, when asked if he is a Zionist, Gingrich said this:

"Well, I believe that the Jewish people have the right to have a state, and I believe that the commitments that were made at a time...remember there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire. And I think that we've had an invented Palestinian people, who are in fact Arabs, and were historically part of the Arab community. And they had a chance to go many places. And for a variety of political reasons we have sustained this war against Israel now since the 1940's, and I think it's tragic."

The word there that is still stirring up opposition is "invented."

Sure, there are all kinds of PC and political reasons to object to its use. But it's simply true. On the other hand, so what? When I first heard about the controversy and the quote, I'll admit my first reaction was "Isn't everybody?"

It's a particularly odd word to toss around in the Middle East. I'm hardly the first person to note that most of the national boundaries there were drawn by British bureaucrats who often didn't give a camel's tail for any historical boundaries recognized by indigenous peoples. Hence the challenge faced by Iraq, where the Kurds and the Shia and Sunni are only the largest and most fractious of many historically incompatible peoples mashed together within the national boundaries.

But there's no need to cross oceans to locate a people with an "invented" national identity. America may have the most explicitly self-invented identity in the history of the planet.

A couple of centuries before religionists pushed "In God We Trust" onto our money, there was another motto favored by the actual Founders. "E Pluribus Unum," the words on the Great Seal, means "Out of many, one."

And while the practical application of that motto has never been smooth -- ask American Indians, Japanese whose families were interred during World War II or too many American Muslims today -- that was always the avowed goal of the American experiment.

For evidence of the relative success of the venture thus far, turn to President Barack Obama, who famously can trace his lineage back to the English, Scottish, Irish, French, Swiss, German, Welsh and Kenyan.

I bet that Americans aren't the only invented people that Gingrich would be comfortable with. Australia started with the British using the continent as a penal colony. What's not invented about that nation's modern identity?

A historian of the scholarship of Gingrich surely knows that once upon a time there was precious little Portuguese spoken in what is now Brazil or Spanish spoken in what is now Mexico.

But maybe Gingrich would say those inventions are old enough to have created their own credibility?

The nation of South Africa has had at least two dramatically different national identities. The Boers imposed their evil invention of apartheid. Nelson Mandela and his allies have helped craft a totally different identity that includes the descendants of the several tribes who lived within the current map boundaries, along with the descendants of European settlers.

An invented people? Admirably so. And it's an invention considerably younger than the aspiration of some Palestinians to have their own nation.

Finally, turn to Israel itself. Before the 1930s, Zionism was a controversial issue amongst world Jewry. For many centuries, the Hebrew language had been nearly as dead as Latin or Greek, relegated to ritual and scholars. The cultural differences between an Ashkenazi in Poland and a Sephardi Jew living in Turkey were enormous.

Hitler and the Nazis mostly settled most Jews' position on Zionism and the need for a Jewish state. So the various and sundry surviving varieties of Jewish culture now live together as a squabbling family in the modern state of Israel, where the invention of the national identity continues to be an ongoing project. (And where arguments about the answer to the question "What is a Jew?" continue to produce front page news stories with enormous political implications.)

If history is any guide, whether or not the American president grants legitimacy to a people will be less about way their identity was crafted and more about what they do with that invention.