I took my usual virtual nations talk to Thirsters, and felt cued when Barbara brought up Tibet in connection with the forcible displacement of some of its people, the administrative institutions most of all, as these were seen to be in conflict with those of mainstream metropolitan China.
Not all Tibetans were pushed out, not by a long shot, and Lhasa remains ethnically very Tibetan to this day. Yet Tibet itself is a Diaspora Nation, with headquarters in nearby India in Dharamshala.
I said diaspora nations were more futuristic in not insisting on seeing themselves projected on some world map as a large contiguous body of territory. A nation might be more like a powder, a spice, than a cut of meat, with campus facilities dotting the globe. Supranational corporations, religious sects, and some universities, already follow this discontinuous discrete design.
So what about a New Palestine, with facilities and subdivisions all over, including in Mesopotamia? What should be its policy towards the various religions?
My vision of New Palestine mirrors the old Palestine: Jews and Muslims living peacefully together, along with Christians and people who practice other religions. The Parliament of World Religions would hail New Palestine for sharing its ideals.
Jewish heritage individuals, as well as Christians, will be able to apply for citizenship and a passport and participate in the design of the state itself, side by side with the other social engineers. New Palestine will therefore not leave itself open to the charge of being just another "ethno-state" versus an "unum-state" as in "e pluribus unum". Islamic Studies will not be neglected, nor will use of Arabic or Farsi be in any way discouraged.
The Dalai Lama was offering similar visions from his headquarters in Dharamshala with respect to his host nation India. Why not pool the very best from every religious lineage, in a national curriculum that does not itself profess to be any particular religion. Wise advice.
One might call that "secular" but not in the sense of clamping down on the whole idea of religious lineages. What's secular are the dynamisms that frustrate any particular and singular ethnicity from seizing the reigns of power.
New Palestine could be synonymous with a university. New Palestine University (NPU) has a ring to it, but if it allows for citizenship and issues passports, then it's clearly more than a typical U of today. It might have to stick with a conventional UN bureaucracy under the hood, but remember the UN itself issues recognized passports.
Why not give every Palestinian a chance to self document and get a UN passport out of the deal, as well as expedited access to NPU facilities? This kind of intake is of course difficult to carry out under conditions of siege and bombardment.
Nations that self aggrandize by engulfing territory owe a lot to the Doctrine of Discovery in some cases, and that rug has been pulled to some extent, as the Vatican repudiates it.
The upshot may not be that "jigsaw puzzle piece nations", as I call them, get overthrown or trampled upon, so much as they dissolve to become more like diasporas themselves, meaning more dispersed, distributed, non-contiguous, and more inspiring of member loyalty because less dense and less slow.
We may soon become a world of network nations, amidst networks of other kinds. In the minds of some, we're there already.
