Politics & Power Quote by Jack Schwartz

By pinning Jewish and Palestinian nationalism to the same historical clock, Schwartz is trying to puncture a stubborn political myth: that one identity is ancient and natural while the other is late, opportunistic, or merely reactive. The phrase "virtually contemporaneous" is doing the argumentative heavy lifting. It’s a calibration, not a slogan, and it carries a scientist’s preference for timelines over moral grandstanding. In a debate where people reach for Bible verses or selective memories, Schwartz insists on causality.

The real context is the geopolitical earthquake of the late 19th and early 20th centuries: the slow collapse of the Ottoman order, World War I, and the carve-up of territory by European powers. "Disruptions" is a cool word for hot events: mass migration, administrative reshuffling, new borders, and the export of European nation-state logic into multiethnic empires. Schwartz’s subtext is that nationalism isn’t a timeless essence; it’s an adaptation. Communities under pressure assemble stories of peoplehood, institutions, and claims to land because modern politics rewards that packaging.

"Ruins of the old empires" also smuggles in a critique of imperial aftershocks. If both national movements are children of imperial breakdown, then the conflict isn’t just a feud between two "ancient peoples" but a struggle intensified by external engineering and the sudden scarcity created by new states. The intent isn’t to flatten differences, but to level the playing field: two modern national projects, born in the same turbulent century, colliding inside a landscape that empires left unstable on purpose.