Self-Departure, Exile, and the Critique of Zionism
Perhaps in some formal sense every book begins by considering its own
impossibility, but this book’s completion has depended on a way of working with
that impossibility without a clear resolution. Even so, something of that impossibility
has to be sustained within the writing, even if it continually threatens to
bring the project to a halt. What started as a book seeking to debunk the claim that
any and all criticism of the State of Israel is effectively anti-Semitic has become a
meditation on the necessity of tarrying with the impossible. I will try to make this
clear in what follows, but let me state the risk of this endeavor clearly from the start.
If I succeed in showing that there are Jewish resources for the criticism of state
violence, the colonial subjugation of populations, expulsion and dispossession,
then I will have managed to show that a Jewish critique of Israeli state violence is
at least possible, if not ethically obligatory. If I show, further, that there are Jewish
values of cohabitation with the non-Jew that are part of the very ethical substance
of diasporic Jewishness, then it will be possible to conclude that commitments to
social equality and social justice have been an integral part of Jewish secular, socialist,
and religious traditions. Though this should come as no surprise, it has become
necessary to reiterate this argument over and against a public discourse that assumes
any criticism of the Israeli occupation, of internal inequalities within Israel, of land
confiscations, and of violent bombardments of trapped populations such as those
we saw in Operation Cast Lead—indeed, any objections to the requirements of
citizenship in that country—is anti-Semitic or anti-Jewish, not in the service of the
Jewish people, or in no way in line with what we might generally call Jewish values.
In other words, it would be a painful irony indeed if the Jewish struggle for social
justice were itself cast as anti-Jewish.
et’s say I succeed in showing that there are not only bona fide but imperative
Jewish traditions that oppose state violence and modes of colonial expulsion and
containment. I then succeed in affirming a different Jewishness than the one in whose
name the Israeli state claims to speak. And I help to show that there are not only
significant differences among Jews—secular, religious, historically constituted—but
also active struggles within that community about the meaning of justice, equality,
and the critique of state violence and colonial subjugation. Indeed, if the argument
were to stop here, and if proved persuasive, then it would establish that it is surely
not anti-Jewish or counter-Jewish to offer a critique of the forms of state violence
instituted and maintained by political Zionism (which would include the massive
dispossessions of Palestinians in 1948, the appropriation of land in 1967, and the
recurrent confiscations of Palestinian lands that continues now with the building
of the wall and the expansion of settlements). This alone is important, since Israel
claims to represent the Jewish people, and popular opinion tends to assume that
Jews “support” Israel without taking into account Jewish traditions of anti-Zionism
and the presence of Jews in coalitions that oppose the Israeli colonial subjugation
of Palestinians.
If I win the point on these terms, I am immediately confronted, however, with
another problem. By claiming there is a significant Jewish tradition affirming modes
of justice and equality that would, of necessity, lead to a criticism of the Israeli state,
I establish a Jewish perspective that is non-Zionist, even anti-Zionist, at the risk
of making even the resistance to Zionism into a “Jewish” value and so asserting,
indirectly, the exceptional ethical resources of Jewishness. But if the critique of
Zionism is to be effective and substantial, that claim of exceptionalism has to be
refused in favor of more fundamental democratic values. However important it may
be to establish Jewish oppositions to Zionism, this cannot be done without a critical
move that questions the sufficiency of a Jewish framework, however alternative
and progressive, as the defining horizon of the ethical. The opposition to Zionism
requires the departure from Jewishness as an exclusionary framework for thinking
both ethics and politics.
Any legitimate way to think about a polity for the region would have to emerge
from the contesting ethical and political traditions that inform conduct, thinking,
modes of belonging, and antagonism in the region. In other words, although it is
surely possible to claim that there are Jewish grounds for a critique of state violence,
ones that ought legitimately to be extended to the State of Israel itself, that remains
a partial, though important, argument to be made during these times. If the prin-
ciples of equality and justice that drive the movement against political Zionism
were exclusively derived from such sources, they would immediately prove to be
insufficient, even contradictory. Indeed, even the critique of Zionism, if exclusively
Jewish, extends Jewish hegemony for thinking about the region and becomes, in
spite of itself, part of what we might call the Zionist effect. Surely any effort that
extends Jewish hegemony in the region is part of the Zionist effect, whether or not it
understands itself as Zionist or anti-Zionist. Is there a way around this conundrum
if one still wants to contest the Israeli claim to represent Jews and Jewishness and to
sever the connection so many now make between the State of Israel and the Jewish
people and, indeed, Jewish values?
It continues to surprise me that many people believe that to claim one’s Jewishness
is to claim Zionism or believe that every person who attends a synagogue is
necessarily Zionist. Equally concerning is the number of people who think they
must now disavow Jewishness because they cannot accept the policies of the State
of Israel. If Zionism continues to control the meaning of Jewishness, then there can
be no Jewish critique of Israel and no acknowledgment of those of Jewish descent or
formation who call into question the right of the State of Israel to speak for Jewish
values or, indeed, the Jewish people. Although it is surely possible to derive certain
principles of equality, justice, and cohabitation from Jewish resources, broadly
construed, how can one do this without thereby making those very values Jewish
and so effacing or devaluing other modes of valuation that belong to other religious
and cultural traditions and practices?
One way around this, perhaps, is to consider what it means to derive those
principles from Jewish resources. The idea of derivation implies a consequential
ambiguity: if such principles have Jewish sources, do they remain exclusively Jewish
principles once they are developed and take new historical forms, or do they
to a certain extent depart from that exclusive framework? Indeed, we might ask
more generally whether the principles of justice and equality at stake in any criticism
of the Israeli state, or other states that commit similar forms of injustice, are
always partially derived from various specific cultural and historical resources and
yet “belong” exclusively to none of them. We can include among such resources
the classical Greek tradition, the French Enlightenment, and the decolonization
struggles of the twentieth century. In these cases, as in others, one can say that such
principles are derived from specific cultural resources, but this does not mean that
they belong exclusively to any one tradition from which they are derived. Indeed,
for a concept of justice to be derived from a specific tradition means that there must
be some way for it to depart from that tradition, to demonstrate its applicability
outside that tradition. In that sense, the departure from the tradition is a precondition
of any tradition yielding strong political principles. So the dilemma is clear: if the
critique of state violence relies on principles or values that are finally, exclusively, or
fundamentally Jewish, understood variously and broadly as a religious, secular, or
historical set of traditions, then Jewishness becomes a privileged cultural resource,
and the Jewish framework remains the only or privileged one by which to think the
critique of state violence. But if one undertakes this critique because one objects
to the principles of Jewish sovereignty that govern that region, historic Palestine,
and because one is in favor of a polity that would put an end to the colonial subjugation
in the West Bank and Gaza, and acknowledge the rights of the more than
750,000 Palestinians forcibly displaced from their homes and lands in 1948—and
through subsequent and recurrent forms of land confiscation—then one is arguing
for a polity that would apply equally and fairly to all the inhabitants of that land. It
would then make no sense to say that Jewish frameworks can provide the basis for
political cohabitation or, indeed, binationalism, since the whole point is to develop
a polity that would not only shelter multiple frameworks, but commit itself to a
binationalism that will only become fully thinkable once colonial rule has come
to an end. Rather than a bid for an easy multiculturalism, my proposal is that the
vast and violent hegemonic structure of political Zionism must cede its hold on
those lands and populations and that what must take its place is a new polity that
would presuppose the end to settler colonialism and that would imply complex
and antagonistic modes of living together, an amelioration of the wretched forms
of binationalism that already exist.
So, though one needs to contest the hegemonic control Zionism exercises over
Jewishness, one needs, equally, to contest the colonial subjugation Zionism has
implied for the Palestinian people. In fact, one would not be concerned with the
first hegemonic move ( Jewish = Zionist) if one were not primarily concerned with
ending the history of subjugation. How does one move on both fronts at once?
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