Parting Ways

Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism

Judith Butler

• Editorial: Columbia University Press
• Año: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780231517959
• Categoría: Theology & Religion
• Categoría: Jewish Theology

Judith Butler follows Edward Said's late suggestion that through a consideration of Palestinian dispossession in relation to Jewish diasporic traditions a new ethos can be forged for a one-state solution. Butler engages Jewish philosophical positions to articulate a critique of political Zionism and its practices of illegitimate state violence, nationalism, and state-sponsored racism. At the same time, she moves beyond communitarian frameworks, including Jewish ones, that fail to arrive at a radical democratic notion of political cohabitation. Butler engages thinkers such as Edward Said, Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi, Martin Buber, Walter Benjamin, and Mahmoud Darwish as she articulates a new political ethic. In her view, it is as important to dispute Israel's claim to represent the Jewish people as it is to show that a narrowly Jewish framework cannot suffice as a basis for an ultimate critique of Zionism. She promotes an ethical position in which the obligations of cohabitation do not derive from cultural sameness but from the unchosen character of social plurality. Recovering the arguments of Jewish thinkers who offered criticisms of Zionism or whose work could be used for such a purpose, Butler disputes the specific charge of anti-Semitic self-hatred often leveled against Jewish critiques of Israel. Her political ethic relies on a vision of cohabitation that thinks anew about binationalism and exposes the limits of a communitarian framework to overcome the colonial legacy of Zionism. Her own engagements with Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish form an important point of departure and conclusion for her engagement with some key forms of thought derived in part from Jewish resources, but always in relation to the non-Jew.

Butler considers the rights of the dispossessed, the necessity of plural cohabitation, and the dangers of arbitrary state violence, showing how they can be extended to a critique of Zionism, even when that is not their explicit aim. She revisits and affirms Edward Said's late proposals for a one-state solution within the ethos of binationalism. Butler's startling suggestion: Jewish ethics not only demand a critique of Zionism, but must transcend its exclusive Jewishness in order to realize the ethical and political ideals of living together in radical democracy.

1. Impossible, Necessary Task

Said, Levinas, and the Ethical Demand

ALTHOUGH IT IS commonly said that a one-state solution and an ideal of binationalism are impracticable goals, even by those who bear such concepts goodwill, it is doubtless equally true that a world in which no one held out for a one-state solution and no one thought anymore about binationalism would be a radically impoverished world. I take it that we might say the same about pacifism. It might be discredited as lacking all Realpolitik, but would any of us want to live in a world in which pacifists no longer existed? What kind of world that would be?

It came as a surprise to me, and also a gift, to read one of Edward Said’s last books, Freud and the Non-European,¹ not only because of the lively reengagement with the figure of Moses it contains, but because Moses becomes for him an opportunity to articulate two theses that are, in my view, worth considering. The first is that Moses, an Egyptian, is the founder of the Jewish people, which means that Judaism is not possible without this defining implication in what is Arab.² Such a formulation challenges hegemonic Ashkenazi definitions of Jewishness. But it also implies a more diasporic origin for Judaism, which suggests that a fundamental status is accorded the condition by which the Jew cannot be defined without a relation to the non-Jew. It is not only that, in diaspora, Jews must and do live with non-Jews, and must reflect on how precisely to conduct a life in the midst of religious and cultural heterogeneity, but also that the Jew can never be fully separated from the question of how to live among those who are not Jewish. The figure of Moses, however, makes an even more emphatic point, namely, that, for some, Jew and Arab are not finally separable categories, since they are lived and embodied together in the life of the Arab Jew.³ Of course, there are reasons to be suspicious of all recourse to origins, biblical and metaphorical, but Said is here conducting a thought experiment to incite us to think differently. Indeed, he leads us back to the figure of Moses, to show that one key foundational moment for Judaism, the one in which the law is delivered to the people, centers upon a figure for whom there is no lived distinction between Arab and Jew. The one is implicated in the other—is this also a figure for understanding how the two identities are articulated through one another outside the terms of the present where Israel, claiming to represent a state based on principles of Jewish sovereignty, exercises forms of colonial rule over Palestinians through disenfranchisement, occupation, land confiscation, and expulsion?

The second dimension of this text effectively follows from the first, since Said’s text is something of a petition, an incitement to consider that “displacement” characterizes the histories of both the Palestinian and the Jewish peoples and so, in his view, constitutes the basis of a possible, even desirable, alliance. Obviously, those forms of displacement are not precisely equal or analogous: The Israeli state is responsible for the forcible displacement of Palestinians and their ongoing subjugation; the dispossession of the Jews from Europe, and their destruction, constitutes its own, separate catastrophic history. Let us assume that there are historically specific modalities of catastrophe that cannot be measured or compared by any common or neutral standard. And yet, are there other ways of extrapolating from one’s own history of dispossession to understand and oppose the dispossession of others?

Said is calling upon the Jewish people to be mindful of their own experience of having been dispossessed of land and rights to forge an alliance with those who have been dispossessed by Israel. His call assumes that there might be, or should be, a Jewish resistance to Israel, that the Jewish people might follow a different historical trajectory than the one that Israel has followed. Even if we grant, as we must, the singular history of Jewish oppression, it does not follow that in every political scenario Jews will always be the victims, that their violence will always be regarded as justified self-defense. In fact, to grant the singularity of one history is implicitly to be committed to the singularity of all such histories, at which point one can begin to ask a different kind of question. The point is not to confirm that Zionism is like Nazism or is its unconscious repetition with Palestinians standing in for Jews. Such analogies fail to consider the very different modes of subjugation, dispossession, and death-dealing that characterize National Socialism and political Zionism. The point is rather to ask how certain kinds of principles might be extrapolated from one set of historical conditions to grasp another, a move that requires an act of political translation that refuses to assimilate the one experience to the other, and refuses as well the kind of particularism that would deny any possible way to articulate principles regarding, say, the rights of refugees on the basis of a comparative consideration of these and other instances of historical dispossession. It may, in fact, be the case that one moral and political legacy from the Nazi genocide against the Jews (which was, in fact, a genocide against several minority populations) is an opposition to all forms of state racism and its modalities of violence, a reconsideration of the rights of self-determination to be accorded any population that is maintained either as a permanent minority (in Israel) or under conditions of occupation (West Bank and Gaza) or dispossessed of lands and rights (diasporic Palestinians from 1948 and 1967).

It may be that binationalism is an impossibility, but that mere fact does not suffice as a reason to be against it. Binationalism is not just an ideal “to come”—something we might hope to arrive in a more ideal future, but a wretched fact that is being lived out as a specific historical form of settler colonialism and the proximities and exclusions it reproduces through the daily military and regulatory practices of occupation. Even though neither “Jews” nor “Palestinians” are monolithic populations, they nevertheless are now in Israel/Palestine bound together in intractable ways through a regime of Israeli law and military violence that has produced a resistance movement that takes both violent and nonviolent forms. But, rather than start with the history of Zionism as a colonial project to understand how Jews and Palestinians have been brought together, Said suggests that one might rethink biblical origins, not because the Bible has ever been a legitimate basis for founding any political order—it has not—but because it offers a figure that might assist us to think in a new way. Moses is the figure of their cathexis, a living conjuncture. And if we consider that Moses was not European, this means that the non-European Jew, the Arab Jew, is at the origin of our understanding of Judaism—a figure within which “Arab” and “Jew” cannot be dissociated. This fact has contemporary implications, not only for rethinking the history of the Jewish people in ways that do not presume a European origin, and, hence, include the Mizrachim and Sephardim as central to its history, but also for understanding that the “Arab Jew” constitutes conjuncture, chiasm, and cohabitation (understood as coarticulation with alterity) as a founding principle of Jewish life.

Said thus notes that the non-European from the Ashkenazi Jewish point of view is essential to the meaning of Judaism. As I read Said’s words on this subject, I found myself grateful for the understanding of Jewishness that I would not quite have arrived at without him. In this way, he acts as the “non-European” who might “found” the Jewish people again. And though this might read as hubris, it strikes me as a moving invocation to recall an originary and insuperable alliance. Although Said was never a devotee of poststructuralism and its critique of the subject (he actively cautioned against the Foucauldian critique of humanism, for instance, in Orientalism),⁴ it is clear that what he likes most in Freud’s embrace of Moses as the non-European, the Egyptian founder of the Jews, is the challenge the figure of Moses poses to a strictly identitarian politics. If Moses stands for a contemporary political aspiration, it is one that refuses to be organized exclusively on principles of national, religious, or ethnic identity, one that accepts a certain impurity and mixedness as the irreversible conditions of social life. Further, for Said, Freud boldly exemplifies the insight that even for the most definable, the most identifiable, the most stubborn communal identity—and for Freud, this was Jewish identity—there are inherent limits that prevent it from being fully incorporated into a monolithic and unified identity, singular and exclusive. Said maintains that identity cannot be thought or worked through alone; it cannot constitute or even imagine itself “without that radical originary break or flaw which will not be repressed, because Moses was Egyptian, and therefore always outside the identity inside which so many have stood, and suffered—and later, perhaps, triumphed.”⁵

Remarkable here is that although Said reflects on the origins of Judaism, he finds there, at the site of that origin, an impurity, a mixing with otherness (what Continental philosophers might call an ineradicable alterity), which turns out to be constitutive of what it is to be a Jew. “The strength of this thought,” he tells us, “is that it can be articulated in and speak to other besieged identities as well … as a troubling, disabling, destabilizing secular wound” (FNE, 54). Although it is not immediately clear what is meant by a “secular wound,” it may be that Said understood secularism to wound or rupture nonsecular modes of political belonging; in this sense, the secular wounds putatively traditional social bonds. And yet, after a wound, it seems, new forms of belonging become possible. He asks whether we might continue to think this thought of two peoples, diasporic, living together, where the diasporic, understood as a way of attaining identity only with and through the other, becomes the basis for a certain binationalism. Could this thought aspire to the condition of a politics of diasporic life? Said asks: can it ever become the not-so-precarious foundation in the land of Jews and Palestinians of a binational state in which “Israel and Palestine are parts rather than antagonists of each other’s history and underlying reality?” (FNE, 55). I would like to query further: is it precisely through a politics that affirms the irresolution of identity that binationalism becomes thinkable? And can we think a binationalism that moves us beyond both the nation and the binary of Jew/Palestinian that is belied by both the Arab Jew and the Palestinian Israeli?

In the service of such a project—binationalism, irresolution of identity, and why it might be worth our while to attend politically to both of these—I hope to turn to the question of a Jewish resistance to Zionism as a contemporary intellectual and political phenomenon, which has a history that is not only “archaic” in the sense that Moses exemplifies but has also been formulated in a number of generally unacknowledged ways throughout twentith century European Jewish history. I think one can find, as it were, historical premonitions of post-Zionism—by which I mean a call for its dissolution by those formed within its matrix—prior to Zionism or, indeed, as part of early versions of Zionism.

Oddly, the classical liberal position is generally considered “post-Zionist,” suggesting that this eighteenth-century political framework figures as a future threat to the project of Zionism. However, the classically liberal position—in particular, that the requirements for citizenship should not be based on race, religion, ethnicity—is subject to intense vilification. When an Israeli publicly remarks that he or she would like to live in a secular state, one that does not discriminate on the basis of religion, ethnicity, or race, it is common to hear that position (and person) decried as aiding and abetting the “destruction” of the Jewish state or committing treason. If a Palestinian (Israeli or not) espouses the same position, namely, that citizenship ought not to be determined by religious or ethnic membership, then that might be considered a “terrorist” act. How did it become historically possible for the precepts of classical liberalism to be equated with terrorism and genocide in the beginning of the twenty-first century?

How are we to understand this charge of “destruction”? We hear it, I think, quite often, and the word destruction of course resonates with that other phrase, the destruction of the Jewish people, which was, after all, the stated aim of Hitler’s genocide. When we hear the word destruction again, as the woeful consequence that would follow from holding a view critical of Zionism, the resonances of the term are mobilized against the person who espouses such a view. The one who calls for the dissolution of an unjust regime, but not the destruction of the population, is nevertheless figured as one who fails to see that apparently only an unjust regime can protect the Jewish population. Thus, by calling for justice, one is figured as calling for genocide. The critique of Zionism is thus understood as emerging from a fundamental insensitivity to the Nazi genocide against the Jews or as a form of complicity with that very genocide. The critique of Zionism and its structural commitment to state violence against minorities is thus itself associated with massive violence against the Jews, the reiteration of ineffable catastrophe, and so the most unconscionable collaboration with Hitlerian politics. Indeed, as soon as that association is secured—and, I would suggest, it is secured for most in a flash—then the conversation comes to an end, and that viewpoint is, oddly enough, excluded from the domain of acceptable political speech. If what the critic opposed to Zionism calls for is the establishment of a new polity based on principles elaborated in classical liberalism—that is, with religion, for instance, firmly separated from any conditions of citizenship, formal and substantive, and one need go no further than Locke or Montesquieu to make such claims—then it would seem that classical liberalism is precisely what threatens the State of Israel. Thus, when “destruction” of that state emerges as a consequence of holding the view that religion and conditions of citizenship ought to be separated, there is an effective foreclosure of an open debate on whether nonexclusionary criteria for rights of citizenship can be developed and implemented for that region. Indeed, one might hold to these views and be rigorously pacifist or one might hold to such views and believe that such a transition to a new polity should happen through nonviolent means, through the elaboration of new forms of law and projects of land redistribution that seek to compensate for decades of land confiscation, but, in such cases, those who hold such views are charged with “violence” and “destruction,” as in “these views lead to the destruction of the Jewish state.”

If we attend to this line carefully, though, we might see that the charge “these views lead to the destruction of the Jewish state” illicitly draws upon the claim that “these views lead to the destruction of the Jewish people” or, more elliptically, “the Jews.” But it is clearly one thing to ask about the political and economic conditions under which Jews and non-Jews might live equally and peaceably, and to think of forms of government that might require a transition from the current regime to another that would constitute a one-state solution or a form of federated power, and quite another to call for the violent destruction of a state or violence against its existing population. Indeed, the reason to envisage a new polity after Zionism may well be based on the recognition that no state can justly maintain itself through the violent subjugation of an indigenous and minority population who live on that land. Indeed, envisaging a polity after Zionism may well be the only way out of violence and destruction.

The public enunciation of the view asks that the State of Israel consider undertaking formal acts by which equality might be more inclusively allocated and contemporary forms of discrimination, differential violence, and daily harassment against the Palestinian people brought to an end. These views call for a new concept of the citizen, a new constitutional basis for the country, and a radical reorganization of land partitions, illegal property allocations, and even minimally a concept of multiculturalism that extends to Jewish, Arab, and Christian inhabitants of those lands. Now, one might argue against all these propositions that they are unreasonable and naive, but even then we would have to ask whether the refusal to reorganize a polity on principles of equality, protection against violence, and the just redistribution of lands is itself based on tacit or explicit desires for Jewish demographic advantage or notions of cultural and religious purity. It seems to me that at this point the affective stakes of nationalism effectively circumscribe the domain of acceptable political speech.

Similarly, when the question is posed (repeatedly) to Palestinians, “do you accept Israel’s right to exist?” it is often taken to be synonymous with “are you in favor of the physical destruction of Israel, understood as Israeli property, lives, institutions, and existing territorial boundaries considered as an indissoluble totality?” The question pertaining to the “right” to exist is of another order, though, since the question asks whether the territorial claims and state apparatus have been founded on legitimate grounds (and whether the continual territorial expansion that happens through new paths for the separation wall and new settlements are something other than illegal land grabs). One might, for instance, argue that the founding was in no sense legitimate, but that practical politics require that the State of Israel be negotiated with and that a mode of cooperation be found between Palestinians and the existing Israeli state. Such a realist view might argue as well that, although the founding was illegitimate, there are concrete ways that Israel can and should offer restitution for stolen lands and displaced populations since 1948. In other words, it does not follow that disputing the legitimacy of Israel’s founding and its continuing claims to certain lands implies that one is in favor of the violent destruction of the current State of Israel. Rather, it implies that the injustices of expulsion, killing, disenfranchisement not only characterize the founding of the state, but have continued, and continue still, as the basic modes of reproducing the state and its legitimacy effect. To call for a cessation of such practices and a new polity for the region constitute political viewpoints, and they cannot be equated with artillery directed toward Haifa or Tel Aviv. The analysis may well shed light on why a people, dispossessed and subjected to military power, seeks recourse to their own military resources to resist and reverse these injustices. But, for my purposes here, I wish only to point out that, if we engage the question of the legitimacy of the Israeli state and its polities on political grounds, there is reason to think that political reflection and negotiation could be the means through which to establish the state on new and legitimate grounds. But, if raising the question of legitimacy is regarded as a declaration of war, then the question of legiti...