 |
| Judith Butler |
Editors
Note: Despite a
campaign to silence them,
philsophers Judith Butler and Omar Barghouti spoke at Brooklyn
College on Thursday night. In an exclusive, TheNation presents
the text of Butler's remarks.
Usually
one starts by saying that one is glad to be here, but I cannot say
that it has been a pleasure anticipating this event. What a Megillah!
I am, of course, glad that the event was not cancelled, and I
understand that it took a great deal of courage and a steadfast
embrace of principle for this event to happen at all. I would like
personally to thank all those who took this opportunity to reaffirm
the fundamental principles of academic freedom, including the
following organizations: the Modern Language Association, the
National Lawyers Guild, the New York ACLU, the American Association
of University Professors, the Professional Staff Congress (the union
for faculty and staff in the CUNY system), the New
York Times editorial
team, the offices of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Governor Andrew Cuomo
and Brooklyn College President Karen Gould whose principled stand on
academic freedom has been exemplary.
The
principle of academic freedom is designed to make sure that powers
outside the university, including government and corporations, are
not able to control the curriculum or intervene in extra-mural
speech. It not only bars such interventions, but it also protects
those platforms in which we might be able to reflect together on the
most difficult problems. You can judge for yourself whether or not my
reasons for lending my support to this movement are good ones.
That is, after all, what academic debate is about. It is also what
democratic debate is about, which suggests that open debate about
difficult topics functions as a meeting point between democracy and
the academy. Instead of asking right away whether we are for or
against this movement, perhaps we can pause just long enough to find
out what exactly this is, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions
movement, and why it is so difficult to speak about this.
I
am not asking anyone to join a movement this evening. I am not even a
leader of this movement or part of any of its governing committee,
even though the New
York Times tried
to anoint me the other day—I appreciated their subsequent
retraction, and I apologize to my Palestinian colleagues for their
error. The movement, in fact, has been organized and led by
Palestinians seeking rights of political self-determination,
including Omar Barghouti, who was invited first by the Students for
Justice in Palestine, after which I was invited to join him. At the
time I thought it would be very much like other events I have
attended, a conversation with a few dozen student activists in the
basement of a student center. So, as you can see, I am surprised and
ill-prepared for what has happened.
Omar will
speak in a moment about what the BDS movement is, its successes and
its aspirations. But I would like briefly to continue with the
question, what precisely are we doing here this evening? I presume
that you came to hear what there is to be said, and so to test your
preconceptions against what some people have to say, to see whether
your objections can be met and your questions answered. In other
words, you come here to exercise critical judgment, and if the
arguments you hear are not convincing, you will be able to cite them,
to develop your opposing view and to communicate that as you wish. In
this way, your being here this evening confirms your right to form
and communicate an autonomous judgment, to demonstrate why you think
something is true or not, and you should be free to do this without
coercion and fear. These are your rights of free expression, but they
are, perhaps even more importantly, your rights to education, which
involves the freedom to hear, to read and to consider any number of
viewpoints as part of an ongoing public deliberation on this issue.
Your presence here, even your support for the event, does not assume
agreement among us. There is no unanimity of opinion here; indeed,
achieving unanimity is not the goal.
The arguments
made against this very meeting took several forms, and they were not
always easy for me to parse. One argument was that BDS is a form of
hate speech, and it spawned a set of variations: it is hate speech
directed against either the State of Israel or Israeli Jews, or all
Jewish people. If BDS is hate speech, then it is surely not protected
speech, and it would surely not be appropriate for any institution of
higher learning to sponsor or make room for such speech. Yet another
objection, sometimes uttered by the same people who made the first,
is that BDS does qualify as a viewpoint, but as such, ought to be
presented only in a context in which the opposing viewpoint can be
heard as well. There was yet a qualification to this last position,
namely, that no one can have a conversation on this issue in the US
that does not include a certain Harvard professor, but that
spectacular argument was so self-inflationary and self-indicting,
that I could only respond with astonishment.
So in the
first case, it is not a viewpoint (and so not protected as
extra-mural speech), but in the second instance, it is a viewpoint,
presumably singular, but cannot be allowed to be heard without an
immediate refutation. The contradiction is clear, but when people
engage in a quick succession of contradictory claims such as these,
it is usually because they are looking for whatever artillery they
have at their disposal to stop something from happening. They don’t
much care about consistency or plausibility. They fear that if the
speech is sponsored by an institution such as Brooklyn College, it
will not only be heard, but become hearable, admitted into the
audible world. The fear is that viewpoint will become legitimate,
which means only that someone can publicly hold such a view and that
it becomes eligible for contestation. A legitimate view is not
necessarily right, but it is not ruled out in advance as hate speech
or injurious conduct. Those who did not want any of these words to
become sayable and audible imagined that the world they know and
value will come to an end if such words are uttered, as if the words
themselves will rise off the page or fly out of the mouth as weapons
that will injure, maim or even kill, leading to irreversibly
catastrophic consequences. This is why some people claimed that if
this event were held, the two-state solution would be imperiled—they
attributed great efficacy to these words. And yet others said it
would lead to the coming of a second Holocaust—an unimaginable
remark to which I will nevettheless return. One might say that all of
these claims were obvious hyperbole and should be dismissed as such.
But it is important to understand that they are wielded for the
purpose of intimidation, animating the spectre of traumatic
identification with the Nazi oppressor: if you let these people
speak, you yourself will be responsible for heinous crimes or for the
destruction of a state, or the Jewish people. If you listen to the
words, you will become complicit in war crimes.
And yet all
of us here have to distinguish between the right to listen to a point
of view and the right to concur or dissent from that point of view;
otherwise, public discourse is destroyed by censorship. I wonder,
what is the fantasy of speech nursed by the censor? There must be
enormous fear behind the drive to censorship, but also enormous
aggression, as if we were all in a war where speech has suddenly
become artillery. Is there another way to approach language and
speech as we think about this issue? Is it possible that some other
use of words might forestall violence, bring about a general ethos of
non-violence, and so enact, and open onto, the conditions for a
public discourse that welcomes and shelters disagreement, even
disarray?
The
Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement is, in fact, a non-violent
movement; it seeks to use established legal means to achieve its
goals; and it is, interestingly enough, the largest Palestinian civic
movement at this time. That means that the largest Palestinian civic
movement is a non-violent one that justifies its actions through
recourse to international law. Further, I want to underscore that
this is also a movement whose stated core principles include the
opposition to every form of racism, including both state-sponsored
racism and anti-Semitism. Of course, we can debate what anti-Semitism
is, in what social and political forms it is found. I myself am sure
that the election of self-identified national socialists to the Greek
parliament is a clear sign of anti-Semitism; I am sure that the
recirculation of Nazi insignia and rhetoric by the National Party of
Germany is a clear sign of anti-Semitism. I am also sure that the
rhetoric and actions of Iran’s Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad are
often explicitly anti-Semitic, and that some forms of Palestinian
opposition to Israel do rely on anti-Semitic slogans, falsehoods and
threats. All of these forms of anti-Semitism are to be
unconditionally opposed. And I would add, they have to be opposed in
the same way and with the same tenacity that any form of racism has
to be opposed, including state racism.
But still, it
is left to us to ask, why would a non-violent movement to achieve
basic political rights for Palestinians be understood as
anti-Semitic? Surely, there is nothing about the basic rights
themselves that constitute a problem. They include equal rights of
citizenship for current inhabitants; the end to the occupation, and
the rights of unlawfully displaced persons to return to their lands
and gain restitution for their losses. We will surely speak about
each of these three principles this evening. But for now, I want to
ask, why would a collective struggle to use economic and cultural
forms of power to compel the enforcement of international laws be
considered anti-Semitic? It would be odd to say that they are
anti-Semitic to honor internationally recognized rights to equality,
to be free of occupation and to have unlawfully appropriated land and
property restored. I know that this last principle makes many people
uneasy, but there are several ways of conceptualizing how the right
of return might be exercised lawfully such that it does not entail
further dispossession (and we will return to this issue).
For those who
say that exercising internationally recognized rights is
anti-Semitic, or becomes anti-Semitic in this context, they must mean
either that a) its motivation is anti-Semitic or b) its effects are
anti-Semitic. I take it that no one is actually saying that the
rights themselves are anti-Semitic, since they have been invoked by
many populations in the last decades, including Jewish people
dispossessed and displaced in the aftermath of the second world war.
Is there really any reason we should not assume that Jews, just like
any other people, would prefer to live in a world where such
internationally recognized rights are honored? It will not do to say
that international law is the enemy of the Jewish people, since the
Jewish people surely did not as a whole oppose the Nuremburg trials,
or the development of human rights law. In fact, there have always
been Jews working alongside non-Jews—not only to establish the
courts and codes of international law, but in the struggle to
dismantle colonial regimes, opposing any and all legal and military
powers that seek systematically to undermine the conditions of
political self-determination for any population.
Only
if we accept the proposition that the state of Israel is the
exclusive and legitimate representative of the Jewish people would a
movement calling for divestment, sanctions and boycott against that
state be understood as directed against the Jewish people as a whole.
Israel would then be understood as co-extensive with the Jewish
people. There are two major problems with this view. First, the state
of Israel does not represent all Jews, and not all Jews understand
themselves as represented by the state of Israel. Secondly, the state
of Israel should be representing all of
its population equally, regardless of whether or not they are Jewish,
regardless of race, religion or ethnicity.
So the first
critical and normative claim that follows is that the state of Israel
should be representing the diversity of its own population. Indeed,
nearly 25 percent of Israel’s population is not Jewish, and most of
those are Palestinian, although some of them are Bedouins and Druze.
If Israel is to be considered a democracy, the non-Jewish population
deserves equal rights under the law, as do the Mizrachim (Arab Jews)
who represent over 30 percent of the population. Presently, there are
at least twenty laws that privilege Jews over Arabs within the
Israeli legal system. The 1950 Law of Return grants automatic
citizenship rights to Jews from anywhere in the world upon request,
while denying that same right to Palestinians who were forcibly
dispossessed of their homes in 1948 or subsequently as the result of
illegal settlements and redrawn borders. Human Rights Watch has
compiled an extensive study of Israel's policy of "separate, not
equal" schools for Palestinian children. Moreover, as many as
100 Palestinian villages in Israel are still not recognized by the
Israeli government, lacking basic services (water, electricity,
sanitation, roads, etc.) from the government. Palestinians are barred
from military service, and yet access to housing and education still
largely depends on military status. Families are divided by the
separation wall between the West Bank and Israel, with few forms of
legal recourse to rights of visitation and reunification. The Knesset
debates the “transfer” of the Palestinian population to the West
Bank, and the new loyalty oath requires that anyone who wishes to
become a citizen pledge allegiance to Israel as Jewish and
democratic, thus eliding once again the non-Jewish population and
binding the full population to a specific and controversial, if not
contradictory, version of democracy.
The second
point, to repeat, is that the Jewish people extend beyond the state
of Israel and the ideology of political Zionism. The two cannot be
equated. Honestly, what can really be said about “the Jewish
people” as a whole? Is it not a lamentable sterotype to make large
generalizations about all Jews, and to presume they all share the
same political commitments? They—or, rather, we—occupy a vast
spectrum of political views, some of which are unconditionally
supportive of the state of Israel, some of which are conditionally
supportive, some are skeptical, some are exceedingly critical, and an
increasing number, if we are to believe the polls in this country,
are indifferent. In my view, we have to remain critical of anyone who
posits a single norm that decides rights of entry into the social or
cultural category determining as well who will be excluded. Most
categories of identity are fraught with conflicts and ambiguities;
the effort to suppress the complexity of the category of “Jewish”
is thus a political move that seeks to yoke a cultural identity to a
specific Zionist position. If the Jew who struggles for justice for
Palestine is considered to be anti-Semitic, if any number of
internationals who have joined thus struggle from various parts of
the world are also considered anti-Semitic and if Palestinians
seeking rights of political self-determination are so accused as
well, then it would appear that no oppositional move that can take
place without risking the accusation of anti-Semitism. That
accusation becomes a way of discrediting a bid for
self-determination, at which point we have to ask what political
purpose the radical mis-use of that accusation has assumed in the
stifling of a movement for political self-determination.
When Zionism
becomes co-extensive with Jewishness, Jewishness is pitted against
the diversity that defines democracy, and if I may say so, betrays
one of the most important ethical dimensions of the diasporic Jewish
tradition, namely, the obligation of co-habitation with those
different from ourselves. Indeed, such a conflation denies the Jewish
role in broad alliances in the historical struggle for social and
political justice in unions, political demands for free speech, in
socialist communities, in the resistance movement in World War II, in
peace activism, the Civil Rights movement and the struggle against
apartheid in South Africa. It also demeans the important struggles in
which Jews and Palestinians work together to stop the wall, to
rebuild homes, to document indefinite detention, to oppose military
harassment at the borders and to oppose the occupation and to imagine
the plausible scenarios for the Palestinian right to return.
The point of
the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement is to withdraw funds
and support from major financial and cultural institutions that
support the operations of the Israeli state and its military. The
withdrawal of investments from companies that actively support the
military or that build on occupied lands, the refusal to buy products
that are made by companies on occupied lands, the withdrawal of funds
from investment accounts that support any of these activities, a
message that a growing number of people in the international
community will not be complicit with the occupation. For this goal to
be realized, it matters that there is a difference between those who
carry Israeli passports and the state of Israel, since the boycott is
directed only toward the latter. BDS focuses on state agencies and
corporations that build machinery designed to destroy homes, that
build military materiel that targets populations, that profit from
the occupation, that are situated illegally on Palestinian lands, to
name a few.
BDS does not
discriminate against individuals on the basis of their national
citizenship. I concede that not all versions of BDS have been
consistent on this point in the past, but the present policy confirms
this principle. I myself oppose any form of BDS that discriminates
against individuals on the basis of their citizenship. Others may
interpret the boycott differently, but I have no problem
collaborating with Israeli scholars and artists as long as we do not
participate in any Israeli institution or have Israeli state monies
support our collaborative work. The reason, of course, is that the
academic and cultural boycott seeks to put pressure on all those
cultural institutions that have failed to oppose the occupation and
struggle for equal rights and the rights of the dispossessed, all
those cultural institutions that think it is not their place to
criticize their government for these practices, all of them that
understand themselves to be above or beyond this intractable
political condition. In this sense, they do contribute to an
unacceptable status quo. And those institutions should know why
international artists and scholars refuse to come when they do, just
as they also need to know the conditions under which people will
come. When those cultural institutions (universities, art centers,
festivals) were to take such a stand, that would be the beginning of
the end of the boycott (let’s remember that the goal of any
boycott, divestment and sanctions movement is to become obsolete and
unnecessary; once conditions of equality and justice are achieved,
the rationale for BDS falls away, and in this sense achieving the
just conditions for the dissolution of the movement is its very aim).
In
some ways, the argument between BDS and its opponents centers on the
status of international law. Which international laws are to be
honored, and how can they be enforced. International law cannot solve
every political conflict, but political conflicts that fully
disregard international law usually only get worse as a result. We
know that the government of the state of Israel has voiced its
skepticism about international law, repeatedly criticizing the United
Nations as a biased institution, even bombing its offices in Gaza.
Israel also became the first country to withhold cooperation from a
UN review of its human rights practices scheduled last week in Geneva
(New
York Times,
1/29/13). I think it is fair to call this a boycott of the UN on the
part of the state of Israel. Indeed, one hears criticism of the
ineffectiveness of the UN on both sides, but is that a reason to give
up on the global human rights process altogether? There are good
reasons to criticize the human rights paradigm, to be sure, but for
now, I am only seeking to make the case that BDS is not a destructive
or hateful movement. It appeals to international law precisely under
conditions in which the international community, the United Nations
included, neighboring Arab states, human rights courts, the European
Union, The United States and the UK, have all failed effectively to
rectify the manifest injustices in Palestine. Boycott, divestment and
the call for sanctions are popular demands that emerge precisely when
the international community has failed to compel a state to abide by
its own norms.
Let us
consider, then, go back to the right of return, which constitutes the
controversial third prong of the BDS platform. The law of return is
extended to all of us who are Jewish who live in the diaspora, which
means that were it not for my politics, I too would be eligible to
become a citizen of that state. At the same time, Palestinians in
need of the right of return are denied the same rights? If someone
answers that “Jewish demographic advantage” must be maintained,
one can query whether Jewish demographic advantage is policy that can
ever be reconciled with democratic principles. If one responds to
that with “the Jews will only be safe if they retain their majority
status,” the response has to be that any state will surely engender
an opposition movement when it seeks to maintain a permanent and
disenfranchised minority within its borders, fails to offer
reparation or return to a population driven from their lands and
homes, keeps over four million people under occupation without rights
of mobility, due process and political self-determination, and
another 1.6 million under siege in Gaza, rationing of food,
administering unemployment, blocking building materials to restore
bombed homes and institutions, intensifying vulnerability to military
bombardment resulting in widespread injury and death.
If we
conclude that those who participate in such an opposition movement do
so because they hate the Jews, we have surely failed to recognize
that this is an opposition to oppression, to the multi-faceted
dimensions of a militarized form of settler colonialism that has
entailed subordination, occupation and dispossession. Any group would
oppose that condition, and the state that maintains it, regardless of
whether that state is identified as a Jewish state or any other kind.
Resistance movements do not discriminate against oppressors, though
sometimes the language of the movement can use discriminatory
language, and that has to be opposed. However, it is surely cynical
to claim that the only reason a group organizes to oppose its own
oppression is that it bears an inexplicable prejudice or racist
hatred against those who oppress them. We can see the torque of this
argument and the absurd conclusions to which it leads: if the
Palestinians did not hate the Jews, they would accept their
oppression by the state of Israel! If they resist, it is a sign of
anti-Semitism!
This kind of
logic takes us to one of the traumatic and affective regions of this
conflict. There are reasons why much of the global media and
prevailing political discourses cannot accept that a legitimate
opposition to inequality, occupation, and dispossession is very
different from anti-Semitism. After all, we cannot rightly argue that
if a state claiming to represent the Jewish people engages in these
manifestly illegal activities, it is therefore justified on the
grounds that the Jews have suffered atrociously and therefore have
special needs to be exempt from international norms. Such illegal
acts are never justified, no matter who is practicing them.
At the same
time, one must object to some of the language used by Hamas to refer
to the state of Israel, where very often the state of Israel is
itself conflated with the Jews, and where the actions of the state
reflect on the nature of the Jews. This is clearly anti-Semitism and
must be opposed. But BDS is not the same as Hamas, and it is simply
ignorant to argue that all Palestinian organizations are the same. In
the same vein, those who wrote to me recently to say that BDS is the
same as Hamas is the same as the Nazis are involved in fearful and
aggressive forms of association that assume that any effort to make
distinctions is naïve and foolish. And so we see how the conflations
such as these lead to bitter and destructive consequences. What if we
slowed down enough to think and to distinguish—what political
possibilities might then open?
And it brings
us to yet another outcry that we heard in advance of our discussion
here this evening. That was BDS is the coming of a second holocaust.
I believe we have to be very careful when anyone makes use of the
Holocaust in this way and for this purpose, since if the term becomes
a weapon by which we seek to stigmatize those with opposing political
viewpoints, then we have first of all dishonored the slaughter of
over 6 million Jewish people, and another 4 million gypsies, gay
people, disabled, the communists and the physically and mentally ill.
All of us, Jewish or not Jewish, must keep that historical memory
intact and alive, and refuse forms of revisionism and political
exploitation of that history. We may not exploit and re-ignite the
traumatic dimension of Hitler’s atrocities for the purposes of
accusing and silencing those with opposing political viewpoints,
including legitimate criticisms of the state of Israel. Such a tactic
not only demeans and instrumentalizes the memory of the Nazi
genocide, but produces a general cynicism about both accusations of
anti-Semitism and predictions of new genocidal possibilities. After
all, if those terms are bandied about as so much artillery in a war,
then they are used as blunt instruments for the purposes of
censorship and self-legitimation, and they no longer name and
describe the very hideous political realities to which they belong.
The more such accusations and invocations are tactically deployed,
the more skeptical and cynical the public becomes about their actual
meaning and use. This is a violation of that history, an insult to
the surviving generation, and a cynical and excited recirculation of
traumatic material—a kind of sadistic spree, to put it bluntly—that
seeks to defend and legitimate a very highly militarized and
repressive state regime. Of the use of the Holocaust to legitimate
Israeli military destructiveness, Primo Levi wrote in 1982, “I deny
any validity to [the use of the Holocaust for] this defence.”
We have heard
in recent days as well that BDS threatens the attempt to establish a
two-state solution. Although many people who support BDS are in favor
of a one-state solution, the BDS movement has not taken a stand on
this explicitly, and includes signatories who differ from one another
on this issue. In fact, the BDS committee, formed in 2005 with the
support of over 170 organizations in Palestine, does not take any
stand on the one state or two state solution. It describes itself as
an “anti-normalization” politics that seeks to force a wide range
of political institutions and states to stop compliance with the
occupation, unequal treatment and dispossession. For the BDS National
Committee, it is not the fundamental structure of the state of Israel
that is called into question, but the occupation, its denial of basic
human rights, its abrogation of international law (including its
failure to honor the rights of refugees), and the brutality of its
continuing conditions—harassment, humiliation, destruction and
confiscation of property, bombardment, and killing. Indeed, one finds
an array of opinions on one-state and two-state, especially now that
one-state can turn into Greater Israel with separated Bantustans of
Palestinian life. The two-state solution brings its own problems,
given that the recent proposals tend to suspend the rights of
refugees, accept curtailed borders and fail to show whether the
establishment of an independent state will bring to an end the
ongoing practices and institutions of occupation, or simply
incorporate them into its structure. How can a state be built with so
many settlements, all illegal, which are expected to bring the
Israeli population in Palestine to nearly one million of its four
million inhabitants. Many have argued that it is the rapidly
increasing settler population in the West Bank, not BDS, that is
forcing the one-state solution.
Some people
accept divestment without sanctions, or divestment and sanctions
without the boycott. There are an array of views. In my view, the
reason to hold together all three terms is simply that it is not
possible to restrict the problem of Palestinian subjugation to the
occupation alone. It is significant in itself, since four million
people are living without rights of mobility, sovereignty, control
over their borders, trade and political self-determination, subjected
to military raids, indefinite detention, extended imprisonment and
harassment. However, if we fail to make the link between occupation,
inequality and dispossession, we agree to forget the claims of 1948,
bury the right to return. We overlook the structural link between the
Israeli demand for demographic advantage and the multivalent forms of
dispossession that affect Palestinians who have been forced to become
diasporic, those who live with partial rights within the borders, and
those who live under occupation in the West Bank or in the open air
prison of Gaza (with high unemployment and rationed foods) or other
refugee camps in the region.
Some people
have said that they value co-existence over boycott, and wish to
engage in smaller forms of binational cultural communities in which
Israeli Jews and Palestinians live and work together. This is a view
that holds to the promise that small organic communities have a way
of expanding into ever widening circles of solidarity, modeling the
conditions for peaceable co-existence. The only question is whether
those small communities continue to accept the oppressive structure
of the state, or whether in their small and effective way oppose the
various dimensions of continuing subjugation and disenfranchisement.
If they do the latter, they become solidarity struggles. So
co-existence becomes solidarity when it joins the movement that seeks
to undo the structural conditions of inequality, containment and
dispossession. So perhaps the conditions of BDS solidarity are
precisely what prefigure that form of living and working together
that might one day become a just and peaceable form of co-existence.
One could be
for the BDS movement as the only credible non-violent mode of
resisting the injustices committed by the state of Israel without
falling into the football lingo of being “pro” Palestine and
“anti” Israel. This language is reductive, if not embarrassing.
One might reasonably and passionately be concerned for all the
inhabitants of that land, and simply maintain that the future for any
peaceful, democratic solution for that region will become thinkable
through the dismantling of the occupation, through enacting the equal
rights of Palestinian minorities and finding just and plausible ways
for the rights of refugees to be honored. If one holds out for these
three aims in political life, then one is not simply living within
the logic of the “pro” and the “anti”, but trying to fathom
the conditions for a “we”, a plural existence grounded in
equality. What does one do with one’s words but reach for a place
beyond war, ask for a new constellation of political life in which
the relations of colonial subjugation are brought to a halt. My
wager, my hope, is that everyone’s chance to live with greater
freedom from fear and aggression will be increased as those
conditions of justice, freedom, and equality are realized. We can or,
rather, must start with how we speak, and how we listen, with the
right to education, and to dwell critically, fractiously, and freely
in political discourse together. Perhaps the word “justice” will
assume new meanings as we speak it, such that we can venture that
what will be just for the Jews will also be just for the
Palestinians, and for all the other people living there, since
justice, when just, fails to discriminate, and we savor that failure.
