ISRAEL'S RECENT MILITARY ASSAULT on Gaza serves as a
reminder of the continuing urgency of the Palestinian question, which has been
a topic of worldwide debate since the June 1967 war and returns to the center
stage of global politics whenever Palestinian or Israeli blood is spilt.
Something has changed in recent years, however, particularly after conflicts so
disproportionate (the 2006 Israeli invasion of Southern Lebanon, the 2008-2009
Gaza war) that it becomes difficult to speak of two “sides” in a conflict
involving a military force, on the one hand, and a majority of unarmed
civilians on the other.
But the increasingly uneven balance of forces is not the
only thing that has tipped the scales in favor of the Palestinian people (if
not their leadership) at dinner tables across the world. Palestinian civil
society has also made itself heard more forcefully, particularly through
non-violent protest actions (represented in films such Bil’in My Love and 5
Broken Cameras) and the 2005 West Bank-based call for an international campaign
of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel. Modeled after the
South African boycott campaigns, the BDS movement has received wide support
from luminaries including Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, Angela Davis, and Alice
Walker. It has also garnered the support (sometimes partial or qualified) of an
increasing number of Jewish activists against Israeli state violence, including
groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace or intellectuals such as Judith Butler
and Naomi Klein. The growing legitimacy of the BDS movement is a symptom of the
changing fortunes of the Palestinian question. It also reveals the extent to
which it has become a Jewish question.
More than 60 years ago, a similar evolution in public
opinion occurred at another historical juncture. In 1960, toward the end of the
bloody Algerian war of independence, 121 French writers, artists, and
intellectuals, including Maurice Blanchot, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de
Beauvoir, Guy Debord, and André Breton, signed a manifesto in favor of support
for the Algerian cause and the right to military insubordination. The
manifesto’s objective was to make public the growing resistance to the
“nameless war” in France, lending legitimacy to actions that were deemed
illegal — army desertion, material assistance to the Algerian nationalist
movement — but that were, according to the manifesto’s signatories, just. The
most visible in a long series of public denunciations of the war — including
the publication of Henri Alleg’s first-hand account of torture, The Question,
in 1958, and the trial of supporters of the Algerian National Liberation Front
in 1960 — was the “Declaration on the Right to Insubordination in the Algerian
War.” Informally know as the “Manifesto of the 121,” this document gave voice
to those French citizens who actively refused to comply with a colonial war
waged in their name. To borrow the philosopher Jacques Rancière’s expression,
these were French citizens who “disidentified” with the French state.
In an article titled “The Cause of the Other,” Rancière
develops the concept of “disidentification” in relation to an event that
occurred a year after the publication of the Manifesto, on October 17, 1961:
the massacre, in the center of Paris, of an estimated 200 Algerian civilians
protesting a racist curfew. In his account, October 17 marks a moment of
disidentification with the state that claimed to act in the name of the French.
The first step in what he calls “political subjectivation,” disidentification
is the “refusal to identify with a certain ‘self’” — in this case, the French
citizen, defined by the state in opposition to its colonial subjects. Equally
important are the second and third steps in the process of political
subjectivation: a relation to “an other that constitutes a community defined by
a certain wrong” (here, the Algerians); and “an impossible identification” with
this other. Political subjectivation, then, demands both disidentification and
impossible identification, refusal of self and espousal of the cause of the
other, who remains, nevertheless, not-me.
¤
Judith Butler’s Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of
Zionism begins with just such a move. The book begins to answer the question
she formulated most succinctly in a 2003 essay for the London Review of Books:
“What are we to make of Jews who disidentify with Israel or, at least, with the
Israeli state?” As such, it constitutes a public expression of her
disidentification with the state of Israel. It is much more than this, of
course: a rigorous reading of the philosophers Emmanuel Levinas, Walter
Benjamin, and Hannah Arendt; a generous engagement with writings on
Israel-Palestine by Edward Said, Primo Levi, and Mahmoud Darwish; and a
remarkable demonstration of the ways in which philosophy allows us to apprehend
Palestine-Israel’s present and imagine its future in new ways. Yet Butler
consistently frames her careful readings of these philosophical, political, and
poetic texts by articulating her own relation to Israel and Zionism. Like other
Jewish intellectuals and artists who have denounced Israeli treatment of
Palestinians, Butler feels compelled, today, to make a public rejoinder to the
state that claims to speak in her name.
This is not Butler’s first foray into the question of
Israel-Palestine, though it is her first book entirely devoted to the topic.
Building on more than a decade of reflection on state violence, Parting Ways
follows the publication of Precarious Life (2006) and Frames of War (2009), as
well as the many talks, interviews, and essays that take up the daunting task
of critiquing Israeli state policies and actions — a task that, as Butler well
knows, inevitably elicits the charge of anti-Semitism or Jewish self-hatred.
(See for example her recent rejoinder to the charge that she condones Hamas and
Hezbollah, a classic example of decontextualized quoting aimed at making any
critique of the Israeli state illegitimate.) Best known for her pioneering book
on gender and sexuality, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
(1990), Butler has consistently applied philosophical rigor to political
problems. Asked in a recent interview by Israeli film maker Udi Aloni about the
connection between her early writings on gender and her more recent work on
Jewishness, she takes a detour via queer politics, which began, in her telling,
as a movement against homophobia rather than for any given gay, lesbian, or
transgender identity, and was forged in alliance with other movements (the
anti-racist movement, for example). For Butler, “queer is about interlocking
minorities; it has never been about an identity politics.” Speaking of Jewish
movements that protest Israeli treatment of Palestinians in the London Review
of Books, she writes: “it is as Jews that they [these movements] assert their
disidentification with that policy, that they seek to widen the rift between
the state of Israel and the Jewish people in order to produce an alternative
vision of the future.” In other words, it is because Israel speaks and acts in
the name of all Jews that she, as a Jew, is compelled to speak out against the
state of Israel. The thread that ties her work on gender and sexuality to her
recent writings on Palestine-Israel, then, is a common resistance to all forms
of “policing of [...] community,” be it queer or Jewish.
Yet Parting Ways is not only a critique of Zionism. It is
also a project for the future. Butler’s readings are aimed at formulating a
non-identitarian, relational conception of Jewishness that might help to pave
the way for “cohabitation” (a concept she borrows from Hannah Arendt) in an
Israel-Palestine open to all its inhabitants, regardless of ethnicity, race or
creed. To this end, she draws on the work of writers and philosophers who have
reflected on the diasporic condition of Jewishness. For Butler, this
alternative tradition places the other at the heart of Jewishness:
Jewishness can and must be understood as an
anti-identitarian project insofar as we might even say that being a Jew implies
taking up an ethical relation to the non-Jew, and this follows from the
diasporic condition of Jewishness where living in a socially plural world under
conditions of equality remains an ethical and political ideal.
Jewishness, for Butler, is historically premised on
cohabitation with the other, and this diasporic history offers a chance “for
the theorization of cohabitation and binationalism.”
Like Arendt before her, Butler attempts to rethink
Jewishness as separate from state sovereignty and from “the ongoing and violent
project of settler colonialism that constitutes political Zionism.” But she
also distances her work from an exclusively Jewish critique of Israel, claiming
the universality of an ethics based on Jewish thought. Applying her
reconceptualization of an ethics interrupted by the other to her own writing,
Butler takes pains to engage with two non-Jewish thinkers who, significantly,
bookend Parting Ways: Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish.
Butler begins with Said, placing her book under the aegis of
Said’s late work, particularly Freud and the Non-European and Reflections on
Exile, which consider the historically distinct Jewish and Palestinian
diasporas in order to reconceptualize political community in Palestine-Israel.
Said offers Butler a way of proposing the political and ethical usefulness of
analogy: far from collapsing heterogeneous, and ostensibly conflicting,
histories of displacement, Said’s attempts to think Jewish and Palestinian
exile together allow for an ethical conception of politics “in which alterity
is constitutive of who one is.” Butler is, of course, aware of the pitfalls of
comparison: how can one compare Jewish suffering, epitomized in the Holocaust,
with the relatively lesser evils of Palestinian dispossession and exile?
And yet it is precisely from the point of view of Jewish
suffering that she makes a plea for justice toward all others, and, first and
foremost, the Palestinians. Thus, if she warns against the betrayal of Jewish
suffering through Israeli state violence, it is in pursuit of a
“multidirectional memory” (to borrow the literary critic Michael Rothberg’s
terminology) of Jewish and Palestinian dispersal. Rather than pit the Holocaust
against the forcible eviction, in 1948, of more than three quarters of a
million Palestinians from their homes (an event known in Arabic as “the
Catastrophe,” al-Nakba) Butler asks “whether the Shoah and its suffering might
contribute to an ethical and political framework for the present that speaks up
against state-sanctioned violence.” While remaining careful to distinguish
between the Hebrew and Arabic terms for catastrophe (Shoah and Nakba), which
denote two separate historical events, Butler nevertheless makes a plea for the
productive cross-fertilization of memory, suggesting that there are lessons to
be learnt by each from the other’s history.
¤
Parting Ways’s concluding chapter articulates most clearly
Butler’s position vis-à-vis the state of Israel as it is currently constituted,
and what she calls its “wretched” forms of binationalism, exerted through
different forms of dispossession of the Palestinians. This is where she comes
closest to formulating a specific political project: one rooted in the ethics
and politics of diaspora developed throughout the book. As her use of the term
binationalism and her invocation of Said’s latter day adoption of the one-state
solution suggest, the Israel-Palestine Butler imagines would resemble the
federal state envisioned by Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt, a state protecting
all citizens irrespective of ethnic or religious belonging. A binational state
is necessary, she argues, because there are already two nations present on the
same territory, making a pragmatic or, in her words, “descriptive” argument
familiar to advocates of the one-state solution. The claims of political
Zionism are unrealizable, and as a consequence Israel “must continually seek to
cover over the gap that exists permanently between its claim to be a Jewish
state and its struggle to maintain demographic advantage because it is not a
Jewish state.” More importantly, however, the claim to define a state as
Jewish, to the exclusion of all other ethnic-religious identities, is
unacceptable to Butler. Her principal objection to such a definition is
“normative”: “no polity has the right to secure demographic advantage for any
particular ethnic or religious group.”
If Butler’s conclusion makes explicit the political
positions taken throughout her readings, she ends Parting Ways in a much less
decisive mode: that of literary analysis. Butler turns to poetry in an attempt
to imagine cohabitation, juxtaposing the question that guides her readings —
“What would Israel do or be without the ongoing dispossession of Palestinians?”
— with the refrain of a poem by Darwish: “what shall we do without exile?”
There is a provocation in this juxtaposition: if Palestinians are constituted
by exile — which is, as Said put it in his writings on Israel-Palestine, a
quintessentially Jewish condition — Israel is defined by the dispossession of
Palestinians, rather than by Jewish exile. Could this be precisely the chance that
wretched forms of binationalism represent? Palestinians are already part and
parcel of Israel; what is needed is a complete overhaul of the form this
binationalism takes. Butler develops this point through her reading of
Darwish’s poem “Who Am I, Without Exile?”, which, according to her, implies
“that this terrible embrace has to become something else and that exile forms
something of a signpost for the future.” The continued life-and-death urgency
of the Palestinian question demands far more than poetry and literary analysis,
of course. Yet Butler invokes poetry here as a way to imagine the future — a
task that is surely too important to leave to politicians alone. And though
Darwish’s poetry is much more complex than her reading suggests, her proposal
that we read him as a thinker of binationalism is compelling. For Butler,
Darwish’s verse “There’s nothing left of me but you, and nothing left of you /
but me [...]” constitutes proof that alliance is possible in exile.
Butler’s own conclusion seems, paradoxically, more
pessimistic. Yet her question — “What would Israel do or be without the ongoing
dispossession of Palestinians?” — is not just a negative observation (Israel is
dialectically bound to the Palestinians, and is nothing without their dispossession).
Her question is also an attempt to imagine an alternative future: what might
Israel look like if it were not defined by the dispossessions of Palestinians?
It is important to note that Butler is speaking of the relation of a state
(Israel) to its constitutive other (Palestinians). In thinking of this
asymmetrical relation between a state and a people, and of Butler’s relation to
both, we would do well to return to Rancière’s conception of political
subjectivation: disidentification with the state that claims to act in one’s
name, impossible identification with those it oppresses. Butler, as a Jew,
disidentifies with the state that acts in her name, and impossibly identifies
with the Palestinians it oppresses.
The Algerian war ended in large part because a growing
number of French citizens refused to allow the French state to kill Algerians
in their name. Of course, France is not Israel, and the Algerians are not
Palestinians. And yet, to paraphrase Butler: how can we draw lessons from one
set of historical conditions to grasp another? In the wake of yet another
disproportionate confrontation in which civilians are the main victims, it is
more urgent than ever to heed the lessons of history. As Butler shows, there
has been Jewish resistance to political Zionism from its turn-of-the-century
beginnings, and there continues to be Jewish resistance to Israeli state
policies today. There is hope, then, that disidentification and impossible
identification may lay the ground for cohabitation in Israel-Palestine, and not
only in philosophy and poetry.
