Sep 12, 2014 - state solution, questioning its viability and desirability. ... dream is the simplest and most obvious so
SCTIW Review Journal of the Society for Contemporary Thought and the Islamicate World September 12, 2014
Gianni Vattimo and Michael Marder, eds., Deconstructing Zionism: A Critique of Political Metaphysics, Bloomsbury, 2013, xvii + 189 pp., $29.95 US (pbk), ISBN: 9781441105943. This edited volume on the logic of Zionism, and on the urgent need to deconstruct it, is as timely as one can get. With the latest Gaza war still underway, Zionism remains as pervasive in media discourse as ever. A powerful narrative that frames the terms of the conflict among Israelis and Palestinians, Zionism nourishes the view of the Jew as exceptional and vulnerable, as the timeless victim of History, immune, in turn, from any wrongdoing. Accordingly, critics of Israel’s policies—such as the illegality of collective punishment and the disproportionate use of force—are met with the expected, but not any less effective, claims of anti-Semitism. Deconstructing Zionism ambitiously seeks to remedy this vexed ethico-political situation. The introduction concisely delineates the various meanings of Zionism and deconstruction. Zionism, in its secular or religious version, stands for the claim that there exists a “natural” bond between the Jewish people and the Promised Land of Israel. Deconstruction, for its part, is antithetical to Zionism. Whereas the latter posits the ideal identity of a self rooted in a phantasmatic Land (and, of course, at the expense of the uprooting of others), the former insists on the relational, fragmented, and excessive character of the self, uncontainable under the master signifiers of State, Nation, Chosen People, and the like. Against the self-assurance of Zionism, deconstruction foregrounds “the diasporic condition of all beings” (xiii). Diaspora marks Jewish history, and serves—for many of the contributors to this volume— as an alternative Jewish model to Zionism. The exemplarity of the Jew becomes no longer associated with the certitude of being but with the contingency of becoming. This is precisely the thought that led Edward Said, in one of his last interviews, to reply boldly to his Israeli interlocutor, who had observed that “[he] sound[ed] very Jewish”: “Of course. I’m the last Jewish intellectual. You don’t know anyone else. All your other Jewish intellectuals are now suburban squires. From Amos Oz to all these people here in America. So I’m the last one. The only true follower of Adorno. Let me put it this way: I’m a Jewish-Palestinian.”1 Here, being Jewish denotes a lack of fixity or rootedness; a modality of being at odds with any form of organic community. Most importantly, being Jewish becomes a position available to all, even, or especially, to Palestinians—the others of the other. 1
Edward Said, “Interview with Ari Shavit, ‘My Right of Return,’” Haaretz, 18 August 2000.
2 Deconstructing Zionism is equally committed to enlarging the scope of what and who can count as “Jewish,” to dislodge the signifier “Jew” from its totalizing and (to Palestinians and other Jews) damaging Zionist narrative. Gianni Vattimo and Michael Marder make this point clear: “To deconstruct Zionism is, therefore, to demand justice for its victims—not only the Palestinians who are suffering from it, but also for the anti-Zionist Jews, ‘erased’ from the officially consecrated account of Zionist history” (xii). To deconstruct Zionism is, then, to intervene in the politics and ethics of Jewishness. It is to historicize Zionism, to look at its violent beginnings, to re-inscribe its religious and secular meanings within specific relations of power. Seeing that “Zionism was a historical construction” (xiii) is a first step to seeing it as an ideological concept. Deconstruction thus aligns itself with the mode of ideological critique. Deconstructing Zionism is tantamount to exposing Zionism’s most distorted and distorting slogan, “A land without a people for a people without a land.” But deconstruction is ideological critique and more. The editors display their Derridean sensibility in their account of the second meaning of deconstruction as a critique of the “metaphysics of presence.” Zionism, in all its forms, presupposes a “natural” link between the concept of Jewish people and the land of Israel; this link presents itself as “transhistorical and unitary.” Accordingly, from such a Zionist perspective, Jerusalem can only appear as the “‘eternal and indivisible’ capital of the State of Israel” (xiii). The mystification of Jerusalem goes hand in hand with the effacement of the city’s tumultuous history and diverse voices. Deconstruction calls into question Zionism’s claim of origins, encapsulated in the Israeli Law of Return, a law recognizing as legitimate any potential return of any Jew to his or her “historical Homeland” (while simultaneously denying Palestinians their own “right of return”). It is not difficult to see why the editors turn to deconstruction for their critical engagement with Zionism. Deconstruction’s endless work of unsettling all narratives of origins (including those of Palestinians) reveals them to be historically contingent beginnings.2 Deconstruction itself is hardly a solution to Israeli brutality and occupation of Palestinian territories, but it short-circuits Zionism’s smoothly functioning logic—a logic that justifies and thus perpetuates Israel’s violence. To be sure, not all of the essays in this volume live up to the ethico-political demands of deconstruction as laid out in the introduction. I will focus on the ones that do. Slavoj Žižek—perhaps surprisingly, given the author’s antagonistic relation to what he disparagingly calls “deconstructionism”—takes up a recurring call of this volume: to deconstruct the twostate solution, questioning its viability and desirability. Žižek perceives in Israeli politics what we might call “a Zionism with a human face.” No longer denying “in theory” a land for the Palestinians, Israel only insists on the right kind of peace partner, one that categorically excludes Hamas. It is easy to recall how the current Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, rejected the Oslo peace accords, actively opposing Yitzhak Rabin’s peace efforts with the Palestinians (at the time the PLO had a status similar to that of Hamas—it, too, was deemed unacceptable by the majority of Israeli politicians). Now, things appear to have changed. We know that Netanyahu and others have repeatedly made speeches about the Israeli “support” for a two-state solution, putting the blame for the failure of progress squarely on Hamas, who still does not recognize Israel’s right to exist. But, for Žižek, the official Israeli position is really an ideological lie: “While paying lip-service to the two-state solution, Israel is busy creating the situation on the ground which will render a two-state 2
See Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic Books, 1975).
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solution de facto impossible” (7). What we have is an “occupation by bureaucracy” (8).3 In other words, violence has become habitual, so, for instance, when the Israeli High Courts of Justice occasionally do side with Palestinian plaintiffs, what gets masked is the baseline, structural violence of Israel occupation: “The condemnation of extra-statist anti-Palestinian violence obfuscates the true problem of state violence; the condemnation of ‘illegal’ settlements obfuscates the illegality of the ‘legal’ ones” (9). For this reason, the narrative of the Gaza war(s) becomes myopic if it only focuses on the rockets being launched into Israel, making the invasion and destruction of Gaza the sole result of Palestinian aggression. In this respect, the latest slogan from Netanyahu and his sympathizers, “We use missiles to defend civilians, Hamas uses civilians to defend missiles,” deflects attention from the brutality of Israeli action, its devalorization of Palestinian lives, and serves to distract the West from the material conditions of daily existence in the occupied territories. A more expansive lens takes into consideration the eight-year Gaza blockade and the increase in Israeli settlements on Palestinian land (which makes the moderate voices in Palestinian leadership seem all the more impotent: peace with Israelis translates into more land confiscation). And if the causes for the conflict are less than selfevident, its proposed solution is not any clearer. Here the volume’s deconstruction of Zionism moves to complicate the notion of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, and to articulate a Jewish position that is otherwise than Zionist. The “two-state solution” might be said to represent for the Palestinians what they “cannot not want.” 4 Though tempting insofar as it affords them a stable and globally recognized identity, the two-state solution leaves unquestioned the ideology of the nationstate, with its logic of inclusion and exclusion, of which the Palestinians have felt the ill effects. Many of the contributors point to an alternative political model: that of bi-nationalism. Like Said before him, Žižek argues for thinking beyond the lure of a two-state solution, for the political necessity of a truly democratic state: “What both sides exclude as an impossible dream is the simplest and most obvious solution—a bi-national secular state comprising of all of Israel plus the occupied territories and Gaza. To those who dismiss the bi-national state as a utopian dream disqualified by the long history of hatred and violence, one should reply that, far from being utopian, the bi-national state already is a fact” (9).5 The idea of a Jewish state is wholly incompatible with a democratic state, whence the need “to abolish the apartheid and transform it into a secular democratic state” (10). Moreover, the two-state solution—evoked as an idea without any significant pressure put on Israel for its implementation—serves to create the illusion of Western involvement. “The myth of ‘two states for two people,’” Vattimo writes, “is all too clearly a way of protracting matters so that it does not appear to be an ongoing excuse by Western democracies to avoid their responsibilities” (18). For the Palestinians, the “road maps to peace” have only perpetuated the unlivable status quo. Zionism and its “logic of coloniality,” as Walter Mignolo calls it (70), must be challenged. If Judaism is not identical to Israel (with Zionism as its state ideology), then what can or The expression belongs to Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation (New York: Norton, 2008). 4 Gayatri Spivak makes use of this paradoxical formulation in Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993). 5 In Violence, Žižek had proposed that Jerusalem become a site for such co-existence, where each side would renounce the idea of an “ethnically ‘pure’ nation-state,” and that this would be seen as “a liberation for themselves, not simply a sacrifice to be made for the other” (Violence: Six Sideways Reflections [New York: Picador, 2008], 127). 3
4 does Jewishness signify? Judith Butler responds to this question in a way that echoes the above quote from Said: “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” (25).6 Equality does not, of course, mean sameness. The Nakba is not the same as—or equivalent to—the Shoah, but this does not mean that the Palestinians should be denied a shared ethico-political framework to work through their trauma and suffering, one that both accounts for their victimization, and gestures toward rectifying the injustice they have endured.7 “The political point,” Butler contends, “is that one cannot defend the Jewish people against destruction without defending the Palestinian people against destruction. If one fails to universalize the interdiction against destruction, then one pursues the destruction of the ‘Other’ with the assumption that only through that destruction can oneself survive” (27). Like Butler, Marc Ellis argues for the need to counter the blatant instrumentalization of the Holocaust narrative: “Holocaust theologians envision the State of Israel as transcending politics. They structure their Holocaust narrative in such a fashion that a practical and ethical critique of the State of Israel’s right to exist or a critique of Israel’s policies toward Palestinians is off-limits. According to Holocaust theologians, only anti-Semites—or selfhating Jews—go down that route” (105). Deconstructing Zionism flatly rejects blackmail of the type that would argue that you are either for the State of Israel (and its Zionist ideology) or you are against Israel and the plight of its Jewish people (and thus, implicitly or explicitly, an anti-Semite). Indeed, Žižek turns the table on such critics by astutely describing their resistance to Jews who are critical of Israeli policies as “Zionist anti-Semitism.” These “selfhating Jews” designate “the foreign excess disturbing the community of the nation-state” (6). Deconstructing Zionism finally calls for attention to language itself, to the ways it mystifies and conditions our perception of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. The language of Zionism ontologizes; it transforms historical victims into timeless others, seemingly impervious to critique. Deconstructing Zionism serves as an important reminder that Zionism as such can never be simply deconstructed (indeed, the title of the volume is not Zionism Deconstructed), or its ideology set aside. Its appeal remains strong if not blinding. And as long as injustice for the Palestinians continues, Zionism will be there to justify the status quo, to deflect blame onto the other—whence the need for deconstructing it. Zahi Zalloua Associate Professor of French and Interdisciplinary Studies Whitman College
This resonates as well with Žižek’s description of the position of the Jews as that of the “‘part of no-part’ in every organic nation-state community” (6). 7 “Equality or nothing, for Arabs and Jews,” as Said put it (“The Gap Grows Wider,” Al-Ahram Weekly, No. 471, March, 2000). 6
© 2014: Zahi Zalloua Authors retain the rights to their review articles, which are published by SCTIW Review with their permission. Any use of these materials other than educational must provide proper citation to the author and SCTIW Review.
Citation Information Zalloua, Zahi, Review of Deconstructing Zionism: A Critique of Political Metaphysics, SCTIW Review, September 12, 2014. http://sctiw.org/sctiwreviewarchives/archives/255.
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