“god will not remain silent” - okcir.com vii 2/balibar-fm.pdf · etienne balibar, born in 1942,...

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ISSN: 1540-5699. © Copyright by Ahead Publishing House (imprint: Okcir Press) and authors. All Rights Reserved.

HUMAN ARCHITECTURE

Journal of the Sociology of Self-

A Publication of OKCIR: The Omar Khayyam Center for Integrative Research in Utopia, Mysticism, and Science (Utopystics)

At a moment when the expropriationof the “occupied territories” by Israel haspractically voided of its content the hypoth-esis of two states in Palestine by destroyingand fragmenting the country in seeminglyirreversible fashion, and when the conflictas such has largely lost its autonomy within

the context of a regional war marked by

theconfrontation between U.S. imperialism, itsallies and its diverse opponents (Islamist orotherwise), what purpose can possibly beserved by new analyses of the constitutionof Zionism? There would seem to be anabysmal gap between the complex histori-

Etienne BALIBAR, born in 1942, is Emeritus Professor of Moral and Political Philosophy at the University ofParis 10 Nanterre (France) and Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine(USA). Among his recent publications are Politics and the Other Scene (Verso, 2002), and We, the People of Europe?Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Princeton University Press, 2004). Forthcoming are Violence and Civility(Columbia University Press) and The Proposition of Equaliberty (Duke University Press). This article is a reviewessay of the following three books: 1) Jacqueline Rose, The Question of Zion, Princeton University Press, 2005; 2)Idith Zertal, Israel's Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, Cambridge University Press, 2005 (translated fromthe Hebrew by Chaya Galai; original title: Death and the Nation), which will be quoted here in the French edi-tion: La nation et la mort. La Shoah dans le discours et la politique d'Israël, translated by Marc Saint-Upéry, EditionsLa Découverte, 2004; and 3) Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, Exil et souveraineté. Judaïsme, sionisme et pensée bi-nationale[Exile and Sovereignty: Judaism, Zionism and binational thought], translated from the Hebrew by CatherineNeuve-Eglise, La Fabrique, 2007 (preface by Carlo Ginzburg). [Translator's note: The author reviewed the sec-ond and third works mentioned in French translation; quotations from all three—few in number—are thus re-translated from the French and all page references refer to French editions.]

“God will not remain silent”Zionism, Messianism and Nationalism

Etienne Balibar

University of Paris, France––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

[email protected]

Abstract: The essay takes advantage of recent publications by Jacqueline Rose, Idith Zertal, andAmnon Raz-Krakotzkin, which with different methodologies address the same “psycho-political” nexus of nationalism and messianism commanding the structure of Zionism, beforeand after the emergence of the State of Israel. It seeks to assess the uniqueness but also thetypical character of the ideological process and the narrative constructions through which anexperience of persecution and victimhood becomes transformed into a consciousness oflegitimate domination. Following the reviewed authors, the essay also emphasizes theimportance of the controversy between Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt whose works, intheir very opposition, remain crucial sources of intelligibility for the tension of the theologicaland the secular in the politics of the Zionist State.

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cal and theoretical references these analy-ses propose, the distance they establishwith respect to stereotypes, and the stark-ness of the choices that a century of wars,violence, diplomatic maneuvers and falsepolitical solutions offers in the end to theparties to the conflict: elimination or “trans-fer,” in the short term, of the Arab popula-tions with the exception of a few zones ofconcentration and surveillance, or, in thelonger term, of the Jewish populations, atthe price of a massive new emigration. Or,first one and then the other.

1

And yet such analyses are important in

many ways; I am convinced that it is al-ways worthwhile to take the time to con-duct them and discuss them. First of all,they reveal the internal contradictions of anideology and a policy which, under givenconditions and a given balance of forces,has contributed like very few others to“making the history” of which we todayare the subjects, wherever we may be in theworld. We can of course use them as polem-ical arguments against given actors, butone can also see in them an indication ofpotentialities of division that crystallized inthe past and could do so again if circum-stances lend themselves to such an out-come, i.e., as a means contributing toavoiding the worst. The rise of criticalthought in Israel—sometimes referred to asa whole as “post-Zionist”—within thesmall minority that truly opposes the settle-ments and seeks to act in concert with thePalestinian resistance, is indeed impres-sive. At the same time such analyses openpathways for comparison between an “ex-treme” and even unique case, and a multi-plicity of state formations that also

represent associations—of very differentsorts—between “messianic” and “na-tional” components, in a synthesis that ismore and more problematic today. On theone hand, then, the idea is to bring out,against appearances, the indeterminationlodged in the heart of a determined

situa-tion

. On the other hand, the idea is to con-tribute to a comprehensive reflection on theforces and representations implicated inthe changes on our cosmopolitical horizon.In both cases, we must recognize the capac-ity of the past to act in the present, by ap-plying as much rigor as possible to theunderstanding of its powers.

This is the perspective in which Iwould like to discuss three recent works onZionism—a notion which continues todominate the “common sense” of percep-tions of the Jewish question and its entan-glement with the history and the functionsof the state of Israel. Despite the differenceof the positions they take on key points,they all challenge the idea of a separation(

coupure

) between the religious and the po-litical and they all bring out, in Israel’s tra-jectory, a history which is not “sacred” butrather a history of the powers of the sacredin the secular world and its effects on thosevery actors who make use of it. All threebooks have the added interest of articulat-ing in timely fashion an astonishing intel-lectual conjuncture which has seensuccessive convergences and oppositionsbetween the critique of the idea of a “Jewishstate” in Palestine, the defenders of an al-ternative, “cultural” Zionism and the parti-sans of a cosmopolitanism rooted in theJewish experience of exclusion, the moststriking episode of which was the confron-tation between Gershom Scholem andHannah Arendt just after the latter pub-lished her “report” on the Eichmann trial.

1

Regarding my own hypotheses on thismatter, see the article I wrote with Jean-MarcLévy-Leblond: “Guerre en Orient ou paix enMéditerranée ?”,

Le Monde,

August 19, 2006; thenon-abridged version is available at this ad-dress: http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3232,36-804577,0.html. In English, see“A Mediterranean Way for Peace in the MiddleEast,”

Radical Philosophy

, November 2006.

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I.

The first book to which I refer does notcome from Israel, even though its authorhas multiple relations with that country:Jacqueline Rose’s

The Question of Zion

,which came out of a series of lectures deliv-ered in 2003 at Princeton University.

2

In thefirst chapter (“The Apocalyptic Sting”),Rose examines the messianic foundationsof political Zionism by drawing inspirationfrom the now classic though still controver-sial analyses by Gershom Scholem of thehistory of the Kabbalah and Jewish messi-anism.

3

It was Scholem himself who, shortly af-ter he moved to Palestine, brought about arapprochement between Zionism and Sab-bataiism, in which he saw the two “politi-cal” moments of the history of the Jewishpeople in the modern era. The “historical”character of redemption in Jewish messian-ism (as opposed to the Christian idea of sal-vation in another world), associated withthe hope for an end to persecutions en-dured in exile and during the enslavementof Israel, engendered a revolutionary ideol-

ogy which Scholem calls “utopian” and“apocalyptic.” This ideology, the result ofan “intense messianic expectation,”

4

repre-sents the messianic age as the moment of a“final confrontation of Israel with

the Na-tions,” a conflagration with a cosmic signif-icance whose cataclysms form thecondition of the national renaissance. Tothis representation of the role of violence inhistory (which also became an element ofMarxism), identified with the suffering of“giving birth,” a particular tradition fromthe Kabbalah adds a specifically antinomicdimension: the messianic era is not onlythat of the reunification in divinity of partsof the world that has been “broken” sincethe creation; it is also—with a view to “has-tening the end”—that of an inversion of thelaw or its realization through its transgres-sion (“it is by violating the Torah that oneaccomplishes it”), a specific form of “the ac-tivism [which takes] utopia as a lever in theaim of establishing a messianic king-dom”—however undecided the figure ofthe messiah himself may be.

5

Traditionalist and rationalist Judaism

(Maimonides) has always vigorously re-sisted this revolutionary conception, whichScholem did not hesitate to see as a “circuitof mutual influences” of Judaism and mille-naristic Christianity.

6

But the episode of therise, recognition and apostasy of the “falsemessiah” Sabbatai Zevi, the repercussionsof which were immense in the 17

th

centuryin Jewish communities as well as in theChristian world, confirmed this idea inspectacular fashion. “Redemption throughsin” here forms the “political” bond be-tween the charismatic power of the mes-siah and the hopes of the people, leading tothe auto-dissolution of its traditions andgiving rise to a nihilistic conception of de-struction as the path to redemption.

7

Sc-holem himself saw in this episode a first

2

The translation of this work was refusedby an important French publisher. JacquelineRose, professor at the University of London, isalso the author of

The Haunting of Sylvia Plath

,Virago, 1991, Virago; the collective work

WhyWar: Psychoanalysis, Politics and the Return to Mel-anie Klein

, Blackwell, 1993;

On Not Being Able toSleep: Essays on Psychoanalysis in the ModernWorld

, Chatto, 2003; and an introduction to thenew English translation of Freud’s essays on“mass psychology,” Penguin Classics, 2004.

3

By Gershom Scholem, see in particular, inFrench:

Le messianisme juif. Essais sur la spiritual-ité du judaïsme

(Calmann Lévy, 1974) (in whichone finds the essay on “redemption through sin”[English title:

The Messianic Idea in Judaism andother Essays on Jewish Spirituality

]; and

SabbataïTsevi, le messie mystique 1626-1676

, Verdier, 1990[English title:

Sabbatai Zevi, the Mystical Messiah

].The most complete presentation in French of theintellectual career of Scholem is that of David Bi-ale:

Gershom Scholem. Cabale et contre-histoire

,Editions de l’éclat, 2001 [in English:

GershomScholem : Kabbalah and Counter-History

, HarvardUniversity Press, 1979].

4

See

Le messianisme juif

,

op. cit

., p. 27.

5

Ibid., p. 40.

6

Ibid., p. 42.

7

Ibid., p. 139 ff

.

, et

Sabbataï Tsevi

…, op. cit.

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manifestation of Jewish nationalism and itsprojects of liberation—an anticipation ofHerzl’s Zionism. As a result, he neverceased to warn against the “messianic”identification of the return of exiled Jews toPalestine with redemption; he sought to“neutralize” the apocalyptic dimension ofmessianism without liquidating it alto-gether, by keeping the political moment,having to do with national, state and terri-torial structures, separate from the spiritualmoment, and by staking out a mystical in-terpretation of the redemption as re-estab-lishment of the unity and harmony of theworld.

8

He defines this separation in manywritings, in particular during the yearswhen he was associated with Martin Buber,Rabbi Judah Magnes (founder off the He-brew University of Jerusalem) and other in-tellectuals living in Palestine and belongingto the Brit Shalom movement, whichfought Zionism’s rallying to the vision ofconquest advocated by Jabotinsky and his“revisionism.” The most remarkable ofthese is a letter to Franz Rosenzweig in1926, in which he expresses his worry overthe consequences for sacred language, butalso for the collective consciousness andthe future of Jews settled in Palestine, of thetransformation of Hebrew into a nationallanguage: “God will not remain silent,” hewrites, meaning that despite the apparentsecularization of language, the apocalypticpowers implied in

invoking of sacred nar-ratives will tend to realize themselves,whatever the obstacles and the humanprice.

9

Jacqueline Rose uses Scholem’s notionto interpret the historical trajectory of Zion-ism from the writing of Herzl’s utopiannovel

Altneuland

(1902) up to the founda-tion of the state of Israel as “Jewish state” inPalestine (1948) and the current situation ofoccupation and progressive destruction of

Palestinian society. She sees in this historythe realization of the

antinomic

element ofmessianism transformed into program ofpolitical action, both destructive and self-destructive. The analogies between themanic-depressive personality of SabbataiZevi and that of Herzl serve as leverage forher argumentation, which has not failed toprovoke controversy.

10

However, the es-sential contribution lies in the relationshipshe establishes between two questions: thatof the national territory as a “land of re-demption” ascribed to the people by reve-lation or by history, but contingent upon anever-ending process of appropriation, al-ways “insufficient”; and that of the collec-tive narcissism that tends to transform all“foreign bodies” into enemies and to turn apeople of victims into a people of oppres-sors. Rose develops her thought with thehelp of psychoanalytical notions (usingFreud, Bion, and Lacan) of collective iden-tity and defense mechanisms against the re-ality it engenders. Everything revolves thusaround the patterns

of extreme violenceand their imaginary elaboration. The mythof Palestine as a “land without people”—anact of denial which can affect either thephysical presence of “nomads” (who are infact peasants), or the legitimacy of the his-torical settlement of Arabs in the “land of

8

On the subject of the “neutralization ofmessianism” in Scholem, see Biale, op. cit., p.132 ff.

9

Most of the political interventions by Sc-holem between 1916 and 1974 are translated inthe collection

Le prix d’Israël

, Editions de l’Eclat,Paris, 2003 [in English:

Messianic Mystics

, YaleUniversity Press, 1998]. The letter to Rosenz-weig, unknown for a long time, also plays a cen-tral role in the much more critical analyses ofRaz-Krakotzkin, who stresses that it is through a“typically messianic interpretation of the situa-tion” that Scholem “warns against the messianicdanger hidden by secularization (

laicisation

)”(

Exil et souveraineté

, p. 133). Krakotzkin’s “am-bivalent” relationship, according to Carlo Ginz-burg, with the work and personality of Scholem,is influenced by the critiques by the new gener-ation of Kabbalah specialists of his “national”conception of older messianism (see Moshe Idel,

Messianisme et mystique

, Paris, 1994).

10

See in particular the exchange with Sha-lom Lappin in the online journal www.de-mocratiya.com/review.asp?reviews.

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the Bible,” or the national identity of thePalestinians—must be forced to fit realityagainst the “evil powers” that resist it. Atthe same time, the historical reality of anti-Semitism and its traumatic culmination ingenocide is turned into the conviction thatthe victims of Zionism are in fact its perse-cutors.

11

In this manner, any manifestationof hostility becomes a threat of annihilation(physical annihilation but also symbolic:degradation and collective “shame,” ex-pressing the powerlessness of the Jews, asthe Shoah was presented for a long time inIsrael), against which all means are justifiedand even sanctified (“every soldier in theJewish militia is an actualization of themessiah”).12

The heart of this analysis is thus a psy-cho-political reflection on the way in whichanti-semitism has come to constitute notonly—as Herzl never tired of repeating—the objective ally of Zionism, by destroyingillusions of assimilation and persuadingJews that persecution is the only destinyoutside “their” nation-state, but also theprojective structure (schème) of a melan-cholic conception of self in which the groupsees itself (while also fearing to see itself) asabsolute victim, object of the murderoushatred of an Other that is both omnipresentand radically evil. This conception of thecollective identity avoids any calling intoquestion of one’s own politics and allowsone, in advance, to attribute any criticism tohostility. It is obviously not the only possi-ble conception, although in certain circum-stances which “liberate” the antinomicelement of the unconscious itself, it is per-

haps irresistible. That is why Rose at-tributes essential importance, at the heartof her book, to the alternative advocated bythe “spiritual” current of Zionism, foundedby Ahad Ha’am (Asher Ginzberg),13 inwhom she sees not only a precocioussource of inspiration for a critique—aimingat Herzl—of exclusive nationalism whichmakes the prior occupants of the promisedland invisible, but also—in anticipation ofFreud’s Civilization and its Discontents and incontinuation of a rabbinic tradition—theinitiator of a “clinic” of melancholic identi-fications, which would liberate the collec-tive consciousness from grief and from thecruel injunctions of the ancestors.14

II.

The relation to ancestors, treated with acompletely different method, is also thesubject of Idith Zertal’s work La nation et lamort. La Shoah dans le discours et la politiqued’Israël, which seems to me to have receivedup to now insufficient or biased attention.15

Zertal takes an interest as an historian inthe constitution and the functions of collec-tive memory, drawing on the works ofMaurice Halbwachs and, among more re-cent scholars, Benedict Anderson and otherhistorians of national culture. In her conclu-sion she converges with the positions ofHannah Arendt, which she attempts toadapt to the current conditions of Israelipolitics.

The main portion of the work is a de-

11 Rose refers here to the key article by Ed-ward Said (to whose memory her book is dedi-cated), “Zionism from the point of view of itsvictims” (1979).

12 This formula was used by the socialistleader Shmuel Yavne’eli in 1918, quoted byRose, p. 150. The theme of “national shame” isalso analyzed by Idith Zertal. It is incorporatedby Krakotzkin into a much more general frame-work of the abjection of the “exiled” Jew, a noto-riously insistent element in the formation of theIsraeli national character.

13 Before 1933, Scholem too identified withthis current. He wrote: “I am, in this respect, areligious Ahad-Haamist.” See Le prix d’Israël, p.163. See also D. Biale, op. cit., p. 40 ff., 171-175.

14 Rose, cit., p. 96 ff.15 Author of many studies of the history of

the state of Israel and emigration to Palestine,Idith Zertal was professor at the Hebrew Uni-versity of Jerusalem and the InterdisciplinaryCenter of Herzliya. She currently teaches in Ba-sel. Her most recent work, written with AkivaEldar, is The War Over Israel’s Settlements in theOccupied Territories, 1967-2007, Nation Books,2007.

128 ETIENNE BALIBAR

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tailed study of the way in which a whole setof commemorations and educational insti-tutions constructed and incorporated thenotion of a “crucial and exclusive link” be-tween the memory of the Shoah and Israelidefense policy.16 The perverse effect of thisnotion was to inscribe at the heart of collec-tive consciousness an equivalence betweenthe Arab world (and today, more and more,the Muslim world) and a new Nazism, ashammered home in the discourse of the po-litical and military elite (with the exceptionof Rabin before he was assassinated) andlargely adopted by public opinion.

It should be noted here, to precludeshrill protests, that Zertal does not contest(any more than does Rose) the idea that Is-rael has enemies, nor that these enemieswish for or fantasize about Israel’s elimina-tion.17 Nor does she contest the fact that, asearly as the period of the Yishuv and dur-ing World War II, certain Palestinian lead-ers imagined an alliance with Nazismagainst the “common enemy”18 and that re-visionism or negationism (Holocaust de-nial) are broadly encouraged today in theArab and Islamic world. That is not theproblem she addresses, however; what shedoes treat is the endogenous construction ofa collective self-image19 through the super-imposing, via certain symbolic events, oftwo systems of representations—one of

which reconstructs ancient or recent historywhile the other interprets politically thecontemporary period—which constantlydraw on each other in configuring reality inorder to delegitimize and dehumanize theenemy. It would not be forcing the meaningof Zertal’s argumentation to define as itsmotive, not an underestimation of the im-portance of the Shoah in Jewish conscious-ness and contemporary history, but rather arevolt against the instrumentalization andeven the banalization of the Shoah,20 whichdeprive it of its historical reality and dis-possess its victims while promoting itsimagined imminence in a completely dif-ferent political conjuncture—thereby ren-dering the violence and crimes of thepresent invisible and inconceivable, giventhe effect of disproportion.

Her analysis reveals the articulationamong several moments. The first concernsthe fiction of a chain of heroic sacrifices forthe nation beginning long before the proc-lamation of independence, the war of 1948and the appropriation for Eretz Israel of theEuropean model of the sacred bond be-tween “land and blood,” with the differ-ence that the mission in Palestine is tocreate, displace and defend the frontieragainst an internal enemy. The model in-voked here is the resistance to the death ofthe settlers of Tel Hai in Upper Galileeagainst their Arab assailants in 1920.21 Withtwo other key examples—that of the exalta-tion of the insurrection in the Warsawghetto (1943) presented as a “Zionist com-

16 On the institution of the “exclusive link”between the memory of the Shoah and the site ofJerusalem by the Yad Vashem law, and its rela-tion to other policies regarding “places of mem-ory,” see Zertal, p. 120. On the reticence ofcertain Shoah survivors, see p. 130 ff.

17 This point is particularly important re-garding the Nasser regime’s propaganda in thedays preceding the attack of June 1967, present-ed as a case of legitimate preventive defense. SeeZertal, op. cit., p. 166.

18 Ibid., p. 144 ff., in particular concerningthe contacts sought by of the Grand Mufti HadjAmin Al-Husseini.

19 Sociologists of Luhmannian inspirationwould employ here the category of “Selbstthema-tisierung” or “self-characterization.” See UlrichBielefeld, Nation und Gesellschaft. Selbstthemati-sierungen in Frankreich und Deutschland, Ham-burg, Hamburger Edition, 2003.

20 On “the long processus of banalization ofthe Shoah,” see p. 88, 156, etc.

21 In the extended version of the mythicalnarrative, which ties modern episodes to Antiq-uity (the destruction of the Second Temple, therevolt of Bar Kochba and the battle of Massada),this chain makes it possible to legitimate theidea of a national and territorial identity that goback a millennium, in which the diaspora repre-sents little more than a “non-history” or a tragicparenthesis prior to reconquest. Raz-Krakotzkindiscusses the fiction of the revolt of Bar Kokhbaand its opposition to the rabbinic tradition inExil et souveraineté, p. 100 ff.

“GOD WILL NOT REMAIN SILENT” 129


bat for the honor of Israel”22 and that of thetragedy of the Exodus as managed by theleaders of the Jewish Agency in order to in-fluence the debates within the UN Com-mission in 1947—we move to a second andeven more sensitive question, that of the se-lection in Israeli policy among testimoniesand even among persons (i.e., survivors).This leads up to a discussion of the way inwhich the state-led construction of memoryrepresses what it considers “shameful”from the standpoint of the “new man” andconstructs scapegoats among the victimsthemselves, while exonerating certain veri-table collaborators.23

What emerges, in Zertal’s striking ex-pression, is a “memory without subjects”(p. 121), a “mixture of appropriation andexclusion” (p. 36), the ideological thrust ofwhich is to construct a “civic religion” (p.82) and to “purify” Israel itself of the “Jew-ish shame” represented by the ignominiousdeath of powerless victims (p. 91, 115).

Without restoring to the survivors theirright to expression, of which the state (butalso, secondarily, the army and the settlerorganizations) took on the role of “certifiedheirs” (p. 237), the officializing of the cult ofthe Shoah dead, of which the Eichmann

trial in 1961 constituted a key moment,nonetheless represented a significant shift.The Shoah is no longer categorized as asign of degeneracy and “passivity” of theghetto Jew as opposed to the “new man”embodied by the Zionist pioneer; it is trans-figured into a founding event of the na-tional renaissance and the negative sign ofIsrael’s chosenness, which guarantees a pri-ori the holiness of its objectives and the (inparticular military) means used to theachieve them.24 Its “unique” character is nolonger discussed—as it still was at the timeof the Biafra war—but proclaimed andsanctified. Once again then, and on a muchgreater scale, a situation is systematicallyread in the shadow of another, thus institut-ing a collective psychology of angst whichexceeds all the particular circumstancesthat might nourish it (regional wars, sui-cide bomb attacks, the Palestinian demandfor a “right to return”), and resulting in anIsraeli self-consciousness as a “refuge na-tion,” placed permanently under the signof extermination. “In this universe whereall meanings are inverted and all projec-tions permitted” writes Zertal, “the con-quered peoples become conquerors;persecutors are turned into the persecuted,criminals into victims, and this upside-down world is sanctioned thanks to the su-preme hallmark of Auschwitz.”2522 Zertal, op. cit., p. 36 ff. Following others,

Zertal stresses the fact that the most prominentsurviving leader of the revolt of the Warsawghetto, Marek Edelman, always opposed thistransfiguration of the insurrection into an epi-sode of “Zionist” heroism, and more generallythe idea that the creation of the state of Israelrepresented not only an historical consequence,but the very “meaning,” revealed a posteriori, ofthe Shoah (see p. 47 ff.).

23 This occurred in particular as a result of a1950 law “against war criminals and the authorsof crimes against humanity” present in Israel it-self: see Zertal, p. 83 ff. In practice, the law tar-geted Jews, themselves Shoah survivors (such asformer kapos and room supervisors in the con-centration camps) but ended up exonerating no-tables who had negotiated with the Nazis in thename of the Judenräte of central Europe. The lawresulted in the scandal of the Kastner trial(1952), for which Ben Gurion conceived theEichman trial as a symbolic reparation (p. 112ff.).

24 According to Zertal, who follows Arendton this point, but also other historians (includ-ing the British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper,who was quite sympathetic to Israeli objectives),the trial was conceived strictly in this perspec-tive.

25 Zertal, p. 268-269 (“L’ange de la mortd’Auschwitz”). Let us recall that Edward Said,who swam against the current in his own camp,called for the Palestinians and Arabs to take thispsychology into account and, beyond this, tomake of the Jewish genocide and the rights it en-tailed (which did not include in his view theright to dispossess others) one of the conditionsfor the solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.See The Question of Palestine (London, 1981); ThePolitics of Dispossession (London, 1994).

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III.

Under these circumstances one can un-derstand why Hannah Arendt, expressingherself “as a Jew” in her report and inter-pretation of the Eichmann trial, while refus-ing all group affiliation,26 provoked ascandal which continues to this day. Afterhaving published in Hebrew, for the firsttime, Arendt’s letter to Scholem which hehad promised to have published with hers,Zertal devotes a long chapter to this apol-ogy for free thinking (Selbstdenken, in Less-ing’s expression) against “the catastropheof political messianism,” and draws inspi-ration from it in her conclusion. In her view,and above and beyond the criticism of thegreat historian’s failure to keep his word,this polemic is exemplary of the way inwhich the current which had believed inthe utopia of Jewish-Arab understandingbecame divided between a cultural nation-alism, powerless to dissociate itself frommythical extrapolations from history de-spite having studied its genealogy method-ically, and a “world citizenship” for whichthe essential political problem to be re-solved is how to achieve the historical con-ditions for coexistence between differentdemands for self-determination, mutuallyantagonistic and yet equally and uncondi-tionally justified.

The Scholem-Arendt controversy alsooccupies a central place in the third workwe are examining here, Amnon Raz-Kra-

kotzkin’s Exil et souveraineté. Judaïsme, sion-isme et pensée bi-nationale.27 However,against the background of the commonfriendship with Walter Benjamin whicheach of the two had in some way incorpo-rated into their thought, this controversy isre-examined from the standpoint of the“political theology” which undergirded theconstruction of the state of Israel and its co-lonial expansion out to the (undetermined)limits of the Biblical Eretz Israel. Here, then,is a third perspective that cuts across anddisplaces the two previous ones.28 It is im-possible here to account fully for a work soworthy of discussion (which we hope willoccur), stunning in its erudition and its the-oretical ambitions. I will first indicate themeaning the author attaches to the notionto which he refers in his title, and then con-centrate my remarks on three plurithematicpoints.

Krakotzkin takes care to distinguishwhat he calls “binational thought” fromany particular institutional solution to theIsraeli-Palestinian conflict in the form ofone or two states. As outlined in the inter-war period by Buber, Magnes, Scholem andArendt, and as it survives today in Israelamong the minority that struggles for therights of Palestinians, it consists first of allin an effective recognition of the presenceof the Arabs, in the midst of which Jewishcommunities have always lived, as the firstresidents of the land of Palestine; secondly,

26 Her controversy with Scholem attests tothis. This controversy turned on “love for Israel”vs. “love for the Jewish people” (Ahavat Israel),to which she counterpoises not the “love of hu-manity” but that of individuals and friends. SeeLes origines du totalitarisme, suivi de Eichmann à Jé-rusalem, Gallimard 2002, p. 1342 ff. (in English :The Origins of Totalitarianism, Schocken, 1951], aswell as G. Scholem, Fidélité et utopie. Essais sur lejudaïsme contemporain, Calmann Lévy, 1978, p.213-228. On Arendt’s conception of the “Jewishquestion” before and after the Eichmann trial,see Martine Leibovici, Hannah Arendt, une Juive.Expérience, politique et histoire (preface by PierreVidal-Naquet), Desclée de Brouwer, 1998.

27 The author is senior lecturer in history ofJudaism at the University of Beersheva. Severalof his previous publications are about Catholiccensorship and the transformations of Jewishthought it brought about in classical Europe.

28 The close exchanges between Scholemand Benjamin on theology and the philosophyof history, (up to the “Theses” of 1940, submittedto Arendt and published by her) are the subjectof a book by Eric Jacobson : Metaphysics of theProfane: The Political Theology of Walter Benjaminand Gershom Scholem, Columbia UniversityPress, 2003. See also Michael Löwy, Avertisse-ment d’incendie. Une lecture des thèses “Sur le con-cept d’histoire,” Paris, 2001 [in English: FireAlarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s “On the conceptof History,” Verso, 2006.



it refers to the idea that “the rights of Jewsand Arabs form a whole” such that one can-not make democracy progress without“treating simultaneously both facets,”29

which requires reasoning no longer interms of exclusive sovereignty but ratherlimited or shared sovereignty. Finally—andthis is a knottier problem—it affirms thatfor the Jews themselves “Palestine is acountry of exile,” as it has become for thePalestinians, in such a way that there is noeschatological identification possible be-tween the “return” of the Jews to Palestineand the construction of a state in the Mid-dle East.30 Binational thought thus consti-tutes both an “intellectual and moralreform” and a political methodology in to-day’s situation, whose outcome cannot bepredicted.

In this perspective, the first thesis of thebook is that the distinction often acknowl-edged in Israel between a “secular” campand a “religious” camp is meaningless. Itwas secular nationalism, and socialism inparticular, predominant at the time of thestate’s founding and in charge of its policiesfor decades alone or in coalition, that car-ried out the “secularization” and the con-servation of theological-political schemas,sacralizing national symbols (the flag withthe star of David reproducing a prayershawl), making the Bible the absolute refer-ence for the representation of borders, andmaking Israel a chosen land which couldonly be appropriated by the Jews. Krakotz-

kin sums up this “inverted secularization”with a witticism: “God does not exist, buthe promised us this land.” This theology,denied and yet omnipresent, associates inclose combination the political aspect—theabsolutization of the national state form—with an apocalyptic religious deviation31

with respect to the idea of the human con-dition as exile, seen as the ethical and mys-tical foundation of Judaism, incorrespondence with the prohibition on“hastening the end.”32 As a paradoxicalconsequence, we must look for the oppo-nents of political messianism among the re-ligious thinkers and parties who opposethe idea of the Israeli territory as a holyland, rather than among the self-pro-claimed “secularists.”33

The negation of exile, this time in a di-rectly historical sense, is at the heart of Kra-kotzkin’s critique of the “orientalism” (inthe sense of Said) that according to him per-vades the self-images and the cultural poli-cies of the state of Israel. The paradox isthat a nation born of persecution of theJews in Europe conceives of itself (startingwith the writings of Herzl) as the vanguardof the Europeanization of the Middle East;and that, in turning against itself—notwithout extreme ambivalence—the systemof “stigma” invented by orientalism, thatnation comes to hunt down ferociously, inits history, cultural traditions and ethniccomposition, everything that evokes “oth-erness” with respect to the models of com-munity developed by European nationsand colonial empires. This “delocalized”orientalism, “projected” out of its place of

29 Raz-Krakotzkin, p. 209.30 This is tantamount to criticizing the no-

tion, inscribed in the Israeli constitution, of astate which is “democratic” because it is “Jew-ish” (and for Jews exclusively). This idea of the“land of exile” is tied to a “secular” elaborationof the religious tradition for which the land of Is-rael does not constitute the place or the instru-ment of salvation but rather that place where theJews attempt to continue to “live in exile,” aslong as all humanity is not yet liberated fromslavery or oppression. It converges with the cri-tique of statism in Benjamin and the oppositionpointed out by Arendt between the position ofthe “parvenu” and that of the “pariah.” See p.199-201.

31 This is so because it actually reaches thepoint of preferring self-destruction to the shar-ing of the land: see the passage on the “Samsonoption” and the taboo on naming the Israeli nu-clear weapon, p. 152 ff.

32 Ibid., p. 45 ff., 197 ff. 33 Ibid., p. 196-203 (with reference to Baruch

Kurzweill and Yeshayahou Leibowitz). The na-tionalist religious parties are nevertheless in theforefront of the colonization of the occupied ter-ritories.

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origin, holds naturally for the systematicnegation of the rights and the very exist-ence of the Palestinian Arabs and for therepresentation of Islam as a backward andfanatic religion. But it holds as well for thesymbolic violence to which the “oriental”Jews are subjected and the erasure ofJudeo-Arab culture, in both its popular andits learned guises, despite its ties to thegreat moment of renaissance of medievalJudaism in Yemen, Baghdad and Cor-doba.34 What a paradox for a state buildingitself in the Middle East, and of which—leaving aside the 20% of Israeli Arabs—nearly half the Jewish majority populationhas origins in Yemen, Iraq and North Af-rica! Greater still is the paradox concerningthe way in which, in denying a specificallyJewish conception of historicity (as Ben-jamin attempted to retrieve it in combina-tion with another messianism) in favor of a“grand narrative” of state modernization,the dominant discourse in Israel presentsJewish history of the past millennium, un-der conditions of diaspora, essentially as along, negative parenthesis and an experi-ence of alienation from the collective iden-tity. The construction of the new man thusbecomes not only an instrument for “eradi-cation of the past,” but also the process bywhich the stereotypes of European anti-Ju-daism are assimilated and ratified.

At the most advanced point of his cri-tique, Krakotzkin, developing an intuitionof Scholem against Scholem himself, then

argues in favor of the thesis that the “secu-larized political theology” guiding Israelipolicy is not so much the effect of an inter-nal deviation of Jewish messianism but theresult of its own impregnation with specifi-cally Christian schemas, from the appropri-ation of Protestant principles of literalistreading and exclusive authority of the Bibleto the use of extermination as a theophanicfounding moment, a sign of God in lay his-tory, via the representation of the “end ofexile” as an “entry into history” in the pro-gressive and positive sense of the term.35

It is against such an inversion of per-spectives, which is much more alienatingthan the “degeneration” to which it claimsto put an end, that Krakotzkin invokes theBenjaminian idea of a history of redemp-tion as a “history of the defeated” (or, in thelanguage of Arendt, the “pariahs”).36 Thishistory is by no means purely speculativesince it opens in his view the possibility ofexercising political responsibility for the con-sequences, for others and for oneself, of theZionist conquest—a responsibility onwhich depend the chances, which in truthare very tenuous, of not paying collectivelythe heaviest price.37

To conclude, I would like to stress twoproblems that clearly call for further reflec-tion. One point in common between theanalyses of Rose, Zertal and Raz-Krakotz-kin, which the very divergence of theirmethods brings out even more strongly(and even violently), is the pervasive pres-ence of anti-semitism and the profundity ofthe deferred effects that its internalizationnever ceases to produce in the self-con-

34 Krakotzkin speaks of “forced de-Arabi-zation,” p. 83. He draws in particular on thework of Gil Anidjar, philosopher and historianwho studied with Derrida and author of “OurPlace in Al-Andalous”: Kabbalah, Philosophy, Liter-ature in Arab Jewish Letters, Stanford, 2002; TheJew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy, Stanford,2003; and most recently, Semites: Race, Religion,Literature, Stanford, 2008. Israeli suppression ofthe Judeo-Arab element at the heart of its ownhistoric identity is the obverse side of the fanta-sized discourse of “Christian” Europe whichplaced the Jew and the Arab, at least since theRenaissance, in the position of absolute enemies,both internal and external, forming a single ene-my at a deeper level.

35 See in particular chapters I (“La négationde l’exil dans la conscience sioniste”) and II (“Leretour à l’histoire”). Scholem discusses in partic-ular the relations between Jewish messianismand Christian millenarism in Sabbataï Tsevi, op.cit., p. 105 ff.

36 See in particular chapter VII: “Arendt,Benjamin, Scholem et le binationalisme.”

37 This responsibility is carefully distin-guished from culpability: see p. 206 ff.



sciousness or Selbstthematisierung that is in-dissociable from the Israeli nationalconstruction. It will no doubt be admittedthat no form of identification with Judaismand with Jewishness (judéité)—and weknow that there are more than one—canemerge unscathed. The traumatism of theShoah, transmitted from generation to gen-eration, adds to it a dimension of inevitabil-ity which is difficult to resist. But thesituation is qualitatively different for Israelinational consciousness because the rela-tionship of the “self” to the “Other” (theforeigner, the enemy) becomes the object ofan institutional construction, a political“appropriation,” and this constructiontakes place under conditions of coloniza-tion, and thus a “vital” denial of the condi-tion of oppressors on the part of formervictims (or rather their heirs, which is notthe same thing). Everything thus occurs—as an effect of the “perverse debt,” in Zer-tal’s expression—as if Sartre’s formula(“it’s anti-semitism that makes the Jew”)had found its deferred realization: it is anti-semitism that constructs Jewishness(judéité) for Israelis, both in the definition ofwhat they reject as foreign to them and ofthat with which they identify. The su-premely ambivalent category of “victim”paradoxically joins together the two as-pects.

The resulting practical consequence istwofold and of course does not concernonly the Jews or the Israelis. First of all, it isimportant to explore in more depth, asHildberg, Arendt and Poliakov had all be-gun to do in different ways, the nature of thehistoric ties between anti-semitism and exter-mination, since these ties are by no meanslogical or linear. Further, it is essential toplace a merciless ideological struggleagainst current forms of anti-semitism (inboth the East and the West) on the agendaof any attempt to contribute to a solution ofthe Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the“neutralization”—insofar as possible—ofnationalist messianism, because the latter

draws nourishment from any circumstancein which the real provides opportunities toconfirm its imaginary. This implies no ne-cessity of giving in to the blackmail towhich any critical examination of Israelihistory and politics is exposed. The diffi-culty arises from the fact that anti-semitismis of course used tactically by Israel but alsoforms, in a much deeper way, an uncon-scious basis of its identity, associated withthe discourse of Zionism from its origins,which obstacles and refutations do notweaken but instead reinforce.

At another level, the analyses of ourthree authors pose anew a complex but cru-cial question: in what sense is the ideologi-cal formation referred to here as“nationalist messianism” or sacralizationof the nation by the “angel of death” specif-ically Israeli? Could it not be that a part ofthe fascination exercised by Zionism, in theWest or elsewhere, on the minds of peoplewho have no particular sympathy for colo-nization, but who may on the other hand beattached to a “civic” or “republican” con-ception of the nation and its particularmanner of combining universalism andcommunitarianism, egalitarianism and ex-clusion, comes from the fact that Israeli na-tionalism brings to an extreme point (andeven to a breaking point) an ideological for-mation that is not—or not entirely—uniqueto it? At a time of general questioning of thecombination of messianism and national-ism—which is more or less indissociablefrom the translation of an historical identityinto state policy and attaches itself, accord-ing to the circumstances at hand, to theideas of “civilizing mission,” “elect na-tion,” “land of resurrection” where the newman is born, or “nation victim of history(France, U.S., U.S.S.R., Poland, India, Iran,etc.)—the particular case of Israel appearsas the stronghold of a certain image of sov-ereignty and as the place where it is (alwaysand already) in the shadow of death.38 Thevery Spinozian formula of Rabbi HaimGrodzinski quoted by Krakotzkin—“Israel

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is a state like any other”—takes on a differ-ent meaning.39 It calls for a more completeinvestigation into everything that the cou-ple formed by the land of the ancestors andsacrificial patriotism, exacerbated by Israelinationalism, owes in fact to the Europeanhistory of nationalisms (including MauriceBarrès!). It further calls, of course, for inves-tigation into the fact that this history hasnever ceased to reactivate and exploit Bibli-cal models—and here we encounter the“circuit of mutual influences” of which Sc-holem spoke. Finally, it demands of us thatwe pose the problem of the specificity andthe singularity (the uniqueness, if one pre-fers) of Jewish history in Israel and outsideIsrael, not in terms of essences or identitiesbut in terms of internal relations and other-nesses, in the past as in the present. Allstates are “like the others” but no nationalhistory is “like another,” since it reflectswithin it all the others.

38 One will find, I believe, an idea of thissort implicit in certain recent writings by Jean-Claude Milner: see Les penchants criminels del'Europe démocratique, Verdier, 2003, in particu-lar § 55, p. 97 ff.: “In truth, there is only one realobstacle [to the expansion of European “peace,”synonym of “unlimited society”]… and that isthe existence of a state named Israel. For Israelpresents itself as a limited whole, in the form ofa nation-state, claiming secure and recognizedborders. Such language is reputed to be intrinsi-cally warlike….”

39 Raz-Krakotzkin, cit., p. 111, 199. This for-mula is all the more striking to me since duringthe period of perestroika, when the philosopherLucien Sève asked me in a falsely naïve way(and with real anxiety) what I thought of theU.S.S.R., I replied exactly that: “It’s a state likeany other…”

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