Racial palestinianization and the Janus-facednature of the Israeli state

NADIA ABU EL-HAJ

ABSTRACT Abu El-Haj focuses on David Theo Goldberg’s analysis of ‘racial

palestinianization’ in The Threat of Race. Most broadly, she argues that the specific

contours of the Israeli state’s racial rule over its Palestinian subjects and citizens do

not fit easily into Goldberg’s characterization of neoliberal racism. She thinks with

and further elaborates Goldberg’s many insights, especially his use of Michel

Foucault’s concept of ‘race wars’ and ‘counter-history’ to think about Zionism and

the Israeli state, and then demonstrates the ways in which, at moments, Goldberg

fails to exit fully the counter-historical narrative he sets out to critique and considers

why that is so. Finally, she questions Goldberg’s naming of racial palestinianization a

‘born again racism’, and complicates his characterization of Israel as a neoliberal

state, insisting on recognizing and highlighting its dual nature: Israel is a neoliberal

and a colonial state, overlapping, and yet each operating according to distinct tactics

and modalities of rule.

KEYWORDS David Theo Goldberg, Israel, Palestine, racial palestinianization, racism,The Threat of Race, Zionism

Since Israel’s latest war on Gaza, the Israeli government has not let in anyreconstruction materials. People are living in tents amid the ruins of

their homes, the economy is at a virtual standstill (as has been the case foryears), and everything except medicine and food has to be smuggled in fromEgypt. As reported in the New York Times:

That leaves Gaza suspended in a state of misery that defies easy categorization. It

is, of course, crowded and poor, but it is better off than nearly all of Africa as well

as parts of Asia. There is no acute malnutrition, and infant mortality rates

compare with those in Egypt and Jordan . . . This is because although Israel and

Egypt have shut the borders for the past three years in an effort to squeeze

I would like to thank Barbara Rosenbaum and an anonymous reviewer for their helpfulcomments. I would also like to thank Bashir Abu-Manneh and John Comaroff for theirinsights on earlier drafts of the article. Finally, I thank Elizabeth Povinelli who gave this alast minute, urgently needed final read, no doubt when she had better things to be doingwith her time.

Patterns of Prejudice, Vol. 44, No. 1, 2010

ISSN 0031-322X print/ISSN 1461-7331 online/10/010027-15 # 2010 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/00313220903507610

Hamas, Israel rations aid daily, allowing in about 100 trucks of food and medicine.

Military officers in Tel Aviv count the calories to avoid a disaster.1

Counting calories in order to avoid a disaster, the calculus of Israel’s

necropolitical regime.2 If Gaza and the West Bank are ‘postcolonies’*/those

‘withering, debilitating, and abandoned spaces’ that stand in contrast to the

postcolonial dream of ‘economic independence, demographic upliftment,

and the promise of human flourishing’3*/they are postcolonies by colonial

design: creating ‘zones of abandonment’ is the conscious, willed policy of the

Israeli state.4

But The Threat of Race is not just about ‘racial palestinianization’. Its

ambitions are greater: first, to provide a ‘conceptual mapping of race-making

and racist structures’ and, second, to produce a ‘cartography of racial

fabrication and racist exclusion across five broad regional terrains’ (327,

emphasis in original). Goldberg calls for a political and an analytic shift

away from ‘antiracialism’, which dominates the contemporary politics of

race. The end of racism lies not in being against race*/as ‘a concept, a name,

a category, a categorizing’ (10)*/but in attending to the lived conditions of

race, to its forms of discrimination, exclusion and violence. After sketching a

broad history of anticolonial and antiracist struggles (anti-slavery move-

ments in Haiti and Cuba, the anticolonial and civil rights movements of the

early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, the anti-apartheid move-

ment and the twinned rise of multicultural politics), Goldberg explores the

consequences of the fact that ‘antiracism’ has given way ‘to the dominant

trend of antiracialism’ (19). In an era in which ‘counter-commitment

regarding race in social arrangements came to be expressed as color-

blindness, or more generally as racelessness’ (330), the ongoing effects of

economic, political and legal racisms have been increasingly ignored,

sidelined and denied. Antiracialism is ‘whiteness by another name, by other

means’ (22). It is ‘born again racism’ (emphasis in original): ‘racism without

race, racism gone private, racism without the categories to name it as such’

1 Ethan Bronner, ‘Misery hangs over Gaza despite pledges of help’, New York Times,28 May 2009.

2 Achille Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, Public Culture, vol. 15, no. 1, 2003, 11�/40. In theaftermath of Hamas’s electoral win in January 2006, an Israeli governmentspokesperson referred to official policy towards Gaza as ‘putting the Palestinians ona diet, but not making them die of hunger’: quoted in Honaida Ghanim,‘Thanatopolitics: the case of the colonial occupation of Palestine’, in Ronit Lentin(ed.), Thinking Palestine (London: Zed Books 2007), 65�/81 (76).

3 David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism (Oxford andMalden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell 2009), 16 (subsequent page references will appearparenthetically in the text).

4 Joao Biehl, Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment (Berkeley and London: Universityof California Press 2005).

28 Patterns of Prejudice

(23). Invisible man, Goldberg writes, ‘has deepened into invisible

racial arrangements of social conditions’ (356). This is the racism of the

neoliberal age.In engaging this broad, rich and passionate text, I focus on ‘racial

palestinianization’, a regional terrain that does not fit easily into the

historical narrative sketched above.5 In reading Zionism through Foucault’s

notion of ‘race wars’, Goldberg provides a novel and fruitful lens through

which to look at the history of the Israeli state. I use that as my starting point

in order to think with and to further elaborate Goldberg’s many insights.

I also point to moments in the text where I disagree with Goldberg’s

analysis, demonstrating the ways in which certain arguments fail to exit

fully the counter-historical narrative Goldberg sets out to critique, and

highlighting the reasons and consequences for such failures. Most broadly,

I question his naming racial palestinianization a ‘born again racism’.

The term places racial palestinianization within a historical trajectory

that never happened in the Israeli state, thereby subsuming Israeli rule

over its Palestinian subjects and citizens too seamlessly under the rubric of

neoliberalism. The Israeli state is a neoliberal state. It is, simultaneously, a

colonial state. Political and economic orders do not shift in ‘block period-

izations’ any more than do scientific paradigms or epistemic virtues.6 The

Israeli state is ‘Janus-faced’.7 It is a regime that manoeuvres between and

speaks in the name of different modalities in relation to shifting forms of

capital, shifting global political imaginaries and shifting oppositional

struggles*/‘threats’*/on the ground. Keeping its Janus-faced nature in

focus, I argue, better enables us to specify the distinctive character of this

racial state and to appreciate the particular political challenges that the

Palestinian struggle*/and its supporters*/face.

5 ‘I have nominated it racial palestinianization rather than israelification (which would bemore consistent with the other modes of racial regionalization I have identified) inorder both to connect it to the representational and political histories of orientalism andto indicate its occupational singularities in the order of contemporary racial expressionsand repressions’, Goldberg explains (130). I find Goldberg’s reasoning for the‘inconsistency’ convincing, especially in terms of the latter justification. Analyticallyand politically it is important to distinguish the Israeli racial regime from those ofEurope, post-apartheid South Africa, the United States and Latin America. Israel is acolonial state whose most fundamental terms of racial rule are structured by adistinction between citizenship and nationality, by the law of return and itsimplications for equalities and rights for Jews v. non-Jews within the state and tothe land, and by its continued occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem andthe Golan Heights. As I argue in what follows, in certain respects I would draw thedistinctions even more starkly than does Goldberg.

6 Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago: University ofChicago Press 1997); Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: ZoneBooks 2007).

7 Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1987).

NADIA ABU EL-HAJ 29

An exceptional racism and the struggle for Palestine

Why, asks Goldberg, was the fight against antisemitism not ‘one ofthe principal expressions of anti-racist social movements?’ In so far asantisemitism ‘certainly since the Shoah [has been declared] as the constitu-tive extreme, always the exceptional case, the struggle against antisemitismhas characterized itself in the singular, as exemplary, as unlike any other

struggle’ (19). That has generated problems for ‘point[ing] to the racialdimensions of Israel’s very definition’ (20). Principally, one always risks theaccusation of antisemite or self-hating Jew. Goldberg eloquently argues forthe distinction between criticism of the state of Israel and antisemitism, andhe makes a much needed and impassioned plea for the responsibility of Jewsto be critical of a state that speaks in their name (112). I want to highlight and

further elaborate a slightly different aspect of the political consequences ofantisemitism as an exceptional racism, however. What has it meant for whatEdward Said called the Palestinian ‘permission to narrate’?8

In the aftermath of the Second World War and more specifically since the1960s, the Holocaust was fashioned in US and Israeli political consciousness

as the singular event of genocide: the archetypal event of victimization andsuffering.9 In the rhetorical call of ‘never again’ the spectre of Europeanantisemitism haunts the Palestinian cause, most especially the struggleagainst the Israeli state in the aftermath of the 1967 war. How can aPalestinian nationalist narrative of disenfranchisement and suffering beheard by Israeli and US (and European) publics when the Holocaust is

the yardstick against which other conflicts are measured and the Jew theur-victim of modern state violence?10 (Many of the legal parameters of theinternational human rights regime were developed in response to Nazipolicies, as is well known. Specifically, the 1949 Geneva Conventions, theuniversal standard for rules of war vis-a-vis civilians, POWs and othercaptive or injured people, were a direct response to the Nazi state.) The racist

character of the Israeli state*/the organization of the state around thedistinction between Jew and non-Jew, military and civilian legal systems,enclosure and movement and, since the 1967 war, the additional distinctionbetween citizen and subject*/becomes unintelligible, perhaps even unspeak-able, for much of the Euro-American world for the better part of thetwentieth and now the early twenty-first centuries.

As evidenced in Goldberg’s text, this political legacy haunts even thosewho do choose to speak critically. Goldberg is explicit in his criticism of the

8 Edward Said, ‘Permission to narrate’, London Review of Books, 16 February 1984, 13�/17.9 See Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1999), and

Idith Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, trans. from the Hebrew byChaya Galai (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 2005).

10 See Novick, The Holocaust in American Life.

30 Patterns of Prejudice

Israeli state. Israel is a racist state: ‘Palestinians are treated not as if a racial

group, not simply in the manner of a racial group, but as a despised and

demonic racial group’ (139). Racial palestinianization is premised on ‘land

clearance’ justified in a language of biblical return, an ideology that

‘distinguishes racial palestinianization from classic modes of settler colonial-

ism’ (130, emphasis added), but a settler colony it remains nevertheless.

Amid these critical reflections, however, Goldberg feels compelled to repeat

that his is not a challenge to Israel’s right to exist:

This critique of palestinianization is not to advocate for nor self-loathingly to

desire Israel’s destruction . . . I am concerned here insistently to question not

Israel’s being, its right to exist, but rather its forms of expression and its modes of

self-insistence and enforcement (142, emphasis in original).

The compulsion to make clear that one is not questioning Israel’s ‘being’ is not

Goldberg’s alone: to speak critically and yet felicitously about Israel requires

that one first recognize Israel’s right to exist. And yet, in the late twentieth

century, recognition emerged as a demand*/a politics*/of the disenfran-

chised.11 In this case, however, recognition must go the other way: if I am

going to criticize you (Israel, a state not a people, a ‘culture’ or an indigenous

group), I must first speak your right to exist. The state of racist exception

permeates this structure of command: as scholars, as critics, even as

Palestinians who have paid a dear price for Israel’s existence, we must

reassure you, one of the most militarily powerful states on earth, of your right

to exist.Goldberg brings Michel Foucault’s discussion of ‘race wars’ to bear on

Zionism’s self-understanding and self-representation. Drawing productively

on the lectures in ‘Society Must Be Defended’,12 Goldberg writes:

Israel came to be seen as an exemplary instance of what Michel Foucault, though

in a different context, memorably has called ‘counter-history,’ as a historical

narrative of insurrection against the grain, establishing itself in the face of

formidable and threatening power directed against it (108).

A ‘rebellion’ against European antisemitism on the one hand, and, subse-

quently, a state facing the ‘formidable threat’ of being surrounded by hostile

11 See Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press 1995); Elizabeth Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition:Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (Durham, NC: DukeUniversity Press 2002); and Patchen Markell, Bound by Recognition (Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press 2003).

12 Michel Foucault, ‘Society Must Be Defended’. Lectures at the College de France, 1975�/76,ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. from the French by David Macey(New York: Picador 2003).

NADIA ABU EL-HAJ 31

Arab countries on the other, Israel fashioned itself as victim, not perpetrator.

And yet, as Goldberg points out, Zionism was a self-determining drive ‘with

a twist’:

The war of races in which the Jew is the hounded, the perennial foe and

fugitive, becomes in Israel’s founding a protracted conflict in which the Jewish

State, Herzl’s dream, is turned into oppressor, victimizer, and sovereign. . . . The

State is transformed, as Foucault says, into protector of the integrity, superiority,

and more or less purity of the homogenizing group, what Foucault marks as

‘the race’ (109).

Goldberg’s own evidence clarifies that this is not a temporal transition or

structural transformation that occurs with the establishment of the state in

1948. From the get-go, Zionist leaders represented their movement as a

counter-historical struggle and as an outpost of European civilization, of

whiteness itself. Goldberg quotes Moses Hess and Theodore Herzl on Jews

as the ‘‘‘bearers of civilization’’’, of Jewish immigration as an ‘‘‘unhoped-for

accession of strength for the land which is now so poor’’’ (108). He

demonstrates through their words that, since the late nineteenth century,

Israel (in potentia) ‘has been thought*/has thought of itself in part . . . as

racially configured, as racially representative. And those insistent racial

traces persist despite the post-Holocaust European repression of the use of

race as social self-reference or -representation’ (108�/9).The success of Zionism’s counter-historical narrative is two-fold as

I understand it. First, it rests on an understanding of Israel as but another

(modern, besieged) nation�/state in a world of nation�/states, a point to which

I return below. Second, it rests on the repression in Israel, and not just in

post-Holocaust Europe, of race as social self-reference. Historically, racial

thought was not anathema to Jewish nationalism (113). In the late nineteenth

and early twentieth centuries, European and American Jewish scientists

drew upon the reigning paradigms of race science to generate their own

scientific accounts of the (racial) character of the Jews. In response to

antisemitic science and rhetoric, and integral to the effort to articulate and

give credence to Jewish nationalism (Jews are not ‘merely’ a religious group),

Jewish scholars constructed scientific analyses of ‘the Jewish question’. They

did so by reconfiguring the relationship between nature and nurture along

Lamarckian lines, recognizing the ‘fact’ of Jewish degeneration while

reinterpreting its cause.13

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, however, racial self-definition could not

be maintained explicitly. It could not be named, even as Israeli population

13 For extended discussions, see John M. Efron, Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors andRace Science in Fin-de-Siecle Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press 1994) and,especially, Mitchell B. Hart, Social Science and the Politics of Modern Jewish Identity(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 2000).

32 Patterns of Prejudice

geneticists searched for evidence of biological unity among the diverse

Jewish ‘populations’ now citizens of the Jewish state.14 Racial reference was

evaporated (151�/2). Jews are not a race. Palestinians are not a race. This

is not a racist state. ‘For where no race, no racial harm. So no racism’ (344).

As Goldberg argues, Israel becomes ‘not so much the state form of apartheid

as a distinct modality of the racial state in denial about its racial predication’

(131, emphasis added).15

Comparisons between the Israeli state and apartheid South Africa

are made frequently. Despite differences there are characteristics of the

Israeli state that are similar to*/and in potentia foreboded a similarity

with*/apartheid rule (107). Rather than focusing on the empirical facts and

debates regarding similar or divergent structures, policies and tactics,

however, I want to highlight the political difference that the distinctive

self-representations of the Jewish and apartheid South African states have

made. What have been the political consequences of Zionism’s successful

self-fashioning as ‘counter-history’, as a movement that reproduced

(‘mimicked’, as Goldberg puts it) ‘the logics of independence fueled by

decolonizing movements’ (107, emphasis added)?If the spectre of antisemitism and the Holocaust haunts the Palestinian

cause, so too does the related success of Zionism’s self-presentation as but

another nationalist, anti-colonial movement in search of an independent

state of its own. In contrast to apartheid South Africa, which, by the mid- to

late twentieth century, spoke an anachronistic language of biological-racial

difference in its justification of white rule*/even when that ideology

morphed into a language of cultural difference, which functioned at best

as a rather thin disguise for the biological-racial*/Israel has successfully

14 Nadia Abu El-Haj, The Molecular Archive: Phylogenetics, the Origins of the Jews, and thePolitics of Epistemology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press forthcoming).

15 In explicating the differences between apartheid and the Israeli state, Goldberg pointsto some specific elements: Israel is a state that ‘tolerates really small Islamic, Christianand Druze communities’ and a ‘shadow state for Palestinians [that] largely lacksself-determination, freedom, a viable economic foundation, and any sort of securityfor its inhabitants’ (131). I want to make a few critical comments regarding theabove description. First, to refer to Israel’s Palestinian citizens by their religiousdenominations is to partake in the Israeli state’s classificatory practices that weredeveloped to deny the Arab population any claim to national rights. Second, they arenot a small minority: Israeli Palestinians are about 18 per cent of the population.Moreover, Goldberg’s narrative regarding the Israeli state’s achievements over thepast sixty years (139) underestimates the extent to which a racial logic has groundedthe state since its very beginning. Following the establishment of the state in 1948,Israel’s non-Jewish citizens were subjected to military rule, which was formally liftedonly in 1966. Economic, social and political inequalities between Jews and non-Jewishcitizens of the state continue to be stark and the political pressures on Palestiniancitizens as ‘disloyal’ citizens of the state are increasing as evidenced, for example, by arecent proposal to subject all Palestinians applying for admission to Israeli universitiesto submit to military security clearance first.

NADIA ABU EL-HAJ 33

represented itself as but another nation�/state in the ‘national-order of

things’,16 all of which began in violence.17

The success of that narrative is evident in Goldberg’s text. Amid his

mostly clear critique of Israel as a project of colonial settlement, albeit

one born of particular historical circumstances and configured in distinctive

ways,18 today’s ‘political common sense’ slips through: that this (Israeli-

Palestinian) ‘conflict’*/as it is named*/is of a different sort, one between two

sides, albeit differentially powerful, each of which asserts a competing

national claim. ‘In short, a dominant faction of the Israeli political establish-

ment has been committed since earliest Zionist settlement, intensifying

with the declaration of Israeli independence in 1948, not simply to deny

Palestinian existence but to make the claim true, to act in its name and on its

terms’ (110). Goldberg establishes a symmetry of form between this denial of

Palestinians and Palestinian denial of Israel’s right to exist: ‘Under Arafat, of

course, Palestinians not only asserted a coherent identity, but also sought to

reciprocate that denial: the state of Israel does not, should not, exist’ (110).

Goldberg points to the crucial distinction between rhetoric and acts. He

argues power does not make right. Power ‘manufactures the conditions

and parameters, the terms, of political, and by extension historical and

representational, possibility’ (110): a power Israel holds and the Palestinians

do not. No matter how ‘rhetorically insistent concerning Israel’s denial and

demise’ (110), Palestinian statements are not equivalent to Israeli acts.But are those claims structurally symmetrical even if not politically

equivalent? Why is denying Israel’s right to exist objectionable in the first

place? Did not anticolonial movements (seek to) dismantle colonial states?

Did they not uproot European settlers from their lands? It is important to

remember that when the PLO first drafted its charter Israel was but twenty

years old. In living memory Israel did not exist. The experience of exile for

750,000 refugees was not just new. It was raw and passionately suffered and

felt. At that historical moment it was unimaginable that Israel was here to stay.

It was inconceivable that, in contrast to all the successful anticolonial

independence movements of the past few decades, Palestine would*/

could*/be lost. For Palestinians, recognizing Israel meant*/and, for many,

16 Liisa H. Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among HutuRefugees in Tanzania (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1995).

17 See, for example, Benny Morris interviewed by Ari Shavit, ‘On ethnic cleansing’, NewLeft Review, vol. 26, March�/April 2004, 37�/51.

18 ‘First, and perhaps most basically, racial palestinianization is committed to landclearance underpinned by an accompanying, if not pre-dating, moral eviction.Territorial clearance in Israel’s case has been prompted historically in terms of‘‘redemption of land.’’ This heart-felt historico-moral claim to land redemption, toretrieving territory always already biblically ‘‘ours,’’ distinguishes racialpalestinianization from classic modes of settler colonialism. Reclamation throughsettlement is extended by renomination, the shrinkage of Palestinian proprietorshipmaterialized in the disappearance of recognizable title’ (130).

34 Patterns of Prejudice

still means*/ratifying their own dispossession. The refusal to recognize

Israel was a refusal of Israel’s self-representation as a counter-history. It was

a demand to recognize Israel as a colonial state. It was a commitment that

history could and must be otherwise.Let me be clear. I am not arguing that Israelis should be uprooted.

(Note: I too am interpolated by the command to ‘recognize Israel’.) Nor am

I making this argument with a view towards a particular political solution:

I refrain from making such an argument as an academic dwelling in the

luxury of an elite New York academic institution and not in a position to

dictate to Palestinians ‘on the ground’ what their political desires should be.

I am making an analytical point. To produce a symmetry of logic here*/even

if not a symmetry of power*/is to fail to understand the ways in which for

Palestinians and as a historical fact (dare I venture), this was and is a project

of colonial settlement, even if one born as part of a long history of European

antisemitism and realized in the wake of Nazi genocide. As I argued in Facts

on the Ground, archaeological practice converged with and fashioned not just

‘the national interest’ (123) but the settler-nationalist interest.19 Zionist

settlement was made possible in the context of an imperial common sense

in which Europeans could and should settle elsewhere,20 bringing European

civilization to the global ‘periphery’, as Goldberg points out. All the while its

grammar was a distinctly national one, a belief in and a commitment to

‘return’. This was settler-nationhood of a distinct variety: temporally,

geographically, ideologically and, from a European perspective in the

aftermath of the Holocaust, ethically. But a project of colonial settlement it

was.21

Why do I point to these moments of inconsistency in Goldberg’s generally

powerfully critical text? Am I just splitting analytic hairs? Perhaps. But I see

no way to move forward*/for Europe and the United States to understand

the passion of Palestinian and Arab publics and politics vis-a-vis Israel, for

them to absorb the symbolic and political importance of the right of

return*/without fully exiting Israel’s counter-historical narrative of being a

movement for national independence, as today but one nation (however

19 Nadia Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2001). Many thanksto Goldberg (123) for clarifying what I was decidedly not arguing in the book, mycritics’ claims notwithstanding.

20 See Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books 1978), and Edward Said,Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books 1994).

21 Goldberg’s ambivalence about the Zionist project*/although not about what Israel hasbecome*/is evident in other moments in the text as well. For example: ‘The postwarmoment was one of intense anti-colonialism. The Pan-African Congress of 1945 . . .significantly brought together almost every future leader of major postcolonialliberations. India and Pakistan attained independence and statehood. Israel came intobeing. China quickly followed . . .’ (340).

NADIA ABU EL-HAJ 35

problematic its origins and policies, however undefined its borders) in thenational order of things.

Racial palestinianization

What is racial palestinianization? It is not a single, unified regime of racialrule: it operates differently vis-a-vis Israel’s Palestinian citizens*/subjected to‘ethnoracial purging’ (119)*/than vis-a-vis those in the territories who arecordoned off behind the Wall in ‘the lock-up facility that is Palestine today’(131), who are subjected to ‘physical and social death’ (26) and to ‘politicide’(122).22 Moreover, racial palestinianization has developed and shifted overtime. I want to elaborate a few historical details not spelled out in Goldberg’stext.

Many of the ways in which the territories have been governed since 1967were developed in the early decades of Israeli statehood to control itsuntrustworthy Palestinian citizens: until 1966, Palestinians citizens of thestate lived in zones under the jurisdiction of military administration and law,areas they could not leave without a permit. These explicitly repressivemeasures were accompanied by an array of civilizing projects (education,party politics and electoral participation, for example). By way of contrast,occupation in the post-1967 era was less of a civilizing mission: administra-tion, yes, but one intended to be civilizing for some imagined if partialintegration, no. Moreover I sense that over the past decade or so, racial rulein the Occupied Territories is moving away from the ‘historicist’ version: abelief that Others can be civilized, that they can be prepared for democraticparticipation and self-rule. Racism in a ‘naturalist’ form is rearing its uglyhead: a belief in the permanent inferiority and incommensurability of racialOthers, albeit one no longer (necessarily) grounded in appeals to biologicaldifference.23 ‘All Muslims are murderers’, one Israeli cabinet ministerdeclared in 2004 (115). Framed increasingly in the language of religiousdispositions*/as a clash of religious civilizations*/violence is read into thevery fabric of Palestinian (and/as Muslim) personhood. It is no longer clearthat there is anyone to negotiate with, as the now standard Israeli mantra goes.If not recuperable, if not civilizable (after all, Israeli troops and settlers leftGaza and look what it has become), Palestinians can be excludedlegitimately from ‘the Kingdom of Moral Ends’ (118). Within the logic of anaturalist racism, racelessly conceived, the necropolitics of these sealed and

22 See also Baruch Kimmerling, Politicide: Ariel Sharon’s War against the Palestinians(London: Verso 2006).

23 For further elaboration of Goldberg’s distinction between historicist and naturalistforms of racial thought, see David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (Oxford andMalden, MA: Blackwell 2002).

36 Patterns of Prejudice

encircled zones of abandonment risks becoming an end*/a ‘solution’*/in itsown right, or so I fear.

If Israeli rule has produced a ‘fate worse than apartheid’ (130), Goldberg isnot surprised that it has brought forth ‘suicidal impulses’ (126). ‘Suicidalnihilism is the Palestinian default mode in response to the Israeli default ofracial branding and group area acts. . . . Encircling imprisonment produces adesperation born of nothing left to lose’ (126�/7). Goldberg makes a muchneeded political move here: suicide bombings are not emblematic of adistinctly Islamic ‘culture of death’, as a wide array of scholars, journalistsand pundits contend, and not just with reference to Palestine.24 Goldbergargues that suicide bombings are a direct response to the brutality of Israelirule, even if an ultimately nihilistic and unproductive one. If one has nothingleft to lose, why not become a ‘shaheed’?25 If one belongs to the generation of‘lost hope’, why not find solace for that ‘hopelessness . . . [in] an investmentin the afterlife’ (127)? In the face of the Wall and its structure of death, is theemergence of a ‘seething disposition’ so difficult to comprehend (128)?

Placing causality squarely in daily life under Israeli control is an importantcritique of widespread assumptions. It is a much needed step in the rightdirection. But it does not go far enough. Are suicide attacks necessarily theresult of seething anger or hopelessness? Do we really know that individualswho engage in such acts are looking for solace in the afterlife? For obviousreasons, we cannot know the motivations of suicide bombers after the fact.More important, as Talal Asad argues, gaining insight into the phenomenonof suicide bombing might not be served best by the search for motivations.26

But there are a few things we do know: many Palestinian suicide bomberswere not particularly religious; secular parties took up the mantle of suicideattacks following in the footsteps of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. We also knowthat suicide bombing takes a lot of planning and preparation. It certainlycannot be reduced simply to an act of anger or despair.

Citizens have long been asked to sacrifice for the nation and countlessgenerations of men*/and women*/have done so. I may consider that arather suicidal desire or choice but, within the national order of things, it iscertainly not taken to be so. We do not presume anger to be the motivatingforce: perhaps it is a commitment to the nation, perhaps it is born ofeconomic necessity (as in today’s US economic draft). In other contexts,dying for a cause might be born of idealism (socialist idealism in the case ofthe brigades who went to fight in the Spanish Civil War). Motivations cannever truly be known. Nevertheless, we need to recognize the possibility ofmultiple reasons why civilians join a cause, even a cause that involvescommitting oneself to a certain death.

24 See Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing (New York: Columbia University Press 2007).25 For an interesting discussion of the ‘shaheed’ in the Islamic discursive tradition and in

the Palestinian political imaginary, see Asad, On Suicide Bombing.26 Asad, On Suicide Bombing.

NADIA ABU EL-HAJ 37

My point is not to defend suicide bombing. I do not support attacks on

civilian populations, whether carried out by suicide bombers, planes or

any other technology of delivery. Moreover, on pragmatic political grounds,

I agree with Goldberg. These attacks have had disastrous consequences for

the Palestinian struggle. Nevertheless, I sense that for Goldberg this violence

is of a different sort: an act of passion and anger rather than of calculation

and design. But there is as much of a ‘rationality’ to the suicide bombing

campaigns in Israel and the Occupied Territories as there is a ‘rationality [to

the] domination at the heart of racial palestinianization’ (128). As Robert

Pape has argued, on the basis of a quantitative study, suicide bombings,

most of which had not been carried out by religious movements,27 might

best be thought of as a tactic, as a ‘weapon of the weak’, to borrow James

Scott’s term.28 When the military prowess of an occupying power cannot be

met ‘directly’, suicide bombing is the most ‘effective’ response. Following

Pape’s analysis, one that accounts well for the political logic of suicide

bombings targeting Israeli citizens, it is a tactic that has sought to bring the

conflict ‘home’ to Israelis, to make them see that the cost for them of a

continued occupation will be too high. It has utterly failed in its aim. It has

solidified public support*/in Israel and abroad*/for the brutality of Israeli

colonial rule. Nevertheless, a rationality drives the campaign, perhaps for

individuals as much as for the organizations that orchestrate it.29 Suicide

bombing remains a military tactic, not an act of anger or revenge.In sketching the brutality of racial palestinianization, Goldberg refers to

the Israeli regime as engaging in an ‘aggressive, militarized neoliberalism’

(129). But what makes Israeli rule over its Palestinian subjects neoliberal? The

neoliberal state, according to Goldberg, involves the retrenchment of the

welfare state and the reorganization of its priorities: neoliberalism ‘seeks to

elevate privatization of property, revenue generation, utilities, services,

and social support systems, including health care, aid, and disaster response

and relief’ (332). And, as Goldberg demonstrates in his discussion of

Iraq*/and its ‘blowback’ in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina*/so

too is policing, and ‘security’ more generally, increasingly outsourced to

private hands (89).

27 Robert A. Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (New York:Random House 2005). It is worth noting that Mohammad Atta, a key actor in the 9/11attacks, is reported to have spent the previous night drinking alcohol and hanging outwith strippers. Such accounts do not square with the reigning understanding of himas a devout Muslim*/a ‘Muslim extremist’*/the presumed ‘motivation’ for hisinvolvement in the attacks.

28 James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven:Yale University Press 1985).

29 There is a tension in Goldberg’s analysis of suicide bombing. Hamas*/andHizbullah*/are represented as rational, well-oiled machines. And yet the act ofsuicide bombing is explained by recourse to notions of despair and anger.

38 Patterns of Prejudice

There are important ways in which Israel is a neoliberal state, the state

more so than the ‘shadow state’ (131). The retrenchment of Labor Zionism in

favour both of reduced labour protections and social services, and of capital

with an increasingly global reach, and the importation of cheap Thai and

Filipino labour to replace Palestinian workers: all policies in keeping with a

neoliberal regime that maintains a colony on the side. As Gadi Algazi has

shown, Israeli companies have devised ‘outsourcing’ techniques that

manage to keep labour ‘at home’: they have established development

centres in Jewish settlements in order to hire cheap ultra-orthodox Jewish

labour. (They ‘live simply’, the explanation goes.)30 Nevertheless, to refer to

Israel’s rule over the territories as an ‘aggressive, militarized neoliberal-

ism’*/or the ‘neo-neoliberalism’ that is ‘Gaza’s permanent nightmare’

(364)*/is misleading. As Algazi argues, in offering ‘housing and social

services unobtainable in Israel proper, [settlements have become] a powerful

magnet for those struggling to subsist’. Shifting the settler movement away

from a primary reliance on the ‘messianic fervour of hard-line settlers’,

government policies have successfully broadened ‘the power base of the

colonization movement, forging a powerful alliance of state, political and

capitalist interests, well-off home-buyers and those suffering real hardship:

large families looking for cheap housing or new immigrants dependent on

government subsidies and seeking social acceptance’.31 Neoliberal capital is

being harnessed to the colonial cause, but it is a colonial cause fully

dependent on the Israeli state without which settlement would not*/could

not*/exist: ‘The settlers took control of these lands, but it was the state that

had confiscated them and enabled the settlement of its citizens in contra-

vention of international law, of some government decisions and in many

cases of court orders.’32

The state of Israeli rule over the West Bank is not neoliberal, even if the

colonial project is being restructured by*/even as the colonial project itself

redirects*/the logic of (Israeli) neoliberal capital. The Israeli state is ever

present in building, funding and protecting Jewish settlements and settlers

(131�/2). Ultra-orthodox Jewish labour is cheap due to the heavy state

subsidization of their lives. The state invests in roads, telephone towers,

electricity grids and water systems. It subsidizes housing, schools and health

care. And it provides ‘the formidable military forces that move around in the

territory’. It provides all the ‘elixir[s] of life for the settlements, the secret of

their power’.33 Meanwhile, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) control and enclose

30 Gadi Algazi, ‘Offshore Zionism’, New Left Review, vol. 40, July�/August 2006, 27�/37(27).

31 Ibid., 30.32 Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar, Lords of the Land: The War over Israel’s Settlements in the

Occupied Territories, 1967�/2007, trans. from the Hebrew by Vivian Eden (New York:Nation Books 2007), xiii.

33 Ibid., xv.

NADIA ABU EL-HAJ 39

Palestinian populations: the state invests in the destruction of the infra-

structures, the livelihoods, the lives of Palestinian under its control. This is

the ‘necropolitical disciplining’ (134) of an ever active and interventionist

colonial state.34

If the Israeli state cannot be characterized simply as neoliberal, neither can

racial palestinianization meaningfully be labelled ‘born again racism’. Prior

to racism being born again, according to Goldberg’s own definition, it was

named, it was fought, and racial segregation and racist exclusions were

legally dismantled. Only then was race disappeared in the name of

antiracialism, whiteness by other means: ‘conservationist segregation . . .

proceeds by undoing the laws, rules, and norms of expectation the Civil

Rights Movement was able to effect’ (78, emphasis in the original). Israel is

not a state and society that, in the aftermath of a successful civil rights or

anticolonial struggle that named race and dismantled the legal structures of

racial segregation, proceeded to un-name it, to privatize racism and

analytically to render segregation*/in housing, in education*/a matter of

34 A recent body of scholarship discusses and debates the applicability of Carl Schmitt’sconcept of sovereignty and the ‘state of exception’, and Georgio Agamben’s notion of‘bare life’, to the question of Palestine; see, e.g., Ronit Lentin (ed.), Thinking Palestine(London: Zed Books 2007). This is not the place for me to engage those discussions atany length, although I would like to note that more sustained and critical readings ofAgamben and Schmitt might be useful prior to asking whether or not their argumentsare ‘applicable’ to the Palestinian case. Achille Mbembe provides just such a criticalreading. In ‘Necropolitics’ (2003), Mbembe develops a theoretically and historicallynuanced discussion of the state of exception, racism and bare life, and then elaborateshis argument by analysing the ‘contemporary colonial occupation of Palestine’ as ‘themost accomplished form of necropower’ (27). Mbembe makes three crucialinterventions that I want to highlight. First, he re-reads the ‘state of exception’through the history of slavery and the colonies and the particular forms of law (orsuspensions of law) and violence that colonialism involved. Second, Mbembeintegrates his discussion of the state of exception with Foucault’s analysis of thefunction of ‘racism’*/as the ‘death function’*/in the modern state. (Foucault’swritings on racism may be more fruitful to analyses of Palestine than is Agamben’sconcept of bare life; see Foucault, ‘Society Must Be Defended’.) Finally, it is worthremembering, as Mbembe insists, that ‘late modern colonial occupation differs inmany ways from early modern occupation, particularly in its combining of thedisciplinary, the biopolitical and the necropolitical’ (27). We don’t have to choosebetween analysing the Israeli state as a typical (if extreme version of the) ‘liberal state’(Raef Zreik, ‘The persistence of the exception: some remarks on the story of Israeliconstitutionalism’, in Lentin (ed.), Thinking Palestine, 131�/47) or as just another,Middle Eastern ‘mukhabarat’ (security/police) state (Ilan Pappe, ‘The mukhabarat stateof Israel: a state of oppression is not a state of exception’, in Lentin (ed.), ThinkingPalestine, 148�/70), or any other kind of regime. It has both liberal and distinctlyilliberal dimensions: it is a colonial state and, for its Jewish citizens, a liberaldemocracy; it is governed by the rule of law and it operates with a sustainedsuspension of that law, under the rubric of military rule and the guise of securityrequirements. The Israeli state is that complex multifaceted matrix of forms and tacticsof rule.

40 Patterns of Prejudice

‘personal preference’. The Israeli racial regime and the legal structures thatsustain it*/the distinction between citizen and subject, between military andcivil law, between Jewish and Arab citizens, between settler roads andPalestinian zones*/remain intact. This is not racist ‘domination now in thename of racial denial’ (151, emphasis added). Racial palestinianization hasalways been racist domination in the name of racial denial.35 This is aninstance of ‘racial evaporation’ (152) avant la lettre: before race, before one’sown racism, was ever named.

The Israeli state is simultaneously colonial and neoliberal. The nationalnecropolitics of Israel is not some limit case of a racism obsessed withsecurity in the neoliberal age. If, in the aftermath of 9/11, the United Statesgovernment sought ‘to emulate Israel in circumstances deemed similar, ‘‘toact like them’’’ (137), that may tell us less about the convergence ofneoliberalisms than about the multiple political modalities of the US state:a neoliberal state with an imperial ambition whose project, reach andtechniques were reimagined, recalibrated and redesigned in the wake of the9/11 attack.

Nadia Abu El-Haj is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropologyat Barnard College and Columbia University, New York. She is the author ofFacts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning inIsraeli Society (University of Chicago Press 2001) and The Molecular Archive(forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press).

35 Goldberg recognizes the different trajectory and yet uses the label ‘born again racism’,which, given that different history, I don’t think can be applied. Although with a verydifferent political dynamic, so too was Israeli racism un-named vis-a-vis its non-Ashkenazi citizens. The trajectory from denial to a born again racism may be a moreappropriate description of the struggle of Mizrahi Jews for their rights than of racialpalestinianization. For an extended discussions of the Mizrahi question, see YehoudaA. Shenhav, The Arab Jews: A Postcolonial Reading of Nationalism, Religion, and Ethnicity(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 2006), and Ella Shohat, Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation (Austin: University of Texas Press 1989).

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