Israel's Dead Soul

Israel’s Dead Soul Israel’s _ Dead Soul Steven Salaita TEMPLE UNIVERSITY PRESS P hiladelphia TEMPLE UNIVERSITY PRESS Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19122 www.temple.edu/tempress Copyright © 2011 by Temple University All rights reserved Published 2011 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Salaita, Steven, 1975- Israel’s dead soul / Steven Salaita. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4399-0637-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4399-0638-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4399-0639-2 (e-book) 1. Israel and the diaspora. 2. Jews—Attitudes toward Israel. 3. Jews— United States—Political activity. 4. National characteristics, Israeli. 5. Multiculturalism—Political aspects—Israel. 6. Politics and culture. 7. Israel—Ethnic relations. 8. Israel—Social conditions—21st century. 9. Israel—Politics and government—21st century. I. Title. DS134.S25 2011 320.54095694—dc22 2010041459 The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992 Printed in the United States of America 2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1 For my mother, who taught me never to hate. For my father, who taught me to hate injustice. We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand. — Picasso Contents _ Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 Chapter 1 Israel as Cultural Icon: The Vacillating Boundaries of Jewish Identity 13 Chapter 2 Is the Anti-Defamation League a Hate Group? 41 Chapter 3 Ethnonationalism as an Object of Multicultural Decorum: The Case of Cornel West and Michael Eric Dyson 71 Chapter 4 Sexuality, Violence, and Modernity in Israel: The Paradise of Not Being Arab 95 Chapter 5 The Heart of Darkness Redux, Again 117 Epilogue A Eulogy to Israel’s Dead Soul 141 Notes 143 Index 157 Acknowledgments _ am immeasurably grateful for the living souls of my wonderful friends and colleagues. No book is created by an individual. I They all grow out of tension and dialogue. Israel’s Dead Soul is a product of intense and invigorating dialogue that has occurred and continues to occur with intelligent and compassionate people who are more than just names on a page to me. For their superb feedback on parts or all of the manuscript, I would like to thank Piya Chatterjee, Sunaina Maira, and Houston Baker Jr. For their guidance and wisdom, I would like to thank Fred D’Aguiar, Virginia Fowler, J. Keˉ haulani Kauanui, Magid Shihade, and Robert Warrior. For the inspiriting conversation, I would like to thank Mohammed Abed, Deborah Alkamano, Saher Safi, Matthew Shenoda, and Jessica Woodruff. For being the most efficient editor of all time, I would like to thank Micah Kleit. For being kick-ass family, I would like to thank Mom, Dad, Danya, and Michael. For the endless smiles they have provided, I would like to thank Eve and Nasr. And for being everything that I could ever possibly hope to be, I would like to thank Diana, my political muse, most demanding reader, and comeliest sparring partner. Israel’s Dead Soul Introduction _ srael’s soul has been the subject of much anguish. Writers and politicians have been lamenting its demise for decades. Shalem ICenter senior fellow Daniel Gordis believes that policy should invoke “something incredibly powerful and positive about the Israeli soul.”1 For decades, novelist David Grossman complains, set- tlers “have operated in the gray areas of the Jewish-Israeli soul.”2 He also claims that “the agonized Israeli soul, hardened by external and internal wars, is . ardent about finally divesting itself of the burden of constant animosity.”3 Richard Silverstein, of the liberal blog Tikun Olam, abhors the murder of donkeys and other animals by the Israeli occupation forces (IOF). “This is what the Occupation does to the Israeli soul,” he laments. “It kills it in the most mun- dane of ways.”4 Israel’s soul is even the subject of an entire book by Yoram Hazony, The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel’s Soul. In it he notes that Israel represents “the regions of the soul that must continue to glow and shimmer and dance if the Jewish state is to live.”5 Writer Yigal Schwartz is more theatrical, proclaiming, “There’s something in the Israeli soul that makes it resist entering a state of normalcy. I sound like a prophet, but that’s my feeling.”6 It is presumably the incomprehensible mechanisms of this fastidious soul and not economic or ideological factors that have prevented Israel from achieving peace. Jewish Voice for Peace activist Tsela 2 b Introduction Barr mourns that Israel’s occupation “has, in the words of one rabbi, ‘morally corrupted the Israeli soul.’ ”7 Israel’s soul even has its own corporeal identity; Yehuda Amichai, who died in 2000, was recently honored with the distinction of being dubbed the “poet of Israel’s soul.”8 Daily newspaper Yediot Aharonot calls humanitar- ian activist Gal Lusky an “Israeli soul commando.”9 Israel’s soul has been searched so frequently and thoroughly that it must be remarkably elusive to have thus far avoided offering pithily wise life lessons to its many interlocutors. It is not the discovery of answers that counts, however; it is the search itself into the soul that portends moral decency. Israel, after all, faces a soul-searching double standard, according to Cathy Young, for “this self-questioning is an important process essential to a democratic society. But it also highlights the rather appalling double standard in the world’s response.”10 On the other hand, “The very question of whether sim- ilar soul-searching is being done by Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist organization which is also the elected leadership of Gaza, would be darkly funny.”11 The formulation is clear: soul-searching is an act of modernity; not doing so intimates a barbarism of deeply immoral ori- gin. Worrying over the state of Israel’s soul, then, is the apogee of a civilized mind. Such worrying does not portend Israel’s decline; it reaffirms Israel’s fortitude. If Israel’s citizens didn’t fret over its soul then Israel would be no better than an Arab state—it would have no reason to exist. It is a lesson journalist Antony Loewenstein understands, noting that “if Israel is to survive for another 60 years, it will need to understand that the ongoing occupation has corrupted its soul.”12 Soul-searching and Israel’s survival are coter- minous matters. This burden can be a full-time job. After all, as Yossi Klein Halevi points out, “No country’s soul has been more severely tested than Israel’s.”13 This book is not about the decline or death of Israel’s soul. It is about the proliferation of anguished speculation about the decline or death of Israel’s soul. Israel’s soul is so significant that it was the subject of a BBC event entitled “Is Israel Losing Its Soul?” To my knowledge, no other country has had its soul publicly examined by a panel of experts. All nations throughout history have been endowed with souls by zealous or anxious citizens, but Israel is unique inso- far as its soul is under constant scrutiny. There are many reasons Introduction b 3 for this scrutiny, but it largely can be attributed to two factors: (1) Israel’s self-image as exceptional requires a fair amount of idealis- tic anguish, and (2) Israel’s moral and legal misdeeds necessitate a professed commitment to self-improvement based on the nostalgia of an invented past. Analyzing the multitudinous examinations of Israel’s soul is the best way to undertake a study of Zionist cultural and political expression, for it is the invented soul of the national entity, Israel, in which emotional and intellectual relationships are housed. Those who praise or lament Israel’s soul are actually telling us about various ethical perspectives for which the soul is merely a fanciful metonym. Nobody has ever mourned the condition of Israel’s soul without being deeply attached to Israel as an ethnocen- tric state. A specific motif arises from this commitment and becomes evident in Zionist art, scholarship, and activism. Much Zionist discourse expresses a yearning for the simpler innocence of an ide- alized Jewish liberation, one undiluted by the barbarity of conflict with Palestinians. This yearning, like all forms of ethnonationalism, relies on nostalgia and historical cherry-picking, but it is especially persistent in phenomena in some way trained on Israel. Zionism presents its advocates with irreconcilable contradictions. It promises liberation through colonization. It attempts to exemplify modernity but relies on a fundamentally tribal mentality. It glorifies democracy while practicing apartheid. There is no way to circum- vent these realities; one cannot support Zionism without eventually encountering its ugly side. As a result, specific discursive strategies arise, and those strategies pervade all forms of Zionist celebration and introspection. This book explores those strategies, paying close attention to how scrutiny of the soul of Israel portends a broader attempt to normatize—that is, to render normative—Zionism as a benign ideology of polite multicultural conviviality. This ideology and liberal American discourses of multiculturalism are profoundly inter- twined. The following chapters assess various modes of Zionist self-expression—scholarly, filmic, activist, philosophical—to illumi- nate how Zionism’s advocates have successfully integrated the ideology into popular notions of enlightenment and political decency. To contest the conflation of Zionism and liberal multiculturalism presents great challenges. There is a danger that we will treat liberal 4 b Introduction multiculturalism as a panacea into which Zionism unjustifiably imposes itself.

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