Jewish Dissenting Rhetoric in Support of Palestinian Rights
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Reinventing Identity: Jewish Dissenting Rhetoric in Support of Palestinian Rights Item Type text; Electronic Dissertation Authors Hotez, Brooke Elise Citation Hotez, Brooke Elise. (2021). Reinventing Identity: Jewish Dissenting Rhetoric in Support of Palestinian Rights (Doctoral dissertation, University of Arizona, Tucson, USA). Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction, presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 26/09/2021 21:37:03 Item License http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/660195 REINVENTING IDENTITY: JEWISH DISSENTING RHETORIC IN SUPPORT OF PALESTINIAN RIGHTS by Brooke Elise Hotez __________________________ Copyright © Brooke Elise Hotez 2021 A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY In the Graduate College THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA 2021 Hotez 2 Hotez 3 Acknowledgements Thank you to my committee—Dr. Matthew Abraham, Dr. Maha Nassar, Dr. Thomas Miller, Dr. Leila Hudson, and Dr. Noam Chomsky—for offering me some of our most precious resource, time. I can’t thank you each enough for taking the time to read my work and offer me the constructive and affirming feedback that I’ve needed to take my writing and thinking to a higher level. Thank you to my teaching mentor Dr. Aimee Mapes for all of your time and support and thank you to all of my professors and colleagues who have been there along the way. Thank you to my family, my husband, my mom and dad, my sister, my one-year-old nephew, my in-laws, and my besties for your faith in me especially when I wasn’t so sure myself. Thank you to every teacher I’ve ever had. Thank you to all the community activists I’ve gotten to work with who are also my teachers. Thank you to my yoga teachers and spiritual guides. Thank you to Jewish Voice for Peace, Congregation Or Chadash, and Chabad Tucson. For the institutional support and access to resources, I thank the university librarians who have fulfilled countless requests to help me find what I’m looking for; I thank the College of Social & Behavioral Sciences, the Bilinski Foundation, the Mellon Foundation and the UArizona Sawyer Seminar, and the English department. I thank the graduate program coordinators who I have relied on for all kinds of help. My cup runneth over; I am so grateful and blessed. Lastly, I want to acknowledge that the United States sits on the original homeland of Indigenous peoples who have stewarded this land since time immemorial. Tucson, Arizona is on Tohono O’odham and Pascua Yaqui Territory. To me, the land acknowledgement statement can be a call to intervene in settler colonialism’s logic of elimination and a prompt to imagine another way forward so we can move from land acknowledgement to land return and reparations. Hotez 4 Dedication To my sister Brittany Hannah. May the ETERNAL protect you and keep you. May the ETERNAL’s face shine for you and show you grace. May the ETERNAL lift up His face towards you and grant you peace. Book of Bamidbar 6:24–26 Hotez 5 Table of Contents List of Figures…………………………………………………………………………………… 6 Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………………… 7 Chapter 1: Zionism’s Third Persona………………………………..…………………………… 10 Rhetorical History of Zionism’s Third Persona………………………………………… 15 The Beginning of Third Persona in Political and Cultural Zionisms…………… 21 American Jews and Zionism……………………………………………………. 29 Jewish Statehood and Palestinian Rights……………………………………… 33 Chapter 2: Zionist Rhetoric of Existential Threat……………………………...………………. 41 The Antisemitic Arab Terrorist Other……………………………………………………46 Holocaust-Centered Worldview and the Terrorist Threat……………………… 48 Rhetorical Dissociation in Hertzberg’s Open Letter…………………………………… 57 Chapter 3: Interrupting Identity, or Heeding the Call for Justice……………………………… 61 Identity as Rhetorical Strategy………………………………………………………… 67 The Interruption and Reinvention of Identity…………………………………………… 73 Reframing the Zionist Mythos of Rebirth and Redemption………………………79 The Agonism of Identity…………………………………………………………………86 Chapter 4: Rhetorical Refusal of Birthright and the Universal Jewish Audience……………… 83 Four Demands for Birthright…………………………………………………………… 95 Rhetorical Memory in Alyssa’s Open Letter………………………………………….. 105 #ReturnTheBirthright and Anti-Zionism………………………………………………. 109 Who is the Rhetorical Audience for JVP?……………………………………………... 119 Chapter 5: Teaching Rhetorical Refusal in the Writing Classroom…………………………… 127 Drama in the Classroom……………………………………………………………….. 130 Audience Analysis and Writing Pedagogy……………………………………………. 135 Audience as Invoked…………………………………………………………… 136 Audience as Discourse Community……………………………………………. 140 Disrupting from Within………………………………………………………… 141 Audience as Source of Invention………………………………………………. 144 Contextualizing the Curriculum……………………………………………………… 150 Lesson Plan 1 of 2, “Exploratory Writing and Textual Analysis”……………. 152 Lesson Plan 2 of 2, “Rhetorical Refusal Workshop and Reflection”…………. 154 See, Do, Reflect………………………………………………………………………. 156 Epilogue……………………………………………………………………………………….. 158 In Memoriam………………………………………………………………………………….. 166 References…………………………………………………………………………………… 168 Hotez 6 List of Figures Fig. 1. Front cover to the August 1988 issue of The New York Review of Books featuring Hertzberg’s open letter; “Table of Contents; August 18, 1988”; nybooks.com, https://www.nybooks.com/issues/1988/08/18/. ……………………………………………….. 58 Fig. 2. Fadel Jaber arrested for “stealing water” (Sheizaf; photo: Noam Sheizaf). …………… 78 Fig. 3. Student activist holds a sign for the #ReturnTheBirthright campaign (“Young Jews”; photo: Nesha Ruther). ………………………………………………………………………….. 89 Fig. 4. Infographic from the historic Human Rights Watch report “A Threshold Crossed,” released 27 April 2021, https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli- authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution. ……………………………………………. 99 Fig. 5. Screenshot of the Canary Mission profile of Bethany Zaiman (screenshot: Hotez). …. 101 Fig. 6. In a Google search, the Canary Mission profile comes before her faculty profile (screenshot: Hotez). …………………………………………………………………………... 101 Fig. 7. Screenshot of #NotJustAFreeTrip media (screenshot: Hotez). ……………………….. 105 Fig. 8. Screenshot of JVP Instagram post of activists and friends Ghada Karmi and Ellen Siegel (screenshot: Hotez). …………………………………………………………………………... 109 Fig. 9. Birthright map of Israel that fails to mark the occupied West Bank, making it look like the West Bank is naturally a part of Israel proper (photo: Bethany Zaiman from her piece in The Nation). ……………………………………………………………………………………….. 152 Hotez 7 Abstract This dissertation asks: • How does dominant rhetoric in support of Israel continue to negate Palestinian history and identity? • What are the boundaries of legitimate political speech in American Jewish discourse regarding Israel? Who crosses them, and what are the consequences? • What leads certain Jewish dissenters to cross intracommunal boundaries about Israel? • How do these boundary formations shift according to context? • What does reinventing Jewish identity in solidarity with Palestinian rights look like? According to the corpus that I examine, not only are dissenters speaking out in support of Palestinian rights, but they are also asserting for themselves what it means to be Jewish. Such assertions of reinvented self-understanding challenge the dominant narrative of Jewish identity as unequivocally Zionist: “Israel, right or wrong” (Waxman, Trouble 55). Through textual analysis, I show how this rhetoric of dissent redraws the contours of Jewish identity as a mode of ethical relations that heeds the call for Palestinian freedom. At the heart of this reinvention of identity, Jewish dissenters reframe Holocaust memory and the threat of antisemitism as interconnected with other forms of ethnic and racial prejudice, not uniquely separate from. Through this reframing, the call for justice from the Palestinian “Other” becomes audible. As a method, rhetorical criticism is the analysis of the symbolism and their effects in discourse. In chapter one, I start by delineating a rhetorical genealogy of Zionism’s erasure of Palestinian life and history. In chapter two, I continue to trace the rhetorical genealogy through Hotez 8 the trope of the antisemitic Arab terrorist Other, an effect of what I refer to as Zionist rhetoric of existential threat. Situated in genealogical context, the case studies of dissent show the imperative for reinventing identity as a way toward justice. Chapter three examines first-person identity reconstitution by critics Peter Beinart and Sara Roy. First-person identity constitution analyzes how authors and speakers constitute their identities in discourse through narrative about their personal realities, or what Dana Anderson calls “expressible self-interpretation” (11). I show how a critical rhetoric of first-person narrative can be a transformative cultural resource that reinvents identity as an ethical practice in relation to otherness. I look to the work of Judith Butler for a philosophy of ethical relations. Chapter four examines the rhetorical refusal of ethnonationalist birthright through the lens of the universal audience. For rhetorical theories of the universal