Levine; [email protected] Draft: Cite Only with Permission

Levine; [email protected] draft: cite only with permission “Yes, but how should we feel about this?” Diasporic Love, Political Radicalism and the Sustainably Critical Study of the Israeli- Palestinian Conflict Daniel J. Levine The University of Alabama Abstract: This paper explores Gershom Scholem’s notion of the ‘apocalyptic sting’ – a messianic political theology which, he feared, haunted Jewish and Israeli politics through the Hebrew language. The paper makes three key moves: first, I connect this notion to contemporary political radicalism in Israel. Second, I suggest how that ‘sting’ might be chastened and contained, even as the belief structures to which it gives rise are not fundamentally repudiated. Third, I suggest ways in which the social-scientific study of world politics – International Relations, broadly conceived – might contribute to that chastening and containment. To that end, I develop the notion of diasporic love, connecting the writings of novelists Ghassan Kanafani and Sami Michael to the work of Jonathan and Daniel Boyarin. I argue that while the social-scientific study of world politics cannot define or rationalize that love, it can work to support it: by thinking through its conditions of possibility, and by helping to translate it into practical programs of political action and affiliation. Keywords: Emotions; International Relations theory; Israel-Palestine conflict; diasporic love; apocalyptic sting; sustainable critique; Scholem, Gershom; Michael, Sami; Kanafani, Ghassan; Ravitzky, Aviezer; Boyarin, Jonathan; Boyarin, Daniel 1 Levine; [email protected] draft: cite only with permission I. Introduction Can Jewish religious thought now acknowledge an intermediate or hybrid model that is neither exile nor redemption? Can it make room for a notion of Jewish historical existence that hovers somewhere between these two poles, without clearly belonging to either? - Ravitzky (1996)1 How could one not seethe and bubble? How could one in silence toil? Peace drives the mind unto delusion, Peace sets the blood to boil. - Natan Alterman: “Peace”2 The Passions and the Interests In his 1996 study Messianism, Zionism and Jewish Religious Radicalism, the Israeli philosopher and public intellectual Aviezer Ravitzky suggests that the Jewish political tradition knows only two binary and opposed metaphysical states: exile and redemption. The former is that which has characterized the Jewish Diaspora: a condition in which God has absconded from the world owing to the sins of His chosen people; in which faithful Jews defer their political aspirations until His return. The latter is redemption: in which God and men dwell together, in which earthly politics is cast in the image of divine light and perfect justice, sub specie aeternitatis. On Ravitzky’s account, no spectrum or ‘middle space’ links those two conditions; redemption cannot exist piecemeal. 1 Ravitzky (1996), pp. 1-2 2 Natan Alterman (N.D.): “Shalom” (performance version). Text available on www.mikigavrielov.com/artID.php?SUBcontent=17&SONGcontent=6. Accessed 19 March 2011. All translations from Hebrew are mine, unless stated. 2 Levine; [email protected] draft: cite only with permission Judaism’s rejection of a middle space, Ravitzky suggests, may have something to do with the “centrifugal” quality of Israeli politics: its tendency to pull toward determinist extremity in both domestic and foreign policy. No earthly, historically contingent political order – certainly no order created by the ‘practical Zionists’ that dominated that movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – could possibly live up to the “dream of utter perfection” for which traditional Jewish notions of redemption militate: in which “the whole Congregation of Israel…would reassemble as one in an undivided Land of Israel, reconstituting its life there according to the Torah in all its aspects.”3 Whatever the virtues and successes of the present-day Israeli state, it cannot help but look inadequate. For, Ravitzky continues -- Only a part of the Jewish people has gathered together into a Jewish state, and only in certain parts of the country. Only some returnees observe the precepts of the Torah. Political and military strife has not vanished from the land. Peace is elusive and morally compromised. Universal redemption seems even more remote than before. In short, the concrete fulfillment wrought by Zionism remains relative and contingent, stopping well short of the absolute terms of the classical vision. As the Rabbis said, the End of Days continues to ‘tarry.’”4 The challenge facing Jewish-Israeli political thought, Ravitzky suggests, is to create the grounding for that ‘middle space,’ given that “the End of Days continues to tarry”: and to do so in the idiom of a theological tradition that specifically rejects it. In the face of that tension – between Manichean visions of redemption and/or diaspora, and a political reality that remains stubbornly in-between – Ravitzky discerns a parallel process of disaffection with and defection from the Israeli ‘social contract.’ This takes two forms. The first he identifies in settler groups like Gush Emunim, Manhigut 3 Ravitzky (1966), p. 1. “Practical Zionism” in this context, refers to those Zionists who sought to build a self-sustaining Jewish homeland on the basis of actual immigration by Jews to Palestine; in contrast to the ‘political Zionism’ of Herzl and the ‘cultural Zionism’ of Ahad Ha’am. See Vital (1982) and Avineiri (1981). 4 Ravitzky (1996), p. 1 3 Levine; [email protected] draft: cite only with permission Yehudit, and the “Youth of the Hilltops:” the move to hasten coming of the ‘End of Days’ by ‘redeeming’ the territories captured by Israel in 1967. The second is a renewed form of political quietism, in the tradition of Haredi (“ultra-Orthodox”) Jews: which denies the Israeli state any privileged claim of loyalty or belonging, viewing it instead as simply another Diaspora regime with which it must deal – preferably, at arm’s length.5 Neither position, Ravitzky observes, is compatible with Israel’s aspiration to remain a participatory, liberal-parliamentary democracy. And yet, those positions have grown to encompass larger and larger swaths of the electorate. “[D]uring the past generation, controversy has deepened and ideological polarities have continued to sharpen.”6 Hence the question cited in the epigraph above: can Israeli Judaism narrate a middle ground? Can “the Jewish return to history” to be managed?7 We might rephrase this question thus: what combination of ethics, institutions and commitments can regulate or restrain a complex economy of religious-theological desire in light of the realities of power and interest? Who is to be the Jewish-Israeli parallel of a Karl Polanyi, an Albert Hirschman, or a John Ruggie, seeking to contain Messianic ‘passions’ by embedding them within sober understandings of political ‘interest’?8 Who is to be Israel’s Reinhold Niebuhr or its Herbert Butterfield, fashioning an Israeli version of “Christian realism” that can reconcile what is due, respectively, unto Caesar, and unto God? This project informs Ravitzky’s work at all levels: moving between ‘high’ and 5 And indeed, the two positions are not wholly mutually exclusive: there is at least anecdotal discussion of both the nationalization of Haredi Jews, and movement by some settlers toward traditionally Haredi beliefs and practices; a phenomenon referred to in the media as hardalizatziyya (an acronym formed from the terms ‘Haredi’ and ‘dati-le’umi’ [religious nationalist]). One withdraws from the duties of Jewish statehood, to avoid conceding a maximalist view of the rights and prerogatives of Jewish nationhood. 6 Ravitzky (1996), p. 7 7 Ravitzky (1993), p. 3. Viz., Fackenheim (1978), Yerushalmi (1982). 8 Polanyi (2001) [1944], Hirschman (1997), Ruggie (1982). 4 Levine; [email protected] draft: cite only with permission ‘low’ politics, and between theology and philosophy on the one hand, and public intellectualism and electoral politics on the other. 9 If Ravitzky’s focus on Jewish tradition gives his study a highly particular idiom, the problem he identifies is linked broadly to contemporary concerns in international and normative theory. It speaks to the ‘theological’ roots of contemporary political concepts and terms of discourse.10 In Zionism, this theological connection is not limited simply to the notion that Jews have a natural or historic affinity to the Land of Israel, which can/should/must serve as the core of its national political (re)awakening.11 It is tied no less tightly to traditional, theologically grounded, notions of exile and redemption as the basic conditions of Jewish political existence. That holds even if Zionist historians, social theorists and ideologues “laundered” those notions through the materialist idioms of sociology, economics or historicism.12 Exile was the Jews’ state, and changing that state was the purpose of the movement. The vituperative, polar quality of Israeli politics – particularly with regard to the question of diplomatic peace and territorial compromise – links directly to that complex 9 On Christian realism, see Butterfield (1950, 1953), Niebuhr (1944) and Patterson (2008). In this vein, Michael Walzer’s Jewish Political Tradition series is of interest (see Waltzer, et al. (2000), as is the work of journals like Azure and Hebraic Political Theory. On Ravitzky’s movement between ‘low’ and ‘high’ politics, compare this his 1996 book to his more recent response

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