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.
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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
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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).
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‘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 to the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis in Ravitzky and Stern (2007); and the book itself. On his public intellectualism, see Ravitzky (2003); and consider in the context of his activism within Meimad, a dovish religious-Zionist movement that has participated in parliamentary politics since the late 1990s. 10 Schmitt (1985) [1934]. This holds, even if we take seriously Asad’s (2003) observation that the “structural analogies” between theological concepts and secular ones should not conceal the fact that “the practices these concepts facilitate and organize differ according to the historical formations in which they occur.” (191) Zionism – especially the ‘synthetic Zionism’ that Ravitky’s radicals wish to replace with something more ‘purer’ – both emerged in response to a change in historical formations, and informed the creation of new ones. 11 As Shenhav (2006) observes: Zionism “hybridizes the secular with the religious, while at the same time obscuring this hybridization, thus purifying nationalism (the very product of hybridization) and treating nationalism and religion as two separate spheres.” (80) My thanks to Rubin (2011) on this point. 12 See for example, Baer (1947), Baer and Dinaburg (1935), Katzenelson (1977) [1934], and Myers (1995) and History and Memory 7:1 (Spring, 1995).
5 Levine; [email protected] draft: cite only with permission of ostensibly secular and avowedly religious political theologies. Each will be given to its own Manichean tendencies: “[w]hat seems to one person the attainment of destiny,”
Ravitzky notes, “may seem to another a betrayal of that same destiny; what to some appears in the light of the messiah will appear others in the dark image of the anti- messiah.”13 That holds as much for Israel’s “Children of 1973” – its strident doves and ostensible secularists – as for the nationalist, demonstratively religious “Youth of the
Hilltops.”14
The lines from Natan Alterman’s poem “peace,” the second quote from the epigraph above, speaks precisely to the breadth of these concerns. In his heyday,
Altermann’s stature as Israel’s and Zionism’s leading poet – an avowed secularist,
“identified with the pragmatic mainstream of the Labor movement” – would be hard to underestimate.15 Predating Ravitzky’s work by some six decades, it nevertheless addresses many of these same concerns.16 Alterman evokes a city rent by political controversy: “in [whose] square, the argument rages/Between those for and those against.” The argument is over peace: its terms, its elusiveness, the sacrifices it will entail. The terms of that peace have been negotiated to death, yet the inhabitants of the city continue to debate it.17 “Peace drives the mind unto delusion” and “makes the blood boil” because it is more than merely the absence of war; the word invokes a basic,
13 Ravitzky (1996), p. 7. 14 The “children of 1973” refers to a popular peace anthem that gained popularity in Israel after the 1973 War; and by extension, to those who sympathize with its sentiments. The “youth of the hilltops” refers to a radical youth movement of settlers, which emerged in the wake of the Oslo-Madrid peace negotiations of the 1990s. 15 Laor (1999), p. 178; though as Laor notes, his politics changed after 1967. For a sense of Alterman’s (continuing) importance, see Goodblatt (2004). 16 See Natan Alterman: Regaim. (Hakibbutz ha-Meuchad, 1974), vol. I, p. 49. The song was recently set to music by pop-singer Miki Gavrielov; it remains relevant event to this day. See www.mikigavrielov.com/artID.php?SUBcontent=17&SONGcontent=6, accessed 1 February 2012. Citations from the poem are taken from the performance version. 17 “All discussions have gone stale/Each topic talked to death/And for a moment, here I thought /We might just catch our breath.”
6 Levine; [email protected] draft: cite only with permission profound notion of justice and permanence.18 Just as in Ravitzky, competing “dream[s] of utter perfection” overwhelm the public sphere. Or as Alterman had it: “like an avenging demon/Peace sets its sights on Israel.”
The Vocation of International Theory
What work can social science, and IR in particular, do here? What is its vocation? Its traditional work – developing policy options on the basis of history and present political conditions, and in the context of particular assumptions about politics and human nature – remains, without question. But perhaps part of our work, too, needs to lie closer toward Ravitzky’s line of inquiry: toward a systematic, ongoing critique of the theologies into which this conflict’s various moments are translated. If Ravitzky is correct, these theologies are not to be refuted in one-off acts of conceptual debunking.
That confuses a particular set of theological commitments with political theology as such; the possibility remains that all politics has its roots in transcendent mystery. So considered, such debunking may simply lie beyond the reach of social science. Weberian disenchantment may simply not always be possible – or indeed desirable.19 In lieu of slaying the metaphysical dragon, theologies might accordingly be continuously, sustainably chastened through opposition to one another. Ravitzky’s ‘middle ground’ is one possible space of that chastening.
My work to date has focused on the academic production of such chastening in the context of IR; a mode of producing knowledge from international theory that I have elsewhere called “sustainable critique.”20 Sustainable critique strives to be practical in its willingness to engage existing political and social constructs as it finds them, and
18 Howard (2000), p. 2. 19 Weber (2002), Bennett (2001). 20 Levine (2011, 2012).
7 Levine; [email protected] draft: cite only with permission critically reflexive as to the reified normative commitments on which those constructs are predicated. In that work, I have proposed this problem primarily in disciplinary-ethical terms: as a challenge facing – even uniting – the vocation of International Relations since its emergence in the middle years of the last century.
In the present essay, I aim to begin the process of bringing that project back to the conflict that initially motivated it: the Israeli-Palestinian. I want to unpack that conflict’s inseparability from transcendent value-commitments, whether avowedly religious or ostensibly secular – and to speak to the normative sensibilities from which those commitments spring.
In that vein, the remainder of this paper is divided into two sections. In the first, I further develop the roots of the problem to which Ravitzky alludes by exploring the key concept on which his argument draws: the notion of an “apocalyptic sting” that lies within Israeli/Jewish politics, as developed by the historian and philosopher of Kabbalah,
Gershom Scholem. I suggest that meeting the problem posed by the apocalyptic sting is more emotive than intellectual: it is less a question of what we believe, or the logical warrants upon which those beliefs are predicated, than it is about how we feel about those beliefs.
In the second section, I develop a sense of how the chastening or tempering of those feelings might be effected, through a close reading of two didactic works of fiction:
Returning to Haifa by the late Palestinian author and Popular Front activist Ghassan
Kanafani (published in 1969), and Israeli novelist Sami Michael’s recent (2005) response to it: the novel Pigeons in Trafalgar Square.21 Michael, I will argue, develops characters with a unique, intuitive capacity for love: a sense of regard for their own needs, and a
21 Kanafani (2000) [1969], Michael (2005).
8 Levine; [email protected] draft: cite only with permission compassion for the needs of others. That love, I shall argue, is able to resist appropriation by or reduction into simple conceptual or ideological schematics. If social science cannot be a space in which to define that love or reduce it to first principles, it could be its work to support it from the margins, once its basic parameters are intuited: to define the conditions in which it can thrive, to limit its own dangerous claims to universalism, and to suggest ways in which it can inform new forms of political action or commitment. In the conclusion, I will re-connect this work to my own notions of sustainable critique and chastened reason.
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II. The Apocalyptic Sting
This Hebrew language is pregnant with catastrophe; it cannot remain in its present state – nor will it…Our children will no longer have any other language; truth be told, they, and they alone, will pay the price for this encounter which we have imposed on them unasked, or without even asking ourselves. One day the language will turn against its own speakers…Will we then have a youth who will be able to hold fast against the rebellion of a holy tongue?
- Gershom Scholem22
Through a Glass, Darkly: Scholem on Modern Hebrew
In a 1926 letter to Franz Rosenzweig, the German-Israeli philosopher and historian of Jewish mysticism Gershom Scholem discerned a fault line running through the politics of the new Yishuv: the emergent Jewish-Zionist community then settling – or on its own account, reconstituting itself – in Palestine. Under the aegis of the British
Mandate’s ‘iron wall,’ that community was then in the midst of its first great expansion.23
In absolute numbers, the Jewish population of Palestine jumped from 60,000 to 84,000 between 1918 and 1922; by 1931 it would number 175,000. If still a minority in
Palestine – and an even slimmer minority of Jews worldwide – the core a self-sustaining
‘Jewish national home’ seemed, finally, to be within reach.24
Institutional growth was also evident. The years following the First World War would see the founding of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (at which Scholem would receive his first appointment), the Histadrut (the Zionist movement’s leading trade union and industrial holding concern), the Haganah (the militia that would become the core of
22 Scholem (1997), p. 27. 23 Shlaim (2000), Jabotinsky (2007) [1923]. 24 Morris (2001), p. 107. For general immigration statistics, see Tessler (1994), pp. 266-7.
10 Levine; [email protected] draft: cite only with permission the Israel Defense Forces), the establishment of Habima (later the state theater), and a variety of institutions of representative self-government.25 New social mores and new forms of social and material production were also emergent: the halutz, or the new
Hebrew Pioneer; the kibbutz – and the emergence of modern Hebrew as a political, economic and cultural lingua franca.26 Scholem, who had moved to Palestine in 1923, was party to that growth, and he shared in this broad sense of excitement.27
It was also community that, for all of its dynamism and self-confidence, found itself profoundly on the defensive. To speak broadly, that defensiveness had two aspects, and Scholem would give it a third. From without, Jewish confrontations with the Arab-
Palestinian population were mounting. Fighting in the Galilee in 1920 had led to the death of Josef Trumpeldor, giving the Yishuv its first fallen hero – its first martyr.28 The
Balfour declaration, and the circumstances by which the secret Sykes-Picot agreement became public in 1917, created a perception – assessing the validity of that perception being a question that exceeds present purposes – of Zionist-British collusion among many
Palestinian Arabs.29 The Yishuv responded with a process of enclavization: the call for economic autarchy through “Hebrew Labor;” the ‘ecological’ separation of Jews from
25 Segev (2000), ch. 11. 26 Scholem (1976), pp. 252-3. On Halutziut and the creation of new national traditions, see, inter alia, Almog (2000), Segev (2000), ch. 11, and Zerubavel (1995). On the revival of Hebrew, see Ben Yehuda (1993) [1882], Harshav (1993), Saenz-Badillos (1993), Saposnik (2008) and Shilo (1994). Halpern and Reinharz (1998) is also of interest. 27 Scholem (1980): “At the time when I came to Eretz Yisrael [the land of Israel], the beginning the twenties, was a high point in the Zionist movement. An impassioned generation had come…expecting great things from work in Palestine, and was making intense efforts to found a Jewish society that would have a productive life of its own. Those were important and wonderful years, despite the shadows that were beginning to appear.” (166) On Scholem’s scholarship in light of that broader collective-political efforts, see, inter alia, Biale (1979), Herzberg (1987), Myers (1995), Piterberg (2008). 28 Zerubavel (1995). 29 Horowitz and Lissak (1978), Migdal (1988), ch. 4, Pappe (2006), ch. 3, Segev (2000).
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Arabs through the creation of new towns and settlements; the creation of a cadre of
‘Arabists’ to help manage Jewish-Arab relations “inter-communally”; and so on. 30
A second aspect of that defensiveness was internal. If Zionism’s successes seemed undeniable, so too was the fragility of those successes. The movement had proven it could ‘transform’ Jews. But if so, then Jews could also be untransformed; the
‘progress’ or emancipation which it effected could be erased – a point underscored by the large number of Jewish immigrants who would leave Palestine after few months or years.31 The ‘new Hebrew worker’ was held together, as the novelist Haim Hazaz observed, by a sustained, highly demanding act of ideological-collective will: the denial of the language, tradition, history and folkways of traditional Judaism – summed up in the notion of shlilat ha-golah, the negation of the Diaspora – in favor of a “Jewry of
Muscle.”32 The possibility of ‘reverting,’ of losing one’s way – as Yudke, one of Hazaz’s best-known protagonists professes to have done – is always a possibility.33
Scholem was aware of these tensions.34 But they appear to him, in his letter to
Rosenzweig, to be symptomatic of a deeper one; an “apocalyptic sting,” nested in the very language into which the newly-emergent Jewish public sphere of Palestine has been encoded and through which it reproduces itself. That tension lies in the Hebrew language: in an aporia which its revival and use for everyday life opens up, and which the
Yishuv, he fears, will be unable to contain.
30 Pappe (2006), pp. 93-98, Horowitz and Lissak (1978), 26-32, Eyal (2006). 31 See Kaniel (1994), also Tessler (1994), p. 185. Rubin (2011) is also of interest, though his focus is about a decade later than the period under consideration here. 32 On the “Jewry of Muscle,” see Nordau (1995) [1903] and Pressner (2007); on the negation of the diaspora, see, inter alia, Klatzkin (1977) [1921], 323-5, Raz-Krakotzkin (1993), Schweid (1984), Zerubavel (1995), pp. 17-33. 33 Hazaz (1956): “I know longer understand anything at all…It’s been years since I’ve understood. […] [W]hat are we doing here? […] In this place. Or in Palestine. In general…” (172) 34 On Scholem’s Zionism, see Herzberg (1987).
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The land is a volcano, and it hosts the language. People talk here about many things which may make us fail – particularly these days about the Arabs. But another more serious danger…threatens us, a danger which follows of necessity from the Zionist enterprise. What will be the result of updating the Hebrew language? Is not the holy language, which we have planted among our children, an abyss that most open up?35
A bit more background can help clarify this argument. That Hebrew would become the lingua franca of the Yishuv was not universally or automatically understood by all
Zionists. Theodor Herzl, in his utopian novel Altneuland, suggested it would be German; and many German-speaking Jews, who played an important role in the creation of educational institutions in Palestine, doubted Hebrew’s potential as a medium for technical or scientific instruction.36 Yiddish was the language most Zionists actually spoke, and French was the language of the international network of schools run by the
Alliance Israelite Universelle. Even among the “Hebraists,” there were any number of subsequent technical disagreements that needed to be worked out: what accent, grammatical and orthographic traditions should be adopted as ‘standard’? How would curricula be formulated and disseminated across the country? Who would oversee the creation of neologisms: from elevator to ice cream to artillery shell?37
By the time Scholem writes to Rosenweig, these arguments were essentially settled.38 Hebrew fluency was already becoming general within the Yishuv: the infrastructure for standardizing its instruction, and for teaching even scientific and technical subjects in it, was well underway. Indeed, the term “Hebrew,” used as a
35 Scholem (1996), p. 27. 36 Viz., Herzl (20000 [1902], p. 68, Shilo (1994) 37 Harshav (1994), part II, Myers (1995), pp. 29-37 and passim, Saenz-Badillos (1993), pp. 269-72, Saposnik (2008), ch. 10. 38 But see Rubin (2011) on this point.
13 Levine; [email protected] draft: cite only with permission modifier, had become something of a catchword: a means to distinguish progressive
Zionism from traditional Yiddishkeit: one would speak of a “Hebrew state,” “Hebrew labor,” a new “Hebrew aesthetic” for public art – even (see fig. 1, below) “Hebrew
Watermelons.”39 Scholem himself had been something of a champion of the Hebrew language in Germany, having broken with the Blau-Weiss – a German romantic-Zionist youth movement, based on the Wanderwogel – over the question of whether its members should learn Hebrew.40
Fig. 1: ‘Hebrew Watermelons: Look for this Trademark’ (advertisement) Unnamed artist (c. 1930s) image: http://www.liberationgraphics.com/ppp/Buy_Hebrew.html, accessed 6 January 2011
And yet, something happens when Scholem encounters the lived experience of the
Hebrew language in Palestine. The promulgators of the ‘new’ Hebrew lack reverence for the powers of the ‘old’ one, from which it has been extracted. Hebrew, he asserts, will not submit to being a passive, secular vernacular for late-modern political and social
39 As Even-Zohar (1981) explains: “During the period under consideration, “Hebrew,” as both a noun and an adjective, had a very precise meaning within the emerging culture…It was used in the sense of ‘a Jew of the land of Israel,’ that is, a non-Diaspora Jew.” (167) 40 Scholem (1980), 58-9.
14 Levine; [email protected] draft: cite only with permission administration.41 Its ‘source code’ – Biblical and medieval Hebrew – were entirely devoted to the transmission, interpretation and application of revelation. The power and resilience of those foundational elements remained latent within the modern language – they were a staple of authentic Jewish self-understanding, and they would, he feared, crowd their way back into Hebrew politics and discourse.42
People here do not realize the meaning of what they have done. They think they have turned Hebrew into a secular language and that they have removed its apocalyptic sting, but it is not so. The secularization of the language is mere empty words, a rhetorical turn of phrase. […] God cannot remain silent in a language in which He has been evoked thousands of times to return to our life.43
Modern Hebrew, on Scholem’s account, has a ‘revengeful’ quality; like the myth of the golem, the creations of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, or Karl Popper’s dread
‘metaphysicalism,’ it draws on a well of pre-modern, ecstatic power; one which threatens to overwhelm the Zionist journeymen who now presume to wield it.44
All of this is admittedly difficult to convey in English. Ravitzky can help here; his account of how contemporary Hebrew usage skates upon transcendently- and eschatologically derived notions, concepts and signifiers:
The…‘apocalyptic sting’ [is] to be found in such [religiously-derived] expressions as memshalah u-mamlachah (rulership and kingdom), kibbutz galuyot (the ingathering of the exiles), yeshuah (salvation), shalom (peace), tsur yisra’el (Rock of Israel) and ge’ulah la-aretz (redemption of the land)—expressions that have found their way into Modern Hebrew vernacular. Similarly, a ‘volcano’ lies dormant in many terms whose original religious meaning has been radically altered or altogether lost in modern Hebrew. For example, bitachon, which now denotes military security, originally referred to trust in God; ha’apalah, which is used to refer to pre-state ‘illegal’ immigration, originally denoted a forbidden and catastrophic breakthrough….The very name given to the State of Israel, Medinat
41 On the role of social science and social administration in early Zionist thought, see Hart (2000), ch 4. 42 On this point, see Biale (1979), and Scholem (1945) [1975]. 43 Scholem (1996), pp. 27, 29. 44 Barouch (2010, 2012), Shahar (2008).
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Yisra’el…is encumbered by the freight of the past and the accompanying tensions between part and whole, the political and the theological.45
The argument here is not simply that Biblical turns of phrase, or that common religious expressions and names of ritual practices have been consciously appropriated; though, as
Charles Liebman and Eliezer Don-Yehiya note, that is certainly the case.46 But where their analysis ties those appropriations back to specific individuals – professed ideologues, who re-work the language in the conscious service of particular political interests or sensibilities – for Scholem, the ‘dependent’ and ‘independent’ variables switch. Hebrew’s ‘pregnancy’ is the logical a priori: it imposes theological resonances and echoes onto the speech acts of all who communicate in it. Knowingly or otherwise, the speaker of modern Hebrew dabbles in the messianic; this power is never expelled, only driven into a state of partial occultation or abeyance.
Worse, Scholem fears, even that partial state of occultation will not last. It rests upon historical contingencies that attend Modern Hebrew’s (re)birth. For the first few generations of its life, nearly all modern Hebrew speakers were perforce non-native: learning Hebrew was part of a process of a committed Zionist’s self-schooling. Learning
Hebrew through the syntactic-grammatical template of another – first – language appears, on his account, to provide a kind of prophylactic barrier around Hebrew’s ‘apocalyptic sting’; hence, in the epigraph above, the burden of it will fall more squarely on “our children.”
One of Ravitzky’s examples can illustrate this. As a matter of fact, one may or may not know that Modern Hebrew’s bitachon – ‘security’ whether national or personal
– initially referred to trust in God. But one’s experience of the term will differ based on
45 Ravitzky (1996), pp. 3-4. 46 See Liebman and Don Yehiya (1983), pp. 38 et seq. and 93 et seq.
16 Levine; [email protected] draft: cite only with permission how one comes to know it: in the context of the youthful acquisition of language, in which one triangulates from spoken context, reading and the like (as in the well-known line from the Psalms: “O Israel, trust [b’tach] in the Lord; its help and protector is He”) versus one who has learned it from a ‘vocab’ sheet, as the equivalent of a parallel term in another (native) tongue.47 The latter experience of acquisition appears to protect the speaker in a way that the former does not. The adult learner of Hebrew comes to the term bitachon in roughly the same way that an empirical phenomenon appears to a neo- positivist observer: as a reality that presents itself simply and directly to one’s senses, disconnected from its generative-historical, theological or metaphysical “force-field.”48
For future generations, no such prophylaxis would exist.
All those words [in Modern Hebrew] which were...taken from the good old lexicon, are filled the brim with explosive meaning. A generation which has inherited the most fruitful of all of the holy traditions, our language, cannot live without tradition, even should it wish to do so a thousandfold. When the power inherent in the language…will again assume form, our nation will once more be confronted by the holy tradition as a decisive example. And then the people will need to choose between the two[.]49
Scholem, it will be recalled, is writing in 1926: before the Arab uprisings of 1929 and the
‘Great Revolt’ [al-Thawara al-Kubra] of 1936.50 In that context, his meaning may have been hard to discern – though his dovish politics in the 1920s is well known.51
47 Psalms (115:9). B’tach (trust, here conjugated in as an imperative verb) is from the same grammatical root as bitachon. This Psalm, or parts of it, appears widely in the Hebrew liturgy. 48 Just, indeed, as English speakers may overlook the connection between security and the Augustianian notion of caritas: “the love of God and Neighbors as the proper motivation of the will transformed by grace.” Patterson (2008), pp. 4-5. Fichte, it will be recalled made a similar argument about the German nation and inherently ‘philosophical’ potential of its organic relationship with the German language; see Addresses to the German nation, no. 4. The term ‘force-field’ I take from Adorno, via Martin Jay and Richard Bernstein; see Bernstein (1991), pp. 41-42: “a relational interplay of attractions and aversions that constitut[e] the dynamic, transmutational structure of a complex phenomenon.” Jay (1993, 1-2) notes that Adorno borrows the term from Walter Benjamin. For monographic studies linking Benjamin’s thought to Scholem, see Handelman (1991) and Jacobson (2003). 49 Scholem (1996), p. 28. 50 On the 1936 Revolt, see Kimmerling and Migdal (2003), Swedenberg (1995).
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In contemporary Israel, by contrast, a highly specific interpretation of Scholem’s concerns suggests itself. Distinctions that once seemed fairly straightforward – between the citizens of the Israeli state as participants in a historically contingent, political- administrative polity and the People of Israel as the chosen bearers of divine revelation throughout history; between the State of Israel the Kingdom of Israel; between the
“earthly” Jerusalem and the “heavenly” one – all have become harder and harder to sustain. Certainly, the impulse to blur them has long been there: the officially-sanctioned
“Prayer for the State of Israel,” by way of example, refers to it as “the first flowering of our redemption” [raishit tzmichat ge’ulateinu].52 But those beliefs, in earlier decades, were clearly in the minority; contained, however uneasily, within what David Ben Gurion called mamlachtiut.53 They are no longer so contained.
Political Theology and Israeli Pluralism
The core problem being discussed here is not – save for the specific idiom of
Israeli politics and Jewish tradition – unique to Hebrew. The German legal theorist Carl
Schmitt observed in the 1920s that the veneer of secularism covering contemporary political concepts was much thinner than was commonly supposed: “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts;” or
51 See Biale (1979), pp. 174-182. 52 See http://www.daat.ac.il/daat/tfila/tfilot-2.htm, last accessed 15 March 2012. 53 That is, a civic-mindedness or public-spiritedness based on political processes and institutions that contained ideological and theological determinism, by nesting them in deliberative processes that ensured on pluralism and accommodation. See Waltzer et al. (2000), p. 494. That definition, however, neatly evades the paradox that lies within the term itself, in its very provenance. It is drawn from an essay by Ben Gurion entitled Netzach Yisrael (“the eternity of Israel”). By this, Ben-Gurion appears to mean those accommodative political processes that ensured the longevity of the Jewish people in Diaspora, which the Israeli state must preserve and adapt. But in observant circles, where the God of Israel is never invoked by His ‘true’ name, it can be a way of referring to God: He is the ‘Eternity of Israel.’
18 Levine; [email protected] draft: cite only with permission following Paul Kahn, “the state is not the secular arrangement that it purports to be.”54
Traditional narratives of modernity understand it as a cluster of demystifying processes by which the roots and forces driving social action become progressively knowable, controllable and rational: removed from the realm of the divine, and opened up to human understanding and human control.55 This includes, as Sheldon Wolin has noted, the political sphere: the aspiration to replace “the political art” with “‘the administration of things’: that is, by a series of operations so routinized as to call for no greater knowledge or ability than that possessed by a common bookkeeper.”56
For Schmitt and Scholem both, that aim is essentially unrealizable: the theological
‘prehistory’ of these ostensibly secular concepts renders them unstable; their theological content is always on the verge of bleeding back in.57 Variants of that concern, moreover, can be found across the social and international theory of the twentieth century: from
Freud, to Adorno and Horkheimer – to Hans Morgenthau’s critique of liberal and scientific ‘idealism’ in light of the ‘animus dominandi.’58 In their various idioms, each warns of a vengeful “return of the repressed:” pre-modern or atavistic forces which do not evade our discernment, so much as they are concealed in the very integuments of our faculties of discernment; and our means of transmitting such discernment to others. The effect of this is to make it impossible for us to trust those faculties fully; to know for certain when we stand on solid, reasoned ground.
54 Schmitt (1985) [1934], p. 36; Kahn (2011), p. 18. 55 Heaphy (2007), ch. 2. 56 Wolin (2004), p. 281. Thanks to Alex Barder. 57 On the Schmitt-Scholem connection, see Schmidt (1993) and Piterburg (2008), ch. 5. Freud (1939, 1950, 1961), Adorno and Horkheimer (2002), Morgenthau (1946, 1951, 1972). See also Petersen (1999), Rengger (2007), Schuett (2007), and Solomon (2012).
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Given details of Schmitt’s political biography, the notion that an occult link connects the ‘apocalyptic sting’ to the ‘concept of the political’ is poignant; this is a difficult emotional space to traverse. And yet that work is demanded. The intensification of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since 2000 gives urgency to Scholem’s critique of
Hebrew and its connection to Jewish radicalism. New resources must be found that can tame, contain or control the apocalyptic sting in Israel’s ‘post-mamlachti’ era. That, in turn, requires both a particular critical sensibility, and a particular cluster of normative and affective commitments. That is, it involves an agonistic commitment to feeling deeply divergent and mutually incompatible loyalties.59 This must be done mindfully: realizing that such divergent feelings, at some level, actually betray the things they cherish most; and yet reaffirm that betrayal as a serious act of commitment, and love.
But before social science can operationalize that sensibility in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it must first specify it. It is to that specification that the paper now turns.
59 Connolly (2005): “An ethos of agonistic respect grows out of mutual appreciation for the ubiquity of faith to life and the inability of contending parties, to date, to demonstrate the truth of one faith over other live candidates. It grows out of reciprocal appreciation for the element of contestability in these domains. The relation is agonistic in two senses: you absorb the agony of having elements of your own faith called into question by others, and you fold agonistic contestation of others into the respect that you convey toward them.” (123-4)
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III. Chastening the Apocalyptic Sting: Diasporic Love
Among the most famous sayings of this kind are those of Rabbi Israel of Rizhin, that in the days of the Messiah man will no longer quarrel with his fellow but with himself, or his bold suggestion that the Messianic world will be a world without images, “in which the image and its object can no longer be related[.]”
- Gershom Scholem60
The tenacity that is valorized by these texts is the tenacity that enables continued Jewish existence, not the tenacity of defending sovereignty unto death.
- Jonathan and Daniel Boyarin61
Two Parables of Struggle
In 2005, the Israeli author Sami Michael published a novel entitled Yonim bi-
Trafalgar (Pigeons in Trafalgar Square). The work is a richly-woven work of didactic fiction, from an author and public intellectual with well-known political commitments in
Israel.62 Born in Baghdad in 1926, Michael was active in the communist underground and fled to Iran. Arriving in Israel in 1949, he became active in the communist party and worked with leading figures like Emile Habibi: experiences he fictionalized in his 1977 novel Hasut (Refuge).63 Since 2001 he has been President of the Association for Civil
Rights in Israel and is a well-known advocate of both Israeli-Palestinian peace and
Jewish-Arab equality.
60 Scholem (1971), pp. 34-5. 61 Boyarin and Boyarin (2002), p. 102. 62 To get a sense of Michael’s stature as a public intellectual and political activist, see (inter alia) Samir (2006), or see his Hebrew-language Wikipedia page. His work has also been the subject of sustained academic engagement in both Israel and abroad: see, for example www.stanford.edu/dept/jewishstudies/events/sami_michael_conf/, last accessed 10 March 2012. 63 Michael (1977); see also Michael (1974). Refuge was published in English by the Jewish Publication Society in the 1980s.
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Pigeons works on several levels. The present discussion will focus on two: first, on the novel as a parable about the crisis in Israeli-Palestinian relations since the outbreak of the second Intifada in 2000. Second, as a literary dialogue: a response to, and a reshaping of, the late Palestinian writer (and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine activist) Ghassan Kanafani’s 1969 novella, Returning to Haifa.64
Since Kanafani’s work sets up the key plot devices in both texts, it makes sense to begin there. In the aftermath of the 1967 war, a Palestinian couple (Said and Safiyya in
Kanafani’s story, Rashid and Nabila in Michael’s), visit the home in Haifa that they were forced to abandon during the war of 1948. Caught up in a stream of refugees, and with the city bisected by British roadblocks, their five-month old son (Khaldun in Kanafani’s novel, Badir in Michael’s) had been abandoned in the crib. Nineteen years later, the couple wishes to learn what has become him.
They find the house occupied by a Jewish woman: a Holocaust survivor and widow of the 1956 Sinai Campaign (Miriam Kushen in Kanafani’s story, Riva Epstein in
Michael’s). She and her late husband (Ifrat/Ephraim) have adopted the boy, who is now grown.65 A tense encounter ensues when Dov/Ze’ev – as he is now known – returns home to meet his biological parents for the first time: a reservist in the IDF, he is in uniform. Though he has been told the circumstances of his birth and adoption, he evinces
64 Kanafani’s work has engendered many such interactions, both in Israel and the Arab world; for an overview, see Sheetrit (2010), pp. 91-2. 65 On the interplay of names and their meanings in the two works, see Sheetrit (2010), p 102. It bears noting that Kanafani’s version reflects a degree of unfamiliarity with Hebrew names, and this plays some role in the decision to change them: Iphrat (‘Efrat’) is, in Modern Hebrew, exclusively a woman’s name; Koshen is not a common Jewish or Hebrew name, though it could be an attempt to transliterate the Biblical place-name Goshen into Arabic, following the Israeli fashion of Hebraizing family names. These faux pas, Sheetrit (idem, p. 106) acutely observes, reflect Kanafani’s desire to impart a kind of knowing verisimilitude to the text; but also tellingly undermine that effort.
22 Levine; [email protected] draft: cite only with permission no interest in the meeting, and confesses no felt connection to Said and Saifyya. As Dov speaks no Arabic, the ensuing encounter takes place in English.
In Kanafani’s novella, the plot climaxes here: in a verbal dual between lost son and lost (in another sense) father. Through the dialogue, Said is brought to the realization that his son was not taken by others, but was rather lost by him. Dov rejects his patrimony; Said abandoned him and must reckon with the consequences of that choice:
You should not have left Haifa. If that wasn’t possible, then no matter what it took, you should not have left an infant behind in is crib. And if that was also impossible, then you should have never stopped trying to return. You say that too was impossible? Twenty years have passed, sir! Twenty years!66
Written in an era of increasing Palestinian political assertiveness, this line of thinking has a clear generational/ideological ‘bottom line.’67 The loss of Dov is the loss of Palestine, given a voice. Said’s attempt to grapple with his reproach mirrors that of an older generation, belatedly acquiring political self-awareness. It is in this sense – in the fashion of Brecht or Gorki – that the text is didactic: Kanafani means for his characters to guide the reader through a particular process of self-reckoning.68
The dialogue is thus carefully contrived. When Dov/Khaldun reproaches his parents for abandoning him without a fight (and with him, their homeland), he is not merely speaking for himself:
66 Kanafani (2000), p. 185. 67 On the growing independence of the Palestinian political movement and the rise of Palestinian armed resistance in the 1960s and 1970s, see Sayigh (1997), Rubin (1994), chs. 2-3, and Kimmerling and Migdal (2003), ch. 8; for a personal account, see Abu Iyad (1981), ch. 4. 68 On the didactic quality of the text and Kanafani’s debt to Brecht and Gorki, see Siddiq (1984), p. 49 and passim, Somekh (1996) and Campbell (2001). Campbell notes that the text is, in fact, a great deal more open-ended than it initially appears, though he refrains from asserting the author’s conscious intention on this score. Sheetrit (2010) and Khouri (2008) argue its open-endedness even more strongly. While that openness is not in dispute, it does not take away from the text’s didacticism. The agitprop qualities of the text are not being disputed, only its exact ideological content, its ‘take home message.’ What follows from Said’s new political self-awareness? Must Khalid’s armed resistance bring about the military destruction of the Israeli state, or is the emancipation of Palestinians not reducible to any single, overdetermined policy outcome?
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You’re all weak! Weak! You’re bound by heavy chains of backwardness and paralysis! Don’t tell me you spent twenty years crying! Tears won’t bring back the missing or the lost.69
As noted, Kanafani’s aim is not merely polemical. Said emerges from the encounter with a new sense of who he is, the meaning of what he has lost and what he must now do.70 It is time to leave: not to flee, but to take their leave. “You two may remain in our house temporarily,” Said tells Miriam and Dov; “it will take a war to settle that.”71 He expresses the hope that he will see his younger son, Khalid, join the fedayin. “Men like
Khalid are looking toward the future, so they can put right our mistakes,” Said tells his wife. “Dov” – he now calls his firstborn by his Hebrew name, as if to underscore the irrevocability of his loss – “is our shame, but Khalid is our enduring honor.”72
If Returning to Haifa calls a generation to arms, Pigeons in Trafalgar assesses the world that attends that generation’s passing. It is now the early 2000s: almost four decades since Kanafani’s initial confrontation between father and son. Said (now renamed Rashid) has been rewritten: from the flaneur who only belatedly realizes his responsibilities, to a committed political activist of the sort Kanafani was himself until his
69 Kanafani (2000), p. 185. 70 Whether Safiyya shares in this new consciousness is unclear; her character is consistently marginalized. In the dialogue with Dov, this marginalization serves as a plot device: she is uneducated and lacks command of English. But she is in fact marginalized throughout the story: even when she is reported by the narrator to have been an active party in conversation.
“All along the way [to Haifa], [Said] talked and talked and talked. He spoke to his wife about everything – about the war and about the defeat, about the Mandelbaum Gate, demolished by bulldozers. And about the enemy who reached the [Jordan] river and then the [Suez] canal in a matter of hours. And about the ceasefire, and the radio, and the way the soldiers plundered belongings and furniture, and the curfew, and his cousin in Kuwait consumed with anxiety, and the neighbor who gathered his things and fled, and the three Arab soldiers who fought alone for two days on the hill near Augusta Victoria hospital, and the men who took off their uniforms and fought in the streets of Jerusalem, and the peasant who was killed the minute they saw him near the largest hotel in Ramallah. His wife spoke of many other matters.” (Kanafani: 2000, p. 150, brackets and emphasis added)
The text does not elaborate further. Her speech appears, in Kanafani’s judgment, not to be worth reporting. 71 Kanafani (2000), p. 187. 72 Kanafani (2000), p. 187.
24 Levine; [email protected] draft: cite only with permission death in 1972.73 Rashid shares also shares Kanafani’s fate: assassinated, apparently by the
Israelis, some decades before the novel’s present day.74
On Michael’s account, Rashid and Kanafani share each other’s fate in another sense as well. Each has become, in death, something of an anachronism. The events of the intervening decades –the first Intifada, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the 1991
Gulf war, the decline of the PLO and the rise of Hamas, the Oslo-Madrid process and its aftermath – altered the temper and ideological orientation of the Palestinian national struggle. Notwithstanding their successes, the Marxist-nationalist vanguard which they represented had failed to deliver the land from its Israeli occupiers. A new generation of
Islamist activists and fighters was taking over, and transforming, the face of Palestinian struggle.75 Scholem’s ‘apocalyptic sting’ was coming to Palestine as well.
At the same time, Israeli domestic and foreign policy changed the stakes and focus of that struggle: through the simultaneous expansion of settlement activity in the
Occupied Territories and the creation, in the 1990s, of an ostensibly autonomous
Palestinian National Authority, firmly located within a larger Israeli “control system.”76
Menachem Klein’s pithy characterization captures this change well: from a conflict over borders to an increasingly fragmented ethnic struggle.77
In the action of the book, Safiyya (now Nabila) renews the effort to reconnect with her son in the years after her husband’s assassination. Urged by his adoptive mother
73 Attar (2007), p. 42. On Kanafani’s political activity, see the introductory essays in Kanafani (2000). 74 On Kanafani’s assassination, see Morris (2001), p. 380. 75 Viz., Michael (2005), p. 122-32, and 213-22. 76 See Kimmerling (1989). Also, inter alia, Ben Porat (2006), Efrat (2006), Gordon (2008), Monk (2002), Newman (2000, 2001), Ophir, et al. (2008), Yiftachel (2002), Misselwitz and Reniets (2006), Weizman (2007). 77 Klein (2010): “Thus the Israelis and Palestinians find themselves trapped between what is unachievable today – the two-state solution – and what can never be achieved – a unitary non-ethnic democracy based on the principle of ‘one man, one vote.’” (4).
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– whose own losses impel her to honor another mother’s love and loss – Dov (now
Ze’ev) gradually overcomes the trauma of learning his ‘secret’: his initial horror and dislocation at discovering he is ‘really’ an Arab; his childhood bigotries; his fear that he has lived a lie; his resentment of his biological father (who in Michael’s account parts from their ill-starred confrontation expressing the hope that younger son might kill him in battle).78 A complex, uncomfortable fabric of familial love begins – not without false starts – to knit the families together. That process is the substance of the novel.
Now a man of considerable economic means, Ze’ev is able to fund one-on-one meetings with Nabila overseas, who has reinvented herself in the intervening years: from an uneducated country girl into a highly-regarded international representative of the
Palestinian people. Later on, the whole of his Palestinian family is brought to London to meet him; their shared experience in Trafalgar square gives the book its title.79 A successful real-estate developer, Ze’ev plans an upmarket geriatric and residential hospital complex in Cyprus for Israelis and Palestinians to manage jointly; this enterprise is, inter alia, to become a space in which all parts of his family might share, if they wish, on equal terms.
Love, Diaspora and the Apocalyptic Sting
It is the particular quality of this emergent form of love – Ze’ev’s for his mothers, and theirs for him – which is of particular interest in light of Scholem’s and Ravitzky’s concerns. My interest lies in how Michael fashions it for his characters, and how they both conceive it and resist the concepts others seek to impose on it. It is a love that its bearers have learned to leave unstated, relying instead on its utter naturalness, on its self-
78 Michael (2005): “‘The battlefield will be the place of your next meeting with your brother.’ And after a short pause, [Rashid] added: ‘He might well best you there.’” (50) 79 Michael (2005), p. 209.
26 Levine; [email protected] draft: cite only with permission evident quality. This is not the power of speaking, but of not speaking: the power recalled in the Scholem quote that serves as this section’s epigraph. Scholem appears to believe that leaving language outside of certain kinds of emotional experience can help defuse or contain the ‘volcano’ that he believes he has identified in the Hebrew language, and in
Hebrew politics. The question is how that bildverbot – that ban on image and speech – can inform or ground the work of contemporary studies of this conflict.
In other words, I want to suggest that this unconceived, unnamed love has a particular critical and destabilizing power – a “diasporic power,” to borrow from
Jonathan and Daniel Boyarin: the ability to effect “a measure of recuperation and a measure of critique.”80 If the movement for a state and for self-determination reflects a felt need to be at home in the world, then the “paradoxical power of diaspora” comes into play once it becomes evident that no ‘homecoming’ can ever be as complete, or as fulfilling, as it is promised to be.
This is the paradoxical power of diaspora. On the one hand, everything that defines us is compounded of all the questions of our ancestors. On the other hand, everything is permanently at risk. Thus contingency and genealogy are the central components of diasporic consciousness.81
Diasporic love, then, provides “a positive resource in the necessary rethinking of models of polity in the current erosion and questioning of the modern state-system and ideal;” an
“alternative ground for the intricate and always contentious linkage between cultural identity and political organization.”82
Boyarin’s and Boyarin’s aim is somewhat different from mine, however: they wish to distill out of the Jewish Diaspora a set of insights that can inform the
80 Boyarin and Boyarin (2002), p. viii. 81 Boyarin and Boyarin (2002), p. 4. 82 Boyarin and Boyarin (2002), pp. 5, 10.
27 Levine; [email protected] draft: cite only with permission understandings of other post-colonial studies; to open up Jewish experience so that it might illuminate (and draw illumination from) “a lost Suriname” or “a lost Zion in
Jamaican rhythms, on the sidewalks of [Brooklyn’s] Eastern Parkway.”83 My aim here is slightly different: to temper, contain or chasten the apocalyptic sting; to develop emotional resources that can sustain the faltering distinction between a “Jewish national home” in Palestine and dreams of messianic redemption that remain quite distinct from it, even if the two draw confusingly on the same stock of words, phrases and images.
Boyarin and Boyarin agree with Scholem on the fecundity of the Hebrew tradition: its inability to be reduced to any single line of instrumental meaning or explanation. But where Scholem sees Hebrew as a ‘volcano,’ Boyarin and Boyarin see it as a source of endless play and possibility.84 Their clever rabbis and canny Jews flatter, dissemble, and negotiate (with God, with the Romans, with the authorities of New York
State) to obtain spaces and niches in which life can be sustained.85 There is no heroism here. But neither are there all-or-nothing wars of Clausewitizian decision. Following the discussion in the introduction, the ‘apocalyptic sting’ is intercepted and tempered before it can apply its “single-point perspective to the organization of political space.”86
Michael aims at something similar. His text reworks and complicates Kanafani, while adhering to its substance and key turning points. This begins from the novel’s account of the false start between father and son:
Ze’ev entered the small salon and his feet froze beneath him. Confronted with the shocked expression of his guests, he wished he could simply disappear. The man looked at him in horror. Because of my uniform, he thought. He walked toward
83 Boyarin and Boyarin (2002), p. ix. 84 My thanks to William E. Connolly and Daniel Monk on this point. 85 Boyarin and Boyarin (2002), pp. 46-55. 86 Ruggie (1993), p. 159. Thanks to Bohman (2005).
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the table and removed his beret. Riva turned to him in her heavily accented English. “These are your real parents.” […] […] His guests did not know Hebrew and he knew only a few works in Arabic. He thus chose, like Riva, to speak in English. “How may I help you, Sir?” The fate of the meeting was at that moment decided. Language is a deceptive bridge of misunderstanding. The curiosity, the intimacy that might have sprouted in other circumstances simply evaporated. English and his IDF uniform. These were real obstacles.87
It is not just Ze’ev’s imperfect English – viz., his overly formal greeting – which renders the ‘bridge of language’ deceptive. It is language itself.
But where Kanafani’s storytelling marginalizes Safiyya, Michael marginalizes
Ze’ev and Rashid. Their back-and-forth is summarized in passing (“a long, cutting monologue;” “waves of resentment;” “venomous words;” “men’s prattle;” “the dream- palace of the Arabs”), while the inner conversation of Ze’ev’s mothers is reported at length.88 The reader of Kanafani’s original already knows what the men have to say.
Michael wishes to fill out the pregnant silences – the “muted possibilities,” as Sheetrit calls them – that his original leaves unpacked.89 Hence:
Riva listened very attentively [hikshiva keshev rav]. […] She had learned from experience not to take words lightly; words were the raw materials from which rifles, deadly poisons, and barbed-wire emplacements are made.90
Riva does not intervene in the conversation. But the work of arranging that conversation fell to her; it came from a felt obligation to honor Nabila’s love for her lost son.91
Nabila’s thoughts, too, reflect both a certain mistrust of the spoken word. From her drive home, after the initial meeting:
87 Michael (2005), p. 47. 88 Compare to n11, above. Michael (2005), pp. 49, 51, 56. The phrase ‘dream palace of the Arabs’ originates with T. E. Lawrence; but note Fuad Ajami’s 1998 book of the same title. 89 Sheetrit (2010), p. 101. 90 Michael (2005), p. 49. 91 “After what I’ve been through, I could not refuse a father and mother.” (Michael: 2005, p. 45)
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Let [Rashid] speak, she told herself. Men’s prattle. She had seen such men in old American movies, chewing tobacco. Chewing, grunting, and spitting.
[…]
Who said one must heave out words even when one’s throat is parched, she thought to herself. She had no desire to speak after a meeting to which she had so looked forward. She felt quite comfortable, even pleased, walled up in silence. Her arms opened in an imaginary gesture of embrace, as if to press this baby, who had since become a man, close to her heart.92
Her resentment at Rashid’s monopolization of the conversation parallels Said’s resentment – in Kanafani’s original – of his son’s reproaches: the shame of being called out, of being unable to give an account of oneself. For Kanafani’s Said, this is belated political consciousness, coming from the persuasive power of speech. For Michael’s
Nabila, it rather the lack of speech which is transformative; the possibilities that words foreclose. She must own her voicelessness; she must give it power.93
Recall again Scholem’s messianic-utopian vision of a world “in which the image and its object can no longer be related.” This would be a world in which words are understood in their paradoxical fullness and emptiness. The ‘deceptive bridge’ of language no longer deceives – not because words are now magically able to sum up the real-world things and objects which they conceptually comprise and truncate; rather because the space between the word and the thing in itself remains self-evident even to the speaker or the thinker, in the very moment of speaking and thinking. Hence, “man will no longer quarrel with his fellow but with himself:” one approaches perfection by dwelling in one’s own ineluctable imperfection.
92 Michael (2005), pp. 51, 52. 93 Michael (2005): “…Nabila felt a jarring surge of inner power. She could practically feel her bones cracking. It was the moment in which the new Nabila had sprouted up from the old, changed. She did not know herself for it. For Rashid, she had always been a good and devoted wife and he had given her more than her due for it; but the division of labor between them had been very clear: he was the educated leader, the man of the world; she was a pleasant enough creature, one who would never scale the exalted heights that were the natural province of men. So had she been, to this moment. No longer.” (53)
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But Michael’s characters have no time for the Messianic era to come. Nabila’s love for her son exists in this particular moment. Its power to “bend Ze’ev’s heart”
[lehakmir et libo] is immediate and demanding; her pain cannot be met by deferring it to another, better world.94 And time is not on their side; all the less given that the appropriation of “messianism” by both Israelis and Palestinians is eroding what little common ground they might yet find. What Ze’ev learns from his mothers in the ensuing decades is the power to hear that pain, and to attend to it, whatever complexity and uncertainty it might bring. It will find no accommodation in the simplifying rubrics of passports and identity documents; and it must learn to live without them.
This is what Ze’ev learns in the ensuing decades from his mothers. Compare his reflections upon meeting his lost siblings to the off-putting introduction he made to his father (“what may I do for you, Sir?”), some three decades before:
Ze’ev considered shaking hands with his sister and brother, but any introduction seemed false to him, alienating. Since the situation was unnatural in its essence, he concluded that it would be best not to initiate at all; no language would serve here, save the language of deaf-mutes.95
“From Riva,” Michael tells the reader, “Ze’ev had learned to be attentive to those who are quiet.”96 It is this attentiveness that allows him to find a space for both his Palestinian sister, who sees him as only one more Israeli like those who assassinated her father and her husband; and his wife, who insists that he is ‘unambiguously’ Jewish and Israeli.
These arguments, Ze’ev now realizes, do not need to be settled.
I would think that you…would understand…the longing of a mother to a son….I value the pain and the love that Nabila, too, carries with her from place to place
94 Michael (2005), p. 83. 95 Michael (2005), p. 199. 96 Michael (2005), p. 205.
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and does not forget. […] If I become closer to Nabila, to my sister and brother, it’s not to the detriment of Israel or Adiv or Anat. I have room for them all.97
Ze’ev’s love has found its diasporic power. It will not be tied down to heroic affirmations; it will be strategic; it will work between and around existing identities, territories and institutions. It knows to dissemble; to be pragmatic, to give ground and to accept what can be offered. It seems, then, a parable for finding the affective balance that
Scholem and Ravitzky fear a Hebrew politics seems to lack.
97 Michael (2005), p. 237.
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IV. Conclusion
Nothing about sustaining this balance is easy. Michael’s male protagonists are all dead by the end of the book: their love has crashed against the violence of the Second
Intifada, and it costs them their lives.98 Pigeon’s closing pages take place on Cyprus, where the surviving women and the children are in the process of relocating themselves to Ze’ev’s hospital. Nabila is learning Hebrew, to communicate with her Jewish-Israeli grandchildren. At the end of Returning to Haifa, Kanafani’s characters know what they must do, and we leave them knowing what we must do. Michael’s characters, by contrast, do not and cannot. Didactic in its own way, it even so denies the reader any simple political or ideological ‘upshot.’
It is for this reason that I have chosen to overlook the novel’s own potential points of ideological closure: first, a view of love, intuition and compassion that feels, at times, too reductively tied to a traditionally feminine standpoint.99 Second, the common cause the novel seems to make not between Israelis and Palestinians simpliciter, but between
Israeli and Palestinian elites against masses, who – however compassionately drawn –
98 Nabila’s two sons ultimately do meet on a battlefield as their father imagines; but one quite different that what Said/Rashid (or Kanafani) imagine: a battlefield for the war as it has of late become. Nabila, now elderly, is hurt in a fall. In her discomfort, she calls her eldest son to be at her side; only belatedly remembering that the conflict’s recent intensification makes a car trip to Ramallah inadvisable. The city is under Israeli siege; his Israeli license plates and ID card gets him past IDF checkpoints – he is taken to be a settler – but once in Ramallah, they make him a target. His car is encircled by an enraged mob, his car- windows are smashed, and – in a move drawn from the headlines of the early 2000s – he is lynched. His younger brother (who was, in Kanafani’s version, to join the armed resistance) dies trying to protect him. 99 As with the book’s dedication: “To all mothers; the Promised Land of the human race.” For discussions of ‘standpoint’ and post-structural feminism in IR, see Sylvester (1994, 2002), Sjoberg (2006) and Ackeley, et al. (2006). The book does cross the lines it sets out, though it does not fundamentally rethink them. By way of example: Karim and Sana – Ze’ev’s Palestinian brother and sister – at times seem to reverse the traditional social roles defined by their genders.
33 Levine; [email protected] draft: cite only with permission seem to be wholly defined by the circumstances of their economic (and hence, it appears, political and social) class: the mob that kills Ze’ev and his brother Karim.100
But these observations bring this essay back to the point from which it started.
There is no dearth of instrumental recommendations for this conflict. It is rather that these recommendations feel so unequal to the conflict they seek to illuminate or resolve: so tied to particular notions of state interest, historical necessity or moral right as to render them partisans to the conflict, rather than interpreters of it. This tendency to reduction derives, I argued in the opening pages of this essay, from the conflict’s proximity to the messianic: the ‘apocalyptic sting’ that dwells in both ostensibly secular and avowedly theological treatments of it. Social scientists, I suggested, were no more immune to that sting than anyone else.
To chasten that apocalyptic sting thus requires more than merely another social- scientific methodology, or a one-off critique of the normative or ideological commitments of this or that policy actor, platform or intellectual. It involves a chastened sensibility, the felt obligation to humility that comes knowing that one is unequal to the thing one seeks to understand. I have described this chastened sensibility at length elsewhere; adapting it to the Israel-Palestine conflict is what I have sought to do here.101
I thus suggested that chastening the ‘apocalyptic sting’ would require a change of affect or emotion: that it challenges how we should feel, or could feel, or might wish to feel about a particular question of politics or policy. Like similar work by Oded
Löwenheim, Naim Inayatullah and Piki Ish-Shalom, it calls itself and others to a mutually
100 Michael (2005), 254-6. On Ze’ev’s wealth and Michael’s implicit critique of class in Israel and Palestine, see pp. 82-3 and n16, above. 101 Levine (2011, 2012)
34 Levine; [email protected] draft: cite only with permission informing, and chastening self-disclosure.102 Michael’s parable works to illuminate that disclosure: sketching out what it might feel like, how it might be embodied and inhabited.
From that “feeling space,” students of world politics might begin to create a “thinking” one that can close the gap with policy realities.
Central to that effort, however, would be recognition of Michael’s ‘deceptive bridge’ of language. Whatever forms of knowledge emerge from this sensibility toward academic argument, it is inherently plural and non-reductive in form: it mistrusts its own inability to adequately express deeply contested political realities as much as it mistrusts the expressions of others. Like Boyarin and Boyarin, it seeks ways to play that mistrust and plurality openly, to make it explicit in the here and now, rather than to wait for a critical-reflexive ‘messianic age’ to do the work for us. In the idiom of Theodor Adorno, is a negatively dialectical thinking space: ideas pull, push and overtake one another, but without the faith that one idea will ever synthesize them all. A cacophony that honors the true depth and complexity of the conflict by negating all reductive claims to the contrary is the notion of truth guiding this work.
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