Exile and the Prophetic: Judith Butler’s Israel

This post is part of Marc H. Ellis’s “Exile and the Prophetic” feature for Mondoweiss. To read the entire series visit the archive page.

Judith Butler’s name is known, almost iconic. As I wrote yesterday, her thoughts on Jewishness and Israel are important. If we’re not careful, though, her thoughts might get lost in translation or the lack thereof. I’m grappling with the implications of her thinking.

In Parting Ways, Butler points to a future that holds promise for Jewishness, Israel and the world. That promise is fraught. We may not be able to keep it.

To begin with, Butler believes that the Jewish notion of exile as fallen – thus the need to “return” to Israel – should be replaced with the diasporic. For Butler, diasporic is the realm of living with others in a diverse world. In that diverse world the notion of Jewish is continually displaced.

Therefore Jews live on the edge of Jewish and non-Jewish. In Butler’s words:

“The point is not to stabilize the ontology of the Jew or of Jewishness, but rather to understand the ethical and political implications of a relation to alterity that is irreversible and defining and without which we cannot make sense of such fundamental terms as equality or justice.”

For Butler, this relation of Jews with others is not singular or singled out. Moreover, it demands a “passage beyond identity and nation as defining frameworks.”

So, for Butler, Jews and Jewishness have a relation to the Other which continually interrupts Jewish identity. The interruption is positive because Butler believes displacement is intrinsic to Jewishness. A set definition of Jew and Jewishness troubles Butler. With a set definition of Jewishness, Jews enter the realm of exile and power seeking. For Butler, it is a place of no return.

On Israel/Palestine, Butler is almost frightening in its challenge. Butler writes that “if dispersion is thought not only as a geographical situation but also as an ethical modality, then dispersion is precisely the principle that must be ‘brought home’ to Israel/Palestine.” For Butler an embraced dispersion grounds a “polity where no religion or nationality may claim sovereignty over another, in fact sovereignty will be dispersed.” Butler continues: “Only an end to political Zionism, understood as the insistence on grounding the State of Israel on principles of Jewish sovereignty, can broader principles of justice be realized for the region.” In lay political terms this means the end of Israel as a Jewish state.

If demanding the end of political Zionism to secure the future of Jews and Palestinians is not enough, Butler broadens the usual terms of the Israel/Palestine debate. Here she includes Israel, at least in its Zionist incarnation, as responsible for damages beyond the Palestinians and Palestine to the broader Middle East. A limited political deal with the Palestinian Authority, for example, won’t be enough for Butler’s Jewish ethical tradition. The dissolution of state Zionism – the Jewish status of Israel as a state – is crucial to the broader Middle East.

Contemporary formations of Zionism cannot accomplish this task. Butler believes a Jew “cannot be a Zionist and struggle for a just end to colonial subjugation.”

From here she is off and running. The question is to where?

“To where” – the question for all of us. How can Butler’s Jewishness be embodied? What does the dissolution of political Zionism mean on the ground and, if this is the path has to be implemented, how can it be achieved?

Butler asks whether Israel can be a Jewish state and a democracy at the same time. For my part, that answer is simple: Israel is a democracy – for Jews. For most Jews that is the end of the story, full stop. What Palestinians within Israel do with their lives is neither here nor there. This is true for Palestinians under occupation and Palestinian refugees around the world as well.

For Butler, even within the 1967 borders, Israel can only become a democracy if the Palestinians expelled from what became Israel in 1948 and since are included as full and equal citizens. To accomplish this goal the map of Israel/Palestine – indeed of significant parts of the Middle East – has to be reconfigured.

How can Jews call Israel a democracy even for Jews when so many Palestinians in the land and outside it are denied their democratic rights? Even if somehow shared with a Palestinian minority, Jewish privilege is not compatible with democracy. Nor is it compatible with Jewishness as Butler conceives it. A Jewishness that borrows, translates and is in perpetual dialogue with everything that surrounds and interpenetrates it, needs a diversity that is equal in rights and standing. If others are diminished, Jews and Jewishness are diminished too.

Applied once again to Israel but now firmly rooted in her sense of diasporic Jewishness, Butler hunkers down with the challenge of challenges:

Indeed, what would Israel do without its subjugated and expelled populations, without its mechanisms of dispossession? In fact, Israel in its present form cannot do without its mechanisms of dispossession without destroying itself as Israel. In this sense, the threat to Israel is a consequence of its fundamental dependency on dispossession and expulsion for its existence. So it is not a question of cleaning up the act of present-day Israel or implementing reforms; but of overcoming a fundamental and ongoing structure of colonial subjugation that is essential to its existence. So in asking, what would Israel be without subjugation of the Palestinians, we pose a question that underscores that Israel as we know it is unthinkable without that subjugation. Without that subjugation, something other than Israel emerges – but is that thinkable? Whatever it is, it is not the destruction of the Jewish people, but rather the dismantling of the structure of Jewish sovereignty and demographic advantage.

Butler moves far beyond Peter Beinart’s, The Crisis of Zionism. Wherein Beinart tries to hold together the future of ‘liberal’ Zionism, Butler refuses. Butler is having none of this play around the edges. But then again Butler doesn’t have the endorsement of either former President Bill Clinton or former Deputy Speaker of the Knesset and President of the New Israel Fund, Naomi Chazan. This gives away the difference of Beinart’s and Butler’s trajectory.

Reforming Zionism is no longer on the global discourse field. Despite Beinart’s pleas and endorsements, it won’t be returning.

“Indeed, what would Israel do without its subjugated and expelled populations, without its mechanisms of dispossession? In fact, Israel in its present form cannot do without its mechanisms of dispossession without destroying itself as Israel.” Butler’s challenge is devastating. Is it real?

If Butler is right, Israel, along with the Jewish establishment in the United States, cannot do without also subjugating and expelling Jews of Conscience. Paraphrasing Butler and applying it to Jewishness, “Jewishness in its present form, at least as it is defined by the Jewish establishments of Israel and America, cannot do without its mechanisms of dispossessing Jews of Conscience – including Judith Butler – without destroying its sense of what it means to be a Jew.”

Yet the question remains: Is Zionism the issue or is it the state of Israel? And if the issue is the state of Israel, why can’t Israel be reformed like other misbehaving states?

It may be that Israel can be reformed once its core – its Jewishness – is excised. Would Jews continue to live in such a state?

If Israel can’t be reformed without removing its core, and if Jews wouldn’t live there without that core, does that mean that Israel is, after all, truly exceptional?

If the state of Israel is exceptional does that mean Jewishness, including Judith Butler’s diasporic Jewishness, is exceptional, too?