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.
Why spend time on those who passed, like Edward Said and George McGovern, and those who will soon pass, Noam Chomsky and Jimmy Carter? In our moment age, though alive, Chomsky and Carter have already gone the way of all living beings. They’re alive. Are they relevant?
We stand on their shoulders whether we want to admit it or not. It’s not about reproducing their witness; each generation cuts its teeth on different issues. Likewise, it’s not about agreeing or disagreeing with certain positions they held. The long arc of a person’s life is what’s important. Without the longer arc, few of us will survive history’s judgment day.
Disagreements are fine. It is necessary to take on the giants now and again if only to assert our own worthiness. However, to disdain the giants because they resonate beyond us is to diminish our own possibilities.
If we look at Said and Chomsky, their limitations are clear. Said was an elitist in many ways. He reveled in his celebrity. His sweep was often too broad, too literary. His views on politics were mostly hidden. Some say Said wasn’t political at all. It was too pedestrian for him. Nor did Said want to be known as a “professional” Palestinian or, first and foremost, as a Palestinian at all. Said longed for acceptance at the summits of intellectual life. Palestine was too small to take him there.
Wherever Said went, others gathered around him. On the various occasions when I was with Said, he engaged each person as a politician does. Yet he was also impatient with his followers. Said always had more to think, more to accomplish. Said was a restless soul. Though he tried to make others feel welcome in his presence, he never felt himself to be in the right place.
Said’s Palestinian connection fueled his ego. Yet he longed for acclaim in the broader realms of the intellectual world. In prestigious and highly paid university lectures, Said rarely talked about Palestine. Sometimes he didn’t even mention or refer to the Middle East. After all, his academic subject matter was literature. Said longed to be remembered for his writings on Orientalism rather than for his essays on Palestine. This drew criticism from those who came to hear him primarily for his quite specific Palestinian commentary.
It came as quite a surprise to Said that his audience tied the two subjects together. When he spoke on Orientalism, his audience thought Palestine. When he spoke on Palestine, his audience thought Orientalism.
Such is the fate of the great narrators in history. Since they write the narrative, they assume that they control what others think about them. Yet the truth is that once you symbolize a flash point in the psyche or the world, it’s pretty much out of your control. The issue is no longer your evolution or what you want to be remembered for. Your fate has been decided.
Who is correct in their evaluation, you or the audience? Do you or your audience control what you offer to the world?
Said’s audience knew better than he. His importance is found in the entanglement of his literary and birth identities. Once Said began to speak and write on Palestine he found his stride. Though his audience overrode him in some respects, demanding that entanglement when he argued for a strict separation, deep down Said knew the score. Said needed the entanglement he disdained. He knew that his importance was bound up in both.
Does this entanglement relate to Chomsky? Said’s and Chomsky’s complex entanglement is itself a dramatic if untold story. Supposedly they were partners in the public arena, Said taking care of the Palestinian part, Chomsky the Jewish part. Since neither announced their primary identities and instead insisted on their universality, their territoriality involved complications they never resolved.
Said and Chomsky were like boxers who circled each other continuously. They never came to blows. They never embraced. They mostly sparred with the audience, their backs to each other.
Like Said, Chomsky doesn’t want to be identified as a Jewish partisan and for the same reason. Such identification diminishes his scope. Perhaps because of the prominence of Jewish intellectuals who don’t announce their Jewishness, Chomsky is able do this more successfully than Said. As a Palestinian – and Arab – intellectual in the West, despite his best efforts, Said couldn’t help being so identified.
Whereas Said had to fight his identification as a Palestinian in order to be accepted as a free ranging intellectual, Chomsky receives a free pass on his Jewish identity. Chomsky is likewise helped by his overt identification with the political Left. Until recently, Jews were so prominent on the Left that it was almost a Jewish club. In the 1960s when Chomsky came to prominence, the Left didn’t card its prospective members. The assumption was that the candidate was most likely a Jew, too.
I have never met Chomsky. Like Said, he has endorsed my writings. I consider their endorsements singular honors. This doesn’t mean I agree with all of Said or Chomsky for that matter. On the Chomsky side, I find him far too focused on American power. Since he doesn’t emphasize his Jewishness, Chomsky is blinded to the Jewish dimension of Israeli power.
Chomsky takes a strictly power and material self-interest approach to Israel. Because of this approach, Chomsky doesn’t understand that while Israel operates in a world of nation-states, it also operates in the realm of Jewish history. True, Israel’s sense of its place in Jewish history is not completely divorced from the practical realities of statehood. Israel isn’t completely dependent on it either.
I’ve often wondered if Chomsky might be aware of this hidden dimension of Israeli calculation. Since it is, more or less, similar to the hidden Jewish dimension within Chomsky himself, I’ve likewise wondered if Chomsky is as unaware of the importance of his Jewishness as he appears to be.
Chomsky’s diminishment of Israel as a state through his insistence that it is essentially an American puppet could represent a strategic ploy to strip Israel of its inner strength. One way of thinking of Chomsky’s ‘Israel-dependence-on-America’ theory is his need to level the Jewish playing field so that the Jewish prophetic can take on the Jewish state. In such an unbalanced power struggle, Chomsky, as a Jewish prophet, needs all the leverage he can get.
Is there any precedence for Chomsky’s (Jewish) battle with Jewish state power? Only the entire history of the Jewish people.
Is there any precedence for the obstinacy of an individual Jew like Chomsky in the battle with Jewish state power? Only the entire history of the Jewish prophetic.
Is there any precedence for Jewish power claiming that Jewish destiny is theirs? Only the entire history of Jewish power.
An epic battle of the Jewish prophetic with Jewish empire is playing out in our lives. Chomsky in Gaza was just the latest installment of the longest running (prophetic) drama in recorded history.
More bloviation. Chomsky is not a universalist. He doesn’t reject Zionism; his whole critique, of “solutions” discourse; ahistorical, technical “law and rights” discourse; “anti-occupation” rhetoric; anti-anti-Semitism; “strategic asset” discourse; is a plea bargain on behalf of Jewish identity.
His views are completely alien to the spirit of Elmer Berger, Isaac Deutsher, Maxime Rodinson, and Israel Shahak, all of whom wrote in the late 1960s and early 1970s when Chomsky first noticed Palestine. The universalists were well to the left of Chomsky in that period. They all categorically rejected Zionism as reactionary and atavistic, which Chomsky has not. Bertrand Russell was also to the left of Chomsky, as shown by his 1970 statement, which I’ve posted.
In the film Last Interview, Edward Said talks self-consciously of cosmopolitanism and universalism, how he doesnt feel tied to any culture, while partaking of all those he is connected to. Chomsky by contrast dotes on Ahad Ha’am’s ruminations on Maimonides, for example, thinks about his Jewish identity “every day” as he once said.
Justice requires a Palestinian state. I expect Chomsky agrees and I have no doubt Said said so, too.
After 1945, Jews pretty much did not require passports to travel and live in the whole world. Jews were not stateless, and today are so very, very far from being powerless. Jews as such don’t need a separate state or an empire. Not that I can see. Israelis will of course want Israel to continue and, sadly, to continue as an empire, to expand beyond all reason, to remain without challenge but nevertheless constantly at war. Hard habit to break it seems. Taking the criminality [of 1945-1948, say] out of Israelity is the puzzle of our time and of our discourse.
After 1948, Palestinians required (but did not have) passports. They were and mostly remain stateless, which is a dreadful problem. They are profoundly powerless. They also desire a state, and not just for getting passports, but it would help.
Diaspora has been good and times and bad at times for Jews. Ditto for Palestinians, but without passports for the majority, mostly bad.
Can someone please translate this into English, Hindi, Punjabi, or German? These are the only languages I understand. Many thanks in advance.
According to Chomsky: ‘The word “prophet” is a very bad translation of an obscure Hebrew word, navi. Nobody knows what it means. But today they’d be called dissident intellectuals. They were giving geopolitical analysis, arguing that the acts of the rulers were going to destroy society. And they condemned the acts of evil kings. They called for justice and mercy to orphans and widows and so on.’
Well, I’ll tell you what it means. The word “prophet” is peculiar to religious traditions in which a man is inspired by God to convey ethics etc. Chomsky’s definition is self-serving and am sad to have heard Chris Hedges make the mistake of employing it. It’s easy to be a prophet in the armchair age where persecution entails being sidelined by the media but still enjoying three meals a day. “Dissident intellectuals” are a clergy, it is not altruist of a genuine thinker to be considered “dissident”, “dissident” is very media savvy. If one wishes to apply the word “prophet” to mean fighting the system, think of social workers on their hands and knees. Also logically and historically speaking, the word “prophet” is not applied to ‘Zayd ibn Amr ibn Nufayl, a cousin of Umar ibn al-Khattab and spiritually a precursor of Muhammad (cf. Bukhari, Fada’il Ashab an-Nabi on the authority of Abd Allah ibn Umar); he died shortly before Muhammad’s call to prophethood (Fath al-Bari VII, 112). Another man, Sa’sa’ah ibn Najiyah at-Tamimi -grandfather of the poet Farazdaq – achieved equal fame as a saviour of infants thus condemned to death; he later embraced Islam. Ibn Khallikan (II, 197) mentions that Sa’sa’ah saved about thirty girls by paying ransom to their parents.’ (Asad commentary, Qur’an)
Unless I am ignorant of how it is applied in Judaism, which I am quite sure is the same as in Islam, the word “prophet” is not the same as “dissident intellectual” as reformers and humanitarians existed alongside “prophets”.
Now one can be prophetic without being a prophet, on that I concur.