On Genealogies of Violence: Said, Bauman, and Arendt on Zionism and the Nation-State

originally written for a postcolonial studies class in my undergrad. I have reproduced it in full here as part of my efforts to forge a Jewish theoretical position from which to criticize Israeli state violence, and to engage other Jews and non-Jews in such conversations.

note that this piece takes a historical perspective on Zionism in terms of its origins in European discourse, and was written before the past 6 years of Israeli settler colonial and genocidal violence against Palestinians in occupied-Palestine and the Gaza Strip. As such, some pieces of this analysis may not reflect a contemporary perspective. However, I believe them still to be useful in understanding the history of the Israeli state as well as its unique relationship to discourses of nationalism and its unique brand of settler-colonialism, whose perhaps only analogue is found in the American state and its origins in “manifest destiny,” the divine promise of complete domination over a land and its resources.

I. Introduction

There is a theoretical ambiguity in postcolonial studies on the issue of nationalism. Regarding it in turn as both dangerous and necessary towards the process of decolonization, thinkers from Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon to Edward Said and Homi Bhabha have problematized and interrogated the issue of nationalism in colonial and post-colonial contexts. Zionism as both a form of settler colonialism and a nationalist reaction to antisemitic violence in Europe — the metropolitan center of colonialist discourse — belongs in this conversation on nationalism, but is itself ambiguously located in postcolonialist frameworks. However, postcolonial theorists who have addressed the question of Zionism — Edward Said being a prominent example[1] — have not addressed this ambiguity, interpreting Zionism solely in the context of European colonialism, and have not considered nationalism as an interpretive framework for Zionist discourse. The history of Zionism and “the Jewish state” is uniquely situated to inform, problematize, and expand our theorization of both nationalism and colonialism, and the violence inherent in each. Additionally, such an analysis adds depth to our understanding of the positionality of social and political power. As Jews in Europe were neither wholly a part of, nor wholly separate from the European colonial powers that developed Orientalist discourse and mobilized it towards colonial ends, and as Jews were themselves the object of a Eurocentric discourse viz. “the Jewish Question,” the European Jewish Zionist becomes a subject doubly and ambiguously marked by both violence and Eurocentrism.

A unique discourse around “the Jewish Question” and “the Jewish state” thus traces the specificity of Zionist colonialism that sets it apart from other forms of colonialist violence. Such specificity is reflected, on the one hand, in the persistence of the Israeli occupation in the face of the decolonization of other Middle Eastern and African nations. On the other hand, and perhaps more critically, this specificity accounts for Zionism’s explicit bifurcation of the interests of Jews and Palestinians. This bifurcation is absent in other colonial discourses, which often take a paternalistic stance towards indigenous populations and emphasize the “mutual” interests of colonizer and colonized. It is this striking feature of Zionist discourse and politics that I want to center in a critique of genealogies of state violence. I aim to show how the making-subject of an objectified and marginalized Other, in this case “the Jew,” can only be accomplished via a violent process of world-(re)organization. Such processes of ordering are essential to the preservation of both the dominant system of signification that sets the stage for them (Eurocentrism and superiority of “the West”) and the new distinctions (between Jew/Palestinian) it performatively enacts. By critiquing Zionism in this light, I hope to clarify both our conceptualization of Zionism as a form of colonialism and our understanding of the nature of state violence more generally.

This paper will explore three genealogies of violence that help to clarify our view of the Zionist situation. Edward Said’s “Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims” will serve as a foundation and a point of departure for my own reading of the history of Zionism, while Zygmunt Bauman’s “Allosemitism: Premodern, Modern, Postmodern” will serve to trace the discourse around “the Jew” (developed through both antisemitic and Zionist discourses) to its location within the ideality of the European nation-state. Finally, Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism will serve to further develop the link between modern antisemitism, the nation-state, and Zionism. I will show how it is within the reification of “the Jewish Question” and the narrative distinctions it presupposed between “the Jew” and the European nations that the “hidden question” (see below) of the native Palestinian receives its meaning — and thus its violence. Finally, I will reflect on my own position as a Jew and a critic of Zionism, and what kinds of possibilities exist for exploding the closed circle whose act of enclosure creates a dividing line between Jewish and Palestinian interests, lives, and experiences.

II. Said and “Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims”

“Yet the other, dialectically opposite component in Zionism, existing at its interior where it was never seen (even though directly experienced by Palestinians) was an equally firm and intelligent boundary between benefits for Jews and none (later, punishment) for non-Jews in Palestine.”

Edward Said, “Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims,” The Edward Said Reader,[2] p. 144

“Zionism therefore developed with a unique consciousness of itself, but with little or nothing left over for the unfortunate natives.”

Ibid. p. 139

Edward Said’s essay “Zionism from the Standpoint of it Victims” offers critical insight into a critique of Zionism precisely insofar as it demonstrates that Zionism as a form of colonial discourse cannot represent its victims, even so as to claim to be working to their benefit. It is this lack of representation that forces Said to write a critique of Zionism with such a title — to even acknowledge that Zionism has victims is a step that disrupts the force of Zionist discourse. In Said’s words, the “actual physical being [of the natives of Palestine] was ignored; later it became a troublesome detail.”[3]Said struggles to account for this belatedness by which the existence of the native came to be acknowledged in the Zionist consciousness; indeed, it is the secondary and disparaging nature of such an acknowledgement that Said consistently emphasizes but for which he fails to account. Said’s essay is crucial in identifying not only the common link between Zionism and other forms of colonialism, but also in identifying Zionism’s unique and striking features, its “unique consciousness of itself,” that distinguishes it from other colonialisms that exhibit a fascination with their colonized subjects. However, as Said’s main move is to link Zionism and European colonialism, he fails to account for these very features in a way that centers their historical specificity.

Despite Said’s genealogical stance towards Zionism, which aims to uncover its roots and expose it as another iteration of a European colonialist project, Said’s conceptualization of Zionism often begins with an idea of Zionism that takes its contemporary historical manifestation as its raison d’être, a gesture contradictory to that of a genealogical critique. He states, “After several decades of treating the Arabs as if they were not there at all, Zionism came fully into its own by actively destroying as many Arab traces as it could.”[4] The notion that Zionism “came fully into its own” presupposes an idea of Zionism that is used to explain the past as conforming to this eventual violent tendency associated with contemporary Israeli policies towards Palestinians. Said often appeals to conditions of the present to explain the lack of representation of Palestinian interests in the past, invoking what he calls “The concealment by Zionism of its own history”[5] as if it were a Zionist triumphalism that ultimately came to power to erase the presence of an alternative narrative, and not a structural feature present to Zionism from the start that did this.

Said’s argument, important though it is for establishing the link between Zionism and colonialism more generally, is ultimately weakened by a refusal to consider the specificity of Zionist discourse vis-à-vis the European powers. Said cannot, apparently, account for why the link between Zionism and European colonialism exists other than to say that Zionism and colonialism both developed in Europe, the center of colonial power, and that many early Zionist exhibited explicitly racist attitudes towards native Palestinian inhabitants. Both of these criticisms granted, these do little to account for Zionism’s specificity from other forms of colonialism. Indeed, Said himself posits that “Racism is too vague a term: Zionism is Zionism. For the Arab Palestinian, this tautology has a sense that is perfectly congruent with, but exactly opposite of, what it says to Jews.”[6] And yet why this perfectly opposite positionality? Positing (above) an “intelligent boundary” at the “interior” of Zionism between benefits for Jews and non-Jews cannot be accounted for with weak claims that Zionism’s “unique consciousness of itself” left “little or nothing left over for the unfortunate natives.” The notion that it is a mere supplementarity of native concerns that lead to their dismissal elides the fact that “Zionism aimed to create a society that could never be anything but ‘native’…”[7] This discursive exigency in effect made it impossible for the Palestinian subject to be represented as native herself.

The flawed theoretical assumption that governs Said’s analysis is that Zionism defined itself against the native, whom it subordinated and excluded. Explaining Zionism in these terms takes the present realities of Zionist colonialism as definitive from the start. In fact, the exclusion of the representation of a native Palestinian population is more readily comprehensible if we consider the fact that it was not against this population that Zionism defined itself, but that its “unique consciousness of itself” was established against the European nations.

This theoretical move is not a mere flipping of Said’s argument, one that re-consolidates a Eurocentric narrative and centers the European metropole as the determinant signifying force, nor is it a move which essentializes an ahistorical Zionism which is unassailable by the tools of critique employed in criticizing other forms of colonialism. Instead, I want to accept Said’s thesis that Zionism and European colonialism are linked in a way that made the Zionist subordination of the Palestinian via Orientalist tropes a historical reality. However, in order to understand in what sense this is true, and to simultaneously account for Zionism’s delayed encounter with the Palestinian, we must turn to the European discourse from which Zionist discourse emerged.

III. Bauman, Allosemitism and “the Jewish Question”[8]

I turn now to Zygmunt Bauman’s essay “Allosemitism: Premodern, Modern, Postmodern,”[9] which situates European discourse around Jews within the European conception of the nation-state. In tracing Bauman’s contentions about the discourse around “the Jew” that circulated in Europe, I aim to show that it is the epistemological and categorical distinctions of this discourse that Zionism reproduces. To understand this, we must examine Bauman’s deployment of the term “allosemitism.” As defined by Bauman, allosemitism “refers to the practice of setting the Jews apart as people radically different from all the others, needing separate concepts to describe and comprehend them and special treatment in all or most social intercourse — since the concepts and treatments usefully deployed when facing or dealing with other people or peoples, simply would not do.”[10] Thus, Bauman identifies an extreme ambivalence located at the heart of discourse around Jews, one in which the discursive subject of “the Jew” becomes problematically located within “the Jewish Question.” Whether one regarded the Jews as ultimately assimilable to the European nations or not, “the Jew” as a site of ambivalence is a subject who needed to be problematized and questioned. This “abstract Jew,” as Bauman puts it, is “the Jew as a concept located in a different discourse from the practical knowledge of ‘empirical’ Jews, and hence located at a secure distance from experience and immune to whatever information may be supplied from experience…”[11] Although I am not interested in the absolute distinction between “empirical” and “abstract” that Bauman makes, his point is important insofar as it highlights that the actual existence of Jews in Europe did not itself necessitate a problematic and unassimilated category of “the Jew.” This latter notions is an effect of a system of representation that carries with it discursive force, one which distinguished absolutely between Jew and European and created a discourse by which it could understand the former’s non-belonging in the European nations.

This discourse, which we know today as “the Jewish Question,” was not only a product of antisemites who sought to argue that Jews could not be accepted into the European nations. Although it is certainly true that “the Jewish Question” was a subject written about by antisemites who argued just this, such as Adolf Hitler and Bruno Bauer (whose argument was famously critiqued by Karl Marx[12]), it was also mentioned by prominent members of the Zionist movement. Leo Pinsker in 1882 describes “The eternal problem presented by the Jewish Question” as “unsolved, like the squaring of the circle, but unlike it, it is still a burning question.”[13] The discourse around “the Jewish Question” led Ahad Haam to ask at The First Zionist Congress in 1897 wheter the “establishment of the Jewish state in our times” would “permit us to say that ‘our question’ has been solved in its entirety…”[14] Finally, it was within this discourse that Theodor Herzl, widely regarded as the “father” of political Zionism, published “A Solution of the Jewish Question” in The Jewish Chronicle in London, 1896.[15] All of this shows that the Zionist movement readily accepted the ambivalent placement of “the Jew” within Europe, and sought to participate in a conversation that purported to discuss the nature of this problematic placement and offer a solution. However, this very participation itself reproduced the placement of the Jewish subject as problematic in a European context. The very system of signification by which Europe came to understand the presence of its Jewish subjects and by which it identified (and manufactured) such presence as inherently problematic are the self-same terms by which Zionism came to understand itself viz-à-viz the European nations.

IV. The Nation-State and Worlding[16] “the Jew”

In what terms can we understand the ambivalence of “the Jew” in Europe, and how did this ambivalence initiate a discourse which sought to understand “the Jew” as an inherent problem that needed addressing? For Bauman, “the Jew” was ambivalent because he represented the impossibility of order, insofar as he was that which the ordering system of the European nations could not account for. He argues powerfully that

[t]he order modern Europe built was to be the nation-state order, and that involved political powers waging cultural crusades against ethnic minorities, regional customs and local dialects, so that the myth of national self-sameness could be made into the legitimizing formula of political powers. Into this Europe of nations, states, and nation-states, only Jews did not fit, having only gypsies [sic] for company. Jews were not an ethnic minority in any one of the nation-states, but dispersed all over the place. But neither were they locally residing members of a neighboring nation. They were the epitome of incongruity: a non-national nation, and so cast a shadow on the fundamental principle of modern European order: that nationhood is the essence of human destiny.[17]

Jews were thus an existential threat to the foundational assumptions of the nation-state as such, the principle of Cuius regio, eius religio that governed that national fantasy of an absolute coincidence between people, culture, language, religion, and nation. As such, the subject of “the Jew” required a “worlding” by which he could be brought into the order of “the world” as the European saw it, that is, into the system of signification by which the European understood the world. To fit the Jew into the world-order of Europe required both locating him in “world” — a determined geographic space — and “order” — a particular arrangement of this space viz. the nation-state. Insofar as the nation-state was understood as a “natural” arrangement of political space, the Zionist solution no doubt appeared to both Jew and European as the “natural” solution to the ambivalence of the Jewish position in Europe, and not the result of a discourse whose first task was to produce that same ambivalence. This making-subject of “the Jew” — previously the object created and represented by an allosemitic discourse — could never be a simple transference, but necessitated a concerted effort of a whole history of forces — forces that could not help but result in violence. To make of the Jewish nation a Jewish state on the model of the European nation-state would involve waging the same “cultural crusades” that were principle to the nation-state as such. In order to produce the effect of a seemingly natural coincidence between Land and People, all that contradicted such an illusion had to be erased — at first, discursively, and later, violently.[18]

V. Arendt on Antisemitism, the Nation-State, and Zionism

By the end of the eighteenth century it had become clear that none of the estates or classes in the various countries was willing or able to become the new ruling class, that is, to identify itself with the government as the nobility had done for centuries. The failure of the absolute monarchy to find a substitute within society led to the full development of the nation-state and its claim to be above all classes, particular interests, the true and only representative of the nation as a whole. It resulted, on the other side, in a deepening of the split between state and society upon which the body politic of the nation rested. Without it, there would have been no need — or even any possibility — of introducing the Jews into European history on equal terms.

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 17[19]

Hannah Arendt’s reflections on these themes helps to further develop my thesis of the connection between the subject-position of “the Jew” as the object of an antisemitic or allosemitic discourse and the eventual development of Zionism. Above, Arendt describes how the particularities of the development of the nation-state necessitated the integration of the Jews into “European history on equal terms.” However, Arendt rightly identifies the “palpable inconsistency that Jews received their citizenship from governments which in the process of centuries had made nationality a prerequisite for citizenship and homogeneity of population the outstanding characteristic of the body politic.”[20] The Jews could never be unambiguously integrated into this framework of the nation-state as such; rather, a different act of world-ordering was required. Thus, Arendt claims that “The only direct, unadulterated consequence of nineteenth-century antisemitic movements was not Nazism but, on the contrary, Zionism, which, at least in its Western ideological form, was a kind of counterideology, the ‘answer’ to antisemitism.”[21] This “answer” is, of course, in reference to the discursive production of “the Jewish Question” which rendered the Jews problematic in the first place.

Arendt thus argues similarly to Bauman that Zionism helped to resolve the dissonance of the presence of the discursive subject of “the Jew” in a European national context. She states that “Zionism in the decade after the first World War, and even in the decade preceding it, owed its strength not so much to political insight (and did not produce political convictions) as it did to its critical analysis of psychological reactions to sociological facts.”[22]Zionism thus resolved psychological tensions produced by the existence of a Jewish population within purportedly homogeneous nation-states, while exhibiting a lack of political realism about what a “Jewish state” would actually mean. Judith Butler, in her Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism, shows how Arendt “attempted to show how, for structural reasons, the nation-state produces mass numbers of refugees and must produce them in order to maintain the homogeneity of the nation it seeks to represent, in other words, to support the nationalism of the nation-state.”[23]This observation “led her to oppose any state formation that sought to reduce or refuse the heterogeneity of its population, including the founding of Israel on principles of Jewish sovereignty…”[24] Arendt thus knew critically how Zionism was both a reaction to European antisemitism and a reproduction of the categorical assumptions of the European nation-state, one that could not avoid the violence that was inherent to those assumptions.

VI. “The Hidden Question”: the Trace of the Palestinian Subject

With the above analyses, we can more readily comprehend why Zionism refuses to represent its colonized subjects: these subjects do not represent a people to be dominated and exploited, as in other forms of colonialism, but rather, represent an absolutely contradiction to the terms by which Zionism understands itself. To acknowledge the existence of Palestinians, or, later, the legitimacy of their experiences, would thus be impossible within Zionist discourse. One document which is especially revealing of Zionism’s refusal to acknowledge the presence of a native Palestinian population was published in 1907 by Yitzhak Epstein. This remarkable document’s title, “The Hidden Question,” neatly summarizes the location of the Palestinian subject within Zionist discourse: “This issue [of Jewish-Arab relations]…has not been forgotten by the Zionists but has simply gone completely unnoticed by them and, in its true form, is barely mentioned in the literature of our movement.”[25] Despite the foundational contradiction that the existence of a native population posed to Zionist discourse, we must understand how it is that the question of the native remained “hidden” within Zionism. Said’s language of a “firm and intelligent boundary” “existing at [Zionism’s] interior where it was never seen” is illustrative of the problem: how is it that Zionism’s bifurcation between Jew and Palestinian existed without Zionism ever representing the Palestinian?

Because Zionism defined itself against the European nations, and insofar as “Europe” was an identity marked by the trace of an Oriental subject,[26]Zionism was itself marked by the colonial exigencies of the European nations. Europe sought to arrange a place within its world-order for “the Jew” while maintaining the essential exteriority of “the Orient” from such order (in the form of the self-same nation. Another form of order was prescribed for “the Orient,” namely, colonialism). At the same time, Zionism had developed its own representational anxieties, constructing and maintaining the precarious position of subjectivity that the European nations had afforded it. The making-subject of “the Jew” was predicated upon the emergence of “the Jew” into the European world-order — in the form of the nation-state — and in this respect it remained precarious insofar as its national narrative was constrained by the representational and colonial interests of the European powers (viz. Britain) and threatened by the inevitably confrontation with the native Palestinian population.

Britain sought to give to the Zionists a Jewish State, but one that maintained the colonial interests that governed all of its policies towards its occupied territories, including Palestine. As the Mandate for Palestine of 1922 shows, Britain aimed to provide the “political, administrative, and economic conditions” that would lay the foundation for Jewish statehood, while providing no such institutions for the native inhabitants of Palestine.[27] At the same time, the Mandate purported to safeguard the “civil and religious rights of all the inhabitants of Palestine, irrespective of race and religion.”[28]Thus, Britain maintained the Zionist aspirations within a colonial discourse that purported benevolence towards colonized populations, but held the Jewish subject — to be properly worlded as European — above them, maintaining and enforcing the system of signification that governed the colonial world.

Thus far we have seen how Zionism defined itself against the European nations, how it inherited the idea of the nation-state from them, and how it sought to attain such an idea for itself. However, the making-subject of “the Jew” qua the making-nation of the Jewish people was threatened by the terms by which Britain sought to maintain Zionism within its own colonial interests. Winston Churchill’s White Paper contradicts the very idea of the nation-state that Zionism inherited from Europe, stating that the goal of making Palestine “as Jewish as England is English” was “impracticable,” thus denying the Jews of the coincidence of people, land, culture, and language that was at the heart of the nation-state as such. This denial exposed the fantasy that lay at the foundations of Zionism as a nationalist discourse, and therefore could not be perceived as anything but an existential threat. Zionism’s only response was violence: desperate violence that sought to reclaim the narrative that authorized the notion of the Jewish State built on the European idea of the nation-state as a national self-sameness. The national self-presence of the Jewish people was contradicted by the presence of an Other, a presence that had to be eradicated by every means and at every level — political, demographic, national, and discursive — to the point at which even to acknowledge this violence is to be accused of threatening the metaphysical existence of the Jewish people.

We must thus understand the trace of the Palestinian subject within the Zionist project which refused to acknowledge any such presence in two senses. In the first, Zionism was itself constrained by the British colonial interests which, at least initially, mobilized the Zionist project. As “the Jew” was translated into the subject of a nation-state as it was understood in Europe, Zionism necessarily inherited the colonial exigencies that were corollary to the European nations’ understanding of themselves. On the other hand, Zionism was itself marked by the negation of the possibilities it foreclosed: like all nationalisms, it refused to acknowledge any heterogeneity that was contrary to its own narrative assumptions. Thus, the native Palestinian subject existed “at the interior” of Zionism as an impossibility — an impossibility that, once inevitably revealed to actually exist in the world, could only be perceived as an absolute contradiction.

VII. Conceptualizing Violence

To understand Zionism in these terms is not to endorse claims that a critique of Zionism is a threat to Israel’s “right to exist,” or anything of the sort; rather, it is to understand the discourse that is enacted by such claims, from which their performative authority is derived. Zionism is a form of settler colonialism that is predicated upon the usurpation of land from native inhabitants, but it conceives of itself as a nationalist project for the benefit of the Jewish people. As such, attempts to account for Zionism’s absolute debasement of Palestinian interests by awkward claims that “Zionism…confronted the Orient in the Orient” simply will not do.[29] Zionism’s act of world-ordering is to place the Jews within a European national worldview, to organize a national space, and not to organize an oriental space and subjectivity as the objects of colonial expansion. Zionism lacks entirely the colonial fascination with its colonized object, described by Timothy Mitchell as the “world-as-exhibition”.[30] For Zionism there is only the land and its “natural” occupants, the Jews. Any other existence that did not fit into this world-ordering narrative was and could only be a diametrically opposed threat, not only to the Zionist idea, but indeed, to the idea of the “Jews”-as-nation. To challenge the Zionist narrative is thus interpreted, as least from within such a narrative, not as a material challenge to colonial interests, but as an existential challenge to the existence of a people, especially as that people becomes increasingly identified with the nation itself. To resist the material interests of a colonial power and to deny the legitimacy of that nation-state itself are two vastly different threats, and the kinds of violence they incite will be categorically different.

How should we conceptualize the violence initiated by Zionist discourse, and how can such a conceptualization inform our understanding of state violence, power, colonialism, and nationalism? Zionism is first of all marked by violence — the violence of European antisemitism, pogroms, and the Holocaust.[31] It then situates itself within the allosemitic discourse that made such violence possible, taking its fundamental distinctions for granted and reproducing them on its own. As a secondary distinction, it comes to understand the existence of a native population as a contradiction to its national narrative within the paradigm of the nation-state it inherited from the European colonial powers. Finally, Zionism wages its own “cultural crusade,” its own act of world-ordering in order to make its understanding of itself and its destiny an empirical reality.

Nationalism in the postcolonial context is a particular kind of world-ordering and violence insofar as it receives its understanding of itself through a dominant discourse which creates the narrative distinctions that mobilize colonialist (or antisemitic) violence. Said’s point that “the cultural horizons of a nationalism may be fatally limited by the common history it presumes of colonizer and colonized”[32] is thus correct but understated. By reproducing the distinction between colonizer and colonized (or between Jew and European), nationalism elevates the colonized to a precarious subjectivity which is resistant to adapting to alternative narratives of victimhood. By seeking only to maintain its own precarious subject position as a position of power against the forces that have done violence to it in the past, nationalism reproduces this same violence in those other narratives and experiences it cannot acknowledge within its world-ordering system. Zionism is a caricatured expression of the violence at the heart of this kind of postcolonial nationalism.

References

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. San Diego: Harcourt Books, 1985.

Butler, Judith. Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.

Cheyette, Bryan and Laura Marcus (ed.). Modernity, Culture, and ‘The Jew’. Stanford University Press, 1998.

Freud, Sigmund. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. London: Hogarth Press, 1960 (Volume Eight of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. James Strachey, collab. Anna Freud, ass. Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson).

Mendes-Flohr, Paul, and Jehuda Reinharz. The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Mitchell, Timothy. Colonizing Egypt. Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Said, Edward. The Edward Said Reader. Vintage Books, 2000.

Said, Edward. Orientalism. Vintage Books, 1979.

Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. Vintage Books, 1994.

[1] It must be remarked that my position in articulating a critique of Zionism and Said’s own position are far from identical. As a Jew, I stand as a subject who is centered by a Zionist discourse that claims that violence against Palestinians to be in the interests of Jews. Although I refuse such a call of identification, at the same time to lay aside my own identity as a Jew in critiquing Zionism would be to reaffirm the notion that Jewish interests and Palestinian interests are mutually opposed. Zionism as a discourse refuses to represent the experiences of violence of its victims, as Said rightly points out. Thus, to speak to these experiences of violence as a Jew means I must simultaneously critique the foundational assumptions of Zionist discourse. My essay is thus situated in this context in which a critique of state violence and a critique of Zionism go hand in hand.

[2] Vintage Books, 2000

[3] Said, p. 125

[4] Ibid., p. 158

[5] Ibid., p. 117

[6] Ibid., p. 166

[7] Ibid., p. 145

[8] Part of my interest in writing this paper is to address how Jews as victims of European antisemitism and Palestinians as victims of Zionism are subjects that mutually efface each other: to speak of one necessitates neglecting the historical reality of the other. As Said puts it, “The fact that no sizeable segment of the Israeli population has as yet been able to confront the terrible social and political injustice done to the native Palestinians is an indication of how deeply ingrained are the (by now) anomalous imperialist perspectives basic to Zionism, its view of the world, its sense of an inferior native Other. The fact also that no Palestinian, regardless of his political stripe, has been able to reconcile himself to [the Jewish perception of] Zionism suggest the extent which, for the Palestinian, Zionism has appeared to be an uncompromisingly exclusionary, discriminatory, colonialist praxis. So powerful, and so unhesitatingly followed, has been the radical Zionist distinction between privileged Jews in Palestine and unprivileged non-Jews there, that nothing else has emerged, no perception of suffering human existence has escaped from the two camps created thereby” (ibid., p. 127). My goal is in part to show how these histories are intimately connected, and how indeed, one cannot be understood without the other.

[9] Modernity, Culture, and ‘The Jew’,Stanford University Press, 1998, pp. 143–156

[10] Ibid., p. 143

[11] Ibid., p. 148

[12] See “The Jewish Problem (1843)” by Bruno Bauer and “On the Jewish Problem (1844)” by Karl Marx in The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History, Oxford University Press, 2011

[13] “Auto-Emancipation (1882),” The Jew in the Modern World, p. 589

[14] “The First Zionist Congress (August 1897),” ibid., p. 606

[15] Ibid., p. 599

[16] I use the term not in the Heideggerian sense, but, as we will see, in the sense of the act of being arranged within the system of order and signification by which the world was represented and understood.

[17] Bauman, p. 153

[18] This essay seeks to principally to understand the discursive absence of the Palestinian subject from Zionist discourse, and how such absence is the condition for the actual violence of the State of Israel. Said’s essay offers one analysis of the latter. Another is found in Sara Roy’s The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-Development (Institute for Palestine Studies, 2004), which traces the process by which Palestinians in the Gaza Strip were systematically deprived of the political and economic institutions necessary to develop a national presence of their own.

[19] Harcourt Books, 1985

[20] Arendt, p. 11

[21] Ibid., p. xv

[22] Ibid., p. 79

[23] New York: Colombia University Press, 2012, p. 121

[24] Ibid.

[25] The Jew in the Modern World, p. 631

[26] Said, Orientalism, Vintage Books 1979

[27] “Mandate for Palestine (July 24,1922),” The Jew in the Modern World, p. 670

[28] Ibid.

[29] Said, “Zionism From the Standpoint of Its Victims,” The Edward Said Reader, p. 145

[30] Mitchell, Timothy, Colonizing Egypt, Cambridge University Press, 1988

[31] The notion that any of these is in any way a justification for the current situation in Israel-Palestine is, of course, absurd.

[32] Said, “Yeats and Decolonization,” Culture and Imperialism, Vintage Books, 1994, p. 223