At the beginning of 2012, Judith Butler published a book gathering a series of studies carried out between 2004 and 2010, Parting Ways. Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism1, with the aim of discrediting the assertions most frequently advanced in the public space whenever a criticism of Israel is formulated there: to criticize Israel is to be antisemitic; to lay claim to one’s Jewishness is to lay claim to Zionism; not to endorse the policy of the State of Israel is to repudiate one’s Jewishness; to assume a non-Zionist or even anti-Zionist “diasporist” position is to put the existence of the Jews in peril. This book thus anticipated the polemic that surrounded the awarding of the Adorno Prize to its author in September 2012.2 However, if many Jews in the diaspora are sensitive to such arguments, it is because most of them know that criticism of Israel and, more broadly, of Zionism is very often underpinned by antisemitic motivations, which Butler does not deny. She rightly describes the double bind that paralyzes them today — as happened to Primo Levi himself in the 1980s: “They abhor the occupation and are appalled by the Israeli military strikes against civilians in Gaza. (…) But they fear that supporting such criticism will feed antisemitism and consider it unacceptable to express publicly criticisms liable to be instrumentalized to increase antisemitism and violent crimes against Jews” (p. 20). From then on they fall silent, thereby confirming through their silence the constitutive limits of the public space where Israel is concerned: “No criticism is audible without immediately arousing the suspicion that the person formulating it has something against the Jews or, if she is herself Jewish, has something against herself” (p. 119). It is in large part to such Jews that Parting Ways is addressed, in order to help them emerge from their muteness, to take a public stand, not to let themselves be intimidated. Beyond them, Butler also addresses those who, closer to her, assume anti-Zionist positions and hold that the State of Israel — issuing from political Zionism — depends structurally on the dispossession and colonization of the Palestinians. Under these conditions, and if one is concerned with political justice, the perilous question of its legitimacy as a State must, in her view, be posed. Perilous because such radicalism is generally presented as a call for the genocide of the Jewish population of Israel, as though the physical existence of a people depended on the nature of its political organization. One must, still according to Butler, dare to pose this question, at least as a reflective moment that prejudges nothing of how one will answer it. All of her analysis converges, however, toward the necessity of a “dismantling of the structure of Jewish sovereignty” (p. 214) in order to free up the possibility of imagining a “form of polity that one could consider legitimate for countries currently inhabited by Jewish and Palestinian Israelis and by Palestinians living under occupation” (p. 19) and who were and still are regularly dispossessed of their country. According to Butler, the one who poses such questions need not necessarily, like many anti-Zionist Jews, cease to call himself Jewish.
In the face of suspicions of self-hatred, of antisemitism or of calls for genocide, Butler knows that it is useless to expend energy proving to the suspicious the purity of her intentions. Her strategy consists rather in showing that, far from being anti-Jewish, the critique — or more exactly her critique — “of state violence and of colonial domination” (p. 2) can be founded on principles elaborated from Jewish resources. Therein lies the book’s philosophical project: to derive universal principles of equality, justice, cohabitation and remembrance from the singular perspective of Jewishness, but a Jewishness distinct from the one the State of Israel claims to represent. These principles are ethical in nature in the sense that ethics signifies “the act by which a place is made for those who are ‘not me’” (p. 9), but Butler wants from the outset to reformulate them in terms of political philosophy, in order to overcome too strict a division between the two domains. Let us state it straightaway: according to Butler, if one takes history from the point of view of the Palestinians, none of these principles could be derived either from Zionism or from Israeli actions. In Israel itself they are never treated on an equal footing with Israelis; the State of Israel is founded on an injustice toward them that has never been repaired and continues with the regime of military occupation; the very structure of this State as a nation-state installed on a territory where another people lived implies their expulsion, against any prospect of cohabitation. Finally, the Zionist narrative represses that of Palestinian dispossession and exile. If one now adopts a Jewish point of view, Israel as a Jewish State proclaims itself the spokesperson of the Jews of the whole world and presents itself as the redemptive outcome of their history, to which only Zionism gives meaning, all the while ceaselessly invoking the Shoah rhetorically to justify “all military aggressions as proceeding from a necessary self-defence” (p. 195). Under these conditions, the extrapolation of principles of equality and justice can be done only from what Zionism sought to negate: the diaspora, exile, which must be reconsidered in a positive way. But the gesture of extrapolation must also confront the Shoah, the major trauma that occurred in the course of this exile. On this point, one must, like Primo Levi, combat every form of denialism, but also keep the awareness of the difference between the “then” and the “now,” so as to avoid the “‘then’ replacing and absorbing the ‘now,’ which can only produce a blindness with regard to the present” (p. 201). One can, Judith Butler asserts, be horrified like Levi by “the antisemitic slogans assimilating Jews to Nazis that appeared on the walls of his city” (p. 203) at the time of the Lebanon War of 1982, while finding intolerable the constraints imposed on the Palestinian populations in the name of Israel’s security, the continued construction in occupied territories, the often brutal conduct of the Israeli military, the proven practice of torture against certain Palestinian prisoners, the destruction of family homes if they are suspected of sheltering a “terrorist,” the “targeted” executions, the number of civilian victims during the bombardments by Israeli aviation (Lebanon, 1982, 2006; Gaza, 2008–2009, 2012), etc. Would the invocation of the universal respect for human rights not, however, suffice to formulate this intolerable? Concerned to articulate the singular with the universal, Butler asserts that there are different ways of arriving at the struggle for rights. Hers comes from the formation she received in her childhood within the Jewish community: “Perhaps I would not be who I am,” she writes, “without a certain religious formation that does not at all imply a set of beliefs concerning God (…) or irrational ways of thinking (…). Certain values are incorporated into practices without being easily extractable from them and transformable into ‘beliefs’ formulated in explicit propositions” (p. 22). Among these practices she often evokes the shivah, that collective ritual of mourning publicly recognizing the loss of a loved one while insisting on the importance of continuing to affirm life. Since the attacks of 11 September, Butler has been worked upon by an essential question: can we content ourselves with publicly mourning only our own dead? Which lives are worthy of being mourned?3 Whoever has heard her speak4 knows that her public presence is not that of a hate-filled passionaria. Despite her notoriety, one senses in her a fragility, an authenticity. After her interventions, she welcomes questions, all questions, in a patient and dialogical way. As a true philosopher, Judith Butler is above all concerned with argumentation, with making explicit the presuppositions that order ways of thinking. It is therefore on this plane that her book must be examined. Is the “derivation,” the “translation,” the “extrapolation,” or again the “universalization” of principles from Jewish resources that she proposes philosophically convincing? And are we necessarily led to share the judgements she proposes on that basis?
But first, what does Judith Butler mean by “Jewish resources”? Writing to defend the validity of a certain notion of jewishness, she also knows that she risks falling into what her entire work combats: identities, stable definitions of the self based on unquestioned categories and norms. The use she proposes of the term “diasporic” or “exilic” — without the return implied by the notion of Galout — seems to her fitting for specifying what she means by Jewishness in an “anti-identitarian” perspective (p. 117). Under Butler’s pen, “diasporic” in fact refers to several senses. It is first of all a geographical condition according to which the “Jews were dispersed among the non-Jews” (p. 99), which she immediately transcribes as a way of being from the outset in relation with them, of living in a world that is always heterogeneous. If one had to situate Jewishness, it would be only “at the moment of its encounter with the non-Jew” (p. 26). Such an encounter does not bring together two terms constituted beforehand, since the “dispersion of the self” (p. 26) — a second sense — that is, the absence of identity, the impossibility of coinciding with oneself, is its immediate consequence. From then on “the relation with the non-Jew is at the heart of Jewish ethics,” which enjoins one “to depart from Jewishness as an exclusive ethical framework” (p. 99). Concretely this means that, against the affective communal attachments reinforced by history, we must rid ourselves of the preoccupation with “the vulnerability and the fate of the Jewish people alone” (p. 27). I will here voice a first reservation, a first difficulty: on the one hand, Butler characterizes Jewish ethics by its relation with the non-Jew; on the other, she asserts that, in order to adopt an ethical attitude, one must depart from Jewishness, that is, from this way of being in relation with the non-Jew… Moreover, can one thus pass from an idea of dispersion of the Jews among the non-Jews to the idea of dispersion of the self, understood as a non-identitarian or non-identified or problematic identity that corresponds rather to the dilemmas of emancipated or assimilated Jews? Before emancipation, the diaspora corresponded to a diaspora of communities, among which circulated scholars, merchants, vagabonds. For the members of these communities, identity went without saying, which did not prevent polyglottism, contacts, disputationes with the non-Jews. Finally, if one situates, as Butler also does, on a historical plane and without necessarily lapsing into a “lachrymose” type of Jewish history, can one simply define the diasporic as qualifying “a population (that) depends on its cohabitation with the non-Jew” (p. 15), without asking at the same time how the non-Jews conceived their cohabitation with the Jews?
A geographical and historical condition, the diasporic is also associated by Butler with the religious tradition that developed in the history of the Jews. However, even if, as we have seen above, Butler evokes certain elements of her religious formation to support her viewpoint, she does not elaborate it by relying directly on the texts of the tradition but on philosophers or thinkers who drew inspiration from it in modernity: Levinas for the relation to alterity, Benjamin for messianism, but also Edward Said for Moses (a Moses already interpreted by Freud). Although Butler indicates, without having the time to develop it, that certain religious sources might be found at the origin of Hannah Arendt’s political thought, the latter occupies a place of choice among these authors for her critique of the impasses of the nation-state with respect to the condition of the stateless and of refugees, which was, among others, that of the Jews in the 1930s. There are in Parting Ways some very fine interpretive pages — those concerning in particular Critique of Violence, that strange text of Walter Benjamin, or again those concerning Primo Levi. But at the risk of seeming to quibble over interpretive details, and since Butler takes the trouble, as a philosopher, to build upon the thought of others, I will have other reservations as to the way she elaborates the articulation between ethics and politics on the basis of Levinas and of Arendt.
From ethics to the political according to Levinas
For Levinas, as Butler rightly recalls, the infinite alterity of the other, the face, erupts into the self, prior to all reflection, commands me by its very vulnerability and weakness and solicits my responsibility in an exorbitant, infinite manner. She also rightly insists on the fact that, according to Levinas, the signification of the face for me is at once its vulnerability and the fear I experience of my own violence, “for all that my existing, despite the innocence of its intentions, risks committing of violence and usurpation.”5 Butler also knows that for Levinas ethics qualifies a dual relation between singularities not subsumable under a common genus: the other man concerns me, me and no other; he singularizes me and solicits from me not discourses, but aid.6 Moreover, the mode of appearing of what Levinas calls the face is not that of a visible form, since it “pierces the form that nonetheless delimits it.”7 The alterity indicated by the face of the Other manifests or expresses itself without one being able to say that it is “seen.” It transcends, Levinas adds, all contextual qualifications, “professor at the Sorbonne (..) son of so-and-so, everything that is in the passport, the manner of dressing, of presenting oneself,”8 but also all cultural or historical qualifiers. Butler indeed evokes the way in which the political, according to Levinas, interrupts the ethical duo by introducing the third party, that is, the other of the other, who comes to moderate the infinity of my responsibility by prompting me toward a questioning such as: “What then are the other and the third party, the one-for-the-other? What have they done to one another? Which one comes before the other? (…) What have I to do with justice?”9. Whereas the ethical relation was pre-reflective — in this sense it is not consciousness that gives me access to the face of the other10 — the political presupposes consciousness, reflection, for I must represent the third party to myself, suspending in some way the infinite hold of the other upon me. In other words, the domain of politics is that of plurality and equality and not of duality and asymmetry. To pass from ethics to the political is to pass, according to Gérard Bensussan’s formulation, “from ethical disquiet (have I the right to be and to persevere in this being?) to the political question (have I the right to withdraw from the interrogations arising from the conflictual plurality of human beings and from their organization as just as possible)?”11 Still according to Bensussan, Levinas’s political quest presupposes first of all that there is no simple transition, no immediate transitivity from ethics to the political, even as any politics cut off from the immemorial indicated by the biblical verses “Do not forget that you were a stranger..” or “No land shall be alienated irrevocably, for the land is mine and you are strangers, domiciled with me,”12 turns into tyranny. Whence, whatever the disagreements one may have with Levinas’s political positions, and even if it is altogether exact that it is always in relation to a justice established by and for the Jews that he evokes the imperative of which Zionism would be the bearer, one must recognize, with Jacques Derrida, that “he always wanted to subtract his thematic (…) of election from every nationalist seduction.”13 Butler, on the contrary, would like to politicize directly the infinite ethical exigency emanating from the other and assigning me to a responsibility itself infinite,14 by posing questions such as “does the face survive in the domain of the political?” (p. 55) or “is it possible to respond to the faces of the multitude?” (p. 57).15
To pose these questions one must, according to Butler, go beyond Levinas, maintain a critical relation to his philosophy. Her point of departure is “the fact that the Palestinians have no face for him (or that they are the emblem of facelessness)” (p. 39). She refers here to an interview of Levinas with Alain Finkielkraut and Shlomo Malka, at the time of the massacre of Palestinians by Christian Lebanese militias under the complicit protection of the Israeli army at Sabra and Shatila. S. Malka having asked Levinas to what extent the Palestinian was not the other par excellence of the Israeli, Levinas replies:
My definition of the other is altogether different. The other is the neighbour, not necessarily the kin, but the kin too. And in that sense, being for the other, you are for the neighbour. But if your neighbour attacks another neighbour or is unjust toward him, what can you do? There alterity then takes on another character; there, in alterity, an enemy can appear, or at least there is found the problem of knowing who is right and who is wrong, who is just and who is unjust. There are people who are wrong.16
One may certainly regret that Levinas did not commit himself more clearly to denouncing the crime of Sabra and Shatila and to expressing directly a compassion toward the Palestinian victims. But in this reply he is concerned first to head off a false interpretation that one might make of his philosophy. The Other is neither Palestinian, nor Israeli, nor Jewish, nor French, nor anything whatsoever, which has nothing to do with the assertion that the Palestinian would have no face. The Other is my neighbour, any one at all whose misery or weakness arouses my infinite responsibility, and as such he may be my closest kin, that is, the one who is of my own. But such an infinite cannot be directly political, for one must pose the question of justice: my immediate neighbour (a Jew if I am Jewish) can do harm to another (another Jew or a non-Jew). In that case I must render justice to that other. This passage, often interpreted as a refusal to consider the alterity of the Palestinian, would correspond rather to the question of the responsibility of the Israelis at Sabra and Shatila. But this formulation also applies to the Palestinian: the fact of not being my kin does not thereby make him the incarnation of the Other. If harm is done to unarmed Palestinian populations, by the Israelis or others, this concerns me, calls for my responsibility, that is, for example, my public denunciation, and must in no case be minimized or forgotten. This does not however guarantee that this other, as a Palestinian, will never do wrong to anyone but himself. And in particular to my kin, those of my own. As Levinas writes in Otherwise than Being, as soon as the question of justice is posed, “my lot matters.”17 This is why, even though one may admit with Butler that between Israel and the Palestinians the positions are not equal, insofar as, among other things, only one of the two positions disposes of the means proper to States, does this suffice to evacuate, as Butler does, the question of the “faults of the Palestinians” by replying “that there are surely better and worse ways of conducting a movement of resistance to colonial occupation but (that) every evaluation of Palestinian strategies should take place within a framework of political resistance” (pp. 119–121)? If it is truly a matter of seeking to elaborate universal ethical and political principles, must our judgements not draw on them for all the parties present, even the one that is dominated by the other? It is certainly scandalous that the Israeli leaders justify their policy by trivializing the reference to the Shoah,18 and it is just to recall that the fact, for European Jews, of having immensely suffered from a genocidal policy does not confer a priori political innocence upon those who escaped it or who are the descendants of the victims. But the history of dispossession, exile and suffering that is that of the Palestinians, and which, unlike that of the Jews, has not been renewed by the creation of a State, does not confer upon them a priori innocence either, from the moment when, since 1948 in particular, they have organized themselves politically. If Butler is altogether right to cast doubt on the constant recourse to the argument of self-defence by the Israeli governments and their strategy of responding to violence with the violence of aerial bombardments, does the exigency of the “struggle for non-violence, that is, for a struggle against an ethics of revenge, a struggle not to kill the other, a struggle to encounter and honour the face of the other” (p. 61) not also concern the struggle of the dominated themselves?
From the political to ethics according to Arendt
Whereas, concerning Levinas, it was for Butler a matter of politicizing his ethics, concerning Arendt it is rather a matter of making explicit the ethical principles that orient her formulations, even though Arendt herself does not do so. One of the strongest ideas that Butler extrapolates from the Arendtian attention to the plurality not only of persons but also of peoples is the idea of a cohabitation upon the earth as a given that does not proceed from our decision. The plurality of peoples is a fact that we do not choose, which means that cohabitation with others, different from us, is a fundamental trait of the human condition. One can say, then, that a just political organization must take account of the necessary non-homogeneity of human populations, even within a State. So that, according to Butler, the invocation of this unchosen cohabitation could be “the basis for a binationalism that tries to undo nationalism” (p. 180). This is why, the Israeli nation-state having willed itself as the State of the Jews alone, it could constitute itself only by expelling the non-Jewish populations and granting only a second-class status to the Arab citizens who remained in place. To support this analysis, the works of Hannah Arendt are fundamental. In this direction, there is in the Origins of Totalitarianism a passage essential for Butler, in which Arendt mentions the birth of the State of Israel:
Like virtually all other events of our century, this solution of the Jewish question had managed only to produce a new category of refugees, the Arabs, thereby increasing the number of the stateless and the rightless by some 700,000 to 800,000 persons. Now what had just occurred in Palestine within the most cramped of territories and on the scale of hundreds of thousands of individuals was subsequently reproduced in India on a vast scale and for millions upon millions of people. Since the peace treaties of 1919 and 1920, refugees and the stateless are, like a curse, the lot of all the new States that were created in the image of the nation-state.19
Butler is right: the history of refugees is the point of departure of Arendt’s critique of the nation-state and of her formulation of the two intrinsically linked rights that the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen lacks: “The right to have rights (which means: to live in a structure where one is judged according to one’s acts and one’s opinions) and (the) right to belong to a certain category of organized community.”20 Butler indeed notes this reference to a specific belonging, but it would be a stage of Arendtian thought subsequently surpassed, such that it would be in Eichmann in Jerusalem that Arendt would have stated the true principle permitting a radical critique of the nation-state, thus linking its structure more directly to “entry into a genocidal politics” (p. 24). One could, according to Butler, formulate it on the basis of Arendt’s justification of Eichmann’s condemnation to death:
“You supported and carried out a policy that consisted in refusing to share the earth with the Jewish people and the peoples of a number of other nations — as if you and your superiors had the right to decide who should and should not inhabit the world”21
It is here that I will diverge once again. If one had, in effect, to formulate the norm that orients the right flouted by Eichmann and his superiors in Arendt’s discourse, it would possibly be: “No one has the right to decide who should and should not inhabit the world.” The genocidal crime proceeds from such a decision, in consequence of which an entire people must be physically effaced from the surface of the earth. Granting that the principle flouted by the treatment the nation-state inflicts on refugees and the stateless refers to a refusal to live with such-and-such a population present on the territory where one lives oneself in the company of those who are similar to oneself, and even if the measures taken against these populations weaken them to the point of making them possible candidates for a more radical treatment that would directly threaten their “right to life,”22 one cannot say, basing oneself on Arendt, that the principle flouted by the nation-state is directly the right of a people to live on the earth, “to inhabit the world,” but rather the right of each one “to belong to a certain organized political community.” In our day, those who invoke this right most often formulate it as a right to constitute a national community. Whence, according to Arendt, the obstinate character of the group consciousness of refugees, who “are the first to insist on their nationality and to want to constitute their own national community.”23 The problem, once again, is that if this claim is realized in the form of a nation-state, it encounters in turn the political impasses that had aroused it, the State that procures a status for a certain group of refugees being structurally led to “produce a new category of refugees” by means most often violent. Yet when Arendt deals directly with the crime of genocide in Eichmann in Jerusalem, she clearly distinguishes it from any other crime — she is thinking here of the war crime — even if, she specifies, millions of people may have been killed: “For genocide it is an altogether different order that is broken and an altogether different community that is violated.”24
Butler senses well the danger incurred by her interpretation of Arendt, since she feels the need to write: “This is certainly not to say that Zionism is Nazism. (Arendt) would have refused this assimilation, and we must refuse it too” (p. 121). And I understand, in order to share it too, the disquiet that gnaws at her, and many others. For an Israeli, it could be formulated thus: we are, on the one hand, the descendants of a minority people that was victim of a genocidal project and, on the other, we are the citizens of a State that was built to the detriment of another people and continues to treat it with injustice. The Shoah cannot but come to haunt our sensibility to what this State does to others. But in the present situation, political responsibility would consist in avoiding any formulation liable to give purchase to the confused idea according to which the Jews, having been the victims of a genocide, would in turn make themselves guilty of one, even if one were to add that this is only potential. If Arendt helps us to think, it is also thanks to her rigorous labour of distinction, for which she is moreover constantly reproached. Butler is aware of this danger but not sufficiently to avoid it in her reading of Arendt.
If the nation-state is incapable by itself of guaranteeing the “right to have rights,” one must imagine another type of political organization. And it is true that the only political structure that would have avoided, in Arendt’s eyes, “the dangerous majority-minority opposition, insoluble by definition,”25 was the federated State on the model of the United States. In the Middle East this federation would have been constituted “of local Judeo-Arab councils, which (would have presupposed) that the Judeo-Arab conflict be resolved at the most elementary level, which is also the most important, that of proximity and neighbourhood.”26 Certainly the Israel of today is not exactly conformable to what Arendt imagines in a catastrophist manner in 1948, but she nonetheless anticipates in its broad outlines the situation that resulted from the partition of the territory of Mandatory Palestine:
even if the Jews were to win the war (…) the country that would then be born would be something altogether different from the dream of Jews the world over, Zionist and non-Zionist. The “victorious” Jews would live surrounded by an entirely hostile Arab population, shut in between constantly threatened frontiers, occupied with their physical self-defence to the point of losing all their other interests and all their other activities.27
Butler builds upon Arendt’s federative hope — effectively founded on an idea of cohabitation — to remobilize the solution of a binational State, which Edward Said also advocates. The binational hypothesis has all the more of an audience today in that the absence of a vision of the future on the part of the Israeli leaders, the strategy of nibbling away at the territorial continuity of Palestine through the settlements, renders more and more problematic the viability of a Palestinian nation-state. Are the Palestinian and Israeli peoples however ready to associate themselves in a State that would be neither Israeli nor Palestinian but that of all its citizens? Is there not also, as Butler herself recognizes, a Palestinian nationalism and a Palestinian aspiration aiming “to establish a nation-state for the first time and without solid international support?” (p. 205). Rather than recognizing the legitimacy of this aspiration, and in order to circumvent the Palestinian claim to a nation-state, Butler insists on the claim to the Palestinian right of return, as a right of refugees. Accession to this right would in no way imply, she warns, that “the Palestinians were going to break by force all at once into the homes of Israeli Jews and dispossess them of their furniture and their property” (p. 207). But their effective return would have to pass through legal restitutions as well as resettlements. From then on the political form corresponding to such a situation could only be, for the Palestinians and the Israelis, a single State and not two, in which nationality would not be the criterion of the legitimacy of citizenship. Butler devotes many pages to arguing in favour of this option. However, whatever the force of her arguments, one could recall here the doubts that Arendt herself expressed in the 1948 text cited above, after having formulated the federative solution, the most just in her eyes. She adds, in fact: “A federated State (…) is unrealizable today. In the present state of things it would be almost as unreasonable to proclaim a federated State over the heads of the two peoples and against their will as it was to proclaim partition. The hour of definitive solutions has certainly not come.”28 This text is to be brought together with the pragmatic point of view that accompanies Arendt’s analysis in the Origins, when, after having criticized a conception of the State based on nationality, she adds: “Until further notice, only the restoration or the establishment of national rights, as the recent example of the State of Israel proves, can ensure the restoration of human rights.”29 Such a pragmatism is today that of the Palestinians, a majority of whom continue today — but for how long? — to want a nation-state.30
Finally, what of the legitimacy of the State of Israel according to Arendt? This question posed itself for her at the time of Eichmann in Jerusalem, not at all in relation to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but with respect to the legitimacy or not of Israel to judge Eichmann. Arendt, like Jaspers, would have preferred Eichmann to be judged by an international tribunal, and she did not spare her criticisms of the way the State of Israel conceived the trial. Yet the arguments she invokes never come down to saying that Israel is incompetent to judge. I will retain here only one of the arguments advanced by Arendt. To defend Israel’s competence, she articulates in her own way the link between the historical Jewish people and this State, and proposes a very singular definition of territory, not as geographical space but as “the space between the individuals of a group whose members are bound to one another, at once separated and protected from one another, by all sorts of relations, founded on a common language, a religion, a common history, customs and laws.”31 The historical Jewish people maintained this kind of relational space through the centuries of dispersion, and it is this space that manifested itself geographically when the State of Israel was created. Arendt thus invokes a certain substantiality issuing from the diaspora, that is, specific bonds among the Jews, Jewishness not being apprehended exclusively as a “dispersion from the self,” a destabilizing relation with the non-Jew, and not solely either as a problem of personal identity. It is from this point of view that Israel has for Arendt a legitimacy — even if the problem remains entire of that other relational space which binds and separates the members of the Palestinian people, and which manifested itself geographically on the territory of Mandatory Palestine, from which thousands of Palestinians were expelled, so that this territory was henceforth no more than the physical manifestation of a single people. Whatever one may think of this State, of the reconstructed character of history, of the ideological elements of the Zionism of which it was the culmination — and which Arendt herself always criticized — this relation and its geographico-political manifestation are henceforth an unavoidable element of reality.
Certainly Israel is an essential part of the history of the Jews, but one knows well that it has not gathered them all, the majority of Jews still living in the diaspora. One knows the strong tendency of the unconditional partisans of Israeli policy to claim that Israel is the spokesperson of the Jews of the whole world. No doubt it is this that Arendt has in mind when she writes the following to Jaspers:
Israel perhaps does not have the right to speak in the name of all the Jews of the world. (I would very much like to know who would in fact have the right to speak for the Jews as Jews in the political sense of the term. It is true that many Jews do not want to be represented as Jews, or then only on the religious plane. Israel does not have the right to speak in the name of these.)32
To speak in the name of others than oneself is to represent them, to engage by one’s word those who agree to assume the same name as the one who speaks in our name. One can accept but also refuse: to be Jewish is not an ethnic affair but proceeds from a voluntary recognition. In that case the “qua Jew” is not a mere psychological trait but engages the relation one agrees to establish for oneself with the historico-cultural relational space of which Arendt speaks and which exceeds the State of Israel as such. For, after having written that Israel does not have the right to speak in the name of the Jews who do not want to be represented qua Jews, Arendt adds: “But the others? It is the only political instance we possess. It does not particularly please me but I can do nothing about it.”33 Years later — we are in 1973, just after the Yom Kippur War — one can read this, in the interview she granted to Roger Errera:
The relations between the diaspora and Israel, or what was previously Palestine, have changed because Israel is no longer simply a refuge for Polish Jews — who came from a country where a Zionist was a fellow who tried to get money from rich Jews for poor Poles. But today it is the representative of the Jewish people in the whole world. Whether this pleases us or not is another question. It does not mean that the Judaism of the diaspora must always be of the same opinion as the Israeli government. It is not a question of government, it is a question of State, and as long as this State exists, it will obviously be what represents us in the eyes of the world.34
To say that Israel is the only political instance we have does not mean that the Jews of the diaspora are citizens of the State of Israel, nor even that their horizon must be to settle there, but that the advent of this State has modified the Jewish condition the world over. So that, whether one wills it or not, what it does “represents,” in the eyes of the world, “us,” that is, those who agree to call themselves Jews, whether we are Zionists or not. An always perilous situation, insofar as it arouses amalgams and simplifications that may meet, outside Israel, more or less explicit antisemitic passions. But the radically new situation in Jewish history is that Israel is an instance not communal but political, in the sense that it is a State endowed with a government and an acting army, and therefore responsible before the world and subject to its judgement, like any other political instance. Despite all the criticisms Arendt addressed to the Zionist movement, she always maintained that it had been the first movement to pose the Jewish question politically, to understand the importance for the Jewish people of emerging from its status as pariah. In the face of this political responsibility, to judge proceeds from the responsibility of Israeli citizens but also of those who do not live in Israel and find themselves in the position of spectators, hence capable of considering in its entirety a fundamentally conflictual scene and of representing to themselves the perspectives of all parties, which implies effectively not only ridding oneself of an exclusively Israelo- — or Judeo- — centred approach, but also taking account of the fact that the protagonists are more than two (there are also the other States of the region, the great powers, etc.). Concerning Israel, the most important protagonists nonetheless remain the Palestinians. For nothing is resolved — and that is to say little — of the injustices that accompanied the birth of the State of Israel. As Arendt wrote in 1948:
the only permanent reality in this whole situation (is) the presence of Arabs in Palestine, a reality that no decision (can) modify — except perhaps the decision of a totalitarian State, applied with the brutal force proper to it.35
Palestine was at the time Mandatory Palestine. But this passage is still valid for the Israel of today.
A FEW REFLECTIONS ON MARTINE LEIBOVICI’S ARTICLE
By Jean-Charles Szurek
I share the sensibility that runs through Martine Leibovici’s article on Judith Butler, and I find stupid and odious the accusation of antisemitism levelled against the American philosopher by the Jerusalem Post, after she received the Adorno Prize in September 2012. Nevertheless, certain messages of Butler that the article reports do not meet with my agreement. Notably the idea according to which “the State of Israel — issuing from political Zionism — depends structurally on the dispossession and colonization of the Palestinians.” This sentence has the “structural” purity of simplification. I understand that it serves to bolster the American philosopher’s “anti-Zionist positions” and to advocate her thesis of a binational State, a totally unrealistic hypothesis that amounts to reformulating the Zionist project. This sentence applies rather to the teams in power in Israel since the end of the 1970s, but can in no way account for the national liberation movement constituted by historical Zionism — that Israel become a State-refuge in the face of antisemitic abuses, a State that took in hundreds of thousands of survivors as well as the Jews driven out of the Arab countries (forgotten in Butler’s reasoning). Certainly the Zionist project superbly ignored the local Arab populations from its very birth, though this is not true for a certain number of Zionist actors, but in the end today, after the creation of the State of Israel and major armed conflicts, after the birth of a Palestinian national project, and even recently of a State of Palestine, there exists a prospect of settlement far closer than the headlong flight of the Israeli right or the binational State. These are the Geneva Accords. One may hope that they will one day prevail. Therein lies the path of political justice, far more than “the perilous question of the legitimacy of the State of Israel” or the “dismantling of the structure of Jewish sovereignty” advanced by Butler. One can hardly believe one’s eyes. I would find it inelegant to propose to Butler a reflection on “the perilous question of the legitimacy of the American State” after the genocide — no, the destruction — of the Indians…
Another point of disagreement with the American philosopher: “(…) the Zionist narrative represses that of Palestinian dispossession and exile.” Are there many nation-states where, forty years after the creation of the State, there could have arisen as vigorous a calling into question of the “Zionist narrative” as the one produced by the new Israeli historians (the Benny Morrises, Ilan Pappés and others), whatever one may think of their works and, for some of them, of a minor-prophet posture? But the heart of the disagreement bears, in my view, on Jewish ethics, “the impasse of the nation-state” and the happiness of living in the diaspora. “The Shoah,” writes Martine Leibovici, following Butler but without drawing the same conclusions from it, “cannot but come to haunt our sensibility to what this State [of Israel] does to others.” Certainly, and this is why many of us have supported, and still do, movements such as Peace Now, J-call, Yesh Din, Yesh Gvul, Machsom Watch and others of which one has no idea in Europe or in the United States. These are moral and political positions conformable to Jewish ethics, to ethics tout court. What arouses my questioning about Jewish ethics as I understand it in Butler is that it would have to constitute a norm with respect to which any deviation would be morally prejudicial: a Jew does not do that. On the one hand, I understand this point of view, but, on the other, how can one fail to see that the singularization of Jewish ethics reinforces all the singularizations reproached to the Jews (chosen people, “sure of itself and domineering,” cunning people, etc.)? Would it not be preferable to tell oneself that Israel will accede to normality when one asks it simply to respect universal ethics? In Butler’s reading of Israel, there dominates a guilt of the Jew in the diaspora, so available to “the infinite alterity of the other” (Levinas). In a word, a great ignorance of what Israel is.
Notes
Columbia University Press, New York, 2012, 251 pages. One could translate this title thus: Voies divergentes. La judéité et la critique du sionisme.↩︎
Among the numerous stances taken in this affair, let us point out for example a petition entitled “No Adorno award for anti-semite Judith Butler” that circulated on the Internet on this occasion.↩︎
Cf. in particular, Judith Butler, Ce qui fait une vie. Essai sur la violence, la guerre et le deuil (Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?), trans. J. Marelli, Paris, Zones, 2010.↩︎
For those who may not have had this occasion, it suffices to surf the web, where one finds a plethora of recordings of her courses and public interventions, even the famous session where she answered a question about Hamas. For example: http://radicalarchives.org/2010/03/28/jbutler-on-hamas-hezbollah-israel-lobby/↩︎
E. Levinas, Entre nous. Essais sur le penser à l’autre (Entre Nous: Essays on Thinking-of-the-Other), p. 175. Cited by Butler, p. 56.↩︎
cf. Gérard Bensussan, Ethique et expérience. Levinas politique, éditions de La Phocide, 2008.↩︎
Emmanuel Levinas, Totalité et infini. Essai sur l’extériorité (Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority), Martinus Nijhoff, 1980, p. 172.↩︎
Emmanuel Levinas, Ethique et infini (Ethics and Infinity), Paris, Le Livre de poche, 1982, p. 80.↩︎
E. Levinas, Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence (Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence), Paris, Le Livre de poche, 1990, p. 245.↩︎
According to Levinas, the expression “to be aware of” would not be fitting (“in the face of the Other, one is aware of the vulnerability of that other,” Butler, p. 56).↩︎
Gérard Bensussan, “Levinas et la question politique,” Noesis, no. 3/2000, p. 12.↩︎
Cited by E. Levinas, in Humanisme de l’autre homme (Humanism of the Other), Paris, Le Livre de poche, 1987, pp. 108–109. Cited and commented on by G. Bensoussan, p. 90.↩︎
Jacques Derrida, Adieu à Emmanuel Levinas (Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas), Paris, Galilée, 1997, p. 202.↩︎
“A ‘nation,’ whatever it may be, that installs itself in the place of the other (…) would be bound to that other, and its responsibility with regard to that other would be infinite” (p. 61).↩︎
From Levinas’s point of view, the expression “the faces of the multitude” means nothing. There is a face only of the other to the one; this is why the passage from ethics to the political is problematic.↩︎
“Ethics and Politics.” Interview of 28 September 1982, in The Levinas Reader, edited by Sean Hand. London: Basil Blackwell, 1989, p. 294. Originally published in Les Nouveaux Cahiers, no. 71, winter 1982–83, p. 5.↩︎
E. Levinas, Autrement qu’être, op. cit., p. 250.↩︎
This is what Levinas himself writes: “To lay claim to ‘the holocaust’ in order to say that God is with us in all circumstances is as odious as the ‘Gott mit uns’ that figured on the belt buckles of the executioners,” The Levinas Reader, op. cit. p. 291 and Les Nouveaux Cahiers, no. 71, p. 3.↩︎
H. Arendt, “L’impérialisme,” trans. M. Leiris, revised by H. Frappat, in Les origines du totalitarisme. Eichmann à Jérusalem, trans. Paris, Gallimard, “Quarto,” 2001, p. 590.↩︎
Ibid., p. 599.↩︎
Eichmann à Jérusalem, trans. A. Guérin, revised by M.I Brudny-de Launay and M. Leibovici, in Les origines, Ibid., p. 1287. My italics.↩︎
“L’impérialisme,” op. cit., p. 598.↩︎
Ibid., p. 595.↩︎
“Eichmann à Jérusalem,” Ibid., p. 1281.↩︎
H. Arendt, “Pour sauver le foyer national juif il est encore temps” (“To Save the Jewish Homeland: There Is Still Time”), trans. P. Pachet revised by S. Courtine-Denamy, in Ecrits juifs (The Jewish Writings), Paris, Fayard, 2011, p. 571.↩︎
Ibid.↩︎
Ibid., p. 567.↩︎
Ibid., p. 271. In this text Arendt also denounces the massacre of Deir Yassin perpetrated by the Irgun as well as the bomb thrown “into the midst of Arab workers queuing in front of the Haifa refinery, one of the few places where Jews and Arabs had been working side by side for years” (pp. 568–569).↩︎
“L’impérialisme,” op. cit., p. 603.↩︎
There exist, however, surveys showing that this majority is in the process of declining (cf. Rachelle Kliger, “Palestinian Two-States Support Waning,” Jerusalem Post, April 22, 2010).↩︎
Eichmann à Jérusalem, op. cit., p. 1272.↩︎
H. Arendt, Lettre à K. Jaspers, Correspondance Hannah Arendt-Karl Jaspers. 1926-1969 (Hannah Arendt–Karl Jaspers Correspondence, 1926–1969), trans. E. Kaufholz, Paris, Payot, 1996, p. 561. Translation slightly modified.↩︎
Ibid., My italics.↩︎
“Discussion avec Roger Errera,” in Edifier un monde. Interventions 1971-1975, trans. D. Séglard, Paris, Seuil, 2007, p. 145.↩︎
“Pour sauver le foyer national juif il est encore temps,” op. cit., p. 565.↩︎