// interview //
Fall 2013
Dissenting Over Diaspora: An Interview with Professor Judith Butler
Adam Shapiro
Judith Butler, the prominent philosopher and gender theorist, sent shock waves across the Jewish world with the publication of her latest book Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism. Her appearance at Brooklyn College last winter in particular generated much protest and even led some to denounce her as an anti-Semite and self-hating Jew. But in her new book, Butler contests that charge and flips it around; according to her, it’s Zionism that isn’t consistent with Jewish values. The Current interviewed Professor Butler, now teaching at Columbia, to explore and challenge her thoughts on Zionism and BDS and learn about the influence of her Judaism on her work.
\\
Current: How does your Jewishness affect your scholarship on a broad level?
Judith Butler: I was very lucky to have had a Rabbi, Daniel Silver, who was also something of a philosopher and a literary critic. So, I learned a fair amount from him when I was quite young about how to read biblical passages but also how to make biblical passages pertain to the present, including contemporary political issues. So on the one hand, we would be doing close readings of a biblical passage but we would also be thinking about broader ethical and social problems that the passage implied. That taught me a certain kind of practice: both how to pay close attention to a text and figure out what its meaning might be but then also to think more carefully about what its meaning is for us is now, that is, how the text still lives for us as we try to think about our own political reality. I remember when I was in high school, he cited Erich Auerbach in one of his sermons, which was quite amazing, introducing me to the difference between Hebraism and Hellenism– I was unclear whether that was a sound distinction even in my high school days. But it led me to study literature in college. I took “the Bible as literature”, for instance, in my freshman year, and became interested in literary hermeneutics more generally, itself derived from biblical exegesis. Hermeneutics and ideology was the focus of my Fulbright Scholar in Heidelberg right after I finished my undergraduate studies at Yale.
I suppose Jewish education provided a place for me for what seemed to me at the time to be open debates, disputation, thinking about interpretation, thinking about evidence, what counts as evidence, what makes one interpretation better than another. I think many of my reading and debating practices probably derive from there, although I have taken many different turns since that time.
C: So it was a kind of Talmudic discursiveness that excited you?
JB: Well, it was Talmudic discursiveness for sure. But also close reading. We read literary texts and thought about what their ethical implications might be. I was inadvertently taught at an early age that literature and philosophy were connected.
C: In the introduction to the book, you say your family’s losses under the Nazi regime had an effect on your work on gender. How so?
JB: The reverberations of that trauma suffused my childhood, to be sure. It is not easy to explain how this made its way into my work on gender. My grandfather on my mother’s side opened silent movie theaters in the city of Cleveland. He did that early, in the teens and twenties and ran them through the thirties and into the talkies. But it was also a time in which his own family in Hungary was under a lot of pressure and then nearly all of his relatives were destroyed by Nazi troops in the early 1940s. Throughout that time, my grandparents and my mother’s family more generally thought to find a way to assimilate to American culture by imitating some of the Hollywood stars they were projecting on the screen. So my grandmother thought she was Helen Hayes and my grandfather thought he was Clark Gable. My understanding is that they thought maybe the Jews would be safe if they looked like Hollywood stars, or if they were like the Jews in Hollywood. So I saw them taking on these really hyperbolic gender ideals, in what I think now was a rather frantic effort to assimilate visually to American culture, but also to higher class Jewish culture, and this was imagined to be a way to establish safety in American society: garnering admiration, looking good, looking respectable and even beautiful. And I think I was surrounded by Eastern European Jews from the shtetls who were trying to look like movie stars. I was doubtless confounded as a child, and those practices were not something I could take on– my gay male cousins were a bit happier with the exercise. I think I started to develop a nascent theory of gender based on what I saw, the visual imagery impressed upon me, and could not fathom.
C: How old were you when you started developing this nascent theory of gender performativity?
JB: After my grandparents relatives were destroyed, the gender norms became more strict in my family and there was a greater intensification during the years I grew up– during the sixties and seventies. And I think that gender patrolling was linked to their desire to be acceptable and to be safe. So that’s one way that a kind of traumatic relay from the Nazi genocide entered into a certain gender politics in US Ashkenazi upper middle class life at that time in the suburbs of Cleveland. As for gender, I mean look, I’m not sure I had a theory of gender at that time but I certainly had an experience of not quite fitting, even feeling the “catastrophic” effects of failing. I was not quite understanding what people meant when they said “girls don’t do that” or “boys do that” or “you don’t quite look like a girl” or “you’re not acting the right way” or “you must wear a dress”. Why was there such intensity attached to such issues! The message was: people are going to be outraged and there is going to be a crime of a disproportionate dimension unless you wear a certain outfit and appear a certain way! So gender deviation was really an unacceptable thing within that community. I had two gay cousins whose gendered behavior was not all that acceptable– I believe we all had to navigate that traumatic patrolling with a certain amount of savvy and a certain amount of humor. So if I were to look at the autobiographical sources of my interest in gender, it would probably end up being a social inquiry into trans-generational trauma and subject formation. In effect, gender was concerned with me way before I became concerned with gender.
C: What about your critique of Zionism and Israel? When did you get an inkling that you don’t fit with the mainstream in that sense?
JB: I was sent to Israel twice as many junior and senior Jewish high school students were at the time and still are. It was prior to Birthright, but the programs I was sent on probably had similarities to that, and were amazingly biased. It wasn’t until I arrived there and saw the racial stratification within Israeli society that I became worried about what kind of ideal Zionism really is. What I was seeing was the difference in economic status between say, Mizrachi and Ashkenazi Jews of various kinds, but also the treatment of North African immigrants. So dramatic examples of racial inequality was what I saw, and that disturbed me greatly. At that time, during the late sixties and early seventies, the US was in a civil rights movement of extraordinary proportions so upon coming to Israel I saw a kind of stratification that was actively being contested in the United States. It was a manifestly unjust situation. But it wasn’t until I went to college that I started to learn from books and from other people – perhaps it was significant that some of those people were themselves Jewish, but not Zionist, and from similar backgrounds to me, and I learned about Gaza and then, belatedly, the dispossession of Palestinians in 1948. I came to be concerned about what it meant that a population was being held under police control without basic democratic rights or rights of self determination, and asked myself how Israel could be called a democratic society under those conditions, becoming more involved in 2004. And I think I went through several stages of becoming involved in that issue, learning about it, rethinking what I had been taught, and sometimes stepping back because it did put me in tension with my community and family of origin. But now word is out, and that tension is what I am willing to live with.
C: In your book, you draw on Edward Said and a book of his in which he actually uses Moses as a figure who might be able to inspire peace and cooperation in Israel/ Palestine. Can you elaborate?
JB: First of all, I think there’s a difference between say, cooperation and cohabitation. Because cooperative ventures very often involve accepting inequality and I worry about cooperative Israeli/ Palestinian operations that don’t really call into question the occupation, second class citizenship or the colonial nature of Israel’s rule. And so, cooperation is a way of keeping the status quo in place. Cohabitation is a word I try to use instead to try to talk about both forms of solidarity that would take aim at the colonial structure of power and forms of living together that might be positive in the context of a new political arrangement in which political equality is substantially realized.
Said, I think, was really interested in whether the diasporic situation of the Palestinian could be a source of understanding or resonance with the diasporic tradition in Jewish life. And he called upon Jews to recall their own history in exile as a way of establishing an understanding of what it meant to suffer radical dispossession. For Said, the salient point about Moses was not only that he was a wanderer, but also an Egyptian so he has a mixed heritage and connects the Arab and the Jewish in his person. We might say that Moses was Mizrachi. As exilic, Moses stands for a certain kind of ethical sensibility of the exile, the one who seeks not just the return of his own people, but whose thinking about return expands to include all those who have been forcibly dispossessed. We see this tension reflected, I think, in warring versions of the Haggadah– those that concern themselves with the return and emancipation of the Jews alone, or those that seek to make connections – not strict analogies – between all peoples searching for emancipation. I think for Said, what’s most important is that one group of people who have been radically dispossessed might not only find a way to chronicle and communicate their own dispossession but might also develop an ethical and political concern for the unjust political dispossession of others. So, Moses is a hopeful figure, not only embodying the link between Jew and Arab, but prefiguring the link that might be made between peoples with very different histories of dispossession. Concretely, what that means for me is, when you start to develop a position about the rights of refugees, and consider that Israel was established, as you know, as a sanctuary for European refugees, one has to take into account the fact that the very founding of Israel produced a new refugee problem, and new demand for sanctuary.
This is one of the major contradictions that drew the critical attention of Hannah Arendt. What would it mean to develop a position on refugees such that whatever sanctuary is found for one group of refugees cannot justifiably expel another population and produce a new refugee class? It can’t be that “oh, my refugee status needs sanctuary and global recognition even if it means that I push others out and produce a new refugee population”. That means that we honor the rights of refugees only in the breach. A justifiable position has to be one in which we generalize, without contradiction, from the position of our own history to take into account the insufferable consequences of dispossession for others. It doesn’t mean those histories are the exact same– they’re not the same, let us be clear. Let’s not get involved in false analogies. But still, I might be able to understand a very different kind of history than my own by virtue of having undergone a history of dispossession and my understanding of dispossession and of the refugee issue might be enlarged through that kind of thinking both through and beyond my own situation. And I think that’s what Said was trying to do, and he makes this view explicit on several occasions. He was trying to say: “what might bring these people together? They both suffered dispossession”. At that moment he wasn’t simply laying blame: “and you! you’re the ones who dispossessed us!”. He was wondering rather what ethical resources might emerge from dispossession. And what political policy toward the rights of refugees and the need for sanctuary that all people have? And if we were to start with that more generalizable claim, what kind of political organization of life might be possible? I believe it is this perspective that provides a set of diasporic principles for thinking about a new kind of polity in Palestine.
C: The diasporic is clearly a very important theme for you. But galut (exile) in traditional Judaism generally has to end in some form of geula (redemption). So if, for you, galut is the preferable Jewish status, what does redemption look like?
JB: Here I rely a great deal on the scholar Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin who has written on sovereignty and exile. His work has only been published in article form in English, but he has a book in French and he’s an extraordinary scholar of these matters.
I think that there are ways of understanding redemption that do not involve gathering all the scattered lives back into the same homeland. In a certain Kabbalistic tradition, one that clearly informed the early Walter Benjamin, redemption was a feature of scattered life, found in all dimensions of the world. So there are theological debates we might have about Benjamin and Gershom Scholem that would feature different ways of understanding redemption – the former decidedly less nationalistic than the latter. But it seems clear that both diasporic Jews, and diasporic Jewish communities, are not well-served by the idea that they are living in a “fallen” condition. The tradition of Jews living with non-Jews in the diaspora might well serve as a model for thinking about possibilities of co-habitation in Israel/Palestine, as I tried to suggest in relation to the founding contradiction at the heart of the refugee issue in Israel/Palestine.
C: You write in the book that using the Holocaust to justify Zionism is not ethically sound. But without a sovereign Jewish state, how can the security of Jewish people be assured?
JB: First of all, my guess is that living on the condition of equality and reciprocal acknowledgement with its Arab neighbors would do more for security of the Jewish people in that area than the militarism of the current state does. So I actually think political equality works in the service of security, works in the service of cohabitation. I think that the source of the anti-Semitism we see today can be found in Greece where they actively, openly elected Golden Dawn people who are Nazi fascists and even in the National Party in Germany where Nazi insignias, which were once really rigorously banned, are now being openly worn again. So there’s a lot that needs to be done politically to combat anti-Semitism that does not have to do with the Israeli state but does have to do with forms of anti-Semitism that are emerging within fascist currents in Europe. And I think that’s where our critical attention should be at this particular moment. My own sense is that one has to oppose all forms of state racism, as we see exemplified in Israel, but all forms of anti-Semitism as well. And this means that the opposition to Israel cannot justifiably participate in anti-Semitism. That said, it is important not to discount an anti-colonial struggle as “definitionally” anti-Semitic. We have to develop a large enough framework to oppose all forms of racism.
C: Some of the concerns about BDS rest in claims that the movement is anti-Semitic. While you have done much to argue that this is not in fact the case, certain statements by BDS leaders, such as Omar Barghouti, have provided cause for concern. What would you respond to Barghouti’s statement that he “could not help but compare the Warsaw ghetto wall with Israel’s much more ominous wall caging 3.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza in fragmented, sprawling prison,” when in your book you reject comparisons and therefore trivializations of the Holocaust?
JB: I do not think that strict analogies can be made between the Nazi genocide and the Occupation, it is true. I do not think that they serve either the ethical imperative to understand the history of that genocide or the contemporary political imperative to oppose the Occupation. I myself do not accept the analogy. But perhaps most importantly, the arguments in favor of BDS do not rely on that analogy, even if some people who support BDS also engage in some of those analogies. The argument for BDS is based on the fact that international laws have been abrogated and continue to be, and existing nation-states do not press the state of Israel to comply with those laws. So on that ground, the boycott emerges as a non-violent effort to pressure a state to comply with international laws and norms that would secure the equal rights of Palestinians within Israel, the rights of self-determination for Palestinians on the West Bank which were promised and suspended by the Oslo accords, and the rights of dispossessed Palestinians to some form of return. None of these claims depend on that analogy.
C: Can you describe the ideal binational state and how it could function practically?
JB: It is not for me to describe or to prescribe. It seems that for political equality to become substantial, all the rightful inhabitants of that land would have to decide it. And that leaves us with the question of who rightfully inhabits those lands. So that would be the most important point of departure. I believe, as I have said, that there are political risks with both the one state and the two state solution, and that it is up to those who have been denied rights of self-determination to enter that political process that decides what form of government would work best. As you know, the two state solution founders very often on the problem of establishing borders. And the one-state proposal founders on the question of who is entitled to full citizenship. If the one-state solution builds a greater Israel, it fulfills the expansionist aims of the settlers. But if it guarantees equal rights before the law without discriminating on the basis of religion, race, or national origin, then we might see something much more promising. Similarly, if a two state solution leaves Palestine with only 10% of its former lands, and still living under siege or occupation, then that would not really work at all. But if the green line is honored and de-colonization is complete, it might be a chance for all inhabitants to exercise legitimates rights of self-determination. So, as you can see, one cannot really say what should happen from the outside, but only help a bit to track the possibilities. My own task is to try to rethink the possible, but not tell others what to do.
C: And a question we ask all our interviewees: do you have a favorite Woody Allen film?
JB: The Purple Rose of Cairo.
\\ ADAM SHAPIRO is a sophomore at Columbia College and Features Editor for The Current. He can be reached at [email protected].
\\
Current: How does your Jewishness affect your scholarship on a broad level?
Judith Butler: I was very lucky to have had a Rabbi, Daniel Silver, who was also something of a philosopher and a literary critic. So, I learned a fair amount from him when I was quite young about how to read biblical passages but also how to make biblical passages pertain to the present, including contemporary political issues. So on the one hand, we would be doing close readings of a biblical passage but we would also be thinking about broader ethical and social problems that the passage implied. That taught me a certain kind of practice: both how to pay close attention to a text and figure out what its meaning might be but then also to think more carefully about what its meaning is for us is now, that is, how the text still lives for us as we try to think about our own political reality. I remember when I was in high school, he cited Erich Auerbach in one of his sermons, which was quite amazing, introducing me to the difference between Hebraism and Hellenism– I was unclear whether that was a sound distinction even in my high school days. But it led me to study literature in college. I took “the Bible as literature”, for instance, in my freshman year, and became interested in literary hermeneutics more generally, itself derived from biblical exegesis. Hermeneutics and ideology was the focus of my Fulbright Scholar in Heidelberg right after I finished my undergraduate studies at Yale.
I suppose Jewish education provided a place for me for what seemed to me at the time to be open debates, disputation, thinking about interpretation, thinking about evidence, what counts as evidence, what makes one interpretation better than another. I think many of my reading and debating practices probably derive from there, although I have taken many different turns since that time.
C: So it was a kind of Talmudic discursiveness that excited you?
JB: Well, it was Talmudic discursiveness for sure. But also close reading. We read literary texts and thought about what their ethical implications might be. I was inadvertently taught at an early age that literature and philosophy were connected.
C: In the introduction to the book, you say your family’s losses under the Nazi regime had an effect on your work on gender. How so?
JB: The reverberations of that trauma suffused my childhood, to be sure. It is not easy to explain how this made its way into my work on gender. My grandfather on my mother’s side opened silent movie theaters in the city of Cleveland. He did that early, in the teens and twenties and ran them through the thirties and into the talkies. But it was also a time in which his own family in Hungary was under a lot of pressure and then nearly all of his relatives were destroyed by Nazi troops in the early 1940s. Throughout that time, my grandparents and my mother’s family more generally thought to find a way to assimilate to American culture by imitating some of the Hollywood stars they were projecting on the screen. So my grandmother thought she was Helen Hayes and my grandfather thought he was Clark Gable. My understanding is that they thought maybe the Jews would be safe if they looked like Hollywood stars, or if they were like the Jews in Hollywood. So I saw them taking on these really hyperbolic gender ideals, in what I think now was a rather frantic effort to assimilate visually to American culture, but also to higher class Jewish culture, and this was imagined to be a way to establish safety in American society: garnering admiration, looking good, looking respectable and even beautiful. And I think I was surrounded by Eastern European Jews from the shtetls who were trying to look like movie stars. I was doubtless confounded as a child, and those practices were not something I could take on– my gay male cousins were a bit happier with the exercise. I think I started to develop a nascent theory of gender based on what I saw, the visual imagery impressed upon me, and could not fathom.
C: How old were you when you started developing this nascent theory of gender performativity?
JB: After my grandparents relatives were destroyed, the gender norms became more strict in my family and there was a greater intensification during the years I grew up– during the sixties and seventies. And I think that gender patrolling was linked to their desire to be acceptable and to be safe. So that’s one way that a kind of traumatic relay from the Nazi genocide entered into a certain gender politics in US Ashkenazi upper middle class life at that time in the suburbs of Cleveland. As for gender, I mean look, I’m not sure I had a theory of gender at that time but I certainly had an experience of not quite fitting, even feeling the “catastrophic” effects of failing. I was not quite understanding what people meant when they said “girls don’t do that” or “boys do that” or “you don’t quite look like a girl” or “you’re not acting the right way” or “you must wear a dress”. Why was there such intensity attached to such issues! The message was: people are going to be outraged and there is going to be a crime of a disproportionate dimension unless you wear a certain outfit and appear a certain way! So gender deviation was really an unacceptable thing within that community. I had two gay cousins whose gendered behavior was not all that acceptable– I believe we all had to navigate that traumatic patrolling with a certain amount of savvy and a certain amount of humor. So if I were to look at the autobiographical sources of my interest in gender, it would probably end up being a social inquiry into trans-generational trauma and subject formation. In effect, gender was concerned with me way before I became concerned with gender.
C: What about your critique of Zionism and Israel? When did you get an inkling that you don’t fit with the mainstream in that sense?
JB: I was sent to Israel twice as many junior and senior Jewish high school students were at the time and still are. It was prior to Birthright, but the programs I was sent on probably had similarities to that, and were amazingly biased. It wasn’t until I arrived there and saw the racial stratification within Israeli society that I became worried about what kind of ideal Zionism really is. What I was seeing was the difference in economic status between say, Mizrachi and Ashkenazi Jews of various kinds, but also the treatment of North African immigrants. So dramatic examples of racial inequality was what I saw, and that disturbed me greatly. At that time, during the late sixties and early seventies, the US was in a civil rights movement of extraordinary proportions so upon coming to Israel I saw a kind of stratification that was actively being contested in the United States. It was a manifestly unjust situation. But it wasn’t until I went to college that I started to learn from books and from other people – perhaps it was significant that some of those people were themselves Jewish, but not Zionist, and from similar backgrounds to me, and I learned about Gaza and then, belatedly, the dispossession of Palestinians in 1948. I came to be concerned about what it meant that a population was being held under police control without basic democratic rights or rights of self determination, and asked myself how Israel could be called a democratic society under those conditions, becoming more involved in 2004. And I think I went through several stages of becoming involved in that issue, learning about it, rethinking what I had been taught, and sometimes stepping back because it did put me in tension with my community and family of origin. But now word is out, and that tension is what I am willing to live with.
C: In your book, you draw on Edward Said and a book of his in which he actually uses Moses as a figure who might be able to inspire peace and cooperation in Israel/ Palestine. Can you elaborate?
JB: First of all, I think there’s a difference between say, cooperation and cohabitation. Because cooperative ventures very often involve accepting inequality and I worry about cooperative Israeli/ Palestinian operations that don’t really call into question the occupation, second class citizenship or the colonial nature of Israel’s rule. And so, cooperation is a way of keeping the status quo in place. Cohabitation is a word I try to use instead to try to talk about both forms of solidarity that would take aim at the colonial structure of power and forms of living together that might be positive in the context of a new political arrangement in which political equality is substantially realized.
Said, I think, was really interested in whether the diasporic situation of the Palestinian could be a source of understanding or resonance with the diasporic tradition in Jewish life. And he called upon Jews to recall their own history in exile as a way of establishing an understanding of what it meant to suffer radical dispossession. For Said, the salient point about Moses was not only that he was a wanderer, but also an Egyptian so he has a mixed heritage and connects the Arab and the Jewish in his person. We might say that Moses was Mizrachi. As exilic, Moses stands for a certain kind of ethical sensibility of the exile, the one who seeks not just the return of his own people, but whose thinking about return expands to include all those who have been forcibly dispossessed. We see this tension reflected, I think, in warring versions of the Haggadah– those that concern themselves with the return and emancipation of the Jews alone, or those that seek to make connections – not strict analogies – between all peoples searching for emancipation. I think for Said, what’s most important is that one group of people who have been radically dispossessed might not only find a way to chronicle and communicate their own dispossession but might also develop an ethical and political concern for the unjust political dispossession of others. So, Moses is a hopeful figure, not only embodying the link between Jew and Arab, but prefiguring the link that might be made between peoples with very different histories of dispossession. Concretely, what that means for me is, when you start to develop a position about the rights of refugees, and consider that Israel was established, as you know, as a sanctuary for European refugees, one has to take into account the fact that the very founding of Israel produced a new refugee problem, and new demand for sanctuary.
This is one of the major contradictions that drew the critical attention of Hannah Arendt. What would it mean to develop a position on refugees such that whatever sanctuary is found for one group of refugees cannot justifiably expel another population and produce a new refugee class? It can’t be that “oh, my refugee status needs sanctuary and global recognition even if it means that I push others out and produce a new refugee population”. That means that we honor the rights of refugees only in the breach. A justifiable position has to be one in which we generalize, without contradiction, from the position of our own history to take into account the insufferable consequences of dispossession for others. It doesn’t mean those histories are the exact same– they’re not the same, let us be clear. Let’s not get involved in false analogies. But still, I might be able to understand a very different kind of history than my own by virtue of having undergone a history of dispossession and my understanding of dispossession and of the refugee issue might be enlarged through that kind of thinking both through and beyond my own situation. And I think that’s what Said was trying to do, and he makes this view explicit on several occasions. He was trying to say: “what might bring these people together? They both suffered dispossession”. At that moment he wasn’t simply laying blame: “and you! you’re the ones who dispossessed us!”. He was wondering rather what ethical resources might emerge from dispossession. And what political policy toward the rights of refugees and the need for sanctuary that all people have? And if we were to start with that more generalizable claim, what kind of political organization of life might be possible? I believe it is this perspective that provides a set of diasporic principles for thinking about a new kind of polity in Palestine.
C: The diasporic is clearly a very important theme for you. But galut (exile) in traditional Judaism generally has to end in some form of geula (redemption). So if, for you, galut is the preferable Jewish status, what does redemption look like?
JB: Here I rely a great deal on the scholar Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin who has written on sovereignty and exile. His work has only been published in article form in English, but he has a book in French and he’s an extraordinary scholar of these matters.
I think that there are ways of understanding redemption that do not involve gathering all the scattered lives back into the same homeland. In a certain Kabbalistic tradition, one that clearly informed the early Walter Benjamin, redemption was a feature of scattered life, found in all dimensions of the world. So there are theological debates we might have about Benjamin and Gershom Scholem that would feature different ways of understanding redemption – the former decidedly less nationalistic than the latter. But it seems clear that both diasporic Jews, and diasporic Jewish communities, are not well-served by the idea that they are living in a “fallen” condition. The tradition of Jews living with non-Jews in the diaspora might well serve as a model for thinking about possibilities of co-habitation in Israel/Palestine, as I tried to suggest in relation to the founding contradiction at the heart of the refugee issue in Israel/Palestine.
C: You write in the book that using the Holocaust to justify Zionism is not ethically sound. But without a sovereign Jewish state, how can the security of Jewish people be assured?
JB: First of all, my guess is that living on the condition of equality and reciprocal acknowledgement with its Arab neighbors would do more for security of the Jewish people in that area than the militarism of the current state does. So I actually think political equality works in the service of security, works in the service of cohabitation. I think that the source of the anti-Semitism we see today can be found in Greece where they actively, openly elected Golden Dawn people who are Nazi fascists and even in the National Party in Germany where Nazi insignias, which were once really rigorously banned, are now being openly worn again. So there’s a lot that needs to be done politically to combat anti-Semitism that does not have to do with the Israeli state but does have to do with forms of anti-Semitism that are emerging within fascist currents in Europe. And I think that’s where our critical attention should be at this particular moment. My own sense is that one has to oppose all forms of state racism, as we see exemplified in Israel, but all forms of anti-Semitism as well. And this means that the opposition to Israel cannot justifiably participate in anti-Semitism. That said, it is important not to discount an anti-colonial struggle as “definitionally” anti-Semitic. We have to develop a large enough framework to oppose all forms of racism.
C: Some of the concerns about BDS rest in claims that the movement is anti-Semitic. While you have done much to argue that this is not in fact the case, certain statements by BDS leaders, such as Omar Barghouti, have provided cause for concern. What would you respond to Barghouti’s statement that he “could not help but compare the Warsaw ghetto wall with Israel’s much more ominous wall caging 3.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza in fragmented, sprawling prison,” when in your book you reject comparisons and therefore trivializations of the Holocaust?
JB: I do not think that strict analogies can be made between the Nazi genocide and the Occupation, it is true. I do not think that they serve either the ethical imperative to understand the history of that genocide or the contemporary political imperative to oppose the Occupation. I myself do not accept the analogy. But perhaps most importantly, the arguments in favor of BDS do not rely on that analogy, even if some people who support BDS also engage in some of those analogies. The argument for BDS is based on the fact that international laws have been abrogated and continue to be, and existing nation-states do not press the state of Israel to comply with those laws. So on that ground, the boycott emerges as a non-violent effort to pressure a state to comply with international laws and norms that would secure the equal rights of Palestinians within Israel, the rights of self-determination for Palestinians on the West Bank which were promised and suspended by the Oslo accords, and the rights of dispossessed Palestinians to some form of return. None of these claims depend on that analogy.
C: Can you describe the ideal binational state and how it could function practically?
JB: It is not for me to describe or to prescribe. It seems that for political equality to become substantial, all the rightful inhabitants of that land would have to decide it. And that leaves us with the question of who rightfully inhabits those lands. So that would be the most important point of departure. I believe, as I have said, that there are political risks with both the one state and the two state solution, and that it is up to those who have been denied rights of self-determination to enter that political process that decides what form of government would work best. As you know, the two state solution founders very often on the problem of establishing borders. And the one-state proposal founders on the question of who is entitled to full citizenship. If the one-state solution builds a greater Israel, it fulfills the expansionist aims of the settlers. But if it guarantees equal rights before the law without discriminating on the basis of religion, race, or national origin, then we might see something much more promising. Similarly, if a two state solution leaves Palestine with only 10% of its former lands, and still living under siege or occupation, then that would not really work at all. But if the green line is honored and de-colonization is complete, it might be a chance for all inhabitants to exercise legitimates rights of self-determination. So, as you can see, one cannot really say what should happen from the outside, but only help a bit to track the possibilities. My own task is to try to rethink the possible, but not tell others what to do.
C: And a question we ask all our interviewees: do you have a favorite Woody Allen film?
JB: The Purple Rose of Cairo.
\\ ADAM SHAPIRO is a sophomore at Columbia College and Features Editor for The Current. He can be reached at [email protected].