There is a strand in your thinking which is not, I think, well known. And that is the strand that makes a plea for peoples, however much history has turned them into enemies, to enter into each other’s predicaments, to make what might seem at moments, if not an impossible, then certainly one of the hardest journeys of the mind. To be a literary critic – and you were as much a literary critic as political writer and activist – is, amongst other things, to enter into the mind of the other, to invite and even force your reader to see themselves in situations far from their own. So much so, indeed, that at moments it can feel like stretching the limits of the imagination beyond endurance to enter this other person’s world. But this demand, for forms of understanding strained beyond the pitch of what is bearable, is – I believe – one of the things that you saw as crucial if there was to be any hope of changing the cruel deadlock of the Middle East.
‘Why should the Palestinians make the effort to understand Zionism?’ The question came from a young woman in the audience at one of the many memorials held for you, this one in London in November 2003 under the auspices of the London Review of Books. It was not your priority, responded Ilan Pappe. And Sara Roy simply and powerfully told the anecdote of how she had witnessed Palestinians flooding with joy onto the curfewed streets of the West Bank where she was living when the possibility of a Palestinian state was first acknowledged by Israel, while the soldiers stood by in silence and just watched. There will be understanding enough, I heard her saying, when there is justice.
They were of course both right: your preoccupation was with justice. In one of your most irate pieces about the Occupation – ‘Sober Truths about Israel and Zionism’, written for Al-Ahram and Al-Hayat in 1995, when the bitter reality of post-Oslo was becoming clearer by the day – you mince no words about the cruel asymmetry of the conflict and the peculiar injustice of the settlements: what they tell us about Israel as a nation, about Zionism as its founding idea. Once a piece of land is confiscated, ‘it belongs to the “Land of Israel”’ and is ‘officially restricted for the exclusive use of Jews’. Many nations including the United States, you allow, were founded on the confiscation of land, but no other country then designates this land for the sole use of one portion of its citizens. You are citing Israel Shahak, Holocaust survivor, founder of the Israeli League of Human Rights, ‘one of the small handful of Israeli Jews who tells the truth as it is’.1
Earlier in the essay, you tell the anecdote of a Palestinian student at Birzeit University who, at the end of a lecture in which you were advocating a more ‘scientific and precise’ approach on the part of the Arab world to understanding the United States, raised his hand to say ‘that it was a more disturbing fact that no such programme existed in Palestine for the study of Israel’ (anticipating in reverse the young woman in London).2 Shahak is your answer. Understanding Israel means understanding the discriminatory foundations of the nation state:
Unless we recognise the real issue—which is the racist character of the Zionist Movement and the State of Israel and the roots of that racism in the Jewish religious law [Halakha] – we will not be able to understand our realities. And unless we can understand them, we will not be able to change them.3
And yet, to stop there is not, I believe – and I believe you believed – to go far enough. Your view was more complex. In fact you decried the UN resolution equating Zionism with racism as politically counterproductive: ‘I was never happy with that resolution.’4 Significantly, given your call for scientific precision in understanding, it was not precise enough: ‘Racism is too vague a term. Zionism is Zionism.’5 ‘The question of Zionism’, you said in conversation with Salman Rushdie in 1986, ‘is the touchstone of contemporary political judgement.’6 What did you mean?
Speaking at the memorial in November, I had cited what remains for me one of your most poignant pleas: ‘We cannot coexist as two communities of detached and uncommunicatingly separate suffering’ – the ‘we’ performing the link for which it appeals.7 I cannot remember whether it was this quotation or my later attempt in the discussion to talk about Zionism that provoked the question of the young woman from the floor. But for me it is the peculiar quality and gift of your thought that you could make your denunciation of the injustice of Israel towards the Palestinians, while also speaking – without ever softening the force of that critique – if not quite for, nonetheless of the reality of the other side: what drove Israel, how it had come to be, what makes it what it is now.
Perhaps your best-known discussion of Zionism is the chapter in The Question of Palestine of 1979, which was your first extended analysis of this history, famously entitled ‘Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims’; the title unambiguously announces that your priority is to raise the plight of the Palestinians, at the time more or less passed over in silence, both in the world and for themselves. Yet that objective, on which you never wavered, is already here accompanied by interconnections and diffusions of another kind. It is here that the link between your literary and political thinking is key (the two roles passionately, intimately joined). ‘The task of criticism, or, to put it another way, the role of the critical consciousness in such cases’, you write in the course of the chapter, ‘is to be able to make distinctions, to produce differences where at present there are none.’8 To critique Zionism is not, you insisted then, anti-Semitic (an assertion that critics of Israel, especially post 9/11, are forced to make even more loudly today). It is, in one of your favourite formulae of Gramsci’s, to make an inventory of the historical forces that have made anyone – a people – who they are. Zionism needs to be read. What is required is a critical consciousness that dissects the obdurate language of the present by delving into the buried fragments of the past, to produce differences ‘where at present there are none’. It is not therefore a simple political identity that you are offering the Palestinians on whose behalf you speak, nor a simple version of the seemingly intractable reality to which they find themselves opposed. It is rather something more disorienting that confers and troubles identity at one and the same time (if the past is never a given nor, once uncovered, is it ever merely a gift).
For me, Gramsci’s injunction always contained a psychoanalytic demand: ‘the consciousness of what one really is […] is “knowing thyself”’, although such knowledge is hardly easy, as every psychoanalyst will attest.9 I see this as your challenge to Zionism and Palestinian nationalism alike. By the time we get to ‘Bases for Coexistence’ in 1997, to this classic Freudian dictum, you have added the sentence I have already cited, which conveys another no less painful and difficult dimension: ‘We cannot coexist as two communities of detached and uncommunicatingly separate suffering.’ And then, against the grain of your own and your people’s sympathies, ‘There is suffering and injustice enough for everyone.’10 (After this piece was published in Al-Hayat and Al-Ahram, you received your first hatemail in the Arab press.) Not just self-reflective, nor just internally unsettling, but perhaps precisely because it is both of these, such knowledge has the power to shift the boundaries between peoples. There can be no progress in the Middle East, I hear you saying, without a shared recognition of pain.
As I reread you today on Zionism, this strained, complicated demand seems in fact a type of constant. This may be of course because I personally so want and need it to be (as Brecht notoriously acknowledged when asked whether his interpretation of Coriolanus was true to Shakespeare’s meaning – he was both ‘reading in and reading into’ the play). But it seems to me that – contrary to your detractors – you were always trying to do two things at once that you knew to be well-nigh impossible. As if you were requiring of all critics of Israel – whether Arab or Jewish, and without dissolving the real historical and political differences between the two peoples – to hold together in their hearts and minds the polar opposite emotions of empathy and rage (however reluctant the first, however legitimate the second for your people might be). Today the understanding of Zionism seems an even more crucial task than when you made the question the touchstone of political judgement nearly twenty years ago. I want to place the role of the critic as you defined it in 1979 together with the plea for a shared recognition of suffering of 1997, on either side of your answer to the Palestinian student at Birzeit. What then do we see?
Zionism has been a success. You said this many times. Shocking, if seen from the viewpoint of its catastrophe for the Palestinians, but true – even for those, such as David Grossman and Yaakov Perry, former head of Shin Bet, (to mention just two) who see Israel today as in a perhaps irreversible decline, in thrall to a militarism destructive of the Palestinians and of itself. Historically Israel has fulfilled its aims. You repeat the point in an interview with Hasan M. Jafri for the Karachi Herald as late as 1992: ‘Zionism for the Jew was a wonderful thing. They say it was their liberation movement. They say it was that which gave them sovereignty. They finally had a homeland.’11 But, as you laid it out so clearly in ‘Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims’, Zionism suffers from an internal ‘bifurcation’ or even, to push the psychoanalytic vocabulary one stage further, splitting: ‘between care for the Jews and an almost total disregard for the non-Jews or native Arab population’.12 Not only unjust, this splitting is self-defeating for the Israeli nation. In the eyes of the Arabs, Zionism becomes nothing other than an unfolding design ‘whose deeper roots in Jewish history and the terrible Jewish experience was necessarily obscured by what was taking place before their eyes’.13 Freud of course spoke of the ‘blindness of the seeing eye’ (or in the words of Jean-Luc Godard, ‘shut your eyes, and see’). Zionism, we could say, has done itself a major disservice. So fervently has it nourished the discrimination between Jew and non-Jew, the rationale of its dispossession of the Palestinians, that, while it may have seized the earth, it has also snatched the grounds for understanding from beneath its own feet.
The negative repercussions for Palestinian political consciousness have been no less, their own cause weakened by the failure to understand the inner force of what it is up against (as Lenin once famously remarked, you should always construct your enemy at their strongest point). The ‘internal cohesion and solidity’ of Zionism has completely ‘eluded the understanding of Arabs’.14 As has the ‘intertwined terror and exultation’ out of which it was born; or in other words ‘what Zionism meant for the Jews’.15 It is the affective dimension, as it exerts its pressure historically, that has been blocked from view. You are analysing a trauma – ‘an immensely traumatic Zionist effectiveness’.16 Terror, exultation, trauma – Zionism has the ruthlessness of the symptom (it is the symptom of its own success). Given this emphasis, your unexpected and rarely commented remarks on the ‘benevolent’, ‘humanistic’ impulse of Zionism towards its own people are even more striking (contrary to the opinion of some of your critics, there is no one- or even two-dimensionality here). On the colonial nature of the venture, and the cruel orientalism of how the Arab people were treated and portrayed, you never ceased to insist. But what if the key to understanding the catastrophe for the Palestinians, of 1948 and after, were to be found in the love that the Jewish people – for historically explicable reasons – lavish on themselves?
We have entered the most stubborn and self-defeating psychic terrain, where a people can be loving and lethal, and their most exultant acts towards – and triumph over – an indigenous people expose them to the dangers they most fear. For it is not just of course that Israel’s conduct has made it impossible for the Arabs to understand her, nor that Israel has been blind towards the Arabs (in fact never true); but that she sees things in the wrong place: ‘Everything that did stay to challenge Israel was viewed not as something there, but as something outside Israel and Zionism bent on its destruction – from the outside.’17 Israel is vulnerable because it cannot see the people who – whether in refugee camps on the borders (the putative Palestinian state), or inside the country (the Palestinian Israelis), or scattered all over the world (the Palestinian diaspora) – are in fact, psychically as well as politically, in its midst.
Contrast this again, as you do repeatedly, with Israel as a nation for all Jewish people – this passionately inclusive, and violently excluding, embrace. Here time and place are infinite: ‘If every Jew in Israel represents “the whole Jewish people” – which is a population made up not only of the Jews in Israel, but also of generations of Jews who existed in the past (of whom the present Israelis are the remnant) and those who exist in the future, as well as those who live elsewhere’ – ‘Israel would not be simply the state of its citizens (which included Arabs of course) but the state of “the whole Jewish people,” having a kind of sovereignty over land and peoples that no other state possessed or possesses.’18 This is in fact far worse than merely ‘two communities of uncommunicatingly separate suffering’, which might suggest indifference or ignorance of a more straightforward kind. This is a historically embedded failure of vision – multiply determined, and with multiple, self-perpetuating effects. In these early readings, you delve into the past, telling all the parties that the main critical, and political, task is to understand how and why.
I realise now that my writing on Zionism is an extended footnote to your questions, an attempt to enter into the ‘terror and exultation’ out of which Zionism was born, to grasp what you so aptly term the ‘immense traumatic effectiveness’ of the Israeli nation state. You mean of course traumatic for the Palestinians. I would add also for the Jews (exultation does not dispel fear). But I have also wanted to revive the early Jewish voices – Martin Buber, Hans Kohn, Hannah Arendt and Ahad Ha’am, some of whom called themselves Zionists – who sounded the critique, uttered the warnings that have become all the more prescient today. Somewhere, I believe, Zionism had the self-knowledge for which Gramsci and, through him, you, make a plea, although I know in the case of Buber and Arendt you feel they were not finally equal to their critique. Calling up these voices, torn from the pages of a dismissed or forgotten portion of the past, I like to think that – as well as rebuilding the legacy of my own Jewish history – I am also doing what you would have appreciated, fulfilling a very personal demand from you to me.
We did not of course always agree. I am sure that in the last analysis you believed that entering the Zionist imagination might be risking one identification too far (are you writing an apology? you once asked). I was preparing the Christian Gauss Seminars to be delivered in September 2003 under the title ‘The Question of Zion’, a deliberate echo of, and my tribute to, The Question of Palestine. When I was writing them last summer, you wanted to read them but I needed to finish them first. ‘I might be able to help you’, you said.
You were planning to attend the second lecture, but knowing by the time of my visit that you might not be well enough, I hurriedly emailed them to my neighbour here before I left so they could be sent to your personal assistant, Sandra Fahy, who was always so helpful, should the need arise. Then, as happens, something was wrong with the attachments so they could not be sent when – indeed unable to attend – you asked for them. I arrived at your apartment clutching a rapidly photocopied version when I visited you on the Sunday four days before you died. Amongst many other things, we talked about the dreadful, deteriorating situation in Israel—Palestine – a decline that had so cruelly tracked your illness over the past decade. ‘I will read them this afternoon’, you said at the end. You were admitted to the hospital the next day. It was of course the conversation I most wanted to have. I had held back in the blithe belief that our dialogue would be endless, that having defeated your illness so many many times before, you would go on doing so for ever. I will not have the gift of your response to the lectures. Which is doubtless why I have used this occasion to lift out of your work the inspiration and form of their imagining.