Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism

ALTHOUGH IT IS commonly said that a one-state solution and an ideal of binationalism are impracticable goals, even by those who bear such concepts goodwill, it is doubtless equally true that a world in which no one held out for a one-state solution and no one thought anymore about binationalism would be a radically impoverished world. I take it that we might say the same about pacifism. It might be discredited as lacking all Realpolitik, but would any of us want to live in a world in which pacifists no longer existed? What kind of world that would be?

It came as a surprise to me, and also a gift, to read one of Edward Said’s last books, Freud and the Non-European,¹ not only because of the lively reengagement with the figure of Moses it contains, but because Moses becomes for him an opportunity to articulate two theses that are, in my view, worth considering. The first is that Moses, an Egyptian, is the founder of the Jewish people, which means that Judaism is not possible without this defining implication in what is Arab.² Such a formulation challenges hegemonic Ashkenazi definitions of Jewishness. But it also implies a more diasporic origin for Judaism, which suggests that a fundamental status is accorded the condition by which the Jew cannot be defined without a relation to the non-Jew. It is not only that, in diaspora, Jews must and do live with non-Jews, and must reflect on how precisely to conduct a life in the midst of religious and cultural heterogeneity, but also that the Jew can never be fully separated from the question of how to live among those who are not Jewish. The figure of Moses, however, makes an even more emphatic point, namely, that, for some, Jew and Arab are not finally separable categories, since they are lived and embodied together in the life of the Arab Jew.³ Of course, there are reasons to be suspicious of all recourse to origins, biblical and metaphorical, but Said is here conducting a thought experiment to incite us to think differently. Indeed, he leads us back to the figure of Moses, to show that one key foundational moment for Judaism, the one in which the law is delivered to the people, centers upon a figure for whom there is no lived distinction between Arab and Jew. The one is implicated in the other—is this also a figure for understanding how the two identities are articulated through one another outside the terms of the present where Israel, claiming to represent a state based on principles of Jewish sovereignty, exercises forms of colonial rule over Palestinians through disenfranchisement, occupation, land confiscation, and expulsion?

The second dimension of this text effectively follows from the first, since Said’s text is something of a petition, an incitement to consider that “displacement” characterizes the histories of both the Palestinian and the Jewish peoples and so, in his view, constitutes the basis of a possible, even desirable, alliance. Obviously, those forms of displacement are not precisely equal or analogous: The Israeli state is responsible for the forcible displacement of Palestinians and their ongoing subjugation; the dispossession of the Jews from Europe, and their destruction, constitutes its own, separate catastrophic history. Let us assume that there are historically specific modalities of catastrophe that cannot be measured or compared by any common or neutral standard. And yet, are there other ways of extrapolating from one’s own history of dispossession to understand and oppose the dispossession of others?

Said is calling upon the Jewish people to be mindful of their own experience of having been dispossessed of land and rights to forge an alliance with those who have been dispossessed by Israel. His call assumes that there might be, or should be, a Jewish resistance to Israel, that the Jewish people might follow a different historical trajectory than the one that Israel has followed. Even if we grant, as we must, the singular history of Jewish oppression, it does not follow that in every political scenario Jews will always be the victims, that their violence will always be regarded as justified self-defense. In fact, to grant the singularity of one history is implicitly to be committed to the singularity of all such histories, at which point one can begin to ask a different kind of question. The point is not to confirm that Zionism is like Nazism or is its unconscious repetition with Palestinians standing in for Jews. Such analogies fail to consider the very different modes of subjugation, dispossession, and death-dealing that characterize National Socialism and political Zionism. The point is rather to ask how certain kinds of principles might be extrapolated from one set of historical conditions to grasp another, a move that requires an act of political translation that refuses to assimilate the one experience to the other, and refuses as well the kind of particularism that would deny any possible way to articulate principles regarding, say, the rights of refugees on the basis of a comparative consideration of these and other instances of historical dispossession. It may, in fact, be the case that one moral and political legacy from the Nazi genocide against the Jews (which was, in fact, a genocide against several minority populations) is an opposition to all forms of state racism and its modalities of violence, a reconsideration of the rights of self-determination to be accorded any population that is maintained either as a permanent minority (in Israel) or under conditions of occupation (West Bank and Gaza) or dispossessed of lands and rights (diasporic Palestinians from 1948 and 1967).

It may be that binationalism is an impossibility, but that mere fact does not suffice as a reason to be against it. Binationalism is not just an ideal “to come”—something we might hope to arrive in a more ideal future, but a wretched fact that is being lived out as a specific historical form of settler colonialism and the proximities and exclusions it reproduces through the daily military and regulatory practices of occupation. Even though neither “Jews” nor “Palestinians” are monolithic populations, they nevertheless are now in Israel/Palestine bound together in intractable ways through a regime of Israeli law and military violence that has produced a resistance movement that takes both violent and nonviolent forms. But, rather than start with the history of Zionism as a colonial project to understand how Jews and Palestinians have been brought together, Said suggests that one might rethink biblical origins, not because the Bible has ever been a legitimate basis for founding any political order—it has not—but because it offers a figure that might assist us to think in a new way. Moses is the figure of their cathexis, a living conjuncture. And if we consider that Moses was not European, this means that the non-European Jew, the Arab Jew, is at the origin of our understanding of Judaism—a figure within which “Arab” and “Jew” cannot be dissociated. This fact has contemporary implications, not only for rethinking the history of the Jewish people in ways that do not presume a European origin, and, hence, include the Mizrachim and Sephardim as central to its history, but also for understanding that the “Arab Jew” constitutes conjuncture, chiasm, and cohabitation (understood as coarticulation with alterity) as a founding principle of Jewish life.

Said thus notes that the non-European from the Ashkenazi Jewish point of view is essential to the meaning of Judaism. As I read Said’s words on this subject, I found myself grateful for the understanding of Jewishness that I would not quite have arrived at without him. In this way, he acts as the “non-European” who might “found” the Jewish people again. And though this might read as hubris, it strikes me as a moving invocation to recall an originary and insuperable alliance. Although Said was never a devotee of poststructuralism and its critique of the subject (he actively cautioned against the Foucauldian critique of humanism, for instance, in Orientalism),⁴ it is clear that what he likes most in Freud’s embrace of Moses as the non-European, the Egyptian founder of the Jews, is the challenge the figure of Moses poses to a strictly identitarian politics. If Moses stands for a contemporary political aspiration, it is one that refuses to be organized exclusively on principles of national, religious, or ethnic identity, one that accepts a certain impurity and mixedness as the irreversible conditions of social life. Further, for Said, Freud boldly exemplifies the insight that even for the most definable, the most identifiable, the most stubborn communal identity—and for Freud, this was Jewish identity—there are inherent limits that prevent it from being fully incorporated into a monolithic and unified identity, singular and exclusive. Said maintains that identity cannot be thought or worked through alone; it cannot constitute or even imagine itself “without that radical originary break or flaw which will not be repressed, because Moses was Egyptian, and therefore always outside the identity inside which so many have stood, and suffered—and later, perhaps, triumphed.”⁵

Remarkable here is that although Said reflects on the origins of Judaism, he finds there, at the site of that origin, an impurity, a mixing with otherness (what Continental philosophers might call an ineradicable alterity), which turns out to be constitutive of what it is to be a Jew. “The strength of this thought,” he tells us, “is that it can be articulated in and speak to other besieged identities as well … as a troubling, disabling, destabilizing secular wound” (FNE, 54). Although it is not immediately clear what is meant by a “secular wound,” it may be that Said understood secularism to wound or rupture nonsecular modes of political belonging; in this sense, the secular wounds putatively traditional social bonds. And yet, after a wound, it seems, new forms of belonging become possible. He asks whether we might continue to think this thought of two peoples, diasporic, living together, where the diasporic, understood as a way of attaining identity only with and through the other, becomes the basis for a certain binationalism. Could this thought aspire to the condition of a politics of diasporic life? Said asks: can it ever become the not-so-precarious foundation in the land of Jews and Palestinians of a binational state in which “Israel and Palestine are parts rather than antagonists of each other’s history and underlying reality?” (FNE, 55). I would like to query further: is it precisely through a politics that affirms the irresolution of identity that binationalism becomes thinkable? And can we think a binationalism that moves us beyond both the nation and the binary of Jew/Palestinian that is belied by both the Arab Jew and the Palestinian Israeli?

In the service of such a project—binationalism, irresolution of identity, and why it might be worth our while to attend politically to both of these—I hope to turn to the question of a Jewish resistance to Zionism as a contemporary intellectual and political phenomenon, which has a history that is not only “archaic” in the sense that Moses exemplifies but has also been formulated in a number of generally unacknowledged ways throughout twentith century European Jewish history. I think one can find, as it were, historical premonitions of post-Zionism—by which I mean a call for its dissolution by those formed within its matrix—prior to Zionism or, indeed, as part of early versions of Zionism.

Oddly, the classical liberal position is generally considered “post-Zionist,” suggesting that this eighteenth-century political framework figures as a future threat to the project of Zionism. However, the classically liberal position—in particular, that the requirements for citizenship should not be based on race, religion, ethnicity—is subject to intense vilification. When an Israeli publicly remarks that he or she would like to live in a secular state, one that does not discriminate on the basis of religion, ethnicity, or race, it is common to hear that position (and person) decried as aiding and abetting the “destruction” of the Jewish state or committing treason. If a Palestinian (Israeli or not) espouses the same position, namely, that citizenship ought not to be determined by religious or ethnic membership, then that might be considered a “terrorist” act. How did it become historically possible for the precepts of classical liberalism to be equated with terrorism and genocide in the beginning of the twenty-first century?

How are we to understand this charge of “destruction”? We hear it, I think, quite often, and the word destruction of course resonates with that other phrase, the destruction of the Jewish people, which was, after all, the stated aim of Hitler’s genocide. When we hear the word destruction again, as the woeful consequence that would follow from holding a view critical of Zionism, the resonances of the term are mobilized against the person who espouses such a view. The one who calls for the dissolution of an unjust regime, but not the destruction of the population, is nevertheless figured as one who fails to see that apparently only an unjust regime can protect the Jewish population. Thus, by calling for justice, one is figured as calling for genocide. The critique of Zionism is thus understood as emerging from a fundamental insensitivity to the Nazi genocide against the Jews or as a form of complicity with that very genocide. The critique of Zionism and its structural commitment to state violence against minorities is thus itself associated with massive violence against the Jews, the reiteration of ineffable catastrophe, and so the most unconscionable collaboration with Hitlerian politics. Indeed, as soon as that association is secured—and, I would suggest, it is secured for most in a flash—then the conversation comes to an end, and that viewpoint is, oddly enough, excluded from the domain of acceptable political speech. If what the critic opposed to Zionism calls for is the establishment of a new polity based on principles elaborated in classical liberalism—that is, with religion, for instance, firmly separated from any conditions of citizenship, formal and substantive, and one need go no further than Locke or Montesquieu to make such claims—then it would seem that classical liberalism is precisely what threatens the State of Israel. Thus, when “destruction” of that state emerges as a consequence of holding the view that religion and conditions of citizenship ought to be separated, there is an effective foreclosure of an open debate on whether nonexclusionary criteria for rights of citizenship can be developed and implemented for that region. Indeed, one might hold to these views and be rigorously pacifist or one might hold to such views and believe that such a transition to a new polity should happen through nonviolent means, through the elaboration of new forms of law and projects of land redistribution that seek to compensate for decades of land confiscation, but, in such cases, those who hold such views are charged with “violence” and “destruction,” as in “these views lead to the destruction of the Jewish state.”

If we attend to this line carefully, though, we might see that the charge “these views lead to the destruction of the Jewish state” illicitly draws upon the claim that “these views lead to the destruction of the Jewish people” or, more elliptically, “the Jews.” But it is clearly one thing to ask about the political and economic conditions under which Jews and non-Jews might live equally and peaceably, and to think of forms of government that might require a transition from the current regime to another that would constitute a one-state solution or a form of federated power, and quite another to call for the violent destruction of a state or violence against its existing population. Indeed, the reason to envisage a new polity after Zionism may well be based on the recognition that no state can justly maintain itself through the violent subjugation of an indigenous and minority population who live on that land. Indeed, envisaging a polity after Zionism may well be the only way out of violence and destruction.

The public enunciation of the view asks that the State of Israel consider undertaking formal acts by which equality might be more inclusively allocated and contemporary forms of discrimination, differential violence, and daily harassment against the Palestinian people brought to an end. These views call for a new concept of the citizen, a new constitutional basis for the country, and a radical reorganization of land partitions, illegal property allocations, and even minimally a concept of multiculturalism that extends to Jewish, Arab, and Christian inhabitants of those lands. Now, one might argue against all these propositions that they are unreasonable and naive, but even then we would have to ask whether the refusal to reorganize a polity on principles of equality, protection against violence, and the just redistribution of lands is itself based on tacit or explicit desires for Jewish demographic advantage or notions of cultural and religious purity. It seems to me that at this point the affective stakes of nationalism effectively circumscribe the domain of acceptable political speech.

FROM BUBER TO ARENDT: A MIXED LEGACY

Hannah Arendt was hardly brandishing weapons when she argued in the late 1940s and early 1950s against Israel as a state based on notions of Jewish sovereignty. She becomes now a resource for post-Zionism, even a trace of post-Zionism that exists prior to its historical inception. Arendt was perhaps, the most avid secular Jewish critic of Zionism in the twentieth century, and she was able to articulate reasons why she found the establishment of the State of Israel to be illegitimate without thereby calling for a war against that polity. To call her a secular Jew is a complicated claim, since the version of secularism she maintained is one that could only be understood over and against a religious Judaism. She was not, for instance, a secular Christian, which would have meant something else. And her secularism could only be understood in relation to the specific religiosity that she rejected. In other words, her way of inhabiting Judaism was through her secularism, and I would even claim that she maintained a specifically Jewish orientation toward her secularism, one that in her case allowed her to maintain a German Jewish identity in exile. In this sense, her secularism does not negate her Judaism, but constitutes its particular mode of life, which is why “secular Jew” is not a contradiction in terms, but rather a historically adequate description since the mid-1900s.

Hannah Arendt’s trenchant criticisms of the founding of Israel have been compiled in a book called The Jew as Pariah and more recently published by Schocken as Hannah Arendt’s Jewish Writings. Although she was a Jew, she insisted that Israel ought not to be a Jewish state and thought its efforts to legitimate its claims to the land through state violence were racist forms of colonization that could only lead to permanent conflict. She also objected to the role the superpowers played in the crafting of the 1948 solution, as it were, since she argued that no polity could be founded and sustained without a popular, democratic exercise of freedom. Indeed, 1948—as a solution imposed upon a community in part by powers that were not inhabitants of the land—was the exact opposite of the democratic revolution she outlined in On Revolution in which a plurality works through concerted action to found a federalist legal and political order.

Although Arendt identified with Zionism in the 1930s, she made clear in an interview in 1972 that she could no longer make such identifications: “I do not belong to any group. The Zionists were the only group to which I ever belonged. Only because of Hitler, understandably enough. And only from 1933 to 1943. After that, I broke.”⁶

Her criticisms of the State of Israel followed from her critique of the nation-state and colonialism.⁷ Martin Buber, on the other hand, was a cultural Zionist, no secularist, and though he was an advocate of cooperative ventures, he failed to criticize Israel as a form of settler colonialism. His version of Zionism has become so anathematic in light of contemporary framings of Zionism that it now reads as “post-Zionist” or simply anti-Zionist. His political position was rather resolutely defeated by the establishment of Israel as a Jewish state in 1948, an act he understood to be the definitive undermining of Zionism itself. At the time, he and others in the Ichud organization disputed the legitimacy of Ben-Gurion’s 1948 declaration of the political sovereignty of Israel as a Jewish state. With Judah Magnes and Hannah Arendt, he called in 1946–47 for a binational polity that would be governed on a federal model. At the time, the U.S. and Britain were closing their doors to further Jewish immigration. And as we now know, Ben-Gurion requested that the major powers close their doors to petitioning Jews during that same time in order to make sure enough Jews could find sanctuary only in Palestine, thus amassing the Jewish population to constitute a demographic majority of Jews over Arabs. After this, he declared the founding of the State of Israel on principles of Jewish sovereignty in 1948.

Buber’s views have been regularly dismissed as idealistic, even as they are credited with providing the ethos for the early kibbutz movement. The most consequential blindness in his position, however, was that he could not see the impossibility of trying to cultivate certain ideals of cooperation on conditions established by settler colonialism. Buber did not seem to understand that the project of settler colonialism, with its seizure of lands and subjugation of Palestinian laborers, undermined the possibility of realizing his cooperative ideals. Although in his early work he argued for a spiritual Zionism that would stay away from claims of land and national statehood, he came to idealize the practice of working with the land, importing a neo-Lockean rationale for land appropriation into his thought. Indeed, he understood the settlement of the lands to be a realization of Zionism even as he resisted the claim to political sovereignty for the Jewish people. Instead, he imagined cooperative agricultural efforts as the basis for any future polity. Painfully, though, he described in neutral terms the Jewish settlements as “colonization” and even accepted that colonization had its virtues. He sought, paradoxically, humane forms of colonization, arguing for what he called concentrative colonialism rather than “expansionist” colonialism.⁸ The use of the word concentrative in the early forties must have carried some terrifying resonances, given its association with the German Konzentrationslager; but it becomes all the more worrisome when we see the “success” of concentrative colonialism in the West Bank and, most emphatically, in Gaza, where living conditions are cramped and impoverished in accord with the concentrative model.

Although Buber was clearly not prepared to undertake a critique of colonialism, he did, to his credit, hold out for a federated state in which Jewish and Palestinian cultural autonomy could be maintained and where the majority would never be in a position to tyrannize the minority. He also called for cooperative economic ventures, the return of Arab lands seized in 1948 and illegally redistributed in 1950, and he asked the Israeli public to try to understand why there might be Palestinian violence against Jews, chastising Israelis for having violated Arab trust and not undertaking cooperative self-government, the fair distribution of arable land, a just adjudication of property rights, and recognition of the humanity of its neighbors.⁹ Buber imagined that modes of civil and economic cooperation would lead organically to a form of government that would be based on a shared way of life between Arabs and Jews. He called for the process of peace and cooperation to begin at the cultural level, with the organization of life itself, and thought that a state form should not be imposed. In his view, an internally complex federal form of government for the region would and could emerge from a common life wrought together.¹⁰ What Buber failed to see is that no “common” projects could set aside the land seizures that had already taken place and that the basis on which he claimed Jewish right to the land installed an aggressive nationalism at the heart of his notion of cooperation. Interestingly, he understood the aims of political Zionism, which were distinct from his form of cultural Zionism, as “perverting” the spirit of Zionism. In his public writings prior to 1948, he made clear that Zionism should have nothing to do with political territory and political states. Similarly, Franz Rosenzweig wrote in The Star of Redemption that Jewish life was, by definition, a life of wandering and waiting. To arrive at a land, and to make Jewishness a matter of property and state, was for him a misunderstanding of the diasporic basis of Jewish values.

LEVINAS

If we return to Said’s formulation, we can see that the figure of Moses offers a different conception of “cohabitation” from what we see in Buber’s notion of “cooperation.” The figure of Moses brings together in his person disparate traditions, Jewish and non-Jewish. If the Jew is bound to the non-Jew as a condition of Jewish life, then the Jew and the non-Jew are not separable: the Jew, at least, cannot be thought without the non-Jew, though we do not know if the reciprocal relation also holds true. To be a Jew, though, means living in relation to the non-Jew, finding a way to refuse identitarian closure. In this way, Said is perhaps closer to the ethical position of Levinas than to Buber. After all, for Levinas, the subject is constituted by the other, and though he sometimes means the “infinite” other, he is also clear that that infinity only makes itself known through the face, the face of another person that bears within it an infinite demand. The other person, one might say, is “over there” and “not me” and, thus, an “alterity” in a clearly locatable sense. But at the same time—and these thoughts must somehow be thought together—that other also constitutes me, and I am, from within, riven by this ethical demand that is at once and indissolubly “over there” and “in here” as a constitutive condition of myself.

This position differs from the “I-Thou” of Buber, which would insist on separate identities, culturally distinct, that nevertheless federate as a cooperative dialogue and venture. The Levinasian position assumes the asymmetry of the relation between the subject and the Other; it also assumes that this other is already me, not assimilated as a “part” of me, but inassimilable as that which interrupts my own continuity and makes impossible an “autonomous” self at some distance from an “autonomous” other. Indeed, the Levinasian position, taken seriously, would defeat Buber’s philosophical notion of dialogue, despite the superficial resonances between them. I want to suggest that the Levinasian “interruption” by the other, the way in which the ontology of the self is constituted on the basis of the prior eruption of the other at the heart of myself, implies a critique of the autonomous subject and the version of multiculturalism that assume cultures are constituted autonomous domains whose task it is to establish dialogue with other cultures. In Levinas’s view, there is a heterogeneity that is prior to my being and that constantly decenters the autonomous subject I appear to be. It also permanently complicates the question of location: where do “I” begin and end, and what are the locatable parameters of “the Other”? This position maintains some closer alliances to Said than to Buber, oddly enough. After all, the politics of miscegenation implied by Said’s use of Moses would seem to constitute the more radical alternative.

Indeed, I expected at first to be able to derive the strongest Jewish statement of an ethical obligation to the other from Levinas, since such an obligation would not be contingent, but would follow from the constitution of the subject by and in alterity. Of course, to make use of Levinas for a left politics is precisely to read him against his own Zionism and his refusal to accept that Palestinians make a legitimate ethical demand on the Jewish people. Philosophically, Levinas outlines an ethical scene in which we are obligated, under most situations, to preserve the life of the other—obligated by the alterity we encounter there. Upon closer inspection, however, it turns out that this scene, which would seem to obligate us universally, is restricted culturally and geographically. The ethical obligation toward the face of the other is not an obligation one can or does feel toward every face. Indeed, at one point in a lecture at the University of California at Irvine, Derrida maintained that if he had to respond to every face he would inevitably become irresponsible. And, if this is true, then the ethical demand is not prior to notions of cultural autonomy, but is precisely framed and restricted in advance by certain notions of culture, ethnicity, and religion. This has concrete implications for understanding the commandment “thou shalt not kill.” For Levinas, the prohibition against violence is restricted to those whose faces make a demand upon me, and yet these “faces” are differentiated by virtue of their religious and cultural background. This then opens up the question of whether there is any obligation to preserve the life of those who appear “faceless” within his view or, perhaps, to extend his logic, by virtue of not having a face, do not appear at all.

We have not yet seen a study of the “faceless” in Levinas, but let us presume it is on its way. The fact that Palestinians remain faceless for him (or that they are the paradigm for the faceless) produces a rather stark quandary, since Levinas gives us so many reasons to extrapolate politically on the prohibition against killing. For instance, for Levinas, the messianic tradition is explicitly one that seeks to counter the politics of revenge, and a reader might reasonably conclude that this would lead him to a non-nationalist politics and a course of minimal violence. When he opposes revenge, he argues that there is no justice to be had in killing those who have killed those closest to oneself or killing those by whom one fears being killed oneself. Levinas remarks that violence done in the name of justice produces a suffering that never operates as a final judgment. This is an odd remark and deserves close scrutiny. Suffering is not a “sign of judgment,” nor is it the act by which judgment is dealt or administered. Thus, one cannot, as a result, interpret one’s own suffering as a judgment, nor can one make another suffer as if such suffering were no more than a judgment of what is true and right. Levinas appears to be arguing that it is a mistake to think that those who suffer violence must have committed some wrong. The presumption of Greek tragedy is refuted by a specifically Jewish view of suffering: the crimes of history do not always strike down the innocent; sometimes they strike down the guilty, but, if they do, that is a contingency, since the order of judgment and the order of suffering (which belongs to the order of history) are radically distinct. When criminals suffer and are “struck down there is no hand of God behind the striking; those forms of ‘striking down’ are not the same as ‘judgments.’ Historical events such as these do not relay divine purposes or the ethical rightness of historical sequence. It is not possible to say that in being struck down, you were judged to be wrong, and that the striking is itself the deliverance of a judgment. ‘Hillel knew that history does not judge’” (DF, 23). No event in history can judge a conscience. No matter how calculated events may be, events themselves are considered “mindless”: neither containing nor implying any form of judgment.

For Levinas, then, messianism seems linked with this fact, that judgment does not and cannot occur in history. The order of morality is not evinced in any historically unfolding sequence of events, and we cannot regard historical events, no matter how terrible or felicitous, as enacting or revealing moral judgments of some kind. And yet there is a form of judgment before which man is called, as it were, and this takes the form of an indisputable assignation, an assignation that does not take place in chronology or in history, an assignation that comes from a modality other than historical time, constituting its very anteriority. One is called upon to respond ethically, and this call is the effective action of the messianic upon human life. If messianism is engaged with a form of waiting, a waiting for the Messiah and, indeed, a waiting for justice, it also is precisely a kind of waiting that cannot be fulfilled in historical time. Messianism is distinguished from eschatology.¹¹ If one waits for judgment within time, one waits for that which time itself can never deliver. If there is a sense to the messianic, it will consist in the interruption of historical time by something outside of it. Benjamin seemed to have a similar view, especially in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” And doubtless we see indications of this in Kafka as well.

In “Jewish Thought Today,” Levinas offers an interpretation of a commentary by Rashi, in which a discussion is reported among Talmudic scholars. They ask, “how would we know who the messiah is?” and one of them concludes that “the messiah might (as well) be me” (89). Rashi is silent in response to this proposal, letting the question stand. Indeed, it is a kind of permanently open question: might the Mes siah be me? So the “who, me?” arrives in this sentence with a question mark. This is a question that cannot be definitively answered, but only repeated, since every “me” who poses the question will be a different one. It is the rhetorical operation of the “infinity” of the ethical demand, in Levinas’s sense. If the Messiah is the just man who suffers, according to this particular commentary, he is also the one who takes on the sufferings of others and the one who may bear some of the infinitely distributed responsibility characteristic of the messianic.

Although our suffering does not reflect a judgment, the suffering of others formulates the substance of the ethical demand that is continuously upon us. For Levinas, there is no “evasion” of this responsibility: “the fact of not evading the burden imposed by the suffering of others defines the self.” And then he states, “all persons are the Messiah,” and “The Self (Moi) is one who has promised itself that it will carry the whole responsibility of the world” (DF, 89).

The messianic is thus not only an experience of waiting and of suffering but also an unwilled and infinite receptivity to the commandment that makes responsibility for the other coextensive with the self. Indeed, responsibility for the other constitutes the ek-static structure of the self, the fact that I am called outside myself, and that this relation to an alterity defines me essentially. When we ask “who might the Messiah be?” and then pose the question, “is it me?” we indicate through that last question that the suffering of others may well be our responsibility and no one else’s. We ask, “am I being addressed by someone’s suffering, and, if so, by whose?” So, though the messianic is often identified with a singular person who may or may not come in time, the messianic is at work, for Levinas, every moment we ask the question “who, me?” Such a moment is not, for him, strictly historical; that is, it does not only happen in response to this or that situation of suffering. The demand traverses historical time and cannot be “relativized” by virtue of historical location, or so it would appear, if we follow his argument through to its logical conclusion. The messianic does not appear in synchronic time, and there is no final verification of “who” the Messiah is, since the whole point of the messianic is to keep the question of the “who” open. The messianic shines through obliquely and infinitely in the question form that articulates the ethical demand. Who, me? In fact, there is no reason to be found outside the question that it should be me, but the question implicates me, as it would anyone to whom it is addressed (and it is presumably addressed to everyone).

But if this demand arrives from a nonhistorical zone, from what he calls the order of judgment distinguished from the order of the event, which is history, then it is difficult to understand to what, precisely, we are obligated to respond. It would seem not to be our historical circumstances or specific historical forms of suffering. Messianism, for Levinas, establishes a perspective by which both history and politics are considered arbitrary, unjustified, even absurd: if we cannot feel the absurd element in history, a part of our messianic sensibility is lost.

In Difficult Freedom it is clear that Levinas is referring to the messianic sensibility of a particular collective, the Jews, who, in his view, have experienced the arbitrary violence of historical events. And though we have been told this ethical perspective traverses historical time, Levinas appears to forget his precept and moves quickly into a discussion of Israel as a historical place, people, and state. Indeed, he goes on to claim that the fate of the Jews is to act within the terms of a universalist particularism. This is no arbitrary fate, but a necessary one. And though, in his view, historical events have an arbitrariness to them, the Jewish task—its fate—is to reconcile the particular with the universal. One the one hand, this task is fate and does not take place “in history.” It is an elect and singular task or destiny, a recurrent one that remains indifferent to particular historical events. On the other hand, this ahistorical “fate” grounds his argument in favor of Zionism as a historical and contemporary reality. If this fate is necessary and ahistorical, then it is not the same as history, understood as an arbitrary sequence and field of accidents distinct from the domain of judgment and morality. The absurdity of human events is thus invoked to dispel the idea that historical suffering is a form of morally necessitated “judgment” upon those who suffer. And yet Zionism becomes a “fate” that exercises a certain necessity in history.

Thus, the critical question emerges: is Zionism a historically formed movement and set of beliefs and practices, or is it an ahistorical “fate” that recurs in history by virtue of a kind of necessity? If it is historical, then there is no moral reason for it to be; but if it is ahistorical, it constitutes a moral necessity that traverses historical time and has its meaning outside of any history. Similarly, we find that Levinas’s descriptions of the ethical relation require a dispossession of the self that is contravened by his descriptions of Zionism in which he seeks recourse to established notions of autonomy and identity and the overcoming of dispossession for the Jews (but not the overcoming of dispossession for everyone, except insofar as the Jew is implicitly universal and so a privileged form of particularism). For instance, Levinas writes, “Zionism and the creation of the State of Israel mean for Jewish thought a return to oneself in every sense of the term, and the end of an alienation that lasted a thousand years” (DF, 164). And though messianism is defined earlier as a certain indifference to history, Zionism now departs from messianism, causing a problem for those readings, such as Jacqueline Rose’s in The Question of Zion, that draw a firm line linking the messianic tradition and Zionist strategies of political self-legitimation.¹² Levinas writes, for instance, “While the spiritual personality of Israel has for centuries excused its lack of participation in the history of the world on the ground that it was a persecuted minority—not everyone has the chance to have pure hands because he is persecuted!—the State of Israel is the first opportunity to move into history by bringing about a just world” (DF, 164).

But what is this justice that the State of Israel is said to bring? It is clearly, for Levinas, one in which the example of universalism embodied in particularism is given form, which means that this people, the Jews, carry universalism as their particular destiny through time. This universalism, this justice, “moves into” history, which suggests that it originates in a nonhistorical relation, synchronic, and somehow passes over into the historical or the diachronic.

What is this ethical relation? And is Levinas maintaining that it is the specific task of Israel to articulate and shelter this mode of ethicality? It is important to remember that our ordinary way of thinking about responsibility is altered in Levinas’s formulation. We do not take responsibility for the Other’s suffering only when it is clear that we have caused that suffering. In other words, we do not take responsibility only for the clear choices we have made and the effects they have had. Although, of course, such acts are important components of any account of responsibility, they do not indicate its most fundamental structure. According to Levinas, we affirm the unfreedom at the heart of our relations with others, and only by ceding in this way do we come to understand responsibility. In other words, I cannot disavow my relation to the Other, regardless of what the other does, regardless of what I might will. Indeed, responsibility is not a matter of cultivating a will (as it is for Kantians), but of recognizing an unwilled susceptibility as a resource for becoming responsive to the Other. Whatever the Other has done, the Other is still the one who makes an ethical demand upon me, who has a “face” to which I am obligated to respond, meaning that I am, as it were, precluded from revenge precisely by virtue of that responsive relation to those others I never chose.

It is, of course, something of an outrage to be ethically responsible for those to whom one never chose to be responsible, but here is where Levinas draws attention to those modes of being implicated in the lives of others that precede and subtend any possible conditions of choice. Arendt will, as I mentioned earlier, develop a similar position, namely, that unwilled cohabitation is a condition of our political lives and not something that we are entitled to destroy. No one can choose with whom to cohabit the earth (this was Eichmann’s profound error). For Levinas, there are situations in which responding to the “face” of the other feels horrible, impossible, and where even the desire for murderous revenge feels overwhelming and irresistible, but a primary and unwilled relation to the Other would demand that we desist both from a voluntarism and an impulsive aggression that follow from the self-preservative aims of egoism. “The face” thus communicates an enormous prohibition against impulsive aggression toward the persecutor. In “Ethics and Spirit” Levinas writes,

The face, for its part, is inviolable; those eyes, which are absolutely without protection, the most naked part of the human body, nonetheless offer an absolute resistance to possession, an absolute resistance in which the temptation to murder is inscribed. The Other is the only being that one can be tempted to kill. This temptation to murder and this impossibility of murder constitute the very vision of the face. To see a face is already to hear “You shall not kill,” and to hear “You shall not kill” is to hear “social justice.”

(DF, 8)

If “persecution” by the Other refers to the range of actions that are unilaterally imposed upon us without our will, sometimes against our will, it takes a more literal meaning for Levinas when he speaks of injuries and, finally, of the Nazi genocide. Levinas writes, amazingly, that “in the trauma of persecution” the ethical consists in “pass[ing] from the outrage undergone to the responsibility for the persecutor … from suffering to expiation for the other.”¹³ Responsibility thus arises for the persecuted, for whom the central dilemma is whether or not one may kill in response to persecution. It is, we might say, the limit case of the prohibition against killing, the condition under which its justification would seem most questionable.

In 1971, Levinas explicitly reflected upon the meaning that the Holocaust has for his considerations of persecution and responsibility. He is surely aware that to derive responsibility from having been persecuted echoes perilously with those who would have blamed the Jews and other victims of the Nazi genocide for their own fates. Levinas clearly rejects this view. He does, however, establish persecution as a certain kind of ethical scene or, at least, a dimension of ethics that cannot be superseded. He situates the particular nexus of persecution and responsibility at the core of Judaism, even as the essence of Israel. By “Israel” he refers ambiguously and consequentially to both senses of the word, the Jewish people and the land of Palestine. He offers the following controversial formulation:

The ultimate essence of Israel derives from its innate [innée] predisposition to involuntary sacrifice, its exposure to persecution. Not that we need think of the mystical expiation that it would fulfill like a host. To be persecuted, to be guilty without having committed any crime, is not an original sin, but the obverse of a universal responsibility; a responsibility for the Other [l’Autre] that is more ancient than any sin. It is an invisible universality! It is the reverse of a choosing that puts forward the self [moi] before it is even free to accept being chosen. It is for the others to see if they wish to take advantage of it [abuser]. It is for the free self [moi libre] to fix the limits of this responsibility or to claim entire responsibility. But it can do so only in the name of that original responsibility, in the name of this Judaism.

(DF, 225)

The preceding paragraph is complex and problematic for many reasons, not least of which is the direct analogy he draws between the suffering of the Jews under Nazism and the suffering of Israel, understood both as land and as people, from 1948 to 1971, the time of his writing. That the fate of Israel is equated with the fate of the Jews is controversial in its own right, dismissing both diasporic and non-Zionist traditions of Judaism. More emphatically, it is clearly wrong to claim that the State of Israel only suffered persecution during those years, given the massive and forcible displacement of more than 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and villages in 1948 alone, not to mention the continuing war, occupation, and so-called extrajudicial killings that have claims the lives of thousands of Palestinians in the ensuing years. It is curious and problematic that Levinas should here extract “persecution” from its concrete historical appearances, establishing it as an apparently timeless essence of Judaism. After all, he references the Nazi campaign to exterminate the Jews of Europe as a historical event and presumably must say this unequivocally to ward off any possible implication of revisionism. If “persecution” now characterizes the “fate” of the Jews, and so a recurrent and ahistorical dimension of existence, then any historical argument suggesting that Jews are not always in the situation of being persecuted could be refuted on definitional grounds alone: Jews cannot be persecutory since, by definition, Jews are the persecuted. This attribution of persecution to “Israel” as a necessary and definitional feature of identity seems corroborated by his view of the preontological structure of the subject. If Jews are considered “elect” precisely because they carry a message of universality, and what is “universal” in Levinas’s view is the inaugurative structuring of the subject through persecution and ethical demand, then the Jew becomes the model and instance for this preontological persecution. The Jew is, accordingly, no longer historical. In fact, the problem is that the Jew is a category that belongs to a historically and culturally constituted ontology (unless it is the name for access to the infinite itself); so if the Jew maintains an “elective” status in relation to ethical responsiveness, then a full confusion of the preontological and the ontological is thereby accomplished in Levinas’s work. The Jew is neither part of ontology nor history—the Jew cannot be understood as belonging to the order of historical time—and yet this exemption becomes the way in which Levinas makes claims about the role of Israel, itself historically formed and maintained, as forever and exclusively persecuted and, by definition, never persecuting. As a result, we are asked to consider this historical political state as timelessly suffering persecution—not as a state with a specific history (which includes the persecution of Palestinians), a present (which includes producing nearly a million displaced peoples in Lebanon), and set of possible futures (which might include an effort to move beyond the politics of revenge and the infinitely self-legitimating claims of being persecuted toward a new notion of relationality that does not presume and reenforce persecution as its condition).

This same confusion between the two domains is made clear in other contexts where Levinas claims that Judaism and Christianity are the cultural and religious preconditions of ethical relationality itself, and, with blatant racism, warns that the “rise of the countless masses of Asiatic peoples [des masses innombrables de peuples asiatiques] and underdeveloped peoples threaten the new-found authenticity” (DF, 165) of Jewish universalism. This, in turn, resonates with his warning that ethics cannot be based on “exotic cultures.” He maintains that, ethically, one may not denounce the hunger of others, but then proceeds to say, “under the greedy eyes of these countless hordes who wish to hope and live, we, the Jews and Christians are pushed to the margins of history, and soon no one will bother any more to differentiate between a Catholic and a Protestant or a Jew and a Christian.” Even Marxism, he writes, whose universalism might once have bound these religions in a new unity, “will … be lost in the vastness of these foreign civilizations and impenetrable pasts” (DF, 165). He calls for a new kinship between Christians and Jews to combat this rise “in what can only be called barbarism.”

I want to underline here that a vacillation exists for Levinas between the preontological sense of “persecution”—associated with an impingement that takes place prior to any ontology—and a fully ontological sense of “persecution” that comes to define the “essence” of a people. Similarly, through apposition at the end of the paragraph, “the name of original responsibility” is aligned with “the name of this Judaism,” at which point it seems clear that this original and hence preontological responsibility is the same as the essence of Judaism. For this to be a distinguishing feature of Judaism in particular, it cannot be a distinguishing feature of all religions, and he makes this clear when he cautions against all religious traditions that fail to refer to “the history of the saints and to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” (DF 165). Although in his rendition we receive an implausible and outrageous account of the Jewish people problematically identified with Israel and figured only as persecuted and never persecuting, it is possible to read Levinas against himself, as it were, and arrive at a different conclusion. Indeed, Levinas’s words here carry wounds and outrages, and they pose an ethical dilemma for those who read them. Although he would circumscribe a given religious tradition as the precondition for ethical responsibility, thereby casting other traditions as threats to ethicality, it makes sense for us to insist, as it were, on a face-to-face encounter, precisely here where Levinas claims it cannot be done. Moreover, although his words wound us here or, perhaps precisely because his words wound us here, we are responsible for him, even as the relation proves painful in its nonreciprocity.

To be persecuted, he tells us, is the obverse of a responsibility for the Other. The two are fundamentally linked, and we see the objective correlate of this in the double valence of the face: “This temptation to murder and this impossibility of murder constitute the very vision of the face.” To be persecuted can lead to murder in response, even the displacement of murderous aggression onto those who in no way authored the injuries for which one seeks revenge. But for Levinas an ethical demand emerges precisely from the humanization of the face: this one I am tempted to murder in self-defense is “one who makes its claim upon me, preventing me from becoming the persecutor in reverse.” It is, of course, one thing to argue that responsibility arises from the situation of being persecuted—that is a compelling and counterintuitive claim, especially if responsibility does not mean identifying oneself as the cause of another’s injurious action. But to argue that any historically constituted group of people are, by definition, always persecuted and never persecutory seems not only to confound the ontological and preontological levels but also to license an unacceptable irresponsibility and a limitless recourse to aggression in the name of “self-defense.” Indeed, the Jews have a culturally complex history that includes the sufferings of anti-Semitism, pogroms, and concentration camps where over six million were slaughtered. But there is also the history of religious and cultural traditions and practices, many of which are pre-Zionist, and there is a history, more vexed than is usually acknowledged, of a relation to Israel as a problematic and even unacceptable ideal and political form. To say that persecution is the essence of Judaism not only overrides agency and aggression performed in the name of Judaism, but preempts a cultural and historical analysis that would have to be complex and specific through recourse to a singular preontological condition, one that, understood as universal, is identified as the transhistorical and defining truth of the Jewish people.

WHO HAS A FACE?

So what has happened to the face in this essay by Levinas? Where is its humanizing directive, its commandment to stay attuned to the precarious life of the other, its demand that I become dispossessed in a relationality that always puts the other first? Suddenly, there is a figure not of a face but of a faceless horde, and the horde threatens not only to engulf this me, but a collective “we” who has, contrary to the understanding of messianism, found itself in the historical position of carrying alone, or with its Christian kin, the spirit of universality itself. There is no nameable Islam here, there is no nameable Arab here, only something vaguely Asiatic, without a face, threatening engulfment, but also threatening the people whose elected task it is to carry universality and so threatening universality itself. There can be no commandment that issues from the face of this other, since this other, faceless, threatens to undermine the entire tradition from which the face emerges, the entire legacy of the commandment itself.

Here we can see the Ashkenazi presumption that underwrites the Levinasian ethical scene, the notion that substantive Jewish history is the history of European Jewry, and not the Sephardim (descended from the Jews in Spain and Portugal) or the Mizrachim (descended from North African and Arab Jewish cultures). And what we read as well, between or at the end of these lines, is a frank argument in favor of Jewish majority rule in Israel. His fear of engulfment is precisely that which we hear voiced by some Israelis who fear what power sharing or cohabitation might mean. And any sense of Zionism as a philosophy of cohabitation is surely lost from view. Levinas freely refers to the “exceptional fate” of Judaism and objects to Islam as a “founded religion,” meaning that it was charismatically induced by a leader who worked his way with unthinking peoples. But surely Levinas can only make this claim about the deficiency of Islam by forgetting that Judaism is founded as well, and by Moses, an Egyptian.

This last is a consequential forgetfulness. Thus it is important to turn not only to Freud, who remembered, but also to Said who recalls that if Judaism is to mean anything, it will be by virtue of its founding implication in what is not Jewish. Those “hungry hordes” whom Levinas fears, who threaten to rise up and destroy the Judeo-Christian foundation of his idea of “civilization” are, in Said’s view, the people in need, the dispossessed and the refugees with whom diasporic Judaism maintains an ethical solidarity. Paradoxically, it is Said who becomes at such a moment the non-European founder of Judaism or, at least, the one who petitions to bring Judaism back to its constitutive relation to those who are not Jewish. Remember his reference to the unhoused and diasporic character of Jewish life that aligns it “in our age of vast population transfers” with “refugees, exiles, expatriates, and immigrants” (FNE, 53) It is against such “hordes” that Levinas seeks to protect Judaism, but for Said those populations are precisely the ones who make the ethical and political demand upon us and with whom the Jews, who have suffered persecution and displacement historically, have good reasons to respond however they can. This responsiveness seemed to be what Levinas meant by the ethical, but if the hordes are “faceless” then no response is possible or obligatory.

An obligatory response would require, though, that we understand Said as constituting a different political future than the one Levinas explicitly provided. The other is not simply on the far side of the border, itself violently imposed and maintained, and there is no separating wall that can nullify the ethical demand for responsiveness to the suffering of the other. How are we to think such a responsibility across a border that is meant to differentiate populations, to prevent their inmixing and to render faceless an entire population? Buber could not imagine the separation wall, though he understood that there were those who would always oppose the notion of “living together.” But, now that “living apart” is mandated by violently policed borders and walls, how do we think the obligation of the other when the face, quite literally, can no longer be seen, when the media does not show the face, when Haaretz raises money for the poor in Israel with the assistance of graphic photos, but not for those who are subject to malnutrition within the violently policed borders of Gaza, whose suffering is systematically shrouded? Doubtless, Buber had a point in believing that political forms of alliance could emerge from ways of life that involved living and working together in deinstitutionalized ways, and that such alliances could provide the foundation and model for collaborative associations seeking nonviolent and just solutions to conflicts that appear intractable. And though it is crucial to form such communities—bilingual educational institutions, bilingual theatrical productions, cooperative resistance movements—the larger problem has to do with a certain facelessness that has become the norm within the dominant media. If belonging to the nation of Israel is a precondition of an ethical bearing, then there can be no ethical bearing toward those who are outside the walls of the nation-state, at which point there is no other, which means that the ethical claim has been nullified. Further, Buber thought he could pursue coexistence within a structure of colonialism, affirming the rights of Jews to lay claim to more land. His view—binational, colonialist, and culturally Zionist—continues to haunt those coexistence projects that think they can work within a structure of colonial subjugation. Only by dissolving colonial subjugation will coexistence first become thinkable.

And yet, what will move the colonizers to consider a reconfiguration of that polity on the principles of equality and social plurality? Said points in the direction of an ethical and political alliance that can be achieved only by living to the side of one’s nationalism, making the border into the center of the analysis, and allowing for a decentering of a nationalist ethos. I would add that it matters whether this is the nationalism of a militarized nation-state or the nationalism of those who have never known a state. And yet we might take his claim as a way of thinking about any possible future nation (Israel, Palestine, or Israel/Palestine), how its commitment to its own people must imply a concomitant commitment to cohabitation with others.

NATIONS

What would it mean to begin the practice of undoing nationalism, of countering its claims, of beginning to think and feel outside its reach? Would this be something akin to what Said saw about the importance of sustaining a diasporic condition for a new polity, one in which identity never fully returns to itself, where identity remains cast out in a web of relations that cannot eradicate difference or return to simple identity? It is not just a question of finding that what I am depends upon a “you” who is not me, but that my very capacity for attachment and, indeed, for love and receptivity requires a sustained dispossession of this “I.” This is, I would suggest, a more radical thought than Buber’s conception of the I and the Thou. It would belong to a diasporic Levinas, one that we find most interestingly embodied in the work of Edward Said.

Surprisingly, we have to consider what it is that one can finally love in order to move outside the claims of nationalism. Let us consider two quotations, one from Hannah Arendt and the other from Mahmoud Darwish. They seemed to be in conversation with one another, and I offer them as examples of a way to live to the side of nationalism. Arendt was, as is well known, criticized by Gershom Scholem and others after she published her Eichmann in Jerusalem. Scholem calls Arendt “heartless” for concentrating on what she takes to be the inadequate visions of Jewish politics at the time. Scholem wrote to her in 1963 from Jerusalem: “In the Jewish tradition there is a concept, hard to define and yet concrete enough, which we know as Ahabath Israel: ‘Love of the Jewish people …’ In you, dear Hannah, as in so many intellectuals who came from the German Left, I find little trace of this.” Arendt replies, disputing first that she comes from the German left (and, indeed, she was no Marxist), but then responds with something quite interesting when accused of failing to love the Jewish people well enough. She writes,

You are quite right—I am not moved by “love” of this sort, and for two reasons: I have never in my life “loved” any people or collective—neither the German people, nor the French, nor the American, nor the working class or anything of that sort. I indeed love “only” my friends and the only kind of love I know of and believe in is the love of persons. Secondly, this “love of the Jews” would appear to me, since I am myself Jewish, as something rather suspect. I cannot love myself or anything which I know is part and parcel of my own person. To clarify this, let me tell you of a conversation I had in Israel with a prominent political personality who was defending the—in my opinion disastrous—non-separation of religion and state in Israel. What he said—I am not sure of the exact words any more—ran something like this: “You will understand that, as a Socialist, I, of course, do not believe in God; I believe in the Jewish people.” I found this a shocking statement and, being too shocked, I did not reply at the time. But I could have answered: the greatness of this people was once that it believed in God, and believed in Him in such a way that its trust and love towards Him was greater than its fear. And now this people believes only in itself? What good can come out of that?—Well, in this sense I do not “love” the Jews, nor do I “believe” in them; I merely belong to them as a matter of course, beyond dispute or argument.¹⁴

In Darwish’s Memory for Forgetfulness, his literary account of the bombings of Beirut in 1982, he describes a scene with his Jewish lover. They have been making love, and he becomes sleepy. He is aware that he has to report to the Israeli police in order to avoid being jailed or permanently expelled. His is the first-person voice in the quotation that follows:

He asks, “Do the police know the address of this house?”

She answered, “I don’t think so, but the military police do. Do you hate Jews?”

I said, “I love you now.”

She said, “That’s not a clear answer.”

I said, “And the question itself wasn’t clear. As if I were to ask you, ‘Do you love Arabs?’”

She said, “That’s not a question.”

I asked, “And why is your question a question?”

She said, “Because we have a complex. We have more need of answers than you do.”

I said, “Are you crazy?”

She said, “A little. But you haven’t told me if you love Jews or hate them.”

I said, “I don’t know, and I don’t want to know. But I do know I like the plays of Euripides and Shakespeare. I like fried fish, boiled potatoes, the music of Mozart, and the city of Haifa. I like grapes, intelligent conversation, autumn, Picasso’s blue period. And I like wine, and the ambiguity of mature poetry. As for Jews, they’re not a question of love or hate.”

She said, “Are you crazy?”

I said, “A little.”

She asked, “Do you like coffee?”

I said, “I love coffee and the aroma of coffee.”

She rose, naked, even of me, and I felt the pain of those from whom a limb has been severed.”¹⁵

Later, he changes tone, only to change it again: she asks, “and you, what do you dream about?” And he replies, “That I stop loving you.” She asks, “Do you love me?” He replies, “No. I don’t love you. Did you know that your mother, Sarah, drove my mother, Hagar, into the desert?” She asks, “Am I to blame, then? Is it for that that you do not love me?” And he replies, “No, You’re not to blame; and because of that I don’t love you. Or, I love you” (125).

This last line carries with it a paradox. I don’t love you. Or, I love you. How are we to read this final conjunctive disjunction? This is both proximity and aversion; it is unsettled; it is not of one mind. It might be said to be the affect, the emotional tenor of an impossible and necessary union, the strange logic by which one wishes to go and insists upon staying. Surely binationalism is not love, but there is, we might say, a necessary and impossible attachment that makes a mockery of identity, an ambivalence that emerges from the decentering of the nationalist ethos and that forms the basis of a permanent ethical demand. Something unresolved, the disquiet of ambivalence, the diasporic conditions of a new polity, an impossible task and so all the more necessary.¹⁶