Palestine in a World on Fire

ON HUMANITY, VIOLENCE, AND IMAGINATION

April 29, 2021

Judith Butler is Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley, where they have taught in Critical Theory and Comparative Literature for several years. They received their PhD in Philosophy from Yale University in 1984. They are the author ofseveral books, including Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (1987), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (1993), The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection (1997), Excitable Speech (1997), Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (2000), Precarious Life: Powers of Violence and Mourning (2004), Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009), Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (2012), Who Sings the Nation-State? with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (2008), Dispossession: The Performative in the Political coauthored with Athena Athanasiou (2013), Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015), Vulnerability in Resistance coauthored with Zeynep Gambetti and Leticia Sabsay (2016), The Force of Non-Violence (2020), and What World Is This? A Pandemic Phenomenology (2022). Butler’s books have been translated into more than twenty-seven languages, and they have received fourteen honorary degrees. They were, from 2015 to 2020, a principal investigator of the Mellon Foundation Grant that initiated the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs on whose board they now serve as cochair. Butler is active in several human rights organizations, having served on the board of the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York and presently participating on the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace. They also serve on the boards of several journals, including Critical Times. They were the recipient of the Andrew Mellon Award for Distinguished Academic Achievement in the Humanities (2009–13). Butler was elected to the British Academy as a Corresponding Fellow in 2018 and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019. In 2020, they served as president of the Modern Language Association. They were a visiting scholar at the Centre Pompidou in 2023 through 2024. In 2024, they published Who’s Afraid of Gender? with Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

ILAN PAPPÉ: Judith, these questions stem directly from what we’ve heard from you over the years—from your books, articles, lectures, and interviews. And this imparts a logic that connects our subjects of interest, from attitudes toward life to the struggle for decolonization in the twenty-first century.

My first question is about the way we can operationalize your notions of the grievable and ungrievable in daily life experience. Not only in the questions of whose life is valuable, but rather in the field of compassion. Much of my effort, and that of many of my Palestinian friends who live in Israel, is focused on an attempt to engage the Jewish public there and in the world with the human cost of the Palestinian 1948 catastrophe, the Nakba, which is commemorated every May 15th.

The effort here is to persuade them to acknowledge the Nakba as a formative, recurring event that requires psychological, legal, moral, and political closure. And to do it by showing basic compassion or grief toward the suffering of the victims of the Nakba, before discussing anything else. When you try to do this, you are immediately faced with a callous wall of rejection, informed by a gut mechanism of defense that blocks any compassion. There is no grieving for the Palestinian victims of the 1948 ethnic cleansing, as there was no grieving or compassion toward the victims of Gaza in 2014. This mechanism appears as a strange sequence of counterarguments beginning with total denial of the catastrophe, followed by a statement that if it did happen the victims are responsible for their fate. And finally, they would say that worse things happen elsewhere.

For me, this mechanism of defense is directly associated with two examples of structural dehumanization: anti-Black racialized violence in the US, epitomized by the murder of George Floyd and others, and the dehumanization of the Palestinians. In many ways, the interconnection between racism in the US and in Israel has been recently recognized by the clear pro-Palestinian position of the Black Lives Matter movement and by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, who demonstrated in solidarity with the victims of the police violence in Ferguson.

Struggling against both forms of dehumanization can potentially be defined as part of the new decolonization effort—one that will be effective only if it overcomes this dehumanization. How could we best challenge dehumanization and the lack of compassion? Here we are concerned with the Jewish Zionist and Israeli attitude to Palestinian suffering due to the ongoing catastrophe, and the long history and continued racialized dehumanization of African Americans in the United States. Because if we do not, we accept the American political science assertion that conflicts or social “tensions” can only be managed and never solved.

Can we move beyond this grievable/ungrievable dichotomy in daily activism that aims to persuade people to acknowledge the suffering of others, as part of a real effort to bring peace and a solution to violence?

JUDITH BUTLER: Ilan, let me first say how much I have learned from you over the years. You were among the first historians from within Israel who allowed me to reconstruct the history of the Nakba and also to see how systemic the denial of that catastrophe is in the official and unofficial Israeli narratives of the founding of the state of Israel. Your historical work and your conceptual work have very clearly paved the way for many of us, especially those of us who grew up within the matrix of Zionism for whom that was a worldview—a framework that was not exactly contestable as a young person. We didn’t have an “outside” to that framework until the excellent work of historians and political activists started to open that up.

But over time, it’s also been clear to me that the internal critique of the Nakba and the systematic dispossession of Palestinians from their lands—the dispossession, the incarceration, the killing, the siege, the forced exile—all of this requires a different set of histories than one that is simply the internal critique of Zionism that progressive or anti-Zionist Jews conduct. It’s extremely important to develop this critique, except if we remain caught in that framework we’re just talking to ourselves.

So part of me thinks well, yes, it’s important to persuade Zionists within Israel or Zionists within the diaspora to understand the radical oppression of Palestine that not only happened in 1948 but continues to happen. The Nakba is indeed a continuing practice and policy—in occupation, in forced dispossession, in disenfranchisement, in Palestine and beyond. It has been important to leave that framework and to ask a different question: how to build international alliances that have, as a primary goal, the liberation of Palestine and the enfranchisement of Palestinians. And to recognize the condition under which Palestinians live, not only as settler colonial, but also as systemic racism.

As we do that, we link Palestine to other struggles, including the antiracism struggle in this country and throughout the world, but also prison abolition and carceral politics. If we think about the industries that have built the checkpoints and militarized police practices of the Israeli regime, they are very often the same corporations and practices that took place in Ferguson. And that take place in police trainings in Singapore, South Africa, and the United States. We have a global condition, which is the militarization of the police. And we also have a framework: understanding carceral politics as involving not just the abolition of prisons, but the prison system, as it extends into everyday life through the militarization of the police. That is already a framework that connects these struggles.

What you say about compassion is very important and I don’t mean to set it aside. I sometimes worry about compassion, that it involves setting up identification: “These other people are just like me.” Just as I suffer, so others suffer. Just as my people suffer, so others suffer. That is a principle of equality and it’s an important one, but there’s also a different history. If I really want to be affected by the catastrophe of the ongoing Nakba, if I want to make myself open to the suffering of others, it may be that I should not assume an absolute parallelism between the lives of others and my life. Because the tendency in the West is to say, “Oh, everyone is equal. Everyone is just like me, everyone is a Western subject.” Through my compassion, which is very commendable, I assimilate everyone to me. And it’s like, “No, that’s not going to work because there’s a separate history and it’s one we need to learn.”

It’s also why many of us need to learn other languages, other histories, and other geographies—so that we don’t assimilate the sufferings of others to our own suffering, because that just brings them into our model. Now we might say that this is a risk we take within the humanist perspective. And as you say, rightly, “How do we convince people, persuade people, or get them to understand this quite systematic dehumanization of Palestinians?” That’s a perfectly great question. The problem I see is that there’s an idea of the human that’s lodged within the critique of dehumanization. If Palestinians or non-Palestinians want to say, “Palestinians are human just like everyone else,” which version of the human are we invoking at that moment?

So it may be that we need a new global understanding of the human to move forward. I do think there’s a hardness, a refusal to accept Palestinian suffering as suffering, on the part of those who want to give the state of Israel the right to enact every and any aggression in the name of self-defense. But cracking open that defensive, aggressive, murderous psychosocial position is an extremely difficult task. And my sense is that instead of persuading people oneon-one, we need to build the international alliance. To build a new consensus that Palestinian rights, Palestinian liberation, must be part of any left liberation struggle. And that a leftism that stops precisely at the moment of Palestine—“I’m left on all these positions, but not Palestine”—is an inconsistent and contradictory leftism.

I think we need to overwhelm them and surround them. We need to make this an unbeatable, un-overcome-able consensus, and we do that through knowledge, through media, through politics.

ILAN PAPPÉ: I still can’t give up on hoping to penetrate through this world of dehumanization and rejection. But it is not the priority, I fully agree, and international networking is far more important. We need to prioritize some of our efforts.

My second question concerns gender, with specific interests stemming from our many colleagues and students who work on gender, sexuality, and feminisms—plural—in the Arab and Muslim world. My entry point is a short quotation from your work: “There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender. That identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results.” There are probably two ways to approach this question, a crude one and a more scholarly one. The cruder approach would be, what is the relevance of a movement such as #MeToo—born as a response to the general abuse of women and developed into a more high-profile exposure of certain misogynist and sexist work cultures in the Western media and entertainment workplace—to the struggle against a far harsher and at times far more brutal repression in the rest of the world?

Something was undoubtedly gained in the globalization of the movement—exposure, influence, and so on—but possibly other things were lost. For instance, an insistence on the centrality of race to the issue of gendered and sexualized violence. It feels like there are prospects for the movement’s influence if these axes of difference are reengaged. Is this a case where universalism is actually Westernism? Or is it a case of an unrealized-as-yet universalism, as you put it when you expanded the meaning of universalism to include what has not yet been realized as universal, or is part of the promise of being universal? Put differently, what is your view on the scholarly and activist schism, or dispute, that unraveled between what we might call “Western feminisms,” on the one hand, and Arab, Muslim, or Islamic feminisms—the ideas put forward by Amina Wadud, Leila Ahmed, and Fatema Mernissi—on the other?

Can there be a universal discussion on gender and sexuality that is blind to cultural context or cultural relativism?

JUDITH BUTLER: Well, I think there can be and in fact there is a global discussion on feminisms in the plural. But I’m not sure about universality. When we make universal claims, they always turn out to be parochial in some way—and they are always contested by what they exclude or what they efface. That means that when we seek to elaborate a general claim, we need to do it through the practice of translation. In other words, it is only through what Said, Spivak, and others have called “cultural translation” that we start to understand how something like the structural oppression of women throughout the globe takes place.

There’s no single model that we can develop in one part of the world and impose upon the other. And, of course, I have emerged in the last thirty years through US feminism, which too often thought that feminist theory takes place in English. That whatever is said in English is therefore universally true! This elaborates a kind of cultural imperialism at the level of language, but even the term “gender” is not easily translatable. Many feminists have had to push back on the term gender, or to find innovations within their own languages because it doesn’t fit with the syntax or perhaps it’s not the central category for feminist concerns.

Gender Trouble, from which you cite, came out thirty-one years ago. It made general claims, but I don’t think it sought to make universal claims. Its concern was precisely to see that the category of “woman” was assumed to have an integrity or foundational status that didn’t work, that produced contestation. And I think we see that now as well, as trans women struggle to be recognized as women. Is it possible to expand the category, to allow it a kind of historical elaboration or articulation, so that it becomes more inclusive? I wouldn’t write Gender Trouble again, but one of the important perspectives that emerged from decolonial feminism is that colonial regimes instituted gender binaries as a Western imposition.

At the time, I just called it “the heterosexual matrix”—I don’t think I would do that again. But the question of how that gender binary was instituted by colonial regimes is an extremely interesting one. There are many feminist scholars, in Uganda for instance, who are able to track the British imposition of the gender binary. We can certainly track the imposition of the French gender binary on its colonized spaces. So I think that a global feminism can take place, but not on the basis of assuming universality.

It worries me that in places like France, or in certain Anglo-American feminist circles, claims are made about feminism that presume that Islamic feminism or feminism that emerges from North Africa or the Middle East isn’t “real feminism” because it doesn’t have a Western idea of emancipation as its goal. For many years I’ve been appalled at how some self-proclaimed “feminists” in France, for instance, assume that all women who come from Arab or Islamic backgrounds in particular are subject to patriarchal control—and that nothing less than the destruction of the religion as a formative influence on women will liberate them. And this strikes me as an extraordinary form of Islamophobia that takes place under the name of feminism and is actively promoted through versions of European white feminism. That obviously needs to be dismantled. There’s now extraordinary work that doesn’t always get published or publicized in the American, British, and European academy from scholars like Leila Ahmed or Suad Joseph on the rich history and diversity of Islamic feminism. And even the convocations of Islamic feminism, one of which took place in France a couple of years ago. This was barely mentioned by the French press—as if it doesn’t really exist, even though it had close to three thousand people attending.

So there’s a cultural war going on. And if feminism is to be a progressive and emancipatory movement, it must be not only antiracist but also include in its antiracism an opposition to Islamophobia. And also other forms of racism against North African and Middle Eastern peoples that make the assumption that the Western ideal of feminism is the only possible emancipatory one. It’s actually a form of cultural imperialism that traffics under the name of “emancipation.” We all need to be involved in that criticism.

I think I’m known for the so-called performativity of gender thesis, and I will never live that down. It’s only one part of my thinking and not one that I think about very much anymore in an active way—it’s not the central aspect of my feminism. I draw from decolonial feminist work in Latin America, people like Rita Segato. I draw from Ni Una Menos, the wonderful movement in Argentina that has made waves throughout the world. I draw from the work of Françoise Vergès, Gayatri Spivak, Sara Ahmed, and my good friend Saba Mahmood who died a few years ago. I draw from a wide range of work now, and I think it’s extremely interesting to think about what it takes to have a global conversation.

For me, the work of linguistic and cultural translation is key. We’re constantly learning! Feminism has not just been about the equality of women, or the emancipation of women from violence and subordination. It has also been a question: What is it to be a woman, or how is that category built, regulated, or reproduced? And that means that the category is being rearticulated through time. If I were to revise the performativity thesis, I would say that we are still in the process of rearticulating the category of women, men, or other genders through different languages and different contexts. This historical renewability of these categories is crucial to our political discourse, and also part of the global challenge of feminism.

ILAN PAPPÉ: If we take the same question that we’ve just discussed and focus on the situation of LGBTQ communities in the Arab and Muslim world, I think it’s more intricate or delicate. I remember joining a demonstration in Greece against the oppression of the Catholic minority by Orthodox Greek institutions with a friend who was part of the movement for civil rights there. He told me that in the evening he planned to demonstrate against the Catholic Church for its treatment of the queer and LGBT communities in Greece. It is very difficult indeed to navigate this particular matrix of the politics of identity in the Arab and Muslim world and remain a committed activist through performative action and resistance. And not succumb, for instance, to the defeatist Foucauldian view of the infinite power of repression, which you, among others, successfully challenged.

This challenge has never been more relevant than when discussing LGBTQ rights in the Arab and Muslim world. There are those, like Joseph Massad in his work, “The Gay International,” who argue that in the past there were more discreet and pronounced ways of living LGBTQ lives that have now been substituted by more demonstrative ways of life and struggle imported from the West. These in turn produced existential dangers for the community that had not there before. I know this not just as an abstract idea. My friend Ussama Makdisi, in his recent book Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World, speaks of an Arab world prior to imperialism, colonialism, and Zionism that did not insist on articulating and stressing every difference. Hence sectarianism was not a destructive phenomenon, but rather a delicate and at times haphazard way of living.

And if I just might add to this something else, a question that indicates that there is something positive in this delicate discussion. It’s offered by Walaa Alqaisiya in her work on the Palestinian group alQaws for Sexual and Gender Diversity in Palestinian Society. Walaa argues that this is a productive site to think and practice decolonization, since it does not allow separating the struggle for gender rights from decolonization—and thus enables a very effective critique of Israel’s pinkwashing.

Of course, alQaws is not the only place where pinkwashing is criticized, but it is important to hear it from within. So can we be more sanguine and, rather than aggravating the situation, use this particular topic to advance decolonization in Palestine and human rights elsewhere in the Arab world and beyond? I’m talking to you from Haifa today, and this topic is very difficult to engage with. But I think we need to continue engaging and perhaps find even better ways to bring the topic to the fore as part of a general discussion of human rights and decolonization.

JUDITH BUTLER: I used to meet with alQaws when I went to Palestine—I don’t think I’m allowed through that border anymore. But my understanding in their writings, especially the work of Haneen Maikey and others, is that the struggle for LGBTQ rights must be linked with the critique of Zionism. And in particular the critique of settler colonialism as it has taken form and perpetuated itself in Palestine. That seems very clear and important. And one reason it’s important is that it is not just a question of identity—meaning gay, lesbian, trans, bisexual identity and getting recognition for identity. “This is my identity. I want to be recognized and I don’t want to be oppressed on the basis of my identity.” These are also communities. These are networks, these are forms of life. And they’re forms of life and communities that are figuring out how to live, how to support one another. And also how to be part of a larger struggle that opposes racism, settler colonialism, state violence, homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, and a whole list of interlocking oppressions.

On the one hand, yes, we want glocalism because we want to understand the very specific struggles that are taking place. Massad did make an important point, which is that hypervisibility is not always the main aim of LGBTQ movements outside the urban centers of Europe and the United States. The point is not to get more visibility, as if visibility itself were a good. Visibility also makes one a target. Visibility without a sustaining community and a neutralization of police violence or of social violence—visibilization does not achieve the goal. What one wants is visibility within a framework that is actually transforming society more broadly—not just on the issue of LGBTQI rights and emancipation, but on all of the interlocking issues. So we need to have an interlocking framework within a specific region.

At the same time, we need to be trans-regional in our thinking. Right now, what do we make of the fact that trans people are being denied their rights in places like Poland, Romania, and Hungary, and that gender is being taken out of the school curriculum in France? And how does this relate to what’s happening in the Middle East, in Palestine? What are the links? What are the incommensurabilities? I sometimes think that if we are just regional in our analysis, we miss the trans-regional ties. We miss the larger question of how the family and its heteronormative framework is being solidified under conditions of militarization, but also through neoliberalism and within certain religious frameworks. What is the relationship between the heteronormative family and the state, and how do we have a trans-regional analysis of that?

Of course, we need regional specificity, but we also need the trans-regional ties. Not just to have a better trans-regional analysis, but also to find the sites of alliance and solidarity that exist there.

ILAN PAPPÉ: We cannot ignore the pandemic, so I will finish with a question on COVID-19 and its impact. In a recent talk, you analyzed the way both optimistic and pessimistic leftist notions generated by COVID-19 were somewhat misguided—these are my words. You powerfully commented that it seems the neoliberal world was very quick to impose its morality and codex on the new reality, by talking about the health of the economy rather than the health of the people. It particularly ignored the health of those in the neoliberal capitalist world who have already been the “collateral damage” of a “healthy” economy, even before the pandemic. The proportional number of fatalities in minority communities in the UK, US, and places such as Brazil attest to it.

In this respect, my worry is that very much as in the case of Occupy Wall Street and the Arab uprisings, the commitment to resist social, economic, and political injustices is an energetic reaction against the apparent neoliberal abuse of the pandemic—but one that yet again is not translated into a sustained social movement of change. Are we putting aside once more, as in 2008 and in the Arab world in 2012, the necessity to organize, coordinate, and create an international counter-alliance to the one that degrades human life and well-being, especially under the panic of the pandemic? Can the more traditional left still contribute in this respect, by offering unions and even parties? Or are you content with more anarchic and sporadic shows of anger and protest, which do change the media discourse and maybe have an impact on its agenda?

This is also true to the solidarity movement with Palestine. And in a way, it goes back to your first answer about international networking—whether it is against this kind of work that Chomsky now called “the biofeudalism” of the pharmaceutical giants who use the pandemic, or the old oppression of corporations.

JUDITH BUTLER: At the beginning of the pandemic, there were people like Arundhati Roy who talked about the pandemic as a possible portal unto a different future. And I think my colleague Angela Davis also thought bringing the economy to a halt might allow us to take a collective historical moment to reflect on what the economy ought to look like, let’s not rebuild in the same way. Of course, I also have that hope—there’s no way not to have that hope. At the same time, from the very beginning there were those who said, “This is going to bolster the power of pharmaceuticals. This is going to bolster state monitoring and surveillance powers more generally.” And that the pandemic will exacerbate geopolitical inequalities and racial inequality within local, regional, and global spheres.

We have, no doubt, seen the intensification of radical inequality. We see that through the ways in which the vaccine has been distributed, the ways in which vaccines are affordable, and which countries have them and are rapidly vaccinating everyone, and which do not. Israel has unjustly received praise for vaccinating those who live within ’48, but even within ’48 I’d like to know how many of those are Jewish and how many of those are not Jewish. The lack of access to vaccines within Palestine is abominable and not properly covered by the media, including the left media. So, we do see the intensification of racial and social class inequalities—there’s no question about it.

But the fact that we see them, that they’re brought into relief, can also be a cause for some optimism because it’s rather hard to deny. Those inequalities are made much more explicit and so become available to a certain kind of tracking—historically, politically, culturally. I don’t think that the pessimists or the optimists are “misguided.” There is no way not to feel both. In other words, I feel both. I think many people oscillate between optimism and pessimism.

Climate change has received a new attention, in part because we understand the interconnected world a bit better by virtue of the pandemic. The pandemic is a disease of the interconnected world. So, once we understand the interconnected world, what does that say about labor? What does it say about resources? What does it say about global inequalities, corporate power and its effect? What does it say about decolonial structures? It gives us another framework outside of nationalism and individualism. And I can only hope that both of those ideologies are more firmly displaced in the course of our thinking and reacting to the pandemic.