Racial palestinianization and the Janus-faced nature of the Israeli state

¹Ethan Bronner, ‘Misery hangs over Gaza despite pledges of help’, New York Times, 28 May 2009.

²Achille Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, Public Culture, vol. 15, no. 1, 2003, 11–40. In the aftermath of Hamas's electoral win in January 2006, an Israeli government spokesperson referred to official policy towards Gaza as ‘putting the Palestinians on a diet, but not making them die of hunger’: quoted in Honaida Ghanim, ‘Thanatopolitics: the case of the colonial occupation of Palestine’, in Ronit Lentin (ed.), Thinking Palestine (London: Zed Books 2007), 65–81 (76).

³David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism (Oxford and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell 2009), 16 (subsequent page references will appear parenthetically in the text).

⁴João Biehl, Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment (Berkeley and London: University of California Press 2005).

⁵‘I have nominated it racial palestinianization rather than israelification (which would be more consistent with the other modes of racial regionalization I have identified) in order both to connect it to the representational and political histories of orientalism and to indicate its occupational singularities in the order of contemporary racial expressions and repressions’, Goldberg explains (130). I find Goldberg's reasoning for the ‘inconsistency’ convincing, especially in terms of the latter justification. Analytically and politically it is important to distinguish the Israeli racial regime from those of Europe, post-apartheid South Africa, the United States and Latin America. Israel is a colonial state whose most fundamental terms of racial rule are structured by a distinction between citizenship and nationality, by the law of return and its implications for equalities and rights for Jews v. non-Jews within the state and to the land, and by its continued occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. As I argue in what follows, in certain respects I would draw the distinctions even more starkly than does Goldberg.

⁶Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1997); Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books 2007).

⁷Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1987).

⁸Edward Said, ‘Permission to narrate’, London Review of Books, 16 February 1984, 13–17.

⁹See Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1999), and Idith Zertal, Israel's Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, trans. from the Hebrew by Chaya Galai (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 2005).

¹⁰See Novick, The Holocaust in American Life.

¹¹See Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1995); Elizabeth Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2002); and Patchen Markell, Bound by Recognition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2003).

¹²Michel Foucault, ‘Society Must Be Defended’. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. from the French by David Macey (New York: Picador 2003).

¹³For extended discussions, see John M. Efron, Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press 1994) and, especially, Mitchell B. Hart, Social Science and the Politics of Modern Jewish Identity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 2000).

¹⁴Nadia Abu El-Haj, The Molecular Archive: Phylogenetics, the Origins of the Jews, and the Politics of Epistemology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press forthcoming).

¹⁵In explicating the differences between apartheid and the Israeli state, Goldberg points to some specific elements: Israel is a state that ‘tolerates really small Islamic, Christian and Druze communities’ and a ‘shadow state for Palestinians [that] largely lacks self-determination, freedom, a viable economic foundation, and any sort of security for its inhabitants’ (131). I want to make a few critical comments regarding the above description. First, to refer to Israel's Palestinian citizens by their religious denominations is to partake in the Israeli state's classificatory practices that were developed to deny the Arab population any claim to national rights. Second, they are not a small minority: Israeli Palestinians are about 18 per cent of the population. Moreover, Goldberg's narrative regarding the Israeli state's achievements over the past sixty years (139) underestimates the extent to which a racial logic has grounded the state since its very beginning. Following the establishment of the state in 1948, Israel's non-Jewish citizens were subjected to military rule, which was formally lifted only in 1966. Economic, social and political inequalities between Jews and non-Jewish citizens of the state continue to be stark and the political pressures on Palestinian citizens as ‘disloyal’ citizens of the state are increasing as evidenced, for example, by a recent proposal to subject all Palestinians applying for admission to Israeli universities to submit to military security clearance first.

¹⁶Liisa H. Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1995).

¹⁷See, for example, Benny Morris interviewed by Ari Shavit, ‘On ethnic cleansing’, New Left Review, vol. 26, March–April 2004, 37–51.

¹⁸‘First, and perhaps most basically, racial palestinianization is committed to land clearance underpinned by an accompanying, if not pre-dating, moral eviction. Territorial clearance in Israel's case has been prompted historically in terms of “redemption of land.” This heart-felt historico-moral claim to land redemption, to retrieving territory always already biblically “ours,” distinguishes racial palestinianization from classic modes of settler colonialism. Reclamation through settlement is extended by renomination, the shrinkage of Palestinian proprietorship materialized in the disappearance of recognizable title’ (130).

¹⁹Nadia Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2001). Many thanks to Goldberg (123) for clarifying what I was decidedly not arguing in the book, my critics’ claims notwithstanding.

²⁰See Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books 1978), and Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books 1994).

²¹Goldberg's ambivalence about the Zionist project—although not about what Israel has become—is evident in other moments in the text as well. For example: ‘The postwar moment was one of intense anti-colonialism. The Pan-African Congress of 1945 . . . significantly brought together almost every future leader of major postcolonial liberations. India and Pakistan attained independence and statehood. Israel came into being. China quickly followed . . .’ (340).

²²See also Baruch Kimmerling, Politicide: Ariel Sharon's War against the Palestinians (London: Verso 2006).

²³For further elaboration of Goldberg's distinction between historicist and naturalist forms of racial thought, see David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell 2002).

²⁴See Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing (New York: Columbia University Press 2007).

²⁵For an interesting discussion of the ‘shaheed’ in the Islamic discursive tradition and in the Palestinian political imaginary, see Asad, On Suicide Bombing.

²⁶Asad, On Suicide Bombing.

²⁷Robert A. Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (New York: Random House 2005). It is worth noting that Mohammad Atta, a key actor in the 9/11 attacks, is reported to have spent the previous night drinking alcohol and hanging out with strippers. Such accounts do not square with the reigning understanding of him as a devout Muslim—a ‘Muslim extremist’—the presumed ‘motivation’ for his involvement in the attacks.

²⁸James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press 1985).

²⁹There is a tension in Goldberg's analysis of suicide bombing. Hamas—and Hizbullah—are represented as rational, well-oiled machines. And yet the act of suicide bombing is explained by recourse to notions of despair and anger.

³⁰Gadi Algazi, ‘Offshore Zionism’, New Left Review, vol. 40, July–August 2006, 27–37 (27).

³¹Gadi Algazi, ‘Offshore Zionism’, New Left Review, vol. 40, July–August 2006, 27–37 30.

³²Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar, Lords of the Land: The War over Israel's Settlements in the Occupied Territories, 1967–2007, trans. from the Hebrew by Vivian Eden (New York: Nation Books 2007), xiii.

³³Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar, Lords of the Land: The War over Israel's Settlements in the Occupied Territories, 1967–2007, trans. from the Hebrew by Vivian Eden (New York: Nation Books 2007), xv.

³⁴A recent body of scholarship discusses and debates the applicability of Carl Schmitt's concept of sovereignty and the ‘state of exception’, and Georgio Agamben's notion of ‘bare life’, to the question of Palestine; see, e.g., Ronit Lentin (ed.), Thinking Palestine (London: Zed Books 2007). This is not the place for me to engage those discussions at any length, although I would like to note that more sustained and critical readings of Agamben and Schmitt might be useful prior to asking whether or not their arguments are ‘applicable’ to the Palestinian case. Achille Mbembe provides just such a critical reading. In ‘Necropolitics’ (2003), Mbembe develops a theoretically and historically nuanced discussion of the state of exception, racism and bare life, and then elaborates his argument by analysing the ‘contemporary colonial occupation of Palestine’ as ‘the most accomplished form of necropower’ (27). Mbembe makes three crucial interventions that I want to highlight. First, he re-reads the ‘state of exception’ through the history of slavery and the colonies and the particular forms of law (or suspensions of law) and violence that colonialism involved. Second, Mbembe integrates his discussion of the state of exception with Foucault's analysis of the function of ‘racism’—as the ‘death function’—in the modern state. (Foucault's writings on racism may be more fruitful to analyses of Palestine than is Agamben's concept of bare life; see Foucault, ‘Society Must Be Defended’.) Finally, it is worth remembering, as Mbembe insists, that ‘late modern colonial occupation differs in many ways from early modern occupation, particularly in its combining of the disciplinary, the biopolitical and the necropolitical’ (27). We don't have to choose between analysing the Israeli state as a typical (if extreme version of the) ‘liberal state’ (Raef Zreik, ‘The persistence of the exception: some remarks on the story of Israeli constitutionalism’, in Lentin (ed.), Thinking Palestine, 131–47) or as just another, Middle Eastern ‘mukhabarat’ (security/police) state (Ilan Pappe, ‘The mukhabarat state of Israel: a state of oppression is not a state of exception’, in Lentin (ed.), Thinking Palestine, 148–70), or any other kind of regime. It has both liberal and distinctly illiberal dimensions: it is a colonial state and, for its Jewish citizens, a liberal democracy; it is governed by the rule of law and it operates with a sustained suspension of that law, under the rubric of military rule and the guise of security requirements. The Israeli state is that complex multifaceted matrix of forms and tactics of rule.

³⁵Goldberg recognizes the different trajectory and yet uses the label ‘born again racism’, which, given that different history, I don't think can be applied. Although with a very different political dynamic, so too was Israeli racism un-named vis-à-vis its non-Ashkenazi citizens. The trajectory from denial to a born again racism may be a more appropriate description of the struggle of Mizrahi Jews for their rights than of racial palestinianization. For an extended discussions of the Mizrahi question, see Yehouda A. Shenhav, The Arab Jews: A Postcolonial Reading of Nationalism, Religion, and Ethnicity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 2006), and Ella Shohat, Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation (Austin: University of Texas Press 1989).