On March 23, 2023, the Divinity School hosted Religion and Public Life Visiting Scholar in Conflict and Peace Raef Zreik. The question of Palestine and the Palestinians, according to Zreik, is shifting more and more from an external matter to an internal question of Israel, Zionism, and the Jewish people writ large. Zreik interrogates the ways questions of war and peace, borders, security, or the ‘two state’ solution become more and more internal to Israel. Related intimately to the state's identity, character and constitutional structure and democratic nature, these questions highlight the merging conversation of existence and essence.
Full transcript
SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.
SPEAKER 2: The Palestinian question as a Jewish question. March 23rd, 2023.
DIANE MOORE: Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome. It is lovely to have you here, and I'm very excited about this conversation we're about ready to have. And I'm going to be very brief in my remarks because we only have an hour.
I'm Diane Moore, and I have the privilege of being the Founding Faculty Director of Religion and Public Life, which supports the religion, conflict, and Peace Initiative, which is sponsoring this event. And we are going to be hearing from two of our distinguished visiting scholars Professors Atalia Omer and Professor Raef Zreik who are with us this year and how fortunate we are.
I'm going to turn this over momentarily to my friend and colleague Hilary Rantisi who runs this Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative for us. Before doing so though, I just want to say I do not take for granted. And I don't think any of us here should for the opportunity to have these kinds of conversations, which by definition and sadly so, are considered to be incredibly controversial to address directly the challenges in Israel-Palestine that have been decades long.
Many academic institutions are shying away from these kinds of conversations, confronting the challenges of what it means to think about these questions in a complex, non-binary way. And I just want to say thank you to our Dean David Hempton for supporting this initiative, and for our donors who are also inspirational to us relevant to these questions. Without them, we would not be here, we would not be able to have these kinds of conversations.
And this is a multi-year Initiative where we are not skimming the surface about these challenges, but really engaging these questions in meaningful, constructive, and generative ways to not just-- and analyze the challenges in the region, but to really work together to create coalitions to address those challenges in a creative and inspiring and more hopeful ways for the future.
So I just want to say and recognize that context not to take it for granted and to be grateful for it. So now I'm going to turn it over to Hilary Rantisi who's our Assistant Director of Religious, Conflict, and Peace Initiative here. The entire Initiative would not be taking place if it weren't for Hilary's incredible experience, her own vision, and her long work in this region. So I'm going to turn it over to you, Hilary, and thank you for your work and for the privilege of working with you.
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HILARY RANTISI: Thank you, Diane. Welcome, everyone. And good afternoon. It's such a delight to see all of you here and to have you be part of this important event today. Our time is short so I'm just going to briefly introduce our program and our speakers today, and we'll have time for Q&A hopefully at the end.
So briefly, our work here at the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative centralizes an analysis of structural injustice, violence and power, and examines how a more capacious understanding of religion can yield fresh insights into contemporary challenges and opportunities for just peace building. Our primary case study in our work here is focusing on Israel-Palestine and our aim is to stretch the scholarly discourse around religion and the practices of peacebuilding, and examine the decolonial potentialities of art, religion, and identity transformation.
Today, we're honored to be hosting Professor Zreik who's been a visiting scholar with us this semester. Last semester, he was at Yale. He has been teaching a course with Professor Atalia Omer and Professor Diane Moore this semester on religion, nationalism, and settler colonialism, the case study of Israel-Palestine.
We're also honored to have Professor Omer with us today as well who will give some brief remarks before opening up for questions at the end. So briefly, Professor Raef Zreik is the Religion and Public Life visiting scholar in conflict and peace at Harvard Divinity School this semester. He is a jurist and a scholar, a public intellectual, and an expert in political philosophy and the philosophy of law, a lecturer on property law and the theory of law at Ono Academic College.
He's the academic co-director of the Minerva Humanities Center at Tel Aviv University, and a senior research fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. Dr. Zreik holds first and second degrees in law from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He also has an LLM from Columbia Law School and a PhD from Harvard Law School. His research addresses questions pertaining to legal and political theory, and issues of citizenship and identity, Zionism and the Palestinian question.
His many publications in these fields have appeared in anthologies and in legal and interdisciplinary journals including theory and event, theoretical inquiries in law, constellations law, and ethics of human rights, Journal of Palestine Studies, Arab Studies Journal, and many other publications. His book entitled Kant's Struggle For autonomy: On the Structure of Practical Reason has just been published by Lexington Books.
And Professor Atalia Omer is the T.J. Dunphy visiting professor of religion, violence, and peacebuilding at Harvard Divinity School and is a senior fellow in conflict and peace at Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative. She's one of the main architects of this program and is a very much part of the leadership team.
So Professor Omer is also Professor of Religion, Conflict, and Peace Studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. Her research focuses on religion, violence, and peacebuilding, as well as theories and methods in the study of religion.
She's the author of Days of Awe: Reimagining Jewishness in Solidarity with Palestinians published by University of Chicago Press in 2019, and When Peace is Not Enough: How the Israeli Peace Camp Thinks about Religion, Nationalism, and Justice published by University of Chicago Press in 2013. She's also co-editor of The Oxford Handbook on Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding and co-author of Religious Nationalism: A Reference Handbook.
Her forthcoming book with Oxford University Press is entitled Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding. She's also widely published in many academic journals. So we're in really good hands here, very honored to have Professors Zreik and Professor Omer with us today. And without further ado, please join me in welcoming them.
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Professor Zreik, would you like to speak from here or remain seated? Wherever you wanted.
RAEF ZREIK: I think I was asked to be seated. I'm fine with both. OK. First of all, I would like-- I hear my-- it's too loud. I mean, as long as I'm not Leonard Cohen, I think this is too loud. So first of all, I would like to thank really the Harvard Divinity School and the program on religion and public health, all who are responsible. Professor Moore Diane, Hilary, Atalia, and, of course, [INAUDIBLE], who's somewhere responsible behind the scene for many of the things that are going on.
Really thank you for giving me this opportunity to be the [INAUDIBLE] at Harvard and for inviting me to give this talk and for all those who supporting this program, making it possible. I mean, I'm aware that the title is-- let's put it-- I wouldn't say problematic, but it's really sort of brings so many different associations, definitely.
And at least there are two ways to think how the title could be perceived by the audience when I say the Palestinian question as a Jewish question. One way is to think that the questions that are facing Palestinians and the way they formulate the Palestinian question resembles the way that the Jewish question was formulated in Europe. That is to say a question of citizenship.
They are second class citizenship in Israel, and structurally, they are second class citizenship. The question of refugeeness, that they are many of them are refugees, self-determination, and exilic nationalism given that the idea of return, it becomes so prominent or not so, it's was built in into the Palestinian history, that the question of return, is very much permanent. This invite naturally the idea of making analogies between the two questions. This is not my project. I mean, this is not what I'm going to do. Probably some others might be interested in that.
The problem with that is it might end up sort of a competition in victim hood, but that's a legitimate project that I'm not following in my talk today. The other meaning of the Palestinian question becoming a Jewish question is the fact that Israel was an attempt to solve the Jewish question. So it's transferred the question from Europe into the Middle East, and it's still things that it's solved the problem.
And more and more, the Palestinian question it's becoming sort of internalized into Israel, so it's becoming impossible to think about Israel without thinking about Palestine. And what you used to be an external question, it's becoming an internal question. Now toward the end, I would say something about why not to call it the Palestinian question as an Israeli question not a Jewish question, because it's not clear why should we invoke Jewishness into this.
I would say a few words toward the end because that's a very valid sort of objection or comment that could be made. So the argument in short is in fact, there's a level of mutual constitution, interdependent imbrication of the question of Palestine into the question of Israel. And I for the purposes of this lecture, I will move between Israel and the Jewish questions freely though clearly I don't claim in any way that they are one. But because Israel claims that it is the answer to the Jewish question, that's why I am following that logic without really endorsing it. I'm using that terminology.
That we've reached the point that even academically, it's not valid anymore to teach sort of the history of Zionism as one class and the history of Palestinian nationalism as a different class because they were always constituting each other, but now we reach to the point that it's become really neither politically nor academically, is valid anymore to continue to treat this as to separate question.
Now, there's the importance of this way of reading that I will expand on it shortly now. It is both analytically important and politically important because think about what's going on in Israel what we call the constitutional counterrevolution, so to say. We treat this as a question of Israel, constitutional question of Israel, but think for one minute those who would be mostly affected or will suffer the consequences of the constitutional changes are basically the Palestinians.
But there's something that hinders our imagination to think the Palestinians as part of the demos that is entitled to be thought, considered, imagined, as part of the demos that is entitled to have a say on the constitution that would affect their life mostly is out of the question. We continue to talk about the constitutional crisis in Israel but the constitutional crisis in Israel-Palestine at the same time.
So there's something about the structure of imagination, the political imaginer that makes the idea of separation, it hinders certain political imagination from growing. And for that, it prohibits certain modes of resistance to the current regime in Israel-Palestine. So there's at the same time, let's say an analytical need and ethical and political need actually to read the reality in more mutual constitution together.
Now the frame that-- or let me put it this way. The way that my talk will unfold is the following, I would tell a story-- a very short story. There are so many stories of Zionism. This is not a summary. This is just one reading amongst so many others that fits my purposes. And then I would tell the story of Palestinian nationalism where when I tell the story of Palestinian nationalism, I would say something about the PLO and I would say something about the Palestinian inside Israel.
And then I would see how actually the two stories becoming in one sense, one story. The two stories came to the point that the questions of existence of Israel and the question of the sense of Israel are becoming one question. So we used to think for many decades, that on the one hand, there's the question of war and peace and borders in Israel, and there's the question of internal politics of the nature of the states, the democracy, the constitutional arrangement, is Israel Jewish and Democratic, as these are two kind of different questioning unfold into two sort of parallel fields of conversation and discourse.
And the argument would say actually, not anymore, the question of the existence and the question of the sense are so much merging into each other because it's almost impossible to think of Israel and Palestine as two entities, because there's one geographical entity that actually changes Israel from the inside and turns the external question into internal. And that's in itself, has its influence on the Palestinian question.
So as the Palestinian questions becoming Jewish question, the Jewish question also is becoming a Palestinian question. That is, the Palestinian, no matter what or they don't like, the Jewish question that was basically a European question is imposing itself on them back in Palestine.
So this issue of the obsession of the national ethnic purity of the national ethnic state that is the product of Europe, that the Zionism have internalized and thought that it can solve the problem by creating a Jewish pure ethnic state in Palestine, is this question is posing itself now on the Palestinian. So this is what it mean that we are invited to have some shift in the way we think about things and the way we should think about the future, and the meaning of liberation, the meaning of decolonization, and the meaning of Jewish self-determination.
And I hope that the question of Israel-Palestine would be able to say something writ large about this whole idea of national self-determination. And the myth of this junction, the idea that we can separate ourselves and create our own sort of property-like relation of absolute and exclusive sovereignty over certain territory, and to put the flag on it and sort of to exclude all other.
The frame that I wouldn't dwell too much on in understanding Zionism-- so I would say something about Zionism Israel and then I would say something about Palestine, is the settler colonial frame. I wouldn't say too much about the frame, but basically, the idea of the settler colonial is that it's a story of immigration but it's an immigration where the immigrant is not ready to accept to be part of the society that immigrants to. He travels with his nomos, with his laws. So he wants to create his own nomos.
Now, there are so many objections to describe Zionism as settler colonial. I will not say too much about this in the question if you would like to discuss that. But for me, this is beyond almost any discussion. I mean because the Zionists themselves perceive themselves as settler colonialist even in their language.
And when I speak in Tel Aviv, I tell my fellow Jewish audience relax, guys. I mean, that's fine. That's fine to be settler colonialist as long as you recognize that and you try to think now what we do with it. I mean, half of the world is settler colonialist. Look at this country and Latin America and South Africa. So the question is what you do with it now that you know you are a settler colonists.
But to tell the story, pretty much it's a story of demographic and geographic expansion. I mean, the Jews were about 80,000 and when Balfour Declaration by the '40s, they were already about 600,000. So it's a story of demographic change. And in 1948, because the program was to create a Jewish majority in Palestine and given there weren't million of Jews coming to Palestine, the only solution was to create a demographic change.
You might call it expulsion, deportation, ethnic cleansing, I don't want-- this is not the issue. The result is a demographic change in Palestine that allows the Jews to solve the Jewish question according to the European ethnic pure state where the Jews have become majority. And in fact, those who are fans of the Jewish and democratic state, the deportations in 1948 is exactly the result of the democratic and Jewish state because had Ben-Gurion been only committed to democracy, he could have left the Palestinian. That wouldn't be Jewish state.
But his commitment-- or he could actually keep the Palestinians without giving them full rights, then it would be Jewish but it wouldn't be democratic. So out of his democracy, he was forced to be as a logical conclusion to expel the Palestinians. So the expulsion was out of his commitment to democracy because he didn't want to have apartheid.
So the ethnic cleansing is the bypassing of the clear apartheid regime within Israel because when you expel people, when physically they don't exist, you don't have to exclude them from the legal system. They simply they are not there. You would need apartheid system had there been the Palestinians would have constitutes a large majority or at least 50/50.
So the problem was solved in 1948, solved for Ben-Gurion. And then the expansion inside Israel continue in terms of now that we have sovereignty, we have to take property. So that's the story of Zionism. Property brought sovereignty and then sovereignty brings ownership over land. But the 1967 actually, brought back the problem that had been solved in 1948 for Zionism because now again, you have majority of Palestinian within certain territory.
Not to speak of Sinai and the Golan, these are marginal in terms of territory. Though the Golan Heights, there were also deportation that it's not mentioned in pretty much in the debates or in the literature on Palestine. Now, as long-- the first probably until the Intifada, Israel still entertained somehow the idea that these territories sort of we don't know what to do with them probably at one point will be part of a bargaining chip that we retain some of them.
In the meantime, we increase the level of economic situation in the West Bank. We incorporate them economically and they will forget about national rights, that didn't work. But that was the first move in order to solve the problem of how we keep the majority of Jews. And Israel learned in 1967 from the mistakes of 1948. So they didn't give them any right to vote or part of citizenship. So they kept them inside the territory but outside the political demos. So they're not imagined.
The Oslo that came after the Intifada, is in many ways is the continuation of still holding the land while keeping the Palestinian outside the political imagination. So the land, the resources, the sky, the water, all the resources of the land is-- and the borders, are in the hands of Israel, but the people are under the control of the Palestinian. So there's occupation but the PA must protect the occupation because if the Palestinian revolt, it's the role of the PA actually to police its own Palestinian. So the PLO actually ended up being a subcontractor.
But at least what Oslo had-- And many people on radical left probably missed that point and they can become aware that there are differences and sometimes small differences make the difference, Oslo though had some aspect of Jewish control over the West Bank, it's still thought in terms of geographical separation between Israel and the Palestinian. Still with some control by Israel, but it thought or imagined some separation between Israel and the Palestinians.
I mention that because soon we will move to what has been going on recently. The Oslo is a story of failure as we know for many reasons, but the most important is probably the expansion of settlements. I mean the idea that there's a green line is just becoming a joke. Because on and on, Israel is just moving into the West Bank, they have railroads, buses, university, everything. So the West Bank is sucked in into inside Israel. So it's becoming more part of Israel. And the idea of separation is becoming more and more difficult.
What is more actually has been going on is not only that Israel is sucking the West Bank into its structure, but actually, there is a sort of the West Bank, the settlers themselves are sucking Israel. In the sense that Israel is becoming another colony itself. So the settlers are moving to the mixed cities like Haifa, Lydda, and Acre in order to resettle there as if the project of sovereignty in 1948 is never finished. You have all the time to conquer the land time and again.
I mean, all Arab capitals were defeated but it seems like they think that Haifa and Lydda were not defeated yet, we have to conquer them time and again and again and again. Now this double movement from the West Bank inside Israel or the logic of colonization that is predominant in the West Bank is immigrating inside Israel. And Israel actually is extending itself to the West Bank really makes the idea of any geographical separation is really unthinkable.
And here comes I think the way to understand the 2018 law, the nationality law, as a law that actually conceptualize this whole space between the river and the sea as just one geopolitical space. So it creates the unity that for so long time actually, we were resisting to see as this is one unity. The PA Has an interest actually to claim that there are two entities, and most of the Israeli public at least on the center left is interested to portray this duality because then the Palestinians are there, we are here.
Now the moment that you perceive that this is one unity and you're still obsessed with the idea of pure ethnic state, then you have to separate but now you separate within unity. There's a different-- apartheid is not simply separation. It's separation within unity. You have to imagine the totality within which unity is taking place as the exception, nothing could be thought as an exception unless it could be thought as included in the rule. But putting it outside the rule allows you to understand that it exception.
So if I buy I say, I'm going to buy all fruits, but I didn't buy a car, that's not an exception. But if I say I'm going to buy all fruits but I don't buy orange, the orange stands out because naturally, it belongs to the rule but I simply ousted it. So that was lacking from the political imagination until it came this rule. If you can't separate geographically, then you have to separate vertically. There are masters and slaves. There are one supreme nation residing over another nation.
And this is the logic that started actually with that law and we see the consequences just now so those who pass the law shouldn't be really surprised by what's going on now in Israel-Palestine. So that's the story of expansion. Now, there are two caveats, which is Sinai and Gaza. Leave them for now. If you want, we can discuss it. Now, when it comes to Palestinian story, the Palestinian story we can say that it went some opposite development. And this is really selective history of Palestinian nationalism, definitely.
I don't claim to summarize Palestinian nationalism but one can clearly see the following. There was a time at least in theory or at least in rhetoric, that there was an Israeli-Arab conflict actually until the mid '70s even before Camp David until '74. The paradox of life is that the defeat of '67 actually brought the war of '74 because the Arab countries want to regain some standing. When they get the standing in '74 as they can find Israel, that paved the road actually for Camp David and to reach a normalization with Israel.
But already in '74, the Arab world says to the Palestinian, go manage your life on your own. The PLO is the only representative. The Palestinians celebrated that moment but that was a dialectical moment because to say that the PLO is the sole representative, that was a sort of a statement hands off as Arabs. So that was I think a crucial point in the history of Israel-Palestine and the Arab world.
The second stage, let's call it a borders war with the PLO either in Amman, in Jordan along the river or in Lebanon. So you see two entities fighting each other. I don't know how much you can say guerrilla war vis-a-vis one of the biggest armies in the world, how much is that. But clearly, the center of gravity was sort of outside Palestine. It was a fight on Palestine, not in Palestine.
The third moment I think is the Intifada, which changed the center of gravity and territories the Palestinian struggle over the land of Palestine. And that is the beginning of the internalization of the question of Palestine, which meant the ongoing expansion of Israel of taking over the West Bank. I think that the third moment, which is we are witnessing in the last few years, is the moment that actually given that the whole region between the river and the sea is becoming more and more united and the possibility of separation becomes simply unimaginable anymore.
And because the status of the Palestinians in Israel is changing as well in the sense that their visibility in the political scene is becoming more and more visible starting from Rabin assassination during the Oslo Accords, where Rabin actually couldn't have passed those Accords without the Palestinian votes of the Arab Knesset members. And actually, Al Amir mentioned this as the first reason why he assassinated Rabin. He said, we should know who's the boss here, who decides. The Palestinian Knesset members cannot.
But this means that more and more, the Palestinian and Israel are not perceived anymore only as civic question. So they are if you to use my terminology, they are becoming part of the regional discourse. So they are part of the Palestinian nationalism. So it's not only internal. So what actually was mainly external, which is Palestinian nationalism through the PLO and the Intifada is becoming internalized through the process of the expanding of the settlement. So what is external becoming internalized, and what is internal and civic becoming nationalized and becoming more sort of belong to the whole scene.
Now, in this reality where Israel is really controlling all of the land and the possibility of disengagement or separation or any sort of drawing borders becoming almost impossible, it's clearly that Palestine becoming at the heart of Israel. And how can you think now anymore that you can solve one problem without solving the other? So the myth of this junction or the myth of purity of the nation state reaches its ultimate crisis.
It's a real crisis that started from the first imagination 100 years ago, from the idea that you solve the Jewish question in Europe through establishing a purely ethnic state, and reality tells you that actually, welcome to the surface of the Earth, the surface of the Earth is too much populated. And the myth of standing back as this is my pure country is becoming problematic. So this is what I call the question of the essence of Israel and the existence of Israel is becoming just one.
I mean this paper, it's been developing-- it's started as a paper I gave 2 and 1/2 years ago at Mamdani seminar in Uganda. And immediately, after that broke the events of 2021, and now we see the constitutional crisis, which really it's very difficult to distinguish the crisis in Huwara from the constitutional crisis, whether these are two different faces of the same one problem. I'll stop here.
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ATALIA OMER: Can you hear me? OK. So it's such an honor and privilege to be here and to be in conversation with Professor Zreik. And I've been learning so much from co-teaching the course with him that Hilary mentioned earlier with him and with Professor Moore. And I also had the benefit of reading the paper Professor Zreik just mentioned on which this talk that-- what he articulated just now is based.
So in tracing the shifting-- my understanding of the paper and the argument is that in tracing the shifting forms and registers of Jewish Zionist m Professor Zreik tells us that if the mode of the two state separation, which defined the Oslo Accords years and framework, but also has a deeper history, deeper roots, dating back to the logic of partition, during the time of the British mandate and various UN resolutions. So this logic of separation partition is based on territorial separation between the presumed two distinct political units.
And then the new basic law this nation or nationalities or Jewish nation state law however it's called, is based on the principle of ethnic separation between Jews and Palestinians within the same unit. So as Zreik links the segregationist logic of partition with the realities of the ethnoreligious and racialized discourse of this law, which is more than just an assertion of the state's essence but also a denial at the same time of Palestinian political meanings in life.
The link between territorial partition and ethnoreligious and racialized segregationist logic, ironically, that's my understanding, reconfigures a fragmented Palestinian consciousness. So it defragments Palestinian consciousness. Zreik writes in the paper on which the talk is based and I quote, "With the passage of time, both Palestinian groups within 48 and outside of 48, simultaneously deploy a discourse of rights and a discourse of national belonging."
This convergence of national belonging and rights discourse is dialectically connected. Zreik tells us to what the Jewish nation state law signals namely that the exclusive right to-- that there is an exclusive right to Jewish self-determination and that this right means to be exclusive de facto in the land of Israel and not limited to the state of Israel. So we see this in action with the current Israeli government, of course.
So now that I kind of re-articulate or affirm the critical insights Zreik is making in tracing the convergences of the Palestinian question from inside and outside the green line, I want to return to the title of the presentation and take it in a slightly different direction though very much related one. What does it mean to examine Palestine as a Jewish question beyond recognizing the mechanisms and realities of multi-pronged violence designed to maintain a supremacist regime that you discuss?
Zreik shows that what the green line enabled in terms of the normative differentiation between '67 and '48 Palestinians has eroded, became a joke as you said. Thereby, exposing the internal logic of Zionism and the meaning of Jewish sovereignty in historic Palestine. But what exactly makes this reality Jewish? This is the question I'm interested in. This is where my responsibility and positionality as a Jewish-Israeli scholar of religion, violence, and peacebuilding resides because I contend that as Zreik's title suggests, Palestine is a Jewish question that must be front and center of Jewish hermeneutical and contemporary Jewish thought and ethics.
Indeed, Palestine is a moral and political Jewish imperative that cannot be bracketed or theorized out of existence through appeals to messianic ahistorical abstractions. So what do I mean by that? Zreik described the ongoing processes of entrenching an ethnoreligious centric nationalist logic within and without the green line as relying on dehumanizing Palestinians through a stratified regime defined as Jewish.
But once again, what exactly makes this regime Jewish? And for this, I turn just very briefly to a few other interlocutors of relevance. Yaacov Yadgar in his book Israel's Jewish Identity Crisis examines the conceptual and hermeneutical problems in modernist reduction of Jewishness to Jews as ethnos or biologies accounts that render the actions of a nation state of Jews as Jewish ipso facto.
Even if such actions are not necessarily recognized as such or their Jewishness can be maybe contested, this argument often depends on an apologetic line. Accordingly, Israel is Jewish in the same way that France is French by virtue of its makeup. Of course, this makeup is an outcome of those long processes of active minority including through ethnic cleansing of Palestinians within '48 and the occupation of '67.
This, Yadgar says, forces Judaism Jews and Jewishness into a historically located political box or skim. Yadgar suggests that Judaism as it transcends this historic embodiment refuses to fit into categories produced in modern European Christianity. So is it the case that Israel is Jewish only insofar as its population is Jewish? Yadgar speaks of tensions between Zionist conceptions from its inception in Europe of the state or state in the making at the time as the Jews' state, Medinat HaYehudim, which is not necessarily the same even according to early internal contestations within the Zionist movement and discourse as a Jewish state, Medina Yehudit.
And some attention was devoted how to make the state also Jewish in content, not biology. A process that entailed a reliance on often a shallow account of Jewish redemptive history and biblical narratives. Jewish sovereignty as a dynamic construct in how Zreik traced it for us also has relied on shallow Jewish normativity. One must dialectically and relationally interrogate how it denied Palestinian sovereignty to examine this process and continue to interrogate what is Jewish about it and are there alternative resources and past to imagine alternative futures or political imaginaries as you talked about.
Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin similarly challenges the Zionist readings of Jewish meanings and its centering of an aspiration to re-enact the biblical over the Mishnaic interpretive thought and hermeneutical proxies. Retrieving the story of Safed in the 16th century as a story of Jewish exile within the land, Raz-Krakotzkin illuminates alternative Jewish modernity and explicit Jewish life in the land, which did not rely on colonial forces and ideology such as Orientalism and an erasure of the East including the experiences of Arab Jews, which is a central dimension of European Zionism as it has been unfolding.
What I appreciate about Raz-Krakotzkin's intervention and retrieval of repressed Jewish meanings and sources is exactly that. It is directly confronted by and grappling ethically with the violence Zionism has inflicted including epistemological and hermeneutically on the Jewish tradition. In my ethnographic study of American Jewish Palestine solidarity activists, I trace how they resist precisely their assimilation into forms of state violence that articulate themselves as Jewish.
They announce to the world in signs and T-shirts and core resistance action in the West Bank or Washington, DC that occupation is not their Judaism. This is a significant intervention to illuminate the need for hermeneutical work, interpretive work along with political emancipatory and restorative processes to redress historical and ongoing harm.
The activists I traced in my book, Days of Awe: Reimagining Jewishness in Solidarity with Palestinians also engage in reclaiming and reimagining their Jewishness outside the Jewish majoritarian and messianic logic of a nation state comprised of Jews whose majoritarian status is an outcome of demographic engineering and settler colonial and epistemic forms of violence.
This is where Zreik's body of work on Palestine and anti-Semitism and the weaponization of anti-Semitism is critical because it shows the dialectic and relational dynamics undergirding the consolidation in 2018, of the Jewish nation state law and subsequent developments. Proclaiming that the state and eventually the land is for Jews and Jews only. And obviously, just to restate this point, we clearly see conveyed by the characters in the coalition today.
This proclamation that the state is a Jewish state but most critically the implementing policies literally mean the erasure, depopulation, displacement, and replacement of Palestinians. Seeing these forms of violence reject abstracting the analysis of Jewish history, destiny, and even presumed propriety rights from the violence that their fulfillment and implementation has inflicted on Palestinians.
To obstruct and extract the Jewish discourse of self-determination or messianic teleological fulfillment from this ethical political relational challenges entails a refusal to assume moral responsibility and urgency to make things right and engage in processes of corrective justice vis-a-vis the victims of the realities and processes Zreik captured in his talk. So when Zreik talks about Palestine and the Palestinians as a Jewish question, it generates for me a need to interrogate Jewish ethical responses and produce hermeneutical challenges to what precisely Jewish means in the construct and realities of the Jewish state. Thank you.
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HILARY RANTISI: OK. We'll open it up for questions but maybe first, Professors Zreik, if you want to respond?
RAEF ZREIK: [INAUDIBLE]
HILARY RANTISI: OK. We'll open it up for questions. We have a mic here. So if you could be patient once you put your hand up, we'll get the mic to you. Don't rush all at once. Yes, we have a question here. Please introduce yourself before you ask your question. Thank you. And have a question mark at the end.
AUDIENCE: Hi. Thank you. My name is [INAUDIBLE]. So I wanted to ask you, both of you really-- you made this distinction between the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and then try to locate where that shift is either in '67 or '73, '74. I wonder if you could speak to also the transition between what was known in the '20s and early '30s as the Jewish question-- Zionism as a solution to the Jewish question itself produces what was then called the Arab question.
And Chaim Weizmann famously said that Zionism would judge by the world in how we treat the Arabs I mean he says that in the '30s And so what is the transition from the Arab question to the Palestinian question? Because the Arab question is not a territorial question, it's a regional question. It's not about Arabs in the state, it's about the Arab world writ large. So does that transition-- I mean, what do you see of the implications of that transition from the Arab question, which obviously was not resolved?
I mean, I don't think that Zionism resolves the Jewish question either. I mean, it aspires to do that. But I don't think that it ultimately does it. The transition itself from then even the term Arab to Palestinian that takes place within the Arab-Israeli conflict to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Arab question to the Jewish question. Thank you.
ATALIA OMER: you want to respond? Raef, do you want to respond?
RAEF ZREIK: Oh, yeah. I thought [INAUDIBLE].
[LAUGHTER]
First of all, I was stating-- first of all, statement of fact that after '74, the Arab world hands off. It's a good question if before that it wasn't really hands off already. But at least in 1948, some Arab countries did participate in the war. I mean not massively. But in '67, the war was imposed. '73, the war was initiated by the Arabs.
Now, what is the meaning of that? That's another question but as just description, the Palestinians were left alone in '74. Now, what does that mean? It could mean many things. It could mean one thing about the whole idea of Arab nationalism. For example, you can think of the idea of Arab nationalism.
One thing you might think out of it if Israel is an attack on Palestine or is it an attack on the East, and the more you think about it as an attack on the Arab region, then the more Israel is part of Europe and this is not a war between two groups, but between sort of two continents or two cultures or between the East and the West colonialism and anti-colonial. So there is a difference.
And that's probably explains that the moment that the Palestinian-- it was a Palestinian-Israeli that started the shift also viewing it as a sort of national conflict, and the idea of partition became more imaginable. So this is what comes to mind immediately.
Now to your question about even Epstein in 1905, writes the Arab questions before Weizmann, but then he meant by the Arabic question the Palestinian question. He didn't mean the Arab question in general. He meant we are taking guys let's not lie to each other. We are taking the lands of the Arabs and we have to think what the hell are we doing here.
So the Arabic question was meant by it the Palestinian question, I think by Epstein. I think that clarifies something, but clearly, I'd be willing to hear more from you on that.
ATALIA OMER: I mean, I'll just add that in the context of Israeli discourse and Zionist discourse broadly, there is kind of a use of the Arab as a generic category that reflects the orientalist kind of underpinnings. And even today, if someone uses that construct Palestinian-Israeli, it signals a particular position because often would hear still the generic Arab.
HILARY RANTISI: We have two questions here. The woman in the green and then--
AUDIENCE: Thanks so much. My name is [INAUDIBLE]. I'm a visiting scholar at the Center for European Studies. My question is about the conditions of imaginative success. I thought it was really crucial to see that both of you focused on imagination and myth. So the Jewish question, the Palestinian question kind of-- and the history of both and how they interrelate, you kind of looked at that from a perspective of imagination, how our imagination changed or has been changing and can change.
And I think there is a slight difference there in both your approaches because, Raef, I think you were more talking about myth from a rational perspective. So you invited us to see how a specific myth of ethnic purity is wrong, just given the facts, and given how history played out. That is more, I would say, if we think of imaginative success in the category of ideology critique.
So we realize a specific myth kind of reaches a crisis as you said or limitations. And then that allows us to criticize it and thereby, maybe change it. So that would be one way to go about it. I would like for you to maybe talk more about that. Raef, I thought you kind of mentioning this idea of occupation is not my Judaism and kind of tying that to hermeneutic practice and interpretive thought is slightly different.
Because it realizes that we can't just simply shed our myths because we're living with them. We constitute each other our own identities through them, and we are complicit in the myths that we also want to criticize. So again, I would really like to invite both of you to talk about the conditions of imaginative success and where you see them.
ATALIA OMER: You want to start?
RAEF ZREIK: Yeah, I think I didn't use the word myth, of course, but you used it.
AUDIENCE: You did it.
RAEF ZREIK: Oh, did I? I did? Oh, OK.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
RAEF ZREIK: OK.
AUDIENCE: Hate to argue.
[LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE: Who needs Google?
RAEF ZREIK: No, this is a joke because a common work is basically on myth so I thought that this is a question that's just coming from her imagination, not mine. But it's clearly that it's-- Yeah, I think I used it.
I don't have a grand theory actually about anti-nationalism. I mean, I spoke very much-- I sounded very much anti-nationalist. I'm against the myth of national self-determination as a myth. I mean, I think that sometimes one should be against it because there is a different for readiness to die for your nation and the readiness to kill for your nation.
So there's still-- I can think that not all politics of identity is as bad as other politics of identity. In the case of Zionism, the idea or the myth of ethnic purity is really disastrous. Because you want to establish ethnic purity in the middle of a populated country and how can you do that without-- so if we speak historically, yeah, in this sense, because of the failure of the myth, it allows us to say something in general about the idea or the dark side of the idea of self-determination.
The dark side of self-determination is by definition ethnic cleansing. We've seen that in Europe and we see that now in Palestine. So in this sense, Zionism could be the laboratory through which we can analyze other categories from other places and in other countries some other times. That's why I call sometimes Zionism as a scandal in the sense it reveals a few things that we think belong to the past, is simply reveals the illnesses, the sickness that are many times are hidden beneath the carpet in the history of Europe in the European history.
HILARY RANTISI: Would you like to add anything?
ATALIA OMER: Yeah, I can add very briefly because I find this question so profound and so important, and really kind of has animated my own intellectual trajectory and personal to political. So I think that kind of a very critical study of history and the emergence the consolidation of this the realities that we have today in Palestine-Israel, really illuminate the constructive nature of this reality and perceptions of reality, this ethnoreligious supremacist positionality.
But understanding having kind of a historical, critical interrogation and understand where it's coming from and understanding that people experience this passionately, is also in a sense hopeful to illuminate other kind of possibilities. So you need both to critique, the critique that locates it in Europe.
Europe as a project, genocidal project, ethnocentric project, colonial project, orientalist project, you do the critique but the critique in and of itself is not sufficient because you also need the hermeneutical interpretive, imaginative, relational. It has to be relational right now. It has to be Palestinian, Israeli, Jews. So this is where I'm standing, where I'm coming from intellectually, but also personally.
HILARY RANTISI: I'm aware that some people need to leave for other events, but it looks a lot of you are still seated. We can continue just for a few more minutes. I will say there is food right next door so on your way out, please help yourself to food. We have lots of food for everyone. OK. We have a question here. Maybe five minutes only so we won't take--
AUDIENCE: How many question?
HILARY RANTISI: No, five minutes for total.
AUDIENCE: Thanks so much to Raef and to Atalia. I've known Raef for years. I've read [INAUDIBLE]. A very profound and thought provoking presentation discussion for someone like me who works in Tel Aviv University. The question didn't arise though was oddly behind both of you, the Divinity School. And no one mentioned religion or no one mentioned religion at length. So I'd like to--
ATALIA OMER: Do it.
AUDIENCE: No, this is the key-- but this is the question. Raef mentioned this briefly, I mean, obviously, it's just a 50 minute talk, you can't talk about everything and can't talk about book but this tension between or this tension/transition from Jewish to Israeli was assumed but not explained. So I like to ask about this transition from Jewish to Israeli in particular here at the Divinity School and particularly here in the States as opposed to then earlier, which is a very secular institution.
Perhaps in the States, being Jewish means something different. It's less of a nation, more religion. I'd like to push that question of religion and connection between religion and Jewishness and Israeli and Israelis.
RAEF ZREIK: This is also brings us to the comments-- of your comments. Yeah, by nature, I mean you couldn't cover it all. I'm just wondering where to start to answer these questions because there are so many ways where to enter into the question.
I mean, the role of religion in Zionism, it starts from being completely suppressed in Herzl and Pinsker, but it's sort of the subtext still there because the idea cannot take off without some intervention of the religious discourse through ideas of-- you name it, redemption, holy land, building the temple, negation of exile. So religion is always there, has always been there. It takes different shapes through different--
It depends if you are talking of 1917 or 1882 or 1967 after which religion became so prominent as if the secular nationalist Zionist discourse is just working for the big narrative of religion. Is it just fits into the miracle, the God miracle that Zionism is just performing as a subcontractor for God's plan in a way. And that's when what we are witnessing now is completely--
Religious discourse taking the shape of a nationalist discourse or a nationalist discourse let's say take the shape of a religious discourse. Probably the other way around is more-- and all of them combined with settler colonial project of uprooting the Palestinian justified by religious discourse. I didn't dwell on religion. Now, but this goes back to Atalia's comments, one of the things in Zionism, it's really complicated and I think I'm now reporting the way I think.
I think in terms of images, I mean, I am still in the age of 15. I studied too much mathematics and physics. First, I have to see the idea. So there's one circle and another circle, two crossing circles or three crossing circles, or relation of entailment, relations of convergence, partial convergence. I still didn't made my mind up exactly about religion and nationalism in Zionism.
It's still an interesting story to be told. I think it's haven't been told completely but one clear thing and this is the virtue of Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin were is that he brings religion back as the solution not as the problem in the sense that the worst thing that happened, it's not the religion in itself but the idea to take something trans historical and to make it historical. To make something divine and to make it political. To make a mission assigned to God and think that humans can do it.
This bringing into Earth, this imminence, actually, this is the problem. Now, there are two ways to solve this imminence issues that you're speaking directly from the mouth of God to the current realities of politics. One, is really to send religion back. Sort of to really cut the Gordian knot from religion. The other, which is Amnon is actually to claim religion and to throw politics back. To say go back politics. We want to go back to suffered. We went to be Jews but not Zionists. We want to be in Palestine but not on Palestine. We want to be in Palestine as exile because we as a faithful to the Jewish faith, our whole existence in this universe is a situation of exile.
So this is actually a radical move of critiquing of Zionism from the point of view of religion. So that's why I say that this is always too many different ways how to critique Zionism, and not the only way is to critique it's not secular. Sometimes secularism is the problem and sometimes religion is the problem. The issue is how they actually the constellation of putting them together. I don't know if this helps in any way but that's what came to mind.
HILARY RANTISI: So I'm very fearful of ending this now because there's a lot to be said and Professor Omer's work is all about this.
RAEF ZREIK: Exactly.
HILARY RANTISI: Please read her work. And if you have a chance to talk to her after, then please do because-- I'm sorry that we are out of time. We really need more time for this conversation but please join me in thanking both our presenters today.
[APPLAUSE]
RAEF ZREIK: Thank you. I didn't have--
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