Am I in Jerusalem? [...]
Under what conditions does one find oneself in Jerusalem?
Jacques Derrida
"How to Avoid Speaking: Denials"
Lecture given in Jerusalem, 1987
A HASIDIC MAN walks through the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. It is summer, June 22, 2018. He carries stones from the Warsaw Ghetto in his right hand, and the word Gaza is written on his back in three alphabets: Latin across his shoulders, Arabic near his heart, and Hebrew on his spine. In a performance titled Counter-Ruin, he walks sixteen kilometers through Berlin, passing the Israeli and American Embassies, through the Brandenburg Gate, through the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, to the Jewish Cemetery at Weissensee. He leaves stones at each location. Last of all, I imagine, he leaves a stone on the grave of Hermann Cohen, the Jewish neo-Kantian to whom the humanity of the Jewish tradition was sacred, its commitment to justice and a radical ideality of peace: “It is time for us to profess our commitment again,” he said within the context of the Anti-Semitism Dispute in Berlin in the 1880s. Yes, it is time to profess our allegiance to a brave community of Jews again. In Cohen’s universe, making such a profession goes hand in hand with a radical critique of Zionism. “These chaps want to be happy” was his flippant commentary on the blood and soil ideology that he recognized in Zionism, including the idealized eudaemonia of the life of the hero soldier. The radicality of Cohen’s work within today’s context is underestimated: his faithfulness to rabbinic diasporic thinking, and his close bond to the Arab-Jewish thinkers Ibn Maimun, Bahya Ibn Paquda, Saady Gaon, and many more. En Umatenu ela betoratenu—“We have no home outside the text” says Saadya Gaon in 9th century Baghdad—and Ibn Maimun in his Arabic introduction to the rabbinic code (Mishna) famously names two conditions for Israel to exercise any political autonomy now or in the future: first, the abolishment of all wars, and second, the annulment of all injustices between the rich and the poor. We are in the middle of an Anti-Semitism Dispute today, one that is more perverse than it was in around 1880. Because today it is the Jew (together with the Palestinian, the Arab, the Muslim) who is marked anti-Semite, especially when staying faithful and upright with respect to the law.
BUT WHY would an American Jewish performance artist, my dear friend Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman, whose family belonged to a community in Eastern Europe that was wiped out by the Nazis and their collaborators—why would he walk through the Brandenburg Gate and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe carrying stones from the Warsaw Ghetto? Does he belong to a Palestinian community? Is he a convert? A Palestinian activist? No, he is not. He undertakes his Gaza Walks on his own and on his own account.
AS JEWISH INTELLECTUALS, artists, activists, scholars, thinkers, critics, even Haredi and Hasidic groups, we scream “Stop the genocide in Gaza” on our own account. We scream “Zionism is not Judaism,” “Free Palestine,” “From the River to the Sea,” “Stop Apartheid,” “Not in Our Name!,” and “Stop the Genocide in Gaza” to protest Israel’s cut-throat violence against the Palestinian civilian population in Gaza, the West Bank, and in East Jerusalem, violence against Lebanese civilians in Lebanon, aggressive land-theft and bombardment in Syria, all on our own account. We protest the systematic destruction of civilian infrastructures, hospitals, schools, churches, mosques, universities, nursery schools, bakeries, water supply systems, olive groves, agriculture in Gaza annihilating everything that is necessary for life there. As Jewish intellectuals in Berlin, we are—I can’t find the right word—we are tired of being taken hostage for the raison d’état of German state interests into an abysmally violent version of Jewish identity, being instructed by the state about what is Jewish and not (humanity is not part of it), all of it being the abhorrent price of defending ethnic and national Jewish exclusivity in Israel. We all know the numbers, and one cannot repeat them enough here: over forty-five thousand (official) deaths in Gaza, more than seventy percent of them children and women (these are the numbers from last week), thousands of people buried under rubble alive, thousands of wounded deprived of medical attention, amputations without anesthesia, fire bombs thrown on plastic tents, targeted killings of nearly two hundred journalists and United Nations employees, the annihilations of hundreds of entire families, and so on and so forth. This type of death continues day after day, so much death, documented in thousands of images—for daily consumption, live, by the entire world. In the midst of this, Jewish voices for peace and justice accept the stamp of anti-Semitism as price for their loyalty in the face of the daily murder in Palestine as a reminder of a Jewishness whose humanity is sadly lost. The most faithful among us bear the badge of anti-Semitism today as a sort of yellow star on which Jude is written.
HOWEVER, and Solidarity as a Political Version of Love has made that very clear: When we scream “Not in Our Name!” we know it is not true. The genocide does happen in our name, as tradition still calls us by that name, calls us Israel. All this violence, the occupation, the apartheid, the displacements, the torture, the deprivation of human rights, the genocide, all of it is happening in our name. We can beat our chests as much as we like on Yom Kippur and say, “We have taken the guilt upon ourselves, we have cheated, we have disenfranchised, we have slaughtered, we have killed, we have expropriated, we have lied, we have committed mass murder—ashamnu, bagadnu, gazalnu, zadnu, chamasnu, dibarnu sheker. As long as the state and the tradition bear the same name, a double-ganger will act in our name, a double-ganger far away from settling accounts for all this guilt. It will be impossible to wrench the name of Israel from this violence, to disentangle its traditions of lovingkindness, justice, and truthfulness from the crimes of a cynical double-ganger. Acknowledging this aporia is the job of Jewish intellectuals. And Jewish Voice for Peace has taught us so much in this respect. But since we are speaking in Berlin, what about the Germans? Why do Germans insist on Jews belonging to the State of Israel, why would they want to arrest Jewish tradition in the grid of that kind of State violence? Does it constitute a kind of perverse satisfaction?
EIGHTY YEARS AFTER THE SHOAH, tying the Jew to the violence of the Israeli apartheid colonial settler state, is this country—Germany—thereby not reaffirming its own fascism in the guise of the Other, the Jew? In this deadlock, the slogans “Free Palestine” and “From the River to the Sea” are screams to be freed from one’s own violence, screams to liberate the Jewish intellectual from this perverted arrest, together with the Palestinian freed from a gruesome deadly occupation. The first will not work without the latter. If the name of Israel is no longer appropriate to embody virtues of humaneness and justice, wouldn’t we all prefer to be Jewish Palestinians? Wouldn't we prefer to join Edward Saïd, who concluded an article in Ha’Aretz in August 2000 with the words: “I am the last Jewish intellectual, follower of Adorno and Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, and Hannah Arendt. I am a Jewish Palestinian.”
I AM A JEWISH PALESTINIAN? Edward Saïd positions himself here in a tradition of diasporic thinking that was long associated with the German Jewish intellectual being at odds with any (Jewish) territorial nationalist claim to land and soil. Due to the foundation of the Jewish state, Jews have lost their claim to the virtues of exile. Palestinians are teaching the rest of the world how to cling to being human in the midst of dispossession, occupation, torture, and death. To speak of the Arab Jew, the Jew Arab, to speak of the Palestinian Jew, the Jewish Palestinian while witnessing the Israeli death machine at work demands an abysmal leap of the political imagination. It means to take a detour via paradise, it means to think the unthinkable, to imagine the unimaginable, to attach one’s actions to the impossible, in order to enter “from the other side.” We are speaking here from behind the veil, from a place of learning that is still forthcoming, from beneath a prayer whose poetry and whose community is yet to be revealed.
“NOT IN OUR NAME!” is the impossible attempt to wrench Israel from an atrocious homonymous embrace. As long as that grip is not loosened, to divest the name from its name remains an impossible task. Israel has turned into a split subject all along, that is the unavoidable consequence set out by the Zionist project from the very beginning. As long as shelilat ha-galut—the negation of the Diaspora—remains the founding principle of the apartheid state, the annulment of the Jewish diaspora is implied in the name of the double-ganger. Those of us who mourn the loss of life and freedom in Palestine today dream to be Jewish Palestinians. We must become Orientals again—this is what it means. And Palestine is at the heart of our agenda for generations to come.
THESE DAYS I somehow begin to much better understand the Ottoman messianic figure of Shabbetai Zvi. When humanity is defiled by war and genocide, famine and injustice administered in the name of Israel, it might be time to switch garments, it might be time to think about one’s name again. Did Jacob not change his name to Israel in a biblical scene of love? When he embraced the angel at the river, did he not “lose his manhood” and “turn into a women” in that embrace according to a reading by Saady Gaon? Have we forgotten? When thinking of Shabbetai Zvi in seventeenth-century Constantinople, did we not witness a similar kind of conversion? A conversion that comes not in the beginning but at the very end, in order to wrench Israel from the ruins of her name? Why would a Jewish messiah turn into a Muslim at the Sultan’s court? Did he wish to switch religions? No.
WE MUST BUILD A POLITICAL HOME that divests Israel from its name. Lebanese filmmaker, thinker, artist, and writer Jalal Toufic calls this divestment the withdrawal of tradition past a surpassing disaster. There are times in which traditions and their names are being so defiled by perversion that due to a radical withdrawal of tradition they are no longer available to their lovers. An immaterial withdrawal, not a material one. When the whole world finds Jewish books, libraries, Talmud classes, and so on readily available in abundance everywhere, it is the lover who can no longer access the tradition due to the perversion of the work of the double-ganger and the subsequent withdrawal of tradition. Yes. Solidarity is a political form of love. And when speaking of Jewish Palestinians, it is time to speak of Jalal Toufic, Saadya Gaon, and Shabbetai Zvi again. In the feminine.
And how do we do that.
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House of Taswir delivered this text at the occasion of a Berlin book talk with
Prof. Sherene Seikaly and Rabbi Alissa Wise on November 27, 2024 at Café MadaMe in Berlin
celebrating the publication of Rebecca Vilkomerson & Alissa Wise,
Solidarity is the Political Version of Love. Lessons from Jewish Anti-Zionist Organizing.
With a Foreword by Omar Barghouti
Afterword by Stefanie Fox
Published 2024
The event was graciously hosted by Julia Gyemant.
Translated from the German and copy-edited by Tas Skorupa.
This essay deliberately retains the form of a manifesto. Its claims are substantiated in the various publications of the author, most importantly House of Taswir: Doing and Undoing Things; Notes on Epistemic Architecture(s) (2014), Freud, Talmud, Taswir (2019), and Wednesday Society. The Couch of Meret O. (2022).
The author would love to teach this manifesto and elaborate its sources in form of a seminar at any university/house of learning in the near future. Inquires to House of Taswir at taswir.projects@gmail.com