Jacqueline Rose Rosemary Bechler 18 - 8 - 2005
In “The Question of Zion”, Jacqueline Rose applies the insights of psychoanalysis to the inner world of Zionist doctrine and attitudes. openDemocracy’s Rosemary Bechler talks to her.
http://leighmdotnet.blogspot.com/2005/08/opendemocracy-nation-as-trauma-zionism.html
openDemocracy: The Question of Zion is dedicated to the memory of Edward Said: its title a tribute to his 1979 work, The Question of Palestine. In what sense is this study a continuation of Edward Said’s project.
Jacqueline Rose: There is a neglected strand in Edward’s work, which begins with that book’s key chapter, “Zionism from the standpoint of its victims”, and continues in his 1997 essay, “Bases for Coexistence”. In the latter, he says: “we cannot coexist as two communities of detached and uncommunicatingly separate suffering.”
He argues that there has to be understanding not just of the others’ history, but of the others’ history of suffering. He also asserts: “The internal cohesion and solidity of Israel, of Israelis as a people and as a society, have, for the most part, eluded the understanding of Arabs generally.” He sees that as a failure.
It is my belief that this same understanding has eluded the critics of Israel. So my starting-point is the Gramscian exhortation to anyone wishing to navigate history that runs through Edward Said’s work also: of knowing yourself as a “product of the historical process”. He described Zionism as having an “immense traumatic effectiveness” for the Palestinians. In such comments he is making a plea for something almost impossible: to hold on to the twin emotions of empathy and rage.
Edward’s work was so often about just such tugs-of-war. It was central to his work that this was a story of injustice, but at the same time he believed there must be a certain level of understanding; above all, of why Zionism is so powerful. How does it command such an apparently intractable allegiance?
Jacqueline Rose is a writer who teaches at the school of English and Drama, Queen Mary, University of London. Among her books are States of Fantasy (Oxford University Press, 1998), On Not Being Able to Sleep: Psychoanalysis and the Modern World (Princeton, 2003) and The Question of Zion (Princeton, 2005.)
Zionism – which I think has been traumatic for the Jews as well as the Palestinians – seems untouchable, so deeply has it entered the hearts of what people feel about themselves. Michel Warschawski (“Mikado”), the veteran peace activist and author of On the Border (South End, 2005) implies this in his comment that real change would necessitate the entire overhaul of an identity.
Another, very personal link to Edward’s work again relates to the Gramscian thread in his thinking. I feel he would have wanted me to revive the story of internal Jewish dissent. He describes the purpose of critical thinking as “to make differences where previously there were none.” I like to think that this is what The Question of Zion has tried to do.
openDemocracy: The book begins by clearing the middle ground you wish to occupy in order to set about making these differentiations. You claim the right to excavate “one of the most potent collective movements of the 20th century” against both those quick to see any criticism as anti-semitism and those flatly opposed to something they scarcely understand. But doesn’t this almost impossible stance run the risk of pleasing no one? What then are the prospects for your challenging thesis to be properly debated?
Jacqueline Rose: One or two foul reviews accuse me of equating Zionism and Nazism – a wilful misrepresentation of my project, and something I have always explicitly ruled out. But Ilan Pappe, perhaps the most controversial Israeli historian in the west and someone for whom I have high regard, suggests that I have achieved my intention: to steer a clear path between an elated identification with the state’s own discourse and a string of insults.
At the same time, the shocking divide between the founding fathers of Zionism and its later “internal” critics can give the impression that Israel offers to its citizens (and indeed the rest of the world) only lethal identification or radical dissent.
This is a tragedy. I would not want – especially in talking to Rosemary Bechler – to underestimate the growing numbers of Israeli people who are slowly, painstakingly, working for peace through contacts with Palestinians and other Arabs. But they don’t have an effective voice in the country, and they certainly have no political representation.
Daniel Barenboim commented at a conference in Budapest commemorating Edward Said that “there is no opposition (in Israel)” and that “1967 changed everything”. Religious parties who until then were politically marginal hailed the victory of 1967 as a miracle, and called in its aftermath for the cohesion and expansion of the Israeli state. Moreover, the post-1967 occupation and the cheap Palestinian labour it made available destroyed socialism as an inner motivating principle for building the state.
Even in the conditions today that Barenboim describes, the debate about Zionism is gathering pace. Bernard Avishai’s extraordinary 1970s book The Tragedy of Zionism was reissued in 2002; John Rose’s The Myths of Zionism was published in 2004.
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http://leighmdotnet.blogspot.com/2005/08/opendemocracy-nation-as-trauma-zionism.html
Leigh www.leighm.net