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Racial palestinianization and the Janus-facednature of the Israeli state
NADIA ABU EL-HAJ
ABSTRACT Abu El-Haj focuses on David Theo Goldberg’s analysis of ‘racial
palestinianization’ in The Threat of Race. Most broadly, she argues that the specific
contours of the Israeli state’s racial rule over its Palestinian subjects and citizens do
not fit easily into Goldberg’s characterization of neoliberal racism. She thinks with
and further elaborates Goldberg’s many insights, especially his use of Michel
Foucault’s concept of ‘race wars’ and ‘counter-history’ to think about Zionism and
the Israeli state, and then demonstrates the ways in which, at moments, Goldberg
fails to exit fully the counter-historical narrative he sets out to critique and considers
why that is so. Finally, she questions Goldberg’s naming of racial palestinianization a
‘born again racism’, and complicates his characterization of Israel as a neoliberal
state, insisting on recognizing and highlighting its dual nature: Israel is a neoliberal
and a colonial state, overlapping, and yet each operating according to distinct tactics
and modalities of rule.
KEYWORDS David Theo Goldberg, Israel, Palestine, racial palestinianization, racism,The Threat of Race, Zionism
Since Israel’s latest war on Gaza, the Israeli government has not let in anyreconstruction materials. People are living in tents amid the ruins of
their homes, the economy is at a virtual standstill (as has been the case foryears), and everything except medicine and food has to be smuggled in fromEgypt. As reported in the New York Times:
That leaves Gaza suspended in a state of misery that defies easy categorization. It
is, of course, crowded and poor, but it is better off than nearly all of Africa as well
as parts of Asia. There is no acute malnutrition, and infant mortality rates
compare with those in Egypt and Jordan . . . This is because although Israel and
Egypt have shut the borders for the past three years in an effort to squeeze
I would like to thank Barbara Rosenbaum and an anonymous reviewer for their helpfulcomments. I would also like to thank Bashir Abu-Manneh and John Comaroff for theirinsights on earlier drafts of the article. Finally, I thank Elizabeth Povinelli who gave this alast minute, urgently needed final read, no doubt when she had better things to be doingwith her time.
Patterns of Prejudice, Vol. 44, No. 1, 2010
ISSN 0031-322X print/ISSN 1461-7331 online/10/010027-15 # 2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/00313220903507610
Hamas, Israel rations aid daily, allowing in about 100 trucks of food and medicine.
Military officers in Tel Aviv count the calories to avoid a disaster.1
Counting calories in order to avoid a disaster, the calculus of Israel’s
necropolitical regime.2 If Gaza and the West Bank are ‘postcolonies’*/those
‘withering, debilitating, and abandoned spaces’ that stand in contrast to the
postcolonial dream of ‘economic independence, demographic upliftment,
and the promise of human flourishing’3*/they are postcolonies by colonial
design: creating ‘zones of abandonment’ is the conscious, willed policy of the
Israeli state.4
But The Threat of Race is not just about ‘racial palestinianization’. Its
ambitions are greater: first, to provide a ‘conceptual mapping of race-making
and racist structures’ and, second, to produce a ‘cartography of racial
fabrication and racist exclusion across five broad regional terrains’ (327,
emphasis in original). Goldberg calls for a political and an analytic shift
away from ‘antiracialism’, which dominates the contemporary politics of
race. The end of racism lies not in being against race*/as ‘a concept, a name,
a category, a categorizing’ (10)*/but in attending to the lived conditions of
race, to its forms of discrimination, exclusion and violence. After sketching a
broad history of anticolonial and antiracist struggles (anti-slavery move-
ments in Haiti and Cuba, the anticolonial and civil rights movements of the
early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, the anti-apartheid move-
ment and the twinned rise of multicultural politics), Goldberg explores the
consequences of the fact that ‘antiracism’ has given way ‘to the dominant
trend of antiracialism’ (19). In an era in which ‘counter-commitment
regarding race in social arrangements came to be expressed as color-
blindness, or more generally as racelessness’ (330), the ongoing effects of
economic, political and legal racisms have been increasingly ignored,
sidelined and denied. Antiracialism is ‘whiteness by another name, by other
means’ (22). It is ‘born again racism’ (emphasis in original): ‘racism without
race, racism gone private, racism without the categories to name it as such’
1 Ethan Bronner, ‘Misery hangs over Gaza despite pledges of help’, New York Times,28 May 2009.
2 Achille Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, Public Culture, vol. 15, no. 1, 2003, 11�/40. In theaftermath of Hamas’s electoral win in January 2006, an Israeli governmentspokesperson referred to official policy towards Gaza as ‘putting the Palestinians ona 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).
3 David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism (Oxford andMalden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell 2009), 16 (subsequent page references will appearparenthetically in the text).
4 Joao Biehl, Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment (Berkeley and London: Universityof California Press 2005).
28 Patterns of Prejudice
(23). Invisible man, Goldberg writes, ‘has deepened into invisible
racial arrangements of social conditions’ (356). This is the racism of the
neoliberal age.In engaging this broad, rich and passionate text, I focus on ‘racial
palestinianization’, a regional terrain that does not fit easily into the
historical narrative sketched above.5 In reading Zionism through Foucault’s
notion of ‘race wars’, Goldberg provides a novel and fruitful lens through
which to look at the history of the Israeli state. I use that as my starting point
in order to think with and to further elaborate Goldberg’s many insights.
I also point to moments in the text where I disagree with Goldberg’s
analysis, demonstrating the ways in which certain arguments fail to exit
fully the counter-historical narrative Goldberg sets out to critique, and
highlighting the reasons and consequences for such failures. Most broadly,
I question his naming racial palestinianization a ‘born again racism’.
The term places racial palestinianization within a historical trajectory
that never happened in the Israeli state, thereby subsuming Israeli rule
over its Palestinian subjects and citizens too seamlessly under the rubric of
neoliberalism. The Israeli state is a neoliberal state. It is, simultaneously, a
colonial state. Political and economic orders do not shift in ‘block period-
izations’ any more than do scientific paradigms or epistemic virtues.6 The
Israeli state is ‘Janus-faced’.7 It is a regime that manoeuvres between and
speaks in the name of different modalities in relation to shifting forms of
capital, shifting global political imaginaries and shifting oppositional
struggles*/‘threats’*/on the ground. Keeping its Janus-faced nature in
focus, I argue, better enables us to specify the distinctive character of this
racial state and to appreciate the particular political challenges that the
Palestinian struggle*/and its supporters*/face.
5 ‘I have nominated it racial palestinianization rather than israelification (which would bemore consistent with the other modes of racial regionalization I have identified) inorder both to connect it to the representational and political histories of orientalism andto indicate its occupational singularities in the order of contemporary racial expressionsand repressions’, Goldberg explains (130). I find Goldberg’s reasoning for the‘inconsistency’ convincing, especially in terms of the latter justification. Analyticallyand politically it is important to distinguish the Israeli racial regime from those ofEurope, post-apartheid South Africa, the United States and Latin America. Israel is acolonial state whose most fundamental terms of racial rule are structured by adistinction between citizenship and nationality, by the law of return and itsimplications for equalities and rights for Jews v. non-Jews within the state and tothe land, and by its continued occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem andthe Golan Heights. As I argue in what follows, in certain respects I would draw thedistinctions even more starkly than does Goldberg.
6 Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago: University ofChicago Press 1997); Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: ZoneBooks 2007).
7 Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1987).
NADIA ABU EL-HAJ 29
An exceptional racism and the struggle for Palestine
Why, asks Goldberg, was the fight against antisemitism not ‘one ofthe principal expressions of anti-racist social movements?’ In so far asantisemitism ‘certainly since the Shoah [has been declared] as the constitu-tive extreme, always the exceptional case, the struggle against antisemitismhas characterized itself in the singular, as exemplary, as unlike any other
struggle’ (19). That has generated problems for ‘point[ing] to the racialdimensions of Israel’s very definition’ (20). Principally, one always risks theaccusation of antisemite or self-hating Jew. Goldberg eloquently argues forthe distinction between criticism of the state of Israel and antisemitism, andhe makes a much needed and impassioned plea for the responsibility of Jewsto be critical of a state that speaks in their name (112). I want to highlight and
further elaborate a slightly different aspect of the political consequences ofantisemitism as an exceptional racism, however. What has it meant for whatEdward Said called the Palestinian ‘permission to narrate’?8
In the aftermath of the Second World War and more specifically since the1960s, the Holocaust was fashioned in US and Israeli political consciousness
as the singular event of genocide: the archetypal event of victimization andsuffering.9 In the rhetorical call of ‘never again’ the spectre of Europeanantisemitism haunts the Palestinian cause, most especially the struggleagainst the Israeli state in the aftermath of the 1967 war. How can aPalestinian nationalist narrative of disenfranchisement and suffering beheard by Israeli and US (and European) publics when the Holocaust is
the yardstick against which other conflicts are measured and the Jew theur-victim of modern state violence?10 (Many of the legal parameters of theinternational human rights regime were developed in response to Nazipolicies, as is well known. Specifically, the 1949 Geneva Conventions, theuniversal standard for rules of war vis-a-vis civilians, POWs and othercaptive or injured people, were a direct response to the Nazi state.) The racist
character of the Israeli state*/the organization of the state around thedistinction between Jew and non-Jew, military and civilian legal systems,enclosure and movement and, since the 1967 war, the additional distinctionbetween citizen and subject*/becomes unintelligible, perhaps even unspeak-able, for much of the Euro-American world for the better part of thetwentieth and now the early twenty-first centuries.
As evidenced in Goldberg’s text, this political legacy haunts even thosewho do choose to speak critically. Goldberg is explicit in his criticism of the
8 Edward Said, ‘Permission to narrate’, London Review of Books, 16 February 1984, 13�/17.9 See 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 byChaya Galai (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 2005).
10 See Novick, The Holocaust in American Life.
30 Patterns of Prejudice
Israeli state. Israel is a racist state: ‘Palestinians are treated not as if a racial
group, not simply in the manner of a racial group, but as a despised and
demonic racial group’ (139). Racial palestinianization is premised on ‘land
clearance’ justified in a language of biblical return, an ideology that
‘distinguishes racial palestinianization from classic modes of settler colonial-
ism’ (130, emphasis added), but a settler colony it remains nevertheless.
Amid these critical reflections, however, Goldberg feels compelled to repeat
that his is not a challenge to Israel’s right to exist:
This critique of palestinianization is not to advocate for nor self-loathingly to
desire Israel’s destruction . . . I am concerned here insistently to question not
Israel’s being, its right to exist, but rather its forms of expression and its modes of
self-insistence and enforcement (142, emphasis in original).
The compulsion to make clear that one is not questioning Israel’s ‘being’ is not
Goldberg’s alone: to speak critically and yet felicitously about Israel requires
that one first recognize Israel’s right to exist. And yet, in the late twentieth
century, recognition emerged as a demand*/a politics*/of the disenfran-
chised.11 In this case, however, recognition must go the other way: if I am
going to criticize you (Israel, a state not a people, a ‘culture’ or an indigenous
group), I must first speak your right to exist. The state of racist exception
permeates this structure of command: as scholars, as critics, even as
Palestinians who have paid a dear price for Israel’s existence, we must
reassure you, one of the most militarily powerful states on earth, of your right
to exist.Goldberg brings Michel Foucault’s discussion of ‘race wars’ to bear on
Zionism’s self-understanding and self-representation. Drawing productively
on the lectures in ‘Society Must Be Defended’,12 Goldberg writes:
Israel came to be seen as an exemplary instance of what Michel Foucault, though
in a different context, memorably has called ‘counter-history,’ as a historical
narrative of insurrection against the grain, establishing itself in the face of
formidable and threatening power directed against it (108).
A ‘rebellion’ against European antisemitism on the one hand, and, subse-
quently, a state facing the ‘formidable threat’ of being surrounded by hostile
11 See 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: DukeUniversity Press 2002); and Patchen Markell, Bound by Recognition (Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press 2003).
12 Michel Foucault, ‘Society Must Be Defended’. Lectures at the College de France, 1975�/76,ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. from the French by David Macey(New York: Picador 2003).
NADIA ABU EL-HAJ 31
Arab countries on the other, Israel fashioned itself as victim, not perpetrator.
And yet, as Goldberg points out, Zionism was a self-determining drive ‘with
a twist’:
The war of races in which the Jew is the hounded, the perennial foe and
fugitive, becomes in Israel’s founding a protracted conflict in which the Jewish
State, Herzl’s dream, is turned into oppressor, victimizer, and sovereign. . . . The
State is transformed, as Foucault says, into protector of the integrity, superiority,
and more or less purity of the homogenizing group, what Foucault marks as
‘the race’ (109).
Goldberg’s own evidence clarifies that this is not a temporal transition or
structural transformation that occurs with the establishment of the state in
1948. From the get-go, Zionist leaders represented their movement as a
counter-historical struggle and as an outpost of European civilization, of
whiteness itself. Goldberg quotes Moses Hess and Theodore Herzl on Jews
as the ‘‘‘bearers of civilization’’’, of Jewish immigration as an ‘‘‘unhoped-for
accession of strength for the land which is now so poor’’’ (108). He
demonstrates through their words that, since the late nineteenth century,
Israel (in potentia) ‘has been thought*/has thought of itself in part . . . as
racially configured, as racially representative. And those insistent racial
traces persist despite the post-Holocaust European repression of the use of
race as social self-reference or -representation’ (108�/9).The success of Zionism’s counter-historical narrative is two-fold as
I understand it. First, it rests on an understanding of Israel as but another
(modern, besieged) nation�/state in a world of nation�/states, a point to which
I return below. Second, it rests on the repression in Israel, and not just in
post-Holocaust Europe, of race as social self-reference. Historically, racial
thought was not anathema to Jewish nationalism (113). In the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, European and American Jewish scientists
drew upon the reigning paradigms of race science to generate their own
scientific accounts of the (racial) character of the Jews. In response to
antisemitic science and rhetoric, and integral to the effort to articulate and
give credence to Jewish nationalism (Jews are not ‘merely’ a religious group),
Jewish scholars constructed scientific analyses of ‘the Jewish question’. They
did so by reconfiguring the relationship between nature and nurture along
Lamarckian lines, recognizing the ‘fact’ of Jewish degeneration while
reinterpreting its cause.13
In the aftermath of the Holocaust, however, racial self-definition could not
be maintained explicitly. It could not be named, even as Israeli population
13 For extended discussions, see John M. Efron, Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors andRace Science in Fin-de-Siecle 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).
32 Patterns of Prejudice
geneticists searched for evidence of biological unity among the diverse
Jewish ‘populations’ now citizens of the Jewish state.14 Racial reference was
evaporated (151�/2). Jews are not a race. Palestinians are not a race. This
is not a racist state. ‘For where no race, no racial harm. So no racism’ (344).
As Goldberg argues, Israel becomes ‘not so much the state form of apartheid
as a distinct modality of the racial state in denial about its racial predication’
(131, emphasis added).15
Comparisons between the Israeli state and apartheid South Africa
are made frequently. Despite differences there are characteristics of the
Israeli state that are similar to*/and in potentia foreboded a similarity
with*/apartheid rule (107). Rather than focusing on the empirical facts and
debates regarding similar or divergent structures, policies and tactics,
however, I want to highlight the political difference that the distinctive
self-representations of the Jewish and apartheid South African states have
made. What have been the political consequences of Zionism’s successful
self-fashioning as ‘counter-history’, as a movement that reproduced
(‘mimicked’, as Goldberg puts it) ‘the logics of independence fueled by
decolonizing movements’ (107, emphasis added)?If the spectre of antisemitism and the Holocaust haunts the Palestinian
cause, so too does the related success of Zionism’s self-presentation as but
another nationalist, anti-colonial movement in search of an independent
state of its own. In contrast to apartheid South Africa, which, by the mid- to
late twentieth century, spoke an anachronistic language of biological-racial
difference in its justification of white rule*/even when that ideology
morphed into a language of cultural difference, which functioned at best
as a rather thin disguise for the biological-racial*/Israel has successfully
14 Nadia Abu El-Haj, The Molecular Archive: Phylogenetics, the Origins of the Jews, and thePolitics of Epistemology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press forthcoming).
15 In explicating the differences between apartheid and the Israeli state, Goldberg pointsto some specific elements: Israel is a state that ‘tolerates really small Islamic, Christianand Druze communities’ and a ‘shadow state for Palestinians [that] largely lacksself-determination, freedom, a viable economic foundation, and any sort of securityfor its inhabitants’ (131). I want to make a few critical comments regarding theabove description. First, to refer to Israel’s Palestinian citizens by their religiousdenominations is to partake in the Israeli state’s classificatory practices that weredeveloped to deny the Arab population any claim to national rights. Second, they arenot a small minority: Israeli Palestinians are about 18 per cent of the population.Moreover, Goldberg’s narrative regarding the Israeli state’s achievements over thepast sixty years (139) underestimates the extent to which a racial logic has groundedthe 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 liftedonly in 1966. Economic, social and political inequalities between Jews and non-Jewishcitizens of the state continue to be stark and the political pressures on Palestiniancitizens as ‘disloyal’ citizens of the state are increasing as evidenced, for example, by arecent proposal to subject all Palestinians applying for admission to Israeli universitiesto submit to military security clearance first.
NADIA ABU EL-HAJ 33
represented itself as but another nation�/state in the ‘national-order of
things’,16 all of which began in violence.17
The success of that narrative is evident in Goldberg’s text. Amid his
mostly clear critique of Israel as a project of colonial settlement, albeit
one born of particular historical circumstances and configured in distinctive
ways,18 today’s ‘political common sense’ slips through: that this (Israeli-
Palestinian) ‘conflict’*/as it is named*/is of a different sort, one between two
sides, albeit differentially powerful, each of which asserts a competing
national claim. ‘In short, a dominant faction of the Israeli political establish-
ment has been committed since earliest Zionist settlement, intensifying
with the declaration of Israeli independence in 1948, not simply to deny
Palestinian existence but to make the claim true, to act in its name and on its
terms’ (110). Goldberg establishes a symmetry of form between this denial of
Palestinians and Palestinian denial of Israel’s right to exist: ‘Under Arafat, of
course, Palestinians not only asserted a coherent identity, but also sought to
reciprocate that denial: the state of Israel does not, should not, exist’ (110).
Goldberg points to the crucial distinction between rhetoric and acts. He
argues power does not make right. Power ‘manufactures the conditions
and parameters, the terms, of political, and by extension historical and
representational, possibility’ (110): a power Israel holds and the Palestinians
do not. No matter how ‘rhetorically insistent concerning Israel’s denial and
demise’ (110), Palestinian statements are not equivalent to Israeli acts.But are those claims structurally symmetrical even if not politically
equivalent? Why is denying Israel’s right to exist objectionable in the first
place? Did not anticolonial movements (seek to) dismantle colonial states?
Did they not uproot European settlers from their lands? It is important to
remember that when the PLO first drafted its charter Israel was but twenty
years old. In living memory Israel did not exist. The experience of exile for
750,000 refugees was not just new. It was raw and passionately suffered and
felt. At that historical moment it was unimaginable that Israel was here to stay.
It was inconceivable that, in contrast to all the successful anticolonial
independence movements of the past few decades, Palestine would*/
could*/be lost. For Palestinians, recognizing Israel meant*/and, for many,
16 Liisa H. Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among HutuRefugees in Tanzania (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1995).
17 See, for example, Benny Morris interviewed by Ari Shavit, ‘On ethnic cleansing’, NewLeft Review, vol. 26, March�/April 2004, 37�/51.
18 ‘First, and perhaps most basically, racial palestinianization is committed to landclearance 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, toretrieving territory always already biblically ‘‘ours,’’ distinguishes racialpalestinianization from classic modes of settler colonialism. Reclamation throughsettlement is extended by renomination, the shrinkage of Palestinian proprietorshipmaterialized in the disappearance of recognizable title’ (130).
34 Patterns of Prejudice
still means*/ratifying their own dispossession. The refusal to recognize
Israel was a refusal of Israel’s self-representation as a counter-history. It was
a demand to recognize Israel as a colonial state. It was a commitment that
history could and must be otherwise.Let me be clear. I am not arguing that Israelis should be uprooted.
(Note: I too am interpolated by the command to ‘recognize Israel’.) Nor am
I making this argument with a view towards a particular political solution:
I refrain from making such an argument as an academic dwelling in the
luxury of an elite New York academic institution and not in a position to
dictate to Palestinians ‘on the ground’ what their political desires should be.
I am making an analytical point. To produce a symmetry of logic here*/even
if not a symmetry of power*/is to fail to understand the ways in which for
Palestinians and as a historical fact (dare I venture), this was and is a project
of colonial settlement, even if one born as part of a long history of European
antisemitism and realized in the wake of Nazi genocide. As I argued in Facts
on the Ground, archaeological practice converged with and fashioned not just
‘the national interest’ (123) but the settler-nationalist interest.19 Zionist
settlement was made possible in the context of an imperial common sense
in which Europeans could and should settle elsewhere,20 bringing European
civilization to the global ‘periphery’, as Goldberg points out. All the while its
grammar was a distinctly national one, a belief in and a commitment to
‘return’. This was settler-nationhood of a distinct variety: temporally,
geographically, ideologically and, from a European perspective in the
aftermath of the Holocaust, ethically. But a project of colonial settlement it
was.21
Why do I point to these moments of inconsistency in Goldberg’s generally
powerfully critical text? Am I just splitting analytic hairs? Perhaps. But I see
no way to move forward*/for Europe and the United States to understand
the passion of Palestinian and Arab publics and politics vis-a-vis Israel, for
them to absorb the symbolic and political importance of the right of
return*/without fully exiting Israel’s counter-historical narrative of being a
movement for national independence, as today but one nation (however
19 Nadia Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2001). Many thanksto Goldberg (123) for clarifying what I was decidedly not arguing in the book, mycritics’ claims notwithstanding.
20 See Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books 1978), and Edward Said,Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books 1994).
21 Goldberg’s ambivalence about the Zionist project*/although not about what Israel hasbecome*/is evident in other moments in the text as well. For example: ‘The postwarmoment was one of intense anti-colonialism. The Pan-African Congress of 1945 . . .significantly brought together almost every future leader of major postcolonialliberations. India and Pakistan attained independence and statehood. Israel came intobeing. China quickly followed . . .’ (340).
NADIA ABU EL-HAJ 35
problematic its origins and policies, however undefined its borders) in thenational order of things.
Racial palestinianization
What is racial palestinianization? It is not a single, unified regime of racialrule: it operates differently vis-a-vis Israel’s Palestinian citizens*/subjected to‘ethnoracial purging’ (119)*/than vis-a-vis those in the territories who arecordoned off behind the Wall in ‘the lock-up facility that is Palestine today’(131), who are subjected to ‘physical and social death’ (26) and to ‘politicide’(122).22 Moreover, racial palestinianization has developed and shifted overtime. I want to elaborate a few historical details not spelled out in Goldberg’stext.
Many of the ways in which the territories have been governed since 1967were developed in the early decades of Israeli statehood to control itsuntrustworthy Palestinian citizens: until 1966, Palestinians citizens of thestate lived in zones under the jurisdiction of military administration and law,areas they could not leave without a permit. These explicitly repressivemeasures were accompanied by an array of civilizing projects (education,party politics and electoral participation, for example). By way of contrast,occupation in the post-1967 era was less of a civilizing mission: administra-tion, yes, but one intended to be civilizing for some imagined if partialintegration, no. Moreover I sense that over the past decade or so, racial rulein the Occupied Territories is moving away from the ‘historicist’ version: abelief that Others can be civilized, that they can be prepared for democraticparticipation and self-rule. Racism in a ‘naturalist’ form is rearing its uglyhead: a belief in the permanent inferiority and incommensurability of racialOthers, albeit one no longer (necessarily) grounded in appeals to biologicaldifference.23 ‘All Muslims are murderers’, one Israeli cabinet ministerdeclared in 2004 (115). Framed increasingly in the language of religiousdispositions*/as a clash of religious civilizations*/violence is read into thevery fabric of Palestinian (and/as Muslim) personhood. It is no longer clearthat there is anyone to negotiate with, as the now standard Israeli mantra goes.If not recuperable, if not civilizable (after all, Israeli troops and settlers leftGaza and look what it has become), Palestinians can be excludedlegitimately from ‘the Kingdom of Moral Ends’ (118). Within the logic of anaturalist racism, racelessly conceived, the necropolitics of these sealed and
22 See also Baruch Kimmerling, Politicide: Ariel Sharon’s War against the Palestinians(London: Verso 2006).
23 For further elaboration of Goldberg’s distinction between historicist and naturalistforms of racial thought, see David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (Oxford andMalden, MA: Blackwell 2002).
36 Patterns of Prejudice
encircled zones of abandonment risks becoming an end*/a ‘solution’*/in itsown right, or so I fear.
If Israeli rule has produced a ‘fate worse than apartheid’ (130), Goldberg isnot surprised that it has brought forth ‘suicidal impulses’ (126). ‘Suicidalnihilism is the Palestinian default mode in response to the Israeli default ofracial branding and group area acts. . . . Encircling imprisonment produces adesperation born of nothing left to lose’ (126�/7). Goldberg makes a muchneeded political move here: suicide bombings are not emblematic of adistinctly Islamic ‘culture of death’, as a wide array of scholars, journalistsand pundits contend, and not just with reference to Palestine.24 Goldbergargues that suicide bombings are a direct response to the brutality of Israelirule, even if an ultimately nihilistic and unproductive one. If one has nothingleft to lose, why not become a ‘shaheed’?25 If one belongs to the generation of‘lost hope’, why not find solace for that ‘hopelessness . . . [in] an investmentin the afterlife’ (127)? In the face of the Wall and its structure of death, is theemergence of a ‘seething disposition’ so difficult to comprehend (128)?
Placing causality squarely in daily life under Israeli control is an importantcritique of widespread assumptions. It is a much needed step in the rightdirection. But it does not go far enough. Are suicide attacks necessarily theresult of seething anger or hopelessness? Do we really know that individualswho engage in such acts are looking for solace in the afterlife? For obviousreasons, we cannot know the motivations of suicide bombers after the fact.More important, as Talal Asad argues, gaining insight into the phenomenonof suicide bombing might not be served best by the search for motivations.26
But there are a few things we do know: many Palestinian suicide bomberswere not particularly religious; secular parties took up the mantle of suicideattacks following in the footsteps of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. We also knowthat suicide bombing takes a lot of planning and preparation. It certainlycannot be reduced simply to an act of anger or despair.
Citizens have long been asked to sacrifice for the nation and countlessgenerations of men*/and women*/have done so. I may consider that arather suicidal desire or choice but, within the national order of things, it iscertainly not taken to be so. We do not presume anger to be the motivatingforce: perhaps it is a commitment to the nation, perhaps it is born ofeconomic necessity (as in today’s US economic draft). In other contexts,dying for a cause might be born of idealism (socialist idealism in the case ofthe brigades who went to fight in the Spanish Civil War). Motivations cannever truly be known. Nevertheless, we need to recognize the possibility ofmultiple reasons why civilians join a cause, even a cause that involvescommitting oneself to a certain death.
24 See Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing (New York: Columbia University Press 2007).25 For an interesting discussion of the ‘shaheed’ in the Islamic discursive tradition and in
the Palestinian political imaginary, see Asad, On Suicide Bombing.26 Asad, On Suicide Bombing.
NADIA ABU EL-HAJ 37
My point is not to defend suicide bombing. I do not support attacks on
civilian populations, whether carried out by suicide bombers, planes or
any other technology of delivery. Moreover, on pragmatic political grounds,
I agree with Goldberg. These attacks have had disastrous consequences for
the Palestinian struggle. Nevertheless, I sense that for Goldberg this violence
is of a different sort: an act of passion and anger rather than of calculation
and design. But there is as much of a ‘rationality’ to the suicide bombing
campaigns in Israel and the Occupied Territories as there is a ‘rationality [to
the] domination at the heart of racial palestinianization’ (128). As Robert
Pape has argued, on the basis of a quantitative study, suicide bombings,
most of which had not been carried out by religious movements,27 might
best be thought of as a tactic, as a ‘weapon of the weak’, to borrow James
Scott’s term.28 When the military prowess of an occupying power cannot be
met ‘directly’, suicide bombing is the most ‘effective’ response. Following
Pape’s analysis, one that accounts well for the political logic of suicide
bombings targeting Israeli citizens, it is a tactic that has sought to bring the
conflict ‘home’ to Israelis, to make them see that the cost for them of a
continued occupation will be too high. It has utterly failed in its aim. It has
solidified public support*/in Israel and abroad*/for the brutality of Israeli
colonial rule. Nevertheless, a rationality drives the campaign, perhaps for
individuals as much as for the organizations that orchestrate it.29 Suicide
bombing remains a military tactic, not an act of anger or revenge.In sketching the brutality of racial palestinianization, Goldberg refers to
the Israeli regime as engaging in an ‘aggressive, militarized neoliberalism’
(129). But what makes Israeli rule over its Palestinian subjects neoliberal? The
neoliberal state, according to Goldberg, involves the retrenchment of the
welfare state and the reorganization of its priorities: neoliberalism ‘seeks to
elevate privatization of property, revenue generation, utilities, services,
and social support systems, including health care, aid, and disaster response
and relief’ (332). And, as Goldberg demonstrates in his discussion of
Iraq*/and its ‘blowback’ in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina*/so
too is policing, and ‘security’ more generally, increasingly outsourced to
private hands (89).
27 Robert 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 9/11attacks, is reported to have spent the previous night drinking alcohol and hanging outwith strippers. Such accounts do not square with the reigning understanding of himas a devout Muslim*/a ‘Muslim extremist’*/the presumed ‘motivation’ for hisinvolvement in the attacks.
28 James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven:Yale University Press 1985).
29 There is a tension in Goldberg’s analysis of suicide bombing. Hamas*/andHizbullah*/are represented as rational, well-oiled machines. And yet the act ofsuicide bombing is explained by recourse to notions of despair and anger.
38 Patterns of Prejudice
There are important ways in which Israel is a neoliberal state, the state
more so than the ‘shadow state’ (131). The retrenchment of Labor Zionism in
favour both of reduced labour protections and social services, and of capital
with an increasingly global reach, and the importation of cheap Thai and
Filipino labour to replace Palestinian workers: all policies in keeping with a
neoliberal regime that maintains a colony on the side. As Gadi Algazi has
shown, Israeli companies have devised ‘outsourcing’ techniques that
manage to keep labour ‘at home’: they have established development
centres in Jewish settlements in order to hire cheap ultra-orthodox Jewish
labour. (They ‘live simply’, the explanation goes.)30 Nevertheless, to refer to
Israel’s rule over the territories as an ‘aggressive, militarized neoliberal-
ism’*/or the ‘neo-neoliberalism’ that is ‘Gaza’s permanent nightmare’
(364)*/is misleading. As Algazi argues, in offering ‘housing and social
services unobtainable in Israel proper, [settlements have become] a powerful
magnet for those struggling to subsist’. Shifting the settler movement away
from a primary reliance on the ‘messianic fervour of hard-line settlers’,
government policies have successfully broadened ‘the power base of the
colonization movement, forging a powerful alliance of state, political and
capitalist interests, well-off home-buyers and those suffering real hardship:
large families looking for cheap housing or new immigrants dependent on
government subsidies and seeking social acceptance’.31 Neoliberal capital is
being harnessed to the colonial cause, but it is a colonial cause fully
dependent on the Israeli state without which settlement would not*/could
not*/exist: ‘The settlers took control of these lands, but it was the state that
had confiscated them and enabled the settlement of its citizens in contra-
vention of international law, of some government decisions and in many
cases of court orders.’32
The state of Israeli rule over the West Bank is not neoliberal, even if the
colonial project is being restructured by*/even as the colonial project itself
redirects*/the logic of (Israeli) neoliberal capital. The Israeli state is ever
present in building, funding and protecting Jewish settlements and settlers
(131�/2). Ultra-orthodox Jewish labour is cheap due to the heavy state
subsidization of their lives. The state invests in roads, telephone towers,
electricity grids and water systems. It subsidizes housing, schools and health
care. And it provides ‘the formidable military forces that move around in the
territory’. It provides all the ‘elixir[s] of life for the settlements, the secret of
their power’.33 Meanwhile, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) control and enclose
30 Gadi Algazi, ‘Offshore Zionism’, New Left Review, vol. 40, July�/August 2006, 27�/37(27).
31 Ibid., 30.32 Idith 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.
33 Ibid., xv.
NADIA ABU EL-HAJ 39
Palestinian populations: the state invests in the destruction of the infra-
structures, the livelihoods, the lives of Palestinian under its control. This is
the ‘necropolitical disciplining’ (134) of an ever active and interventionist
colonial state.34
If the Israeli state cannot be characterized simply as neoliberal, neither can
racial palestinianization meaningfully be labelled ‘born again racism’. Prior
to racism being born again, according to Goldberg’s own definition, it was
named, it was fought, and racial segregation and racist exclusions were
legally dismantled. Only then was race disappeared in the name of
antiracialism, whiteness by other means: ‘conservationist segregation . . .
proceeds by undoing the laws, rules, and norms of expectation the Civil
Rights Movement was able to effect’ (78, emphasis in the original). Israel is
not a state and society that, in the aftermath of a successful civil rights or
anticolonial struggle that named race and dismantled the legal structures of
racial segregation, proceeded to un-name it, to privatize racism and
analytically to render segregation*/in housing, in education*/a matter of
34 A recent body of scholarship discusses and debates the applicability of Carl Schmitt’sconcept 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 atany length, although I would like to note that more sustained and critical readings ofAgamben and Schmitt might be useful prior to asking whether or not their argumentsare ‘applicable’ to the Palestinian case. Achille Mbembe provides just such a criticalreading. In ‘Necropolitics’ (2003), Mbembe develops a theoretically and historicallynuanced discussion of the state of exception, racism and bare life, and then elaborateshis argument by analysing the ‘contemporary colonial occupation of Palestine’ as ‘themost accomplished form of necropower’ (27). Mbembe makes three crucialinterventions 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 (orsuspensions of law) and violence that colonialism involved. Second, Mbembeintegrates his discussion of the state of exception with Foucault’s analysis of thefunction of ‘racism’*/as the ‘death function’*/in the modern state. (Foucault’swritings on racism may be more fruitful to analyses of Palestine than is Agamben’sconcept of bare life; see Foucault, ‘Society Must Be Defended’.) Finally, it is worthremembering, as Mbembe insists, that ‘late modern colonial occupation differs inmany ways from early modern occupation, particularly in its combining of thedisciplinary, the biopolitical and the necropolitical’ (27). We don’t have to choosebetween 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 Israeliconstitutionalism’, in Lentin (ed.), Thinking Palestine, 131�/47) or as just another,Middle Eastern ‘mukhabarat’ (security/police) state (Ilan Pappe, ‘The mukhabarat stateof Israel: a state of oppression is not a state of exception’, in Lentin (ed.), ThinkingPalestine, 148�/70), or any other kind of regime. It has both liberal and distinctlyilliberal dimensions: it is a colonial state and, for its Jewish citizens, a liberaldemocracy; it is governed by the rule of law and it operates with a sustainedsuspension of that law, under the rubric of military rule and the guise of securityrequirements. The Israeli state is that complex multifaceted matrix of forms and tacticsof rule.
40 Patterns of Prejudice
‘personal preference’. The Israeli racial regime and the legal structures thatsustain it*/the distinction between citizen and subject, between military andcivil law, between Jewish and Arab citizens, between settler roads andPalestinian zones*/remain intact. This is not racist ‘domination now in thename of racial denial’ (151, emphasis added). Racial palestinianization hasalways been racist domination in the name of racial denial.35 This is aninstance of ‘racial evaporation’ (152) avant la lettre: before race, before one’sown racism, was ever named.
The Israeli state is simultaneously colonial and neoliberal. The nationalnecropolitics of Israel is not some limit case of a racism obsessed withsecurity in the neoliberal age. If, in the aftermath of 9/11, the United Statesgovernment sought ‘to emulate Israel in circumstances deemed similar, ‘‘toact like them’’’ (137), that may tell us less about the convergence ofneoliberalisms than about the multiple political modalities of the US state:a neoliberal state with an imperial ambition whose project, reach andtechniques were reimagined, recalibrated and redesigned in the wake of the9/11 attack.
Nadia Abu El-Haj is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropologyat Barnard College and Columbia University, New York. She is the author ofFacts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning inIsraeli Society (University of Chicago Press 2001) and The Molecular Archive(forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press).
35 Goldberg 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 verydifferent political dynamic, so too was Israeli racism un-named vis-a-vis its non-Ashkenazi citizens. The trajectory from denial to a born again racism may be a moreappropriate description of the struggle of Mizrahi Jews for their rights than of racialpalestinianization. For an extended discussions of the Mizrahi question, see YehoudaA. 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).
NADIA ABU EL-HAJ 41
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