Anachronism and Morality: Israeli Settlement,Palestinian Nationalism,and Human Liberation

Abstract

This article is concerned with how the idea of anachronism can interfere with our thinking about social justice, peace, and human liberation. In the case of Israel/Palestine the idea of anachronism is deployed among liberals, progressives and radical theorists, and activists seeking peace and social justice who express animosity toward religiously motivated settlers and their settlement project. One of the ways in which they differentiate themselves from these settlers is by suggesting that settler actions belong to the past. They also pity Palestinians conceived of as stuck in an oppressive system of settler colonialism that also belongs to the past, preventing them from moving forward. Both perceptions of anachronism limit the ways we can think about human liberation and peace. This article sheds light on a conundrum about who or what belongs to the past, and how thinking in such terms can contribute to the production of a particular moral collective and to the production of enmity. Both perceptions of anachronism frame history as a kind of progress in which peoples or groups might be ranked according to their levels of civilizational attainment, an idea we abandoned long ago as an analytical tool, but seem to have retained as a matter of practical political sympathy and judgment. This temporal conditioning can interfere with the thinking of even some of the most progressive social theorists, and mimics a colonial impulse.

Keywords

Benjamin citizenship conflict Fanon Israel morality Palestine

Global social movements, like the unprecedented global movement against the Iraq war in 2002–3 or the ongoing World Social Forum gatherings, already herald a world that is beyond the logic of national liberation – even as the settler colonial hold over Palestine remains as a relic of an antiquated era, and therefore appears especially intolerable. (Mohammed Bamyeh, 2010: 62)

One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents see it as a historical norm. (Walter Benjamin, 1968[1940])

This article is concerned with some of the ways the idea of anachronism interferes with our thinking about social justice, peace, and human liberation. This idea is deployed unevenly and with differing outcomes. In the case of Israel/Palestine, the idea of anachronism is sometimes deployed among liberals, progressives, radical theorists, and activists seeking peace and social justice, who express animosity toward religiously motivated settlers and their settlement project. While activists and ordinary Israelis frame this animosity as a response to land theft, unequal distribution of resources, violence against Palestinians and overall social, economic, and other injustices, there is another level of animosity that is largely unconscious and often unspoken. It is this deeper level that concerns me here. Beyond describing the violences and injustices suffered by Palestinians, this level of analysis touches on an unspoken temporal framework that often eludes us as we operate from within it. Focusing on this level of analysis reveals yet another reason why the search for justice is so difficult. There is a sense that within the world of real politics, a very limited set of options is available. The Occupation seems to be something temporary that will give way to something better as history unfolds in stages, but particular political options seem to be all that is available or possible ‘right now’. Even among the self-described radical left¹ there is a sense of limitation, of all that can be accomplished for now; a temporary-ness that requires stages of progress toward an anticipated better future, even though that temporary ‘now’ has been with us already for more than 45 years.

One of the ways in which some liberal or left-wing theorists and activists differentiate themselves from religious Jewish settlers in the Occupied Territories is by suggesting that settler actions belong to the past.² The idea of anachronism is applied differently to Palestinians, who are pitied for being stuck in an oppressive system of settler colonialism that belongs to the past, preventing them from moving forward.³ Both perceptions of anachronism limit the ways we can think about human liberation and about peace. Both perceptions of anachronism frame history as a kind of progress in which peoples or groups might be ranked according to their levels of civilizational attainment,⁴ an idea we abandoned long ago as an analytical tool, but seem to have retained as a matter of practical political sympathy and judgment. One result of this temporal framework is a failure to engage with people we see as despicable Others, in this case, religious settlers. This failure prevents us from seeing some of the ways in which settlers, generally conceived of as radical, right-wing ultra-nationalists, might embody ideas that are outside the limited imaginings of political frameworks based on territorial nationalism and human sovereignty. My central point, however, is that ultimately, seeing the dilemma of the settlers and the dilemma of the Palestinians as linked to historical progress undermines the objectives of those who seek peace and social justice, foreclosing possible ways of imagining futures and reproducing enmity instead of liberation. This is not to suggest that the terms liberation or peace or justice are somehow self-evident, nor is it to point to some pre-existing state of human freedom. To fully interrogate these terms is beyond the scope of this article. Instead I use them as they arise in the field, including their use by scholars, activists and ordinary Israelis.⁵

If we substitute the word ‘nationalism’ for the word ‘Fascism’ in the quote above from Benjamin, the statement continues to make sense. In a broad way, this article considers the difficulty of thinking outside currently available models of political belonging as we consider solutions to violent conflicts and seek social justice. It is difficult to move away from thinking about the state as the guarantor of rights and liberties, and beyond thinking of such states as territorially defined. I would like to propose that this difficulty is partly conditioned by the ways in which morality is intertwined with ideas about time. I will argue that the most powerful contemporary discourses of conflict and its resolution are founded on a progressive temporality that sections off that which belongs to the present and future from that which ought to be relegated to the dustbin of the past. Walter Benjamin was acutely aware of the hazards of such thinking. He warned us that naïve beliefs in progress always moving us forward through time to a better future might undermine even revolutionary thinkers.⁶ Speaking of Fascism, he explained that ‘the amazement that the things we are experiencing are “still” possible … is not philosophical. This amazement’, he wrote, ‘is not the beginning of knowledge – unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable’ (Benjamin, 1968[1940]: 257, emphasis in original). In many ways, we have yet to fully assimilate Benjamin’s prescience, and we thereby run the risk of following a path toward the very horrors we seek to eliminate.

In this article I will focus on how such temporal conditioning leads to two contradictory positions. One position prevents people from engaging with others outside their moral collective because those others’ ways of living are considered a thing of the past. The other prompts those inside the moral collective to suggest outdated modes of liberation for people who are imagined to have been unjustly left behind as history sweeps by them. Who or what constitutes that moral collective should become clearer as this article progresses; however, I would like to emphasize that it is a fluid collective without clear or consistent boundaries. It is a collective that might be described as Western, secular, liberal humanist, leftist, peace seeking, or liberationist, keeping in mind that all of these terms have multiple definitions.⁷ The point is that this moral collective is produced, reproduced and negotiated in part through processes of differentiation that include the kind of temporal thinking under consideration here. Some ‘people out of time’ arouse anger, revulsion and condemnation, while others inspire sympathy. That revulsion not only prevents engagement with the despised, but it also mimics the very colonial impulse that progressive and radical theorists and activists struggle against.

My examples of how left-wing activists deploy the idea of anachronism against religiously motivated settlers and in favor of Palestinian sovereignty come primarily from my fieldwork among religiously motivated settlers in post-1967 Israeli occupied territories and movements opposed to them within Israel (Dalsheim, 2005, 2008a, 2008b, 2011) and from additional visits in 2010 and 2012 (Dalsheim, 2010, nd) and reports from the field. To illustrate the problem of a secular progressive temporality deployed toward the goal of liberating Palestinians, I will provide a close reading of some of the work of Mohammed Bamyeh (2003, 2010), as an example of scholarship by a social theorist who has been thinking deeply about issues of liberation, particularly in Palestine in the context of contemporary globalization. Such a reading, I propose, could easily be extended to numerous other scholars and activists. In the quote above, Bamyeh characterizes the logic of national liberation as a thing of the past, or as something that will soon pass as global social movements herald a new stage in history. His underlying belief in ‘progress’ is signaled by his fury or amazement that settler colonialism is still possible in Palestine. As I will explain later in the article, Bamyeh problematizes nationalist liberation as a universalist solution, while highlighting current local struggles that make up a global social movement as the wave of the future. The universal (a thing of the past) is replaced by the local; however, as we shall see, the local solution Bamyeh offers for Israelis and Palestinians is defined by nationalist parameters (a thing of the past). His local solution also participates in producing enmity as it marginalizes particular people through an alternative narrative of the past on which to base collective identity.⁸ Bamyeh’s idea of a single new collective narrative, and the specific details of that narrative, ultimately undermine his own goals of ‘recognizing the humanity of ourselves and others’ in the spirit of Fanon that he invokes.

I will return to Bamyeh later in the article. First I will illustrate some of the ways in which the idea of anachronism helps constitute a moral collective in the space of Israel/Palestine, how that idea complicates the politics of conflict and injustice, and then consider some of its unexpected outcomes. I will suggest that the anger and revulsion at religiously motivated settlers in the Israeli occupied territories, partly expressed through deployment of the idea that they belong to the past, prevents us from seeing them fully. When we turn away we fail to notice how some of these settlers think or rethink their relationship to territory in ways that might move beyond territorial nationalism. While this analysis might be extended to other radical religionists in Israel/Palestine, such as members of Hamas or Islamic Jihad, these groups are marginalized in different ways from religiously motivated Jewish settlers.⁹ The case of radical Palestinian Islamists has lost its ability to stand entirely outside the compass or to test the limits of liberal theories of politics. We perceive them as subalterns with legitimate reasons for rebelling against Israeli oppression; we may abhor their use of violence, but guess that it might disappear were they liberated, and then engaged as national actors within the larger international community. Having fitted them into a broader category of political liberation movements, we have difficulty using them to look critically at the elements of political thought they might challenge.

But when we look at Israeli settlers, we often react differently. Although some liberals and progressives express empathy for Palestinian radical religionists – perhaps abhorring some of their tactics while understanding their plight – religious Jewish settlers remain Others with whom most of the left can feel no such empathy. For liberal Israelis, as well as for progressive international scholars and activists, they remain an unredeemable problem, a bone stuck in the throat. Both their actions and their goals anger us. Rather than people seeking liberation, we see them as land thieves. Rather than subaltern nationalists, we see them as imperialists, a political category we cannot take seriously as a moral option. The example of Israeli settlers retains its ability to shock, to disquiet, to unsettle, and to challenge the political positions we take for granted. And in so doing, they allow us to see new things.¹⁰

Elsewhere (Dalsheim, 2011), I have explored the processes through which Jewish Israelis in favor of and opposed to settlement in post-1967 Occupied Territories constitute their collective morality through a discourse of conflict, and I have conceptualized these processes as a ‘desire to differentiate’, pointing to the commonalities among settlers in a settler-colonial social formation. What I will concentrate on here is how that differentiation works through ideas about time. The academy is not immune to the collective constitution of moral selves, nor to deeply ingrained epistemologies that form our thinking and that may interfere with the goals we set for ourselves. This article does not argue for or against the moral or political positions of Israelis, Palestinians, or scholars and activists who have taken positions on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Instead, it tries to shed light on the strange puzzle of how thinking about people as anachronisms contributes to the production of a particular moral collective and to the production of enmity.

The puzzle of anachronism in this case consists of three simultaneous propositions:

That religiously motivated Jewish settlers in post-1967 Israeli occupied territories are an anachronism for at least three reasons: their actions belong to a pre-state past, their beliefs are not modern, and their temporal ideology is abhorrent.

That territorial nationalism belongs to the past. In an era of globalization, national belonging is becoming less important as a form of identity on the one hand, and less reliable as a guarantee of human and civil rights on the other. Nationalism is no longer the best means for achieving human liberation.

That Palestinians still need national liberation, national identity, and ethno-national territorial sovereignty. Israelis opposed to post-1967 occupation are often in favor of national liberation for Palestinians, as are scholars who deconstruct ideas about national belonging and activists in the international community and the global social movement. Even when nationalism is not necessarily recommended for Palestinian liberation, ‘the Palestinians’ remain imagined as a national group.

What these propositions share is an underlying notion of the naturalness or taken-for-grantedness of the nation as the basis of social or political order, the ground on which to make claims and to guarantee rights. (This is the secular position: it is men who guarantee men’s rights and who have the sovereign power to do so.) The three propositions are, however, also differently nuanced depending upon whether the conflict in Israel/Palestine is conceptualized as a struggle between two nations for a particular piece of territory, or as a post-colonial struggle for independence. These are currently the most widely rehearsed conceptualizations; each is limiting and each produces settlers and Palestinians as anachronistic for different reasons. Before we get to the details of that puzzle, I will briefly introduce the field and some of the ways in which temporality is deployed in Israel, in particular in processes of differentiation.

The Israeli socio-political-religious scene tends to be depicted in both popular and academic discourse in sets of binary oppositions: right–left, religious–secular, in favor of–opposed to settlement in post-1967 occupied territories. These complex and overlapping divisions are often conflated to the simple opposition of left-wing secular versus right-wing religious, and are considered a part of what is known locally as the ‘rift among the people’.

The so-called rift among the people became exacerbated following the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. That event brought the split into focus with media attention on the religious community from which the assassin came, and a collective soul-searching in reaction to the shock of one Jew purposely killing another for political or religious reasons. However, the commonly understood political distinctions between left and right, secular and religious, have a longer history.

The ‘left’ of Israeli Zionist politics emerged from the socialist or labor Zionist movement that arose in Europe in response to a growing sense that Jews could never become fully assimilated or fully accepted in Europe. Today, it tends to be associated with a liberal humanism, with the secular kibbutz movement, and with what is known as the ‘peace camp’ in Israel. It generally includes those Israelis who are opposed to the occupation of territories gained in the 1967 war. This left, however, is not exclusively secular. It includes shades and variations of secularity and religiosity, including some orthodox Jews, particularly those often called ‘modern Orthodox’ who are generally viewed as distinct from Haredi or ultra-Orthodox Jews. In addition to the Zionist left, there is a more radical, non- or anti-Zionist left that includes Israelis who may agree with many of the left-wing Zionist positions like opposition to post-1967 occupation, but are opposed to the Zionist project, which many see as the colonization of Palestine.

The ‘right’, on the other hand, which cannot be divorced from modern discourses of liberalism, is historically associated with a more hawkish position, with a belief in the right of the Jewish people to establish a state on what is known as ‘greater Israel’ or ‘the whole of Israel’ (Eretz Israel ha-Shlema). This position has historically been opposed to relinquishing territory occupied following the 1967 war and has often been aligned with more traditional or religious Jews who share a belief in the right to settle on the ancient biblical Land of Israel. Of course, the right is not exclusively the domain of the religious, and it includes its own versions and shades of religiosity and secularity. In addition, there is an Orthodox Jewish community that rejects modern political Zionism and therefore does not fit into the left–right spectrum of Israeli politics (Rabkin, 2006). Ethnicity, class, and other dimensions of social identity further complicate these categories. These categories have a disciplining power, marginalizing or silencing those whose beliefs and actions do not fit easily into such left/right and secular/religious distinctions, and leaving little room to account for what appear as unusual alliances. I have written in greater detail about such positions and the difficulty of expressing or acting upon them elsewhere (Dalsheim, 2011: ch. 7).¹¹ Part of my goal here is to understand the nature of deeply embedded frameworks that make such positions difficult to articulate or recognize.

Space, Time, Morality: The Nation and Anachronistic Settlers

The former Jewish communities in the Gaza Strip portrayed themselves to the outside world in a number of ways through newspaper articles, public protests and private discussions, museum displays, and films. One particularly interesting example was a film produced by the people living in the Jewish communities of Gaza before they were forcibly removed by the Israeli government in the summer of 2005. The film, Between the Sand Dunes, was primarily employed as part of the campaign to garner support among Israelis for their cause; however, it did not inspire a sense of solidarity among left-wing, secular Israelis. Indeed, it provoked quite the opposite reaction. When I showed this film to left-wing kibbutz members who lived near the Gaza Strip and to left-wing political activists in other parts of the country, it infuriated people for a number of reasons, including the idea that these settlers and their project belong to the past.

Between the Sand Dunes is a carefully constructed and edited representation of the religious settler community. It was one of the productions shown to visitors, including school children, who came to a museum and visitors’ center in the Gaza settlements prior to the disengagement, which is where I first saw it. The film depicts images and scenes that evoke a specific positive self-image, one that creates a sense of comfort, solidarity, or ‘home’ among like-minded viewers, including members of the nationalist religious camp in Israel and some more right-wing secular Israelis as well.

Between the Sand Dunes depicts life in the settlements of Gush Katif, focusing on the beautiful seaside landscape, the crimson sunsets, and rows of palm trees. It emphasizes the industrious settlers who worked hard developing agriculture in the arid and non-arable sand dunes, showing vast expanses of greenhouses. The film tells of the special techniques of planting and raising vegetables and flowers in the sands of the Gaza area. It zooms in with close-ups of the innocent faces of young children, with their large, deep brown eyes and endearing smiles. All the while a melodious song in the background lends an atmosphere coinciding with the innocence in those eyes. A voice sings:

Here is a strip of land that kisses the waves. Here, where people live with love, and in their hearts there is hope … here people preserve the sanctity of the land … Here in the Land of Israel!

There is one short scene of horror and burning. This was an incident in which Palestinians from the surrounding area had attacked the settlers. Otherwise, there were no Palestinians in sight, no large brown eyes of Palestinian children or men and women at work. Their presence, the enormous population, so much greater than the Jewish population of Gaza, was hidden from view.

The images in Between the Sand Dunes provoke outrage among those opposed to the settlement project in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. For example, I was once invited to speak about the impending disengagement, then an issue of current events, to a group of fifth graders at a school in Jerusalem. When I showed this film to the class their history and civics teacher, who is also a left-wing political activist, told me of his outrage, and methodically analyzed the film with his students and pointed out the problems of how the film represents the issue. Not only did the film make it appear as though there were no Palestinians except for violent terrorists, but the Israeli flag was also repeatedly shown flying above it all as though this was the story of the entire nation, of all Israelis. The teacher was offended by this representation that certainly did not reflect his position, nor that of all the children in the class, which included Palestinian citizens of Israel.

The gap in emotional responses to the sights portrayed in this film is an indication of the cultural training of the senses. Reading the landscape, like reading any text, involves interpretations that are based in previous training, learning, and reading experiences (Starrett, 2003). Interpretations are intertextual, drawing on previous knowledge and codes, and falling back on learned narratives. Variously situated groups read their own moral superiority into these representations as they create and re-create their identities in the process. Religious settlers and their supporters identified positively, seeing the settlers as hardworking, pious people carrying out the work of God against all odds. Secular, liberal, and left-wing viewers expressed outrage and identify themselves as diametrically opposed.

Left-wing, secular Israelis were infuriated by the images in the film first of all because the force and military might that made those settlements possible is missing from the depiction. Kibbutz members I interviewed who lived in the surrounding communities, some of whom protested again the Gaza settlements, explained that such force was necessary in pre-state years to ensure the survival of the Jewish people but was excessive and unnecessary now.¹² They were infuriated by the particular way this story is told because it so closely resembles the way the pioneering socialists depicted themselves in pre-state years.¹³ The film depicts a hard-working, honest people who till the soil and make the desert bloom. The people in the film have built a beautiful, simple, idyllic community, for which they have made many sacrifices including physical injury and loss of life as they stand firm against a violent enemy. There is something uncanny about this film that the uninitiated might miss. If it were in black and white, some of the clothing were different and the religious elements removed, this film could be a portrayal of kibbutz life in pre-state and early state years. From the point of view of kibbutz members, descendants of the Socialist Zionists who established the state, these settlers have stolen and perverted their pure and honorable story (Dalsheim, 2005). These settlers are living practices that belong in the past, practices that had to take place in the years before there was a state and an army. In the early days, settlement was essential, there was no choice, and while there was force and violence involved, that was necessary then to establish a state and preserve the Jewish people. Now, there is a state and an army, and these practices are excessive, activists who protested against settlements told me. The settlers are an anachronism and must be brought into the present of the national collective by being removed from their homes and moved across the geographical divide into morally acceptable territory. Some of those who protested against the settlements carried signs that read ‘and the sons (children) shall return to our borders’, a play on the biblical quote (Jeremiah 31:17) ‘vay shavu banim l’gvulam’ (literally ‘and the sons return to their borders’, also translated as ‘and your children will return to their territory’), implying that these settlements are beyond the legitimate borders and constituted a moral transgression. This idea also ironically seems to imagine these settlers as somehow in exile. It is almost as though the political redemption of the nation hinges upon returning these sons of Israel to the pre-1967 borders.¹⁴ Of course, the residents of Gush Katif in the Gaza Strip would quickly point out that the establishment of their communities did not require the removal of Palestinians. Unlike some of their brethren in the kibbutz communities inside the borders of the pre-1967 Green Line, they did not build their homes on the ruins of Palestinian communities.¹⁵ Despite the obvious continuities of the Zionist project on both sides of the Green Line, the notion that Zionism itself could be deemed anachronistic is somehow protected by deploying the idea of anachronism against religiously motivated settlers and against settlement in the Occupied Territories.

Seeing settler actions as out of place in the contemporary world is one way in which they are portrayed as belonging to the past. There are at least two other ways in which these settlers are marginalized as belonging to an earlier time, outside the contemporary liberal moral collective. First, certain kinds of religious beliefs and practices are often imagined as holding society back from advancement or turning it backwards, limiting personal freedoms that are the signs of an open, modern society where individuals can pursue their own paths and fulfill their own desires.¹⁶ These ideas are part of what Charles Taylor (2002, 2007) has called a ‘modern social imaginary’, based on the idea that human beings are ‘rational, sociable agents who are meant to collaborate in peace to their mutual benefit. This underlying theory provides an idea of moral order, of how to live together in society’ (Taylor, 2002: 92).

Two other temporal frameworks, and the moral and political assumptions associated with them, are embodied by settlers, and impinge on Taylor’s secular ideal of living together. The Jewish community of Hebron, for example, has been described by secular and left-wing Israelis as reminiscent of the Jewish ghettos of Europe. The Hebron Jews are a tiny community of about 50 families and yeshiva students (estimated at between 500 and 800 people) considered among the most radical, violent and aggressive in the effect their community has had on the Palestinians who lived and owned shops in and near the Jewish settlement.¹⁷ It is a place where the injuries of settlement are still fresh and palpable. The Palestinian shops on what was once a bustling shopping street have recently been shuttered, displacing businesses and interfering both with freedom of movement and with Palestinians’ ability to make a living (see Freedland, 2012).

‘Why would they want to live like that?’ one father of three in his mid 40 s, who lived on a kibbutz, asked disparagingly of the Jews in Hebron, expressing a sentiment I heard over and over when I spoke to secular and left-wing Israelis. Why would they want to go back in time to the days before nationalism brought liberation to the Jews, creating a state where they could live freely, flourish economically and culturally?¹⁸ Part of the secularist ethos of Jewish nationalism is precisely about individual freedoms in contradistinction to the world of European shtetls, and so this father of three asked why these people would want to live ‘as though they were still in those ghettos’. In Israel people can run their own lives, free to be Jewish without assimilating to a hegemonic gentile culture or to the confining elements of Orthodox religious beliefs. One older kibbutz woman, among the founding members of her community, was adamant about the importance of being freely Jewish, expressing one’s Jewishness any number of ways and still being Jewish even when one does not pray, attend synagogue or keep kosher. Israelis can wear bikinis on the beach and spend Saturday in coffee shops and restaurants rather than in synagogue (precisely the activities that religious settlers point to as indicative of lack of values among the secular). They can celebrate Jewish holidays freely and according to their own interpretations. And they don’t have to live in those crowded conditions, walled off from surrounding communities.

Another set of beliefs interfering with the secular age seems to reach even further back in time, beyond the period of state formation and beyond Jewish history in Europe. Many of the Israelis who support a two-state solution see religious settlers as threatening to the possibility of peace with the Palestinians because their beliefs about the sanctity of the Holy Land threaten the possibility of territorial compromise. Some Israelis express fears that any attempt to remove settlers could result in civil war. Religious settlers see themselves as bravely redeeming God’s ancient promise to the Jewish people. Other Israelis see these actions as the theft of Palestinian land, the construction of homes in politically contested territory, the exercise of face-to-face violence against Palestinians, and the destruction of their property. Religiously motivated settlers see themselves as acting on the knowledge that God gave them the Land, and that it is their right and their responsibility to live on the Land and to live there according to the requirements of the Torah in order to fulfill their duty as Jews and hasten the coming of the messiah. However, many left-wing and secular Israelis, as well as other religious Jews, question the authenticity of these beliefs as Judaism, and disbelieve religious settlers’ belief in their beliefs. (They can’t possibly believe that stuff, the liberal argument goes; the settlers use religion instrumentally for political purposes.)¹⁹ This ideology, secular liberals argue, is employed to justify extreme territorial nationalism. Thus, Larry Abramson (2009: 284) recalls

participating in anti-occupation and anti-settlement demonstrations as far back as the early 1970s in which our slogans equated the concept of sacred land with idolatry, a political theology we condemned as diametrically opposed to true Jewish – and even Zionist – values.

In addition to perceptions that settler actions belong to a pre-state past and violate ideals of secular coexistence, religiously motivated settlers are also despised as anachronistic for their temporal ideology. In other words, their beliefs about time make them a particularly repugnant and inauthentic thing of the past.²⁰ Even worse perhaps than recreating the ghettos of Europe, religiously motivated settlers live according to a temporal ideology and a social imaginary in which biblical ancestors have a vital role in contemporary life. Religious settlers think of themselves as living biblical stories in the present. In this sacred temporality, time is not exclusively linear, and among the faithful Jews in Hebron as well as the communities of Gush Katif in the Gaza Strip, time was experienced as cyclical or as a spiral relationship between past and present. Each year and each season, the past was repeated, yet changed, as the faithful moved closer and closer in their relationship to God, watching the divine plan unfold and bringing redemption nearer. The rabbi of a girls’ high school (ulpana) in Neve Dekelim, the largest community in the settlements of Gush Katif, speaking at a Purim event prior to the disengagement, reminded his audience that ‘what happened then is in fact now’. The story of Esther, retold on the holiday of Purim, tells a tale in which all reason and logic in the world is turned on its head, and one can no longer distinguish good from evil. ‘This’, the rabbi said, was ‘precisely what is happening now.’ The disengagement plan was devoid of all logic; the world had turned upside down and nothing made sense when a Jewish government would consider removing Jews from the Land of Israel. ‘There is no difference’, the rabbi explained, ‘then is now. And anyone who does not understand this is sorely mistaken.’

Secular narratives that are constrained by the contours of a particular linear progressive temporality cannot contain the ideas expressed by this rabbi, and the behavior of those settlers who did not make practical arrangements for their removal from the land could then only be interpreted as either irrational or purposely defiant.²¹ Although parallels can be found, for example, in social scientific thought that seeks patterns or rules to explain human history and uncover a greater truth in ‘human nature’, or predict the ways in which these forces will eventually be worked out,²² the rabbi’s predictions of repeated patterns – then is now – seemed absurd from a specifically progressivist temporal perspective.

During my fieldwork, I interviewed a number of left-wing secular Israelis who explained their disdain for religiously motivated settlers by recalling their interactions with settlers while guarding them as soldiers in the reserves. These recollections illustrate conflicting temporal ideologies. Some of the most disturbing stories came from Hebron, where soldiers told of settler children throwing stones at an elderly Palestinian woman laden with packages. Why don’t these children, who are being raised in a deeply religious manner, offer to help the old woman with her packages? One soldier who grew up on a kibbutz, but now lives with his wife and children outside Tel Aviv, said he asked the children what they were doing; why were they throwing stones? What had the woman done to deserve this? The children explained that they were throwing stones in retribution for the Arab massacre of Jews in Hebron. That was in 1929; now it was 2005. The soldier was confused and outraged. A stone memorial placed in a wall of the Muslim quarter in the Old City of Jerusalem marks the site where a Jewish man was killed in the 1990s, presumably by local Palestinians. The placard reads: ‘On this spot Elhanan Aharon Atteli was murdered by the evil ones … By the spilling of his blood, we shall live on.’ This is followed by: ‘Remember what Amalek did to you on your way’ (Deut. 25: 17). The Amalekites are depicted in the Bible as a tribe of nomadic people who attacked the Israelites during the exodus from Egypt (Exod. 17: 8–17). They appear in other places in the text and the interpretations of what is required by the injunction to ‘remember Amalek’ are varied. In this case, the term has come to stand for any and all those who are considered ‘enemies’ of the Jewish people.

Time, in this case, is not the linear, progressive time – or historicism – that some critical scholars have argued leaves no room for representing subaltern Others, and that I am arguing creates certain blind spots.²³ This time is cyclical and spiraling, and place is spiraling too. The past is the present and Amalek is the Palestinian woman in Hebron.

Thinking about religiously motivated settlers as anachronistic, morally repugnant and threatening to security has a disciplining force for international scholars, activists, and liberal Israelis. It prevents engagement with them, even making research difficult because the researcher’s own moral integrity can be called into question as somehow supporting occupation or as sympathizing with settlers and not with Palestinians.²⁴ It is often considered morally acceptable to cross the border into occupied territory to meet with Palestinians, but wrong to have anything at all to do with religious settlers. It is wrong to make any purchases in these settlements because doing so supports the settlement project. But the moral community being created by these judgments is a fragile one, for it ignores the deeply entangled nature of economic systems. If it is wrong to make purchases that support the post-1967 settlement project, then it must also be wrong to pay taxes in Israel and wrong to purchase products in Tel Aviv and, if we really want to trace the sources of funding, it would ultimately be unacceptable to work and pay taxes in the United States, which provides economic, material, military and political support for Israeli settlement policies. Is it then also wrong for Palestinians themselves to work in the settlements in agriculture and in construction? Such complications, of course, are very problematic for practical political mobilization and unsettling to the constitution of moral selves among progressive Israelis and left-wing activists, and scholars in the international community.

Lack of engagement with settler communities can prevent us from seeing the range of ways of being and sets of beliefs found among them, including some ideas and practices that move beyond the limited imaginings of territorial nationalism, even though the settlers are often depicted as extreme nationalists.²⁵ Even when these ways of being are reported in the news or in academic texts, we tend to delegitimize them. These are exceptions, fringe beliefs and behaviors, the actions of a small group of crazy people, I have often heard left-wing Israelis or scholars and activists in the international community comment. But my research and reports from the field suggest otherwise. Indeed, the ideas expressed by some religiously motivated settlers about national sovereignty seem to be becoming more porous than they were in the past and more flexible than some of the nationalist ideas currently found among many secular Zionists. These ideas might be taken to be variations on some current ways of theorizing about ‘flexible citizenship’ (Ong, 1993), and might compare to progressive political positions that also consider nationalism and national liberation a thing of the past in the current context of globalization.

Flexible Citizenship of the Settler Variety

Contrary to popular ideas and representations of the monolithic, fanatic, uncritical mindset of religious settlers, my research reveals a range of positions and beliefs among these settlers, including various ideas about living with Palestinians (Dalsheim, 2011). Prior to Israel’s unilateral withdrawal in 2005, a number of religious settlers sought ways of remaining in the Gaza Strip even if the Israeli government decided to implement the disengagement and withdraw from the territory. I encountered a range of ideas among the Gaza settlers and some of their supporters who were thinking about how they had been living on the sacred land and about their relationship with Palestinians. While many settlers were angry at those Israelis they thought did not understand how important it was to the future of the state for Israel to maintain sovereignty and for the settlers to remain in their homes in the Gaza Strip, there were other ideas as well. For example, one weekend a group of women met to talk, think and pray together about the impending disengagement. In that meeting I heard suggestions that maybe the settlers had been placing too much emphasis on the commandment to live on the sacred land and had neglected some other important commandments. There were some who thought they had not been paying enough attention to their relationship with their Palestinian neighbors and some who thought the knee-jerk response to remain steadfast and strong in the face of Palestinian violence was aggressive, and that God was sending messages that this was not the way His people should behave. Some settlers I spoke to were seeking ways of arranging to remain on the sacred land with Palestinian agreement. Some thought they might retain Israeli citizenship, but live beyond the borders of Israel. They would be in Palestine, but not citizens there. Although this idea never came to fruition, nor was it clear that it would have broad appeal, there were those who wanted to live in the Holy Land with the people God placed together with them; surely God must have meant for them to live on that land, piously upholding the commandments of the Torah with the Palestinians God had also placed there.

Recent visits to the Jewish community in Hebron suggest some people there and elsewhere in the West Bank (Mayne, 2012) are also thinking about how to live with Palestinians, remaining in Hebron whether or not it remains under Israeli control. In addition, there are religiously motivated settlers who have demonstrated against the construction of the separation barrier/wall, a move that might be seen as reflecting shared interests with some Palestinians. In light of current ideas about territorial compromise and the establishment of a Palestinian state, some people are seeking ways to continue living on the sacred land. They speak about wanting to live in peace and cooperation with their Palestinian neighbors (Ettinger and Lior, 2011).²⁶ Jewish settlers have been contemplating their relationship with Palestinians, and for some the importance of living under Israeli sovereignty may be secondary to their insistence on remaining near the biblical ancestors who are buried in Hebron, or staying in other places in the West Bank/Judea and Samaria. This is not because of a newfound fondness for the Palestinians, nor does it mark an end to settler violence against Palestinians; however, some settlers have begun speaking out publicly about their interest in improving cooperative relationships with their Palestinian neighbors. But according to many left-wing and secular liberals, these settlers don’t mean what they say. They are just manipulators. Many of these disbelievers are also seriously concerned that the growth of settlement has created a new reality that will make separation into two states practically impossible.²⁷ In other words, the idea that settlers might not be wedded to traditional ideas about national sovereignty threatens the possibility of reconciling conflict through national liberation.

Flexible citizenship is an idea borrowed from Aihwa Ong (1993, 2006), who is concerned with minority identity formation at the intersections of national and transnational political arenas.²⁸ My adaptation of the term here is intended to suggest that religious settlers also negotiate shifting discursive terrains as they are produced as fundamentalists and as spoilers to peace through the processes discussed in this article. Ong (1993: 771) explains that her

notion of flexible citizenship, linked to flexible accumulation and mobile investors, suggests that the citizenship concept should be examined in the context of the global economy and the range of meanings it can have for different groups of people. While people continue to fight and even die for their particular visions of citizenship (Anderson, 1991[1983]),²⁹ as in the ‘ethnic cleansing’ campaign in Bosnia, for many wealthy Overseas Chinese, citizenship in the profound sense of duty toward or identification with a particular nation-state is minimal.

In the case at hand, we find religious settlers placing less value on their identification with the nation-state and the particular kind of nationalist citizenship loyalty Ong adopts from Anderson. Perhaps this is not a result of economic interests, at least not on the part of the settlers, but it has been suggested that the current peace process and ideas of territorial compromise are directly influenced by the forces of global capitalism.³⁰ For example, Israel can remain competitive in the global economy through developing its high-tech industries that do not require additional land as agriculture would. And, recently, Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer was quoted as saying that Israel could become a leading economy globally if a Middle East peace deal is reached, partially because it could spend less on its military (Scheer and Rabinovitch, 2010). Thus, one might argue flexible ideas about citizenship among religiously motivated settlers can be construed as part of the disarticulation of the elements we tend to think of as coming together to form contemporary citizenship: rights, entitlements, territoriality, a nation (Ong, 2006: 6).

Beyond the Logic of National Liberation

The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge – unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable. (Walter Benjamin, 1968[1940]: 257, emphasis in original)

Religiously motivated settlers in post-1967 Israeli occupied territories are easily depicted and despised in abstraction. They are essentialized Others. Their presumed extreme territorial nationalism combined with deep faith in the righteousness of their path – along with the direct acts of violence and expropriation in which some of them engage based on this faith – is disturbing to progressive Israelis and activists and to scholars in the international community, a disturbance which prevents us from understanding that some of these settlers remain committed to territory but not necessarily to ethno-territorial nationalism.³¹ Yet some who oppose the settlement project do so precisely in order to protect territorial nationalism as the ground of liberation.

This brings us back to Mohammed Bamyeh’s quote at the opening of this article. Bamyeh is not alone in arguing that national liberation is a thing of the past, that this is no longer the way to achieve human liberation. Nor is he alone in understanding that nationalism itself, particularly ethno-nationalism, is rife with dangers and violences, with roots in fear and hatred of the ‘other’, and affinities with exclusionary practices and racism, even if territorial nationalism is still the norm in world affairs. The question, then, is why this thing of the past – a social formation that has been criticized as cruel, whose quests for post-colonial liberation ultimately led to what David Scott (2004: 2) describes as ‘acute paralysis of will … rampant corruption and vicious authoritarianism’ – would still be recommended or wished for on behalf of solidarity with Palestinians? In other words, what happens when some anachronisms (the ideas and practices of the settlers) provoke revulsion while others (the Palestinian quest for national sovereignty) inspire sympathy? What happens when the idea of belonging to the past on the one hand, and having been left behind by a presumably progressive movement of history, on the other, are deployed in the constitution of moral collectives? What other ways of thinking about time might allow us to ‘bring about as much equality as possible, given differences’, as Sari Nusseibeh, the Palestinian president of al-Quds University, recently suggested (Watzman, 2011), or to ‘recognize the humanity, in all its complexity, of our own selves and others’ (Bamyeh, 2010: 53)?

I would like to reconsider Bamyeh’s insights about struggles for liberation in what he describes as the ‘post-colonial and globalized world’, in relation to the puzzle set out at the opening of this article. That puzzle, you remember, consists of three propositions: (1) religiously motivated Jewish settlers in post-1967 Israeli occupied territories are anachronistic for their supposedly extreme territorial nationalism; (2) territorial nationalism belongs to the past: in an era of globalization, national belonging is becoming less important as a form of identity and less reliable as a guarantee of human and civil rights, and is no longer the best means for achieving human liberation; and (3) Palestinians still need national liberation and ethno-national territorial sovereignty, or at the very least need to continue to be imagined as a national group.

Bamyeh (2010: 62), in thinking about a world that is ‘beyond the logic of national liberation’, writes that ‘the settler-colonial hold over Palestine remains as a relic of an antiquated era, and therefore appears especially intolerable’. Why is it especially intolerable? Is it that settler-colonialism should have long since passed from this world? That would depend on how one conceptualizes a settler-colonial social formation.³² Settler-colonialism has been conceptualized as a structure formed by invasion (Wolfe, 1999). While such a structure might undergo transformations, it cannot pass like an event imagined on a timeline, followed by another event. That structure is still in place in the Americas, in Australia, and elsewhere. Or is it especially intolerable that this particular group of people has not passed through the stage of national liberation, a stage that has been called both cruel and a failure in other contexts? Why, if Israel has been so widely criticized for its ethno-nationalism, should we promote another ethno-national state alongside it? And more to the point of this article, how does an insidious secular progressive temporal ideology interfere with the thought of even such an insightful theorist as Mohammed Bamyeh?

‘This is the twenty-first century, how could this be happening now?’ The words belong to a resident of the town of Jenin in the West Bank, reached by a radio station on his cellular phone in the spring of 2002 amid the slaughter wrought by the Israeli military Operation Defensive Shield … In an age of globalization and reduced sovereignty, the time of nations and their states seems to be passing. Yet over Palestine today hovers a logic fully out of joint with its times. The old-fashioned colonialism that had devoured Palestine shows no signs of relenting. If anything, the opposite is happening. Today we witness a far more fanatic religious attachment to a greater ‘Eretz Yisrael’ than had been the case half a century ago.

The tragedy of modern Palestine, beyond all the horrors and suffering associated with it, is doubly tragic in that it appears to have been caused not by any necessary logic of history but rather by countertimely events. (Bamyeh, 2003)

The entire tragic situation belongs to the past, and it is this temporal placement that makes the situation especially intolerable. But Walter Benjamin teaches us that asking how these things can still be happening ‘is not the beginning of knowledge – unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable’. In other words, Benjamin warns against precisely the kind of temporal ideology that lies behind Bamyeh’s words. On the one hand, the religious zeal for Eretz Yisrael, which of course refers to beliefs and practices traced to the influence of religiously motivated settlers, is an abhorrent thing of the past. And, on the other, Palestinians have been left behind by the sweeping tides of history which have granted to most other nations the reality of territorial sovereignty.

Thus it would seem natural to argue that Palestine must be allowed to resume its rightful but long-postponed march along the path of decolonization and independence. Yet, in Palestine we confront the possibility that even this seemingly modest proposal may now be out of date. (Bamyeh, 2003: 826)

Bamyeh suggests that the language of nationalism is indeed not the answer for Israel/Palestine. Instead, he recommends reimagining the collective through an agreement on a common narrative that might form the basis of any possible resolution.³³ Indeed, he recalls the work of Ammiel Alcalay (1993), who writes about an alternative past preceding the constitution of distinct categories of Jews and Arabs as enemy Others. In many ways, this is precisely the kind of move that Benjamin’s theorizing calls for, recalling a different past, an alternative that can provide a basis on which to rebuild the present. However, remaining entrenched in categories of national belonging, Bamyeh calls for justice to right the wrongs of the past and for a new collective narrative that would bring these two separated nations together. What is most problematic in Bamyeh’s theorizing is that, in order to arrive at that new collective historical narrative, he imposes a particular progressive temporality in calling for the removal of ‘culture’, to concentrate on concrete grievances arising from past injustices and ‘dismantling the blinding religious mythology with which this concreteness of things is covered up’ (Bamyeh, 2003: 828).

Such dismantling, of course, removes the cultural meanings of some of the people involved while it retains the cultural meanings of others. This move, I think, has the potential to continue cycles of violence because to make amends for having silenced and oppressed Palestinians, it requires silencing or marginalizing other groups. The common narrative Bamyeh recommends would include an understanding of Zionism as the removal of Jews from Europe, a cruelty that should be understood as having continued the work of the Nazi Holocaust while also creating a new tragedy.

The common narrative that Bamyeh suggests, along with many others who call for alternative histories, might provide a new collective narrative for some of the variously situated people directly involved in this conflict. It might work for some secular and left-wing Israelis and Palestinians in particular locations. But there are others, including some religiously motivated settlers and likely religiously motivated Palestinians as well, who would be removed from this narrative, or left behind, as it were. Bamyeh, like many left-wing and secular Israelis, understands the religious idea of the right and responsibility of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel as a strange perversion. Indeed he speaks about religious extremism among Palestinian Muslims and Israeli Jews as resulting from the mistakes of politics and diplomacy – like Gramsci’s (1971) idea of the ‘morbid symptoms’ that appear in the interregnum between changing hegemonies. This then provides the alibi for ignoring, marginalizing or neutralizing them, a move I see as not only potentially leading to additional violences, but undermining Bamyeh’s own goals of human liberation as it dehumanizes those morally repugnant ‘others’ (Harding, 1991) whose beliefs and practices are perceived as belonging to the past.

Bamyeh asks that we reconsider what Fanon’s thinking about human liberation from colonial domination might have to teach us about the struggles for liberation faced today. These struggles are both inescapably global, he explains, and intensely local. At one instance, the main struggles of our time are waged against unimaginably abstract forces rather than ‘old, clearly discernible agents of colonial power’ and, at another instance, they are ‘deeply earthly and even personal’ (Bamyeh, 2010: 53). Yet, despite these differences, he suggests that Fanon’s concern with liberation involving ‘all sectors of the personality’ (Fanon, 1963: 310, in Bamyeh, 2010: 53) provides a useful framework in which to think about current struggles for liberation. The challenge, according to Bamyeh’s interpretation of Fanon, is to focus on the disorders that impede our ability to ‘recognize the humanity, in all its complexity, of our own selves and others’ (Bamyeh, 2010: 53). Liberation, he writes, is a matter of ‘introducing a perspective into the world that makes such ways of seeing possible.’ Would such a perspective not also have to include recognizing multiple temporalities?

While reiterating the intolerability of the anachronism of the Palestinian situation, Bamyeh also calls for a different strategy to achieve human liberation. He writes about the global social movement and the idea of local actions and solutions rather than a universalist appeal (such as uniting the workers of the world, or anti-colonial nationalism). His theorizing is compelling and, if the repugnance for certain anachronistic Others could be set aside, one might consider applying his insights to local situations in the space of Israel/Palestine in ways that would not necessitate a reversion to the anachronistic strategy of national liberation. Indeed, one might take a cue from the flexible citizenship ideas found among some religiously motivated settlers who have suggested they might remain in Palestinian administered/sovereign territory, but without Palestinian citizenship, living there as resident aliens but under the sovereignty of God.³⁴

Recognizing humanity in all its complexity must surely include recognizing the humanity even of the despicable anachronistic Others who live in the past, surrounded by walls among biblical ancestors. However, the idea of focusing on the local that social theorists and activists promote for liberation in the globalized present holds the potential to make room for all kinds of differences that would not have to be submerged in a single unifying temporal narrative, nor in a single universalist resolution to the local conflict in Israel/Palestine.

Bamyeh and other social theorists turn to local struggles that are united not by a particular version of a new world order, but by local people struggling to take back control of their everyday lives (local food, micro-investment, environmentalism, native peoples’ claims).³⁵ But somehow, in Bamyeh’s Palestine, ‘local’ seems to mean reconfiguring the social order in a singular, unified way for all the various population groups that would be directly affected by such a solution. He suggests a new collective identity that would emerge from a new historical narrative. If local is the new global, why remain within the parameters of a predefined location? A resolution and way forward for the residents of Gaza and Sderot might not be the same as what the residents of Jaffa and Tel Aviv require. The people who identify as Bedouin in the Negev and Galilee might have different ideas about the past, present and what recognizing their humanity might mean. And, of course, those who identify as Jewish and Palestinian residents of Hebron surely have their own ideas of how they might go forth together or separately. Indeed, some members of these communities have begun meeting to discuss issues of mutual concern, which often does not include agreeing on or even proposing an overall solution to ‘the Israeli/Palestinian conflict’ but instead focuses on local matters, everyday issues, and shared interests (Ettinger and Lior, 2011; Lazaroff, 2012; Other Voice: http://www.othervoice.org/)..

The idea of multiple local solutions might be unappealing to those who are concerned about the relative power relations of those involved. But there are many different kinds of asymmetries. That those asymmetries are not taken into account when we talk in bare terms about ‘power’ does not mean they are not central here; because if we only take some kinds of ‘power’ into account, the goals we have for social justice will always continue to be blocked. Some will argue that in order to achieve justice, ‘the powerful’ or those who have benefitted from the settler–colonial formation must give something up, return something, or make amends to those who have primarily been the victims of settler colonialism. Yet, this might be another version of avenging the ancestors that Benjamin warns us to be cautious about. Benjamin’s (1968[1940]: 260) writing about the training of thought that was ‘nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren’ suggests we should take care not to simply act in ways that we think might ensure that the ancestors will not have suffered, struggled, fought or died for no reason.

What look like distinct binary divisions between categories of settlers and natives, colonizers and colonized, or even powerful and powerless, are never quite that simple or straightforward (Cooper and Stoler, 1997). Settlers in the occupied territories are in a position of relative power vis-à-vis Palestinians, because they are supported by the Israeli state and its army and by Israeli governments from both the right and left, which have for decades built infrastructure, permitted the construction of homes and communities, and protected those communities (Zertal and Eldar, 2007). But the population of Israelis who make their home in the Occupied Territories includes people of greater and lesser means, those who could not afford housing elsewhere, and those who are un- or underemployed (Dalsheim, 2008a). Oren Yiftachel (2006) calls such communities development towns rather than settlements, even though some of them are located in the Occupied Territories. Development towns are communities primarily composed of members of weaker population groups (Khazzoom, 2005), including Jews of Middle Eastern and North African descent and heritage (Mizrahim) and more recently immigrants from Ethiopia and the former Soviet Union, many of whom struggle with ethnic and economic discrimination in Israeli society. Thinking in terms of Fanon (1967), it is important to bear in mind that, even if we could easily distinguish between the powerful and the oppressed, the people who fit into each of those categories should be thought of as negatively affected by colonization in different ways. Fanon, like Memmi (1967) and later Nandy (1983), understood the importance of the effects of colonization on the colonizers.

As Bamyeh (2010) points out, Fanon argued that decolonization includes healing the disorders that prevent all of us from recognizing our own and each other’s humanity. Post-colonial scholars have argued that the ‘decolonization’ of the colonizer (like the colonized) would require a radical psychological shift and deconstruction of a certain narcissism based on illusory identity. Decolonization involves a change of mind and not only the end of the colonizer’s control. Colonizers have to recognize the humanity of the colonized, which in this case might mean recognizing that the injustices suffered by Palestinians involves their colonizers having to give up their homes, their sovereignty, their privilege. The idea is that colonialism, because of its brutality and inherent injustice, creates ‘monsters’ out of men.³⁶ It results in the colonized who hate themselves because they internalize the way the colonizers see them. They hate their ‘primitive, uncivilized’ selves and want to become like the colonizers, but since they never can, they continue to hate themselves. It creates colonizers who accept the colonial system and believe it is right, but also colonizers who refuse – who feel bad about the situation and think it’s wrong, but participate in the system anyway, sometimes justifying this as a lack of choice.³⁷ Rather than think about domination as a vertical hierarchy of power, Bamyeh’s invocation of Fanon to recognize the fullness of humanity and heal the disorders that prevent such recognition requires recognizing the scattered nature of hegemony (Grewal and Kaplan, 1994) that would allow us to consider gender, ethnicity, class or other differences that complicate simply binary divisions of power.

An important part of post-colonial theorizing has been to show that domination has worked through colonial knowledge that produced the colonized as an homogenized, undifferentiated horde of uncivilized primitives, while the colonizers could be individuals with differences among them. Thus, Memmi (1967: 88) wrote that ‘the colonized is never characterized in an individual manner, he is entitled only to drown in an anonymous collectivity’. To recognize ‘humanity’ then meant to see beyond that binary distinction and see the colonized as having their own culture that is not necessarily less, but different, and also to see them as people with individual differences. So to turn the tables and paint the colonizers as an undifferentiated, primitive horde is precisely to mimic that very colonial impulse that Fanon, and later Bhabha (1994), wrote against.

The call to recognize our own and others’ humanity has primarily been about the ‘colonized’, or about whichever group the critical theorist thinks is being dominated. But to take this idea seriously really requires more. As I have suggested, the difficulty of taking this call seriously is partly conditioned by the ways in which morality is intertwined with ideas about time.

Relegating our despised Others – Jewish settlers – to the past is only possible if we subscribe to a linear historicism in which human destiny flows inevitably toward liberation through territorial ethnonationalism. By accusing settlers of temporal derangement – their actions, their beliefs, even the kinds of communities in which they live have been superseded by more acceptable forms of being and belonging – the secular left hopes to pull the Jews of Israel back within their proper boundaries³⁸ and thus redeem history by setting in place those two last, small pieces of the world map of nation-states: Palestine and Israel. (It makes little difference whether these last pieces are two ethnonational states, one binational state, or one state for all its citizens; the point is that such states are both inevitable and desirable as culminations of a necessary logic of history that has been freed of the untimely blockages of settlement and allowed to flow freely once again.) Only the dismantling of settlements will accomplish the goal of pulling both Jews and Palestinians into the right places on both the landscape and the timeline.

But those who want to commit themselves to thinking beyond models of rights and belonging organized around state formations must recognize the puzzle and the opportunity that thinking about religious settlers provides. Expelling them from the moral community by condemning them as anachronisms that have halted the flow of history means that we lose the critical ability to question the nature of history and the historical narrative of ethnonationalism, the destructive nature of which we condemn in the idealized Other of the settler just as surely as we hold it out as a bright promise of civilization and progress to the disenfranchised.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to numerous colleagues for our challenging discussions of the ideas I grapple with in this article, and to those who read and commented on earlier and different versions. People whose critical comments have helped clarify my thoughts include Gil Anidjar, Louise Bethlehem, Jonathan Boyarin, Rebecca Bryant, Asaf Harel, and especially Gregory Starrett. Thanks to Charles Kurzman and the Middle East Center at Chapel Hill for providing a forum in which to present these ideas. I am especially grateful to the editors and anonymous reviewers at Theory, Culture & Society.

Notes

Joyce Dalsheim is a cultural anthropologist and currently Assistant Professor of Global, International, and Area Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She has carried out extensive fieldwork in Israel/Palestine, studying controversies over historical narratives, nationalism, religiosity and the secular. She is the author of Unsettling Gaza: Secular Liberalism, Radical Religion, and the Israeli Settlement Project (Oxford University Press, 2011). She is the Associate Editor for Israel and Palestine for the Review of Middle East Studies and has recently published in Social Analysis, Journal of Historical Sociology, Social Identities, and Comparative Studies in Society and History. She is currently working on a new manuscript, Producing Spoilers: Peacemaking and the Production of Enmity in a Secular Age, under contract at Oxford University Press.

References

Abramson

(2009) What does landscape want? A walk in W.J.T. Mitchell’s holy landscape. Culture, Theory and Critique, 50(2–3): 275–288.

Alcalay

(1993) After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Anderson

(1991[1983]) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edn. London: Verso.

Asad, T. (2006) Responses. In: Scott D. and Hirschkind C. (eds) Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors (Cultural Memory in the Present). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 206–243.

Auerbach

(2009) Hebron Jews: Memory and Conflict in the Land of Israel, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Bhabha H. (1994) Of mimicry and man: The ambivalence of colonial discourse. In: The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 85–92.

Bamyeh

(2003) Palestine: Listening to the inaudible. South Atlantic Quarterly, 102(4): 825–849.

Bamyeh

(2009) Anarchy as Order: The History and Future of Civic Humanity, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Bamyeh

(2010) On humanizing abstractions: The path beyond Fanon. Theory, Culture & Society, 27(7–8): 52–65.

10.

Benjamin, W. (1968[1940]) Theses on the philosophy of history. In: Arendt H. (ed.) Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books.

11.

Boyarin

(1996) Palestine and Jewish History: Criticism at the Borders of Ethnography, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

12.

Butler

(2008) Sexual politics, torture, and secular time. British Journal of Sociology, 59(1): 1–23.

13.

Campos, M. (2007) Remembering Jewish–Arab contact and conflict. In: Sufian S. and LeVine M. (eds) Reapproaching Borders: New Perspectives on the Study of Israel–Palestine. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

14.

Chakrabarty

(2000) Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

15.

Connolly

W.E.

(1999) Why I Am Not a Secularist, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

16.

Cooper, F. and Stoler, A.L. (1997) Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World. Berkeley: University of California Press.

17.

Dalsheim

(2005) Antagonizing settlers in the colonial present of Israel–Palestine. Social Analysis, 49(2): 122–143.

18.

Dalsheim

(2008a) Twice removed: Mizrahim in Gush Katif. Social Identities, 14(5): 535–551.

19.

Dalsheim, J. (2008b) Recognizing demonized Muslims, recognizing vilified Jews: Are the moral imperatives converging? Paper presented at the Association of Israel Studies Annual Meetings, New York University, New York.

20.

Dalsheim

(2010) On demonized Muslims and vilified Jews: Between theory and politics. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 52(3): 581–603.

21.

Dalsheim

(2011) Unsettling Gaza: Secular Liberalism, Radical Religion, and the Israeli Settlement Project, New York: Oxford University Press.

22.

Dalsheim, J. (nd) Theory for praxis: Peacemaking, cunning recognition, and the constitution of enmity. Submitted to Social Analysis.

23.

Dalsheim

Harel

(2009) Representing settlers. Review of Middle East Studies, 43(2): 219–238.

24.

De Martino, C. (2010) The trap of the Green Line: Interview with Professor Yehuda Shenhav. Medarabnews. Available from: http://www.medarabnews.com/2010/04/07/the-trap-of-the-green-line-%E2%80%93-interview-with-professor-yehuda-shenhav/ (accessed June 2012).

25.

Ettinger, Y. and Lior, I. (2011) Menahem Froman, the rabbi of Tekoa, formally establishes ‘Eretz Shalom’. Haatretz.co.il, 27 February.

26.

Euben

(1999) Enemy in the Mirror: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Limits of Modern Rationalism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

27.

Fabian

(1983) Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object, New York: Columbia University Press.

28.

Fabian

(2006) The other revisited. Anthropological Theory, 6(2): 139–152.

29.

Fanon, F. (1963[1961]) The Wretched of the Earth, trans. C. Farrington. New York: Grove Press.

30.

Fanon, F. (1967) Black Skins, White Masks, trans. C.L. Markmann. New York: Grove Press.

31.

Foucault, M. (1988[1984]) The ethic of care for the self as a practice of freedom: An interview with Michel Foucault (conducted by R. Fornet-Betancourt et al., trans. J.D. Gauthier). In: Bernauer J. and Rasmussen D. (eds) The Final Foucault. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

32.

Freedland J. (2012) An exclusive corner of Hebron. The New York Review of Books, 23 February.

33.

Graeber

(2002) The new anarchists. New Left Review, 13: 61–73.

34.

Gramsci, A. (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. Q. Hoare and G.N. Smith. New York: International Publishers.

35.

Grewal, I. and Kaplan, C. (1994) Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

36.

Handelman

(2004) Nationalism and the Israeli State: Bureaucratic Logic in Public Events, Oxford: Berg.

37.

Harding

(1991) Representing fundamentalism: The problem of the repugnant cultural other. Social Research, 58(2): 373–393.

38.

Khazzoom

(2005) Did the Israeli state engineer segregation? On the placement of Jewish immigrants in development towns in the 1950s. Social Forces, 84(1): 115–134.

39.

Lazaroff, T. (2012) A sheikh, settlers and MPs meet in Hebron Hills tent. The Jerusalem Post, 7 July.

40.

Lustick, I. (1994) Preface to the 1994 edition. In: For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel. New York: Council on Foreign Relations Books.

41.

Mahmood

(2005) Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

42.

Mayne, H. (2012) Nofharim: An ethnography of women in a Jewish West Bank settlement. Master’s thesis, University of Florida.

43.

Mehta

(1990) Liberal strategies of exclusion. Politics and Society, 18: 427–454.

44.

Memmi

(1967) The Colonizer and the Colonized, Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

45.

Nandy

(1983) The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism, Delhi: Oxford University Press.

46.

Nimni

(2003) The Challenge of Post-Zionism: Alternatives to Israeli Fundamentalist Politics, London: Zed.

47.

Nusseibeh

(2011) What is a Palestinian State Worth?, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

48.

Ong

(1993) On the edge of empires: Flexible citizenship among Chinese in diaspora. positions, 11(3): 745–778.

49.

Ong

(2006) Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

50.

Other Voice (2008) Available at: http://www.othervoice.org/ http://www.othervoice.org/ (accessed July 2012).

51.

Popper, K.R. (1959) Prediction and prophecy in the social sciences. In: Gardiner P. (ed.) Theories of History. New York: The Free Press, 276–285.

52.

Povinelli

(2002) The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

53.

Rabkin, Y. (2006) A Threat from Within: A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism, trans. F.A. Reed. London: Zed.

54.

Scheer, S. and Rabinovitch, A. (2010) Peace would make Israel a top global economy. Reuters: http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/05/02/us-israel-fischer-idUSTRE6411S720100502.

55.

Scott

(2004) Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

56.

Scott, D. and Hirschkind, C. (eds) (2006) Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

57.

Shafir

(1989) Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914, New York: Cambridge University Press.

58.

Shenhav

(2010) The Time of the Green Line [bemalkodet hakav ha yarok]: Towards a Jewish Political Thought, Tel Aviv: Am Oved (Hebrew).

59.

Starrett

(2003) Violence and the rhetoric of images. Cultural Anthropology, 18(3): 398–428.

60.

Taylor, C. (1994) The politics of recognition. In: Gutman A. (ed.) Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

61.

Taylor

(2002) Modern social imaginaries. Public Culture, 14(1): 91–124.

62.

Taylor

(2007) A Secular Age, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

63.

Van der Veer, P. (2006) Pim Fortuyn, Theo van Gogh, and the politics of tolerance in the Netherlands. In: De Vries H. and Sullivan L.E. (eds) Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World. New York: Fordham University Press.

64.

Warschawski, M. (2005) On the Border, trans. L. Laub. Cambridge, MA: South End Press.

65.

Watzman, H. (2011) The Mideast maverick: Sari Nusseibeh proposes an interim route to peace in the Midddle East. Chronicle of Higher Education, 30 January.

66.

Weinreich, M. (1980) History of the Yiddish Language, trans. S. Noble. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

67.

White

(1987) The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourses and Historical Representation, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

68.

Wolfe

(1999) Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, London: Cassell.

69.

Yiftachel

(2006) Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

70.

Zertal, I. and Eldar, A. (2007) Lords of the Land: The War for Israel’s Settlement in the Occupied Territories 1967–2007. New York: Nation Books.

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.00 MB