Exil et Souveraineté

"First of all, let me say I chose the book because it is the most readily available work in a European language in which Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin puts forth his original argument on sovereignty and exile. Ideally, I would have chosen his two-part essay in Hebrew (1993 and 1994), entitled “Exile within Sovereignty: Toward a Critique of the ‘Negation of Exile’”. I wish this essay was available in English and other European languages. Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin is a contemporary of mine and a close friend who teaches at Ben Gurion University in Israel. He did his doctorate at Tel Aviv University with the famous scholar of both European and Jewish history Amos Funkenstein. First, let me tell you something about his name as it relates to his views. He was born to parents who were part of the Labour elite in Israel. They were members of the Palmach [fighting force] and fought in the 1948 war. The surname with which he was born is Raz, which is a typical Israeli surname. The fact that he, not his parents, decided to hyphenate his name and add the East European name Krakotzkin is not coincidental, it’s a political choice. That fact that he has added the Krakotzkin to the Raz is, in a nutshell, his criticism of the Zionist principle of the negation of Jewish exile. What Raz-Krakotzkin has done is study the way medieval Jews were represented in Zionist scholarship. Zionism really has one ideological foundation which has three expressions – the negation of exile, the return to the land of Israel and the return to history. The negation of exile is to say that the Jews from time immemorial had constituted a territorial nation which was exiled from its homeland. Therefore, its existence in exile is abnormal – it’s not full and cannot by definition be the full expression of the essence of this nation. In order to be normalised and healthy, it has to be expressed on the soil of the homeland. Therefore, life in exile may have given birth to some impressive cultural achievements, but is by definition not a full expression of Jewish life. This can happen only when they are territorialised in their own homeland. Therefore, negation. Because life in exile is by definition not full, it’s abnormal and hence also the stereotypes that are basically anti-Semitic of the exilic Jew as docile, submissive, unproductive, unhealthy, even physically ugly. The return to the land of Israel is not separable from the negation of exile, it’s just the same principle told differently, in which to normalise the Jews you have to bring them back to the land of Israel. Their experiences and histories in exile are insignificant and are only significant in so far as they are a transitory movement back to the land of Israel. Now what the return to the land of Israel really is, is the negation of Palestine and, by implication, of its native inhabitants and their history. What this really is, is a double negation. The negation of exile negates the existential experiences of Jews in exile. The return to the land of Israel negates the experienced history of Palestine and its inhabitants as long as there is no Jewish sovereignty over it. The history of the Jews in their places of exile is insignificant and the history of Palestine and Palestinian Arabs before Zionism and the creation of Israel is again denied and rendered meaningless. Now, what Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin does is to criticise the negation of Jewish exile by using [German-Jewish intellectual] Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History [also translated as On the Concept of History ]. The way he looks at Walter Benjamin’s approach is as a radical criticism of the fetish of progress by victorious, triumphant, positivist historical scholarship. He then says this can be applied also to the Zionist negation of exile. What he’s calling for – you have to remember that he is a very political scholar – is the adoption of an exilic perspective on the sovereignty of the Jews over the land of Israel from within that sovereignty and its consequences for the Palestinians. This clarifies the title “Exile within Sovereignty” of his seminal essay in Hebrew. What he says is that only through this perspective can we forge first of all a genuine alliance with the Palestinians – they as victims and we as dissenters from Israeli sovereignty, of which we have been part – and create a sort of opposition which is based on an exilic criticism of sovereignty, a perspective that through this Jewish experience in exile can identify with the victim. He says this is a precondition for any political consciousness in which the dispossession of the Palestinians is reversed by creating an alliance between the dispossessed of Zionism, the exilic Jews of the past (obviously their negated perspective rather than they in person) and the Palestinians of the present. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter What he is seeking to achieve, in other words, is a position in which you cannot celebrate sovereignty, which the Jews have achieved, without marking the consequences of this sovereignty for those who are exiled within their own homeland, the Palestinians. This is a precondition for achieving a political alliance between dissenting Jews and Palestinians in order to create a change within Israel/Palestine. The foundation of this is a criticism of Jewish sovereignty from within that sovereignty. He’s not denying that he is part of that project of Jewish sovereignty but he’s undermining it by bringing in the perspective of exile. He’s been accused of creating this idyllic picture of exile, but that’s not what he’s trying to do. He brings in Walter Benjamin in order to ignite an exilic criticism from within Israel, from within Jewish sovereignty, in order to undermine it. It’s a complicated attempt, but for me it was an influential text on shaping my own thoughts about Zionism and Israeli-ness and about the settler colonial conflict with the Palestinians."