ugisfeelings · 1 year ago
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Perhaps it’s apt that a dying political ideology seeks redemption in a dead discipline. As the Israeli government and public become ever more vocal and defensive about their daily practice of abuse and murder, as another Nakba is initiated with impunity and in fact legally sanctioned, liberal Zionists continue to dwell in what Saree Makdisi has called a “culture of denial.”[1] Purportedly aghast at what their Israel has become, some intellectuals—rather than honestly reckoning with the past—resort to desperate exercises in obfuscation. A new book edited by Stefan Vogt, Derek Penslar, and Arieh Saposnik, Unacknowledged Kinships: Postcolonial Studies and the Historiography of Zionism(2023), seeks both to rescue Zionism from its history of violence in Palestine and delegitimize efforts for Palestinian liberation. 
"Complexity” is the order of the day. A history of colonialism that has become clearer by the hour, both because of its increasing desperation on the ground and the efforts of committed scholars to carefully expose its methods and rhetoric, is made opaque. Devoting all their energies to language, to the cherry-picked utterances of one or another Zionist, at the complete exclusion of the material reality of Zionism in Palestine or Israel’s insidious role in the Arab world or across the three continents, is the basis of this endeavor. The editors claim—as Penslar has done since his well-known and widely criticized 2001 article “Zionism, Colonialism and Postcolonialism”—that Zionism cannot be understood as “colonial” because it was both an anti-colonial nationalist movement (even “subaltern”) not a colonial enterprise projected from a metropole and a postcolonial, developmentalist, state like so many others.[2] And if one must reluctantly claim Zionism as colonialism and Israel as colonial, that can only be done in reference to the events of 1967 and after (and even then, with extensive hand-wringing, or in the case of Johannes Becke’s contribution to the volume, tendentious comparison). The colonial project in Palestine explicitly initiated at the end of the nineteenth century by European Zionist settlers, facilitated by the British Empire in the 1920s, accelerated in the 1930s, consecrated in 1948, and continuing to this very day, is rendered irrelevant.
For the editors and a number of the contributors, “postcolonialism” refers principally to the work of Homi Bhabha and his notion of “the in-between.” The binary of colonizer and colonized is deemed insufficient for understanding Zionism by the editors, and Bhabha’s writing on the “hybridity” and “instability” produced by colonialism is taken as a guiding gesture.[3] Recourse to Bhabha and the wielding of his work explicitly against that of the anti-colonial Edward Said—Unacknowledged Kinships foil from its first paragraph onwards—has its origins in the reception of Anglo-American postcolonial theory in Israel during the 1990s. The journal Teoria ve Bikoret, founded in 1991 in Jerusalem and edited until 1999 by the Israeli philosopher Adi Ophir, was the principal forum for post-colonial theory in Israel. “Academic and journalistic texts” Ella Shohat writes of this period, “have fashioned a kind of folk wisdom that posits Homi Bhabha as having surpassed Said.” “Without engaging in any depth Said’s oeuvre,” Shohat continues in an indispensable 2004 article for the Journal of Palestine Studies “or the varied debates around postcolonial studies, the facile recital of the Bhabha-beyond-Said mantra has come to be an entrance requirement for ‘doing the postcolonial’ in Israel.”[4]
Thirty years later, the editors of Unacknowledged Kinships seek novelty. The reasons for which are political, they argue. The collaboration of postcolonial studies and Zionist historiography, the editors hope, “could help overcome the destructive competition that often exists between the struggles against racism and the struggles against anti-semitism, in favor of a joint effort to confront past and present forms of exclusion, subordination, and persecution” (5). What the editors clearly mean is that they would prefer if anti-colonial and anti-racist organizers and intellectuals would desist from criticizing Zionism and Israel on anti-colonial and anti-racist grounds. The editors are explicit later in the introduction when they claim that postcolonial scholars’ support for Palestinians and BDS is partly due to their “sometimes insufficiently complex view of the conflict” (15). The editors take ambiguity—the other keyword that dominates the book—as “the very foundation of postcolonial studies” (15). Ambiguity, they argue, must be reaffirmed. [...]
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