The start of the second intifada, in 2000, is considered by many as the definitive moment in which an atmosphere of hope, and the peak of Israeli leftist opposition to the occupation, was destroyed. Many who had previously been activists, in more and less radical groups, referred to the years since then as a time of disappointment and despair (Rosenblum 2008). The dominant Israeli narrative since then has echoed former Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s infamous mantra, that “there is no partner for peace,” which was his commentary during the 2000 Camp David summit with Yasir Arafat and Bill Clinton (Ben-Eliezer 2012; Malley 2001). Israeli activism resisting this dictum has thus challenged the prevailing sense that the state of Israel is willing to make peace, while the Palestinians are not. Equally, while the “two-state solution” has nominally been accepted by Israeli politicians, including the right-wing Likud’s Benjamin Netanyahu, the “facts on the ground” continue to make this option seem remote.5 In criticizing dominant Israeli understandings of the state’s intentions, and emphasizing instead the ongoing process of colonial expansion and suppression of Palestinian resistance, left radical activists have found themselves in stark opposition not only to the state but also to most of the rest of the Jewish Israeli population. In the light of this state of affairs, as well as a rising consciousness among Israeli activists of the buried histories of Palestinians’ expulsion and displacement in the 1947–1949 war, or Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”), there is a widespread feeling among left radical activists of total alienation from a wider Jewish Israeli public. They find themselves in constant positions of opposition and rejection regarding possible ethical responses to the suffering of Others, basic understandings of history, and political imaginaries of the future in Israel/Palestine.
The ethical and emotional rejection of the Israeli state, and dominant Jewish Israeli orientations toward it, go hand in hand, among left radical activists, with the desire to come closer to Palestinians and others who have been made “enemies” (Anidjar 2003) under Israeli sovereignty. This is expressed in two key ways: first, in the idea that the key role of Jewish Israelis should be to support and participate in the struggles of Palestinians, rather than to lead and define the shape of protest and dissent; second, in the myriad ways in which activists try to struggle in the everyday against the regime of separation that the state has imposed (for example, through taking Arabic lessons or in actively seeking out encounters and friendships with Palestinians). Rather than working toward the moral purity of Jewish Israel, as did earlier and more Zionist leftist groups, the radical left as it exists now has promoted a fundamental reconsideration of the imperative for and the ethical nature of the “Jewish state” (cf. Lamarche 2010; Sela 2005).
This simultaneous affective disconnection from the Israeli state and desired relation with its oppressed Others is perhaps the key feature of the activism I analyze here. A strong and passionate rejection of predominant Jewish Israeli subjectivities, and their othering of Palestinians and other non-Jews in Israel/Palestine, emerges as activists attempt to challenge and curtail state violence. Activism becomes as much about rejecting the self as it is about reaching out to the oppressed Other. Placing these dynamics at the heart of an analysis takes us far, I claim, in understanding how Jewish Israeli left radical activism takes shape as it does, why it remains rather disconnected from Palestinian struggles and forms of resistance, and the vitriolic reactions it receives from the wider Jewish Israeli public that are disproportionate to the size and influence of this rather marginal social movement. More than ideological programs or labels such as anarchist, anti-Zionist, or socialist—although these identities and political philosophies are significant, to be sure—what I found in common among all the activists I came to know was the way they vehemently rejected the broader Jewish Israeli population’s expressions of fear and hatred of the Palestinian Other, and the associated presupposition of a loving nationalist kinship among Israeli Jews.
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Relations with Others in Israeli activists’ attempts at solidarity thus appear in what follows as the site of ethics. Placing otherness at the heart of the ethical, I follow the thought of philosopher Emmanuel Levinas and argue that ethics is constituted by a worldly response to Others, and thus is also tied up in that world’s politics, its troubles and its failings. Beyond processes of ethical self-cultivation (Faubion 2011; Hirschkind 2006; Laidlaw 2002, 2014; Mahmood 2005) or the tacit and “ordinary” quality of everyday ethical practice (Lambek 2010), the ethics of Jewish Israeli left radical activism entail difficult and unchosen relations with Others and practices that unsettle and disturb. How to live differently with Others was the key question for Jewish Israeli left radical activists I came to know. It was a question that they could only ask, reflect on, and attempt to answer, in response to the violence, inequality, and injustice that determines how Jewish Israelis, Palestinians, and others currently cohabit the space of Israel/Palestine. My use of the notion of “ethicopolitics” in this book, then, signals how ethics could only take shape in relation to politics—to how different subjects have been made to live under Israeli sovereign control in very particular ways.
In Israeli activists’ struggles and their almost obsessive focus on Others—Palestinians, primarily, but not exclusively—and their attempts to turn away from what have emerged as dominant ways of being Jewish Israeli, I find echoes of Levinasian ethics and the notion of the subject “interrupted” (Butler 2005, 2006) or held “hostage” (Levinas 1991) to the Other. Considered by many to have overstated both the primacy of the Other and the use of a rather pained language to refer to ethics, Levinas’ project was a critique of early twentieth-century phenomenology and of Western philosophy’s approach to consciousness more broadly. Before subjectivity, he argues, is sentience and sensibility, as well as alterity—the world that exists prior to and outside of the subject (Levinas 1979, 1991). The encounter with this otherness, through which subjectivity, and ethics, come to be, is a fundamentally traumatic one and it is to this affective rupture that the self consequently responds, or is repeatedly called on to respond (Critchley 1999: 194–195). The language of persecution Levinas uses to describe ethical subjectivity thus signals the founding violence at the heart of subjectivity. He then proposes that ethics is the relation with the Other, or with alterity in general, that attempts to recognize that otherness in its own affective and bodily forms, rather than in the categories of the self—the “ego”—that transform otherness into the already damaged realm of subjective being. There is, therefore, an impossibility about ethics, in its Levinasian sense. Ethics is an always failed attempt to relate non-violently toward Others, constantly undermined by the actual moment of response, which can take place only in the terms already laid out by the reductions and limitations of language and politics. Thus, those who in this book figure as “Others” are the subjects who become fixed as such, as Palestinian, Mizrahi, or otherwise Other, in the shadows of a dominating Jewish (Ashkenazi) Israeli self. The activist imaginary relies on these homogenized, almost phantasmatic Others, even as it attempts an openness to difference and challenges the violence of such representations.
When ethics is imagined as the difficult encounter with Others and otherness in the world, it already implicates the ways in which such distinctions and divisions between selves and Others have been shaped, governed, and restricted, by the political. Equally, subjective engagement in political life—of activists or others—is a maneuvering of one’s positioning in systems of power and domination that