Precarious Life

No, it's not anti-semitic 
  
 An interesting article from one of the most prominent post-
modernist social theorists in the States.

London Review of Books: Vol. 25 No. 16, dated 21
August 2003

No, it's not anti-semitic

Judith Butler

"Profoundly anti-Israel views are increasingly
finding support in progressive intellectual
communities. Serious and thoughtful people are
advocating and taking actions that are anti-
semitic in their effect if not their intent."

Lawrence Summers, 17 September 2002

When the president of Harvard University declared
that to criticise Israel at this time and to call
on universities to divest from Israel are 'actions
that are anti-semitic in their effect, if not
their intent', he introduced a distinction between
effective and intentional anti-semitism that is
controversial at best. The counter-charge has been
that in making his statement, Summers has struck a
blow against academic freedom, in effect, if not
in intent. Although he insisted that he meant
nothing censorious by his remarks, and that he is
in favour of Israeli policy being 'debated freely
and civilly', his words have had a chilling effect
on political discourse.

Among those actions which he called 'effectively
anti-semitic' were European boycotts of Israel,
anti-globalisation rallies at which criticisms of
Israel were voiced, and fund-raising efforts for
organisations of 'questionable political
provenance'. Of local concern to him, however, was
a divestment petition drafted by MIT and Harvard
faculty members who oppose Israel's current
occupation and its treatment of Palestinians.
Summers asked why Israel was being 'singled out .
. . among all nations' for a divestment campaign,
suggesting that the singling out was evidence of
anti-semitic intentions. And though he claimed
that aspects of Israel's 'foreign and defence'
policy 'can be and should be vigorously
challenged', it was unclear how such challenges
could or would take place without being construed
as anti-Israel, and why these policy issues, which
include occupation, ought not to be vigorously
challenged through a divestment campaign. It would
seem that calling for divestment is something
other than a legitimately 'vigorous challenge',
but we are not given any criteria by which to
adjudicate between vigorous challenges that should
be articulated, and those which carry the
'effective' force of anti-semitism.

Summers is right to voice concern about rising
anti-semitism, and every progressive person ought
to challenge anti-semitism vigorously wherever it
occurs. It seems, though, that historically we
have now reached a position in which Jews cannot
legitimately be understood always and only as
presumptive victims. Sometimes we surely are, but
sometimes we surely are not. No political ethics
can start from the assumption that Jews monopolise
the position of victim. 'Victim' is a quickly
transposable term: it can shift from minute to
minute, from the Jew killed by suicide bombers on
a bus to the Palestinian child killed by Israeli
gunfire. The public sphere needs to be one in
which both kinds of violence are challenged
insistently and in the name of justice.

If we think that to criticise Israeli violence, or
to call for economic pressure to be put on the
Israeli state to change its policies, is to be
'effectively anti-semitic', we will fail to voice
our opposition for fear of being named as part of
an anti-semitic enterprise. No label could be
worse for a Jew, who knows that, ethically and
politically, the position with which it would be
unbearable to identify is that of the anti-semite.
The ethical framework within which most
progressive Jews operate takes the form of the
following question: will we be silent (and thereby
collaborate with illegitimately violent power), or
will we make our voices heard (and be counted
among those who did what they could to stop that
violence), even if speaking poses a risk? The
current Jewish critique of Israel is often
portrayed as insensitive to Jewish suffering, past
as well as present, yet its ethic is based on the
experience of suffering, in order that suffering
might stop.

Summers uses the 'anti-semitic' charge to quell
public criticism of Israel, even as he explicitly
distances himself from the overt operations of
censorship. He writes, for instance, that 'the
only antidote to dangerous ideas is strong
alternatives vigorously advocated.' But how does
one vigorously advocate the idea that the Israeli
occupation is brutal and wrong, and Palestinian
self-determination a necessary good, if the
voicing of those views calls down the charge of
anti-semitism?

To understand Summers's claim, we have to be able
to conceive of an effective anti-semitism, one
that pertains to certain speech acts. Either it
follows on certain utterances, or it structures
them, even if that is not the conscious intention
of those making them. His view assumes that such
utterances will be taken by others as anti-
semitic, or received within a given context as
anti-semitic. So we have to ask what context
Summers has in mind when he makes his claim; in
what context is it the case that any criticism of
Israel will be taken to be anti-semitic?

It may be that what Summers was effectively saying
is that the only way a criticism of Israel can be
heard is through a certain acoustic frame, such
that the criticism, whether it is of the West Bank
settlements, the closing of Birzeit and Bethlehem
University, the demolition of homes in Ramallah or
Jenin, or the killing of numerous children and
civilians, can only be interpreted as showing
hatred for Jews. We are asked to conjure a
listener who attributes an intention to the
speaker: so-and-so has made a public statement
against the Israeli occupation, and this must mean
that so-and-so hates Jews or is willing to fuel
those who do. The criticism is thus given a hidden
meaning, one that is at odds with its explicit
claim. The criticism of Israel is nothing more
than a cloak for that hatred, or a cover for a
call for discriminatory action against Jews. In
other words, the only way to understand effective
anti-semitism is to presuppose intentional anti-
semitism; the effective anti-semitism of any
criticism turns out to reside in the intention of
the speaker as retrospectively attributed by the
listener.

It may be that Summers has something else in mind;
namely, that the criticism will be exploited by
those who want to see not only the destruction of
Israel but the degradation or devaluation of
Jewish people in general. There is always that
risk, but to claim that such criticism of Israel
can be taken only as criticism of Jews is to
attribute to that particular interpretation the
power to monopolise the field of reception. The
argument against letting criticism of Israel into
the public sphere would be that it gives fodder to
those with anti-semitic intentions, who will
successfully co-opt the criticism. Here again, a
statement can become effectively anti-semitic only
if there is, somewhere, an intention to use it for
anti-semitic purposes. Indeed, even if one
believed that criticisms of Israel are by and
large heard as anti-semitic (by Jews, anti-
semites, or people who could be described as
neither), it would become the responsibility of
all of us to change the conditions of reception so
that the public might begin to distinguish between
criticism of Israel and a hatred of Jews.

Summers made his statement as president of an
institution which is a symbol of academic prestige
in the United States, and although he claimed he
was speaking not as president of the university
but as a 'member of our community', his speech
carried weight in the press precisely because he
was exercising the authority of his office. If the
president of Harvard is letting the public know
that he will take any criticism of Israel to be
effectively anti-semitic, then he is saying that
public discourse itself ought to be so constrained
that such statements are not uttered, and that
those who utter them will be understood as
engaging in anti-semitic speech, even hate speech.

Here, it is important to distinguish between anti-
semitic speech which, say, produces a hostile and
threatening environment for Jewish students -
racist speech which any university administrator
would be obliged to oppose and regulate - and
speech which makes a student uncomfortable because
it opposes a particular state or set of state
policies that he or she may defend. The latter is
a political debate, and if we say that the case of
Israel is different, that any criticism of it is
considered as an attack on Israelis, or Jews in
general, then we have singled out this political
allegiance from all other allegiances that are
open to public debate. We have engaged in the most
outrageous form of 'effective' censorship.

The point is not only that Summers's distinction
between effective and intentional anti-semitism
cannot hold, but that the way it collapses in his
formulation is precisely what produces the
conditions under which certain public views are
taken to be hate speech, in effect if not in
intent. Summers didn't say that anything that
Israel does in the name of self-defence is
legitimate and ought not to be questioned. I don't
know whether he approves of all Israeli policies,
but let's imagine, for the sake of argument, that
he doesn't. And I don't know whether he has views
about, for instance, the destruction of homes and
the killings of children in Jenin which attracted
the attention of the United Nations last year but
was not investigated as a human rights violation
because Israel refused to open its borders to an
investigative team. If he objects to those
actions, and they are among the 'foreign policy'
issues he believes ought to be 'vigorously
challenged', he would be compelled, under his
formulation, not to voice his disapproval,
believing, as he does, that that would be
construed, effectively, as anti-semitism. And if
he thinks it possible to voice disapproval, he
hasn't shown us how to do it in such a way as to
avert the allegation of anti-semitism.

Summers's logic suggests that certain actions of
the Israeli state must be allowed to go on
unimpeded by public protest, for fear that any
protest would be tantamount to anti-semitism, if
not anti-semitism itself. Now, all forms of anti-
semitism must be opposed, but we have here a set
of serious confusions about the forms anti-
semitism takes. Indeed, if the charge of anti-
semitism is used to defend Israel at all costs,
then its power when used against those who do
discriminate against Jews - who do violence to
synagogues in Europe, wave Nazi flags or support
anti-semitic organisations - is radically diluted.
Many critics of Israel now dismiss all claims of
anti-semitism as 'trumped up', having been exposed
to their use as a way of censoring political
speech.

Summers doesn't tell us why divestment campaigns
or other forms of public protest are anti-semitic.
According to him, some forms of anti-semitism are
characterised as such retroactively, which means
that nothing should be said or done that will then
be taken to be anti-semitic by others. But what if
those others are wrong? If we take one form of
anti-semitism to be defined retroactively, what is
left of the possibility of legitimate protest
against a state, either by its own population or
anyone else? If we say that every time the word
'Israel' is spoken, the speaker really means
'Jews', then we have foreclosed in advance the
possibility that the speaker really means
'Israel'. If, on the other hand, we distinguish
between anti-semitism and forms of protest against
the Israeli state (or right-wing settlers who
sometimes act independently of the state),
acknowledging that sometimes they do,
disturbingly, work together, then we stand a
chance of understanding that world Jewry does not
see itself as one with Israel in its present form
and practice, and that Jews in Israel do not
necessarily see themselves as one with the state.
In other words, the possibility of a substantive
Jewish peace movement depends on our observing a
productive and critical distance from the state of
Israel (which can be coupled with a profound
investment in its future course).

Summers's view seems to imply that criticism of
Israel is 'anti-Israel' in the sense that it is
understood to challenge the right of Israel to
exist. A criticism of Israel is not the same,
however, as a challenge to Israel's existence,
even if there are conditions under which it would
be possible to say that one leads to the other. A
challenge to the right of Israel to exist can be
construed as a challenge to the existence of the
Jewish people only if one believes that Israel
alone keeps the Jewish people alive or that all
Jews invest their sense of perpetuity in the state
of Israel in its current or traditional forms. One
could argue, however, that those polities which
safeguard the right to criticise them stand a
better chance of surviving than those that don't.
For a criticism of Israel to be taken as a
challenge to the survival of the Jews, we would
have to assume not only that 'Israel' cannot
change in response to legitimate criticism, but
that a more radically democratic Israel would be
bad for Jews. This would be to suppose that
criticism is not a Jewish value, which clearly
flies in the face not only of long traditions of
Talmudic disputation, but of all the religious and
cultural sources that have been part of Jewish
life for centuries.

What are we to make of Jews who disidentify with
Israel or, at least, with the Israeli state? Or
Jews who identify with Israel, but do not condone
some of its practices? There is a wide range here:
those who are silently ambivalent about the way
Israel handles itself; those who only half
articulate their doubts about the occupation;
those who are strongly opposed to the occupation,
but within a Zionist framework; those who would
like to see Zionism rethought or, indeed,
abandoned. Jews may hold any of these opinions,
but voice them only to their family, or only to
their friends; or voice them in public but then
face an angry reception at home. Given this Jewish
ambivalence, ought we not to be suspicious of any
effort to equate Jews with Israel? The argument
that all Jews have a heartfelt investment in the
state of Israel is untrue. Some have a heartfelt
investment in corned beef sandwiches or in certain
Talmudic tales, religious rituals and liturgy, in
memories of their grandmother, the taste of
borscht or the sounds of the old Yiddish theatre.
Others have an investment in historical and
cultural archives from Eastern Europe or from the
Holocaust, or in forms of labour activism, civil
rights struggles and social justice that are
thoroughly secular, and exist in relative
independence from the question of Israel.

What do we make of Jews such as myself, who are
emotionally invested in the state of Israel,
critical of its current form, and call for a
radical restructuring of its economic and
juridical basis precisely because we are invested
in it? It is always possible to say that such Jews
have turned against their own Jewishness. But what
if one criticises Israel in the name of one's
Jewishness, in the name of justice, precisely
because such criticisms seem 'best for the Jews'?
Why wouldn't it always be 'best for the Jews' to
embrace forms of democracy that extend what is
'best' to everyone, Jewish or not? I signed a
petition framed in these terms, an 'Open Letter
from American Jews', in which 3700 American Jews
opposed the Israeli occupation, though in my view
it was not nearly strong enough: it did not call
for the end of Zionism, or for the reallocation of
arable land, for rethinking the Jewish right of
return or for the fair distribution of water and
medicine to Palestinians, and it did not call for
the reorganisation of the Israeli state on a more
radically egalitarian basis. It was, nevertheless,
an overt criticism of Israel.

Many of those who signed that petition will have
felt what might reasonably be called heartache at
taking a public stand against Israeli policy, at
the thought that Israel, by subjecting 3.5 million
Palestinians to military occupation, represents
the Jews in a way that these petitioners find not
only objectionable, but terrible to endure, as
Jews; it is as Jews that they assert their
disidentification with that policy, that they seek
to widen the rift between the state of Israel and
the Jewish people in order to produce an
alternative vision of the future. The petitioners
exercised a democratic right to voice criticism,
and sought to get economic pressure put on Israel
by the US and other countries, to implement rights
for Palestinians otherwise deprived of basic
conditions of self-determination, to end the
occupation, to secure an independent Palestinian
state or to re-establish the basis of the Israeli
state without regard to religion so that
Jewishness would constitute only one cultural and
religious reality, and be protected by the same
laws that protect the rights of others.

Identifying Israel with Jewry obscures the
existence of the small but important post-Zionist
movement in Israel, including the philosophers Adi
Ophir and Anat Biletzki, the sociologist Uri Ram,
the professor of theatre Avraham Oz and the poet
Yitzhak Laor. Are we to say that Israelis who are
critical of Israeli policy are self-hating Jews,
or insensitive to the ways in which criticism may
fan the flames of anti-semitism? What of the new
Brit Tzedek organisation in the US, numbering
close to 20,000 members at the last count, which
seeks to offer a critical alternative to the
American Israel Political Action Committee,
opposing the current occupation and working for a
two-state solution? What of Jewish Voices for
Peace, Jews against the Occupation, Jews for Peace
in the Middle East, the Faculty for Israeli-
Palestinian Peace, Tikkun, Jews for Racial and
Economic Justice, Women in Black or, indeed, Neve
Shalom-Wahat al-Salam, the only village
collectively governed by both Jews and Arabs in
the state of Israel? What do we make of B'Tselem,
the Israeli organisation that monitors human
rights abuses in the West Bank and Gaza, or Gush
Shalom, an Israeli organisation opposing the
occupation, or Yesh Gvul, which represents the
Israeli soldiers who refuse to serve in the
Occupied Territories? And what of Ta'ayush, a
Jewish-Arab coalition against policies that lead
to isolation, poor medical care, house arrest, the
destruction of educational institutions, and lack
of water and food for Palestinians?

It will not do to equate Jews with Zionists or
Jewishness with Zionism. There were debates among
Jews throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries
as to whether Zionism ought to become the basis of
a state, whether the Jews had any right to lay
claim to land inhabited by Palestinians for
centuries, and as to the future for a Jewish
political project based on a violent expropriation
of land. There were those who sought to make
Zionism compatible with peaceful co-existence with
Arabs, and those who used it as an excuse for
military aggression, and continue to do so. There
were those who thought, and still think, that
Zionism is not a legitimate basis for a democratic
state in a situation where a diverse population
must be assumed to practise different religions,
and that no group ought to be excluded from any
right accorded to citizens in general on the basis
of their ethnic or religious views. And there are
those who maintain that the violent appropriation
of Palestinian land, and the dislocation of
700,000 Palestinians, was an unsuitable foundation
on which to build a state. Yet Israel is now
repeating its founding gesture in the containment
and dehumanisation of Palestinians in the Occupied
Territories. Indeed, the wall now being built
threatens to leave 95,000 Palestinians homeless.
These are questions about Zionism that should and
must be asked in a public domain, and universities
are surely one place where we might expect
critical reflections on Zionism to take place.
Instead, we are being asked, by Summers and
others, to treat any critical approach to Zionism
as effective anti-semitism and, hence, to rule it
out as a topic for legitimate disagreement.

Many important distinctions are elided by the
mainstream press when it assumes that there are
only two possible positions on the Middle East,
the 'pro-Israel' and the 'pro-Palestinian'. The
assumption is that these are discrete views,
internally homogeneous, non-overlapping, that if
one is 'pro-Israel' then anything Israel does is
all right, or if 'pro-Palestinian' then anything
Palestinians do is all right. But few people's
political views occupy such extremes. One can, for
instance, be in favour of Palestinian self-
determination, but condemn suicide bombings, and
find others who share both those views but differ
on the form self-determination ought to take. One
can be in favour of Israel's right to exist, but
still ask what is the most legitimate and
democratic form that existence ought to take. If
one questions the present form, is one anti-
Israel? If one holds out for a truly democratic
Israel-Palestine, is one anti-Israel? Or is one
trying to find a better form for this polity, one
that may well involve any number of possibilities:
a revised version of Zionism, a post-Zionist
Israel, a self-determining Palestine, or an
amalgamation of Israel into a greater Israel-
Palestine where all racially and religiously based
qualifications on rights and entitlements would be
eliminated?

What is ironic is that in equating Zionism with
Jewishness, Summers is adopting the very tactic
favoured by anti-semites. At the time of his
speech, I found myself on a listserv on which a
number of individuals opposed to the current
policies of the state of Israel, and sometimes to
Zionism, started to engage in this same slippage,
sometimes opposing what they called 'Zionism' and
at other times what they called 'Jewish'
interests. Whenever this occurred, there were
objections, and several people withdrew from the
group. Mona Baker, the academic in Manchester who
dismissed two Israeli colleagues from the board of
her academic journal in an effort to boycott
Israeli institutions, argued that there was no way
to distinguish between individuals and
institutions. In dismissing these individuals, she
claimed, she was treating them as emblematic of
the Israeli state, since they were citizens of
that country. But citizens are not the same as
states: the very possibility of significant
dissent depends on recognising the difference
between them. Baker's response to subsequent
criticism was to submit e-mails to the
'academicsforjustice' listserv complaining about
'Jewish' newspapers and labelling as 'pressure'
the opportunity that some of these newspapers
offered to discuss the issue in print with the
colleagues she had dismissed. She refused to do
this and seemed now to be fighting against 'Jews',
identified as a lobby that pressures people, a
lobby that had put pressure on her. The criticism
that I made of Summers's view thus applies to
Baker as well: it is one thing to oppose Israel in
its current form and practices or, indeed, to have
critical questions about Zionism itself, but it is
quite another to oppose 'Jews' or assume that all
'Jews' have the same view, that they are all in
favour of Israel, identified with Israel or
represented by Israel. Oddly, and painfully, it
has to be said that on this point Mona Baker and
Lawrence Summers agree: Jews are the same as
Israel. In the one instance, the premise works in
the service of an argument against anti-semitism;
in the second, it works as the effect of anti-
semitism itself. One aspect of anti-semitism or,
indeed, of any form of racism is that an entire
people is falsely and summarily equated with a
particular position, view or disposition. To say
that all Jews hold a given view on Israel or are
adequately represented by Israel or, conversely,
that the acts of Israel, the state, adequately
stand for the acts of all Jews, is to conflate
Jews with Israel and, thereby, to commit an anti-
semitic reduction of Jewishness.

In holding out for a distinction to be made
between Israel and Jews, I am calling for a space
for dissent for Jews, and non-Jews, who have
criticisms of Israel to articulate; but I am also
opposing anti-semitic reductions of Jewishness to
Israeli interests. The 'Jew' is no more defined by
Israel than by anti-semitism. The 'Jew' exceeds
both determinations, and is to be found,
substantively, as a historically and culturally
changing identity that takes no single form and
has no single telos. Once the distinction is made,
discussion of both Zionism and anti-semitism can
begin, since it will be as important to understand
the legacy of Zionism and to debate its future as
to oppose anti-semitism wherever we find it.

What is needed is a public space in which such
issues might be thoughtfully debated, and to
prevent that space being defined by certain kinds
of exclusion and censorship. If one can't voice an
objection to violence done by Israel without
attracting a charge of anti-semitism, then that
charge works to circumscribe the publicly
acceptable domain of speech, and to immunise
Israeli violence against criticism. One is
threatened with the label 'anti-semitic' in the
same way that one is threatened with being called
a 'traitor' if one opposes the most recent US war.
Such threats aim to define the limits of the
public sphere by setting limits on the speakable.
The world of public discourse would then be one
from which critical perspectives would be
excluded, and the public would come to understand
itself as one that does not speak out in the face
of obvious and illegitimate violence.




Judith Butler's book of essays, Precarious Life: Politics,
Violence, Mourning, about culture and politics after 11
September, is due from Verso in the spring. She is Maxine
Elliot Professor in Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the
University of California at Berkeley.




Ran Greenstein
Johannesburg, South Africa