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Thursday, March 18, 2004

What I'm Reading

I've been procrastinating from writing by reading Ella Shohat's great piece "Rupture and Return: Zionist Discourse and the Study of Arab Jews" from the Social Text special issue on "Palestine in a Transnational Context."

You can read it here (in HTML) or here (in PDF.)

Central to Zionist thinking was the concept of Kibbutz Galuiot—the "ingathering of the exiles." Following two millennia of homelessness and living presumably "outside of history," Jews could once again "enter history" as subjects, as "normal" actors on the world stage by returning to their ancient birth place, Eretz Israel. In this way, Jews were thought to heal a deformative rupture produced by exilic existence. This transformation of Migola le'Geula—from diaspora to redemption—offered a teleological reading of Jewish History in which Zionism formed a redemptive vehicle for the renewal of Jewish life on a demarcated terrain, no longer simply spiritual and textual but rather national and political. The idea of Jewish return (which after the establishment of Israel was translated into legal language handing every Jew immediate access to Israeli citizenship) had been intertwined with the imaging of the empty land of Palestine. Its indigenous inhabitants could be bracketed or, alternately, portrayed as intruders deemed to "return" to their Arab land of origins (a discourse that was encoded in the various transfer plans).

A corollary of the notion of Jewish "return" and continuity in Israel [End Page 49] was the idea of rupture and discontinuity with diasporic existence. In order to be transformed into "New Jews" (later Israelis), the "Diasporic Jews" had to abandon their diasporic culture, which, in the case of Arab Jews, meant abandoning Arabness and acquiescing in assimilationist modernization, for "their own good." Within this Promethean rescue narrative, concepts of "ingathering" and "modernization" naturalized and glossed over the historical, psychic, and epistemological violence generated by the Zionist vision of the New Jew. 1 This rescue narrative also elided Zionism's own role in provoking ruptures, dislocations, and fragmentation for Palestinian lives, and—in a different way—for Middle Eastern and north African Jews. These ruptures were not only physical (the movement across borders) but also cultural (a rift in relation to previous cultural affiliations) as well as conceptual (in the very ways time and space, history, and geography were conceived).

¶ 2:08 AM

Smash Yale-[ comments.]

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