1/1/2024 0 Comments Be a witness synonymThis argument was immediately apparent to many Jewish thinkers in the wake of the Holocaust-who rejected it. Instead, it is the necropolitics of the Holocaust that are always deployed in defense of Israel as a “Jewish state.” Israel’s use of that unspeakable history portrays Zionism as the solution to the failure of diaspora Jews to protect ourselves. It means putting “life over death,” with all the implications of that phrase in the present crisis. A place is not necessarily a synonym for land, certainly not for land expropriated from others and defended violently and exclusively. To follow Gilmore again, let’s begin with the understanding that freedom is a place not a state. This has become unsayable, to the extent that the US House of Representatives has endorsed the belief that anti-Zionism is antisemitism, over many of its own Jewish members. The first alternative to think about is to undo the connection of Jewishness to the nation-state of Israel. Especially if those states are carceral colonial ones.Ībolition looks, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore puts it, “to find alternatives to the despairing sense, that so much change, in retrospect, seems only ever to have been displacement and redistribution of human sacrifice.” Palestine is the classic example of this failure-the effort to undo the wrongs of the Holocaust came only at the expense of so many other wrongs. My point is simple: states are not necessarily the means through which people(s) will find self-determination and certainly not the only way to do so. That is to say, a non-absolute, interlaced way of being. The only possible sovereignty that would sustain these principles would be what Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson has called a “nested sovereignty,” in the North American context. In all the territory formerly known as Palestine under the Ottoman Empire, that’s not happening, to put it mildly. “the rights of all peoples to pursue freely their economic, social and cultural development without outside interference” and that “Governments are to represent the whole population without distinction as to race, color, descent or national or ethnic origin.” The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination holds that the right to self-determination involves States don’t have rights, they have power. Learning from the Black radical tradition, it’s time for abolition.Īt once it will seem that I have sinned because is there not a “right to self-determination”? But I want self-determination for people, not states. The shift is that it is not (only) the Jewish part of the “Jewish state” mantra that’s the problem, it’s the state. The choices aren’t different but their implications are. ![]() It feels to me that what it means to be “Jewish” but not pro-Israel, anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian, is not the same today as it was two months ago now, on October 6, 2023.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |