Newsgroup: it.arti.cinema
Titolo: No, it's not anti-semitic

Judith Butler
LRB
Vol. 25 No. 16
21 August 2003
    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.
26 August 2003
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n16/print/butl02_.html

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    Immagino che tu l'abbia letto tutto, vero Percy? Inoltre tu non hai la minima idea di chi
sia Judith Butler, vero? Servito: 
http://www.theory.org.uk/ctr-butl.htm
. Capisci, Percy? Temo di
no. In ogni caso si tratta della stessa persona che ha dichiarato quanto segue "Madonna is one
media icon who can be seen to have brought queer theory to the masses." Mi spiego? Ha delle
cazzo di referenze questa qui! A occhio e croce non ha nemmeno mai scopato con un uomo, cosa
vuoi che stramerda ne sappia di questioni internazionali? È logico che la pensi come te, si
tratta di pura solidarietà di specie.
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