August 31, 2006
Zizek on Jerusalem
In the LRB, Zizek on Jerusalem.
If there ever was a passionate attachment to the lost object, a refusal to come to terms with its loss, it is the attachment of Israelis and many diaspora Jews to the ‘Holy Land’ and above all to Jerusalem. The present troubles are supreme proof of the consequences of such a radical fidelity, when taken literally. For almost two thousand years, when the Jews were fundamentally a nation without land, living in exile, their reference to Jerusalem was a negative one, a prohibition against ‘painting an image of home’ or indeed against feeling at home anywhere on earth. Once the return to Palestine began a century ago, the metaphysical Other Place was identified with a specific place on the map and became the object of a positive identification, the place where the wandering which characterises human existence would end. The identification, negative and positive by turns, had always involved a dream of settlement. When a two-thousand-year-old dream is finally close to realisation, such realisation has to turn into a nightmare.
Brecht’s joke a propos the East Berlin workers’ uprising in 1953 – ‘The Party is not satisfied with its people, so it will replace them with a people more supportive of its politics’ – is suggestive of the way Israelis regard the inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza. That Israelis, descendants of exemplary victims, should be considering a thorough ethnic cleansing – or ‘transfer’ – of the Palestinians from the West Bank is the ultimate historical irony.
What would be a proper imaginative act in the Middle East today? For Israelis and Arabs, it would involve giving up political control of Jerusalem, agreeing that the Old Town should become a city without a state, a place of worship, neither a part of Israel nor of a putative Palestine, administered for the time being by an international force.
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I amwell into my 70s, and yet I recall even as a very young boy Jewish people saying: Next Year in Jerusalem. Yet the post suggests that an obsession about Jerusalem is a relatively new thing. And I guess, so too, the Wall (aka Wailing Wall)..When the Arabs controlled the city, Jews were forbidden their holy places;when the Israelis took over, they allowed Christians and Muslims as well as Jews to enjoy their heritage. Such differences are seldom if ever noted by media that is left of center (aka sympatico with Arabs or, put another way, anti-Israel.
Posted by: fred lapides | Aug 31, 2006 7:34:07 PM
Zizek says, "If there ever was a passionate attachment to the lost object, a refusal to come to terms with its loss, it is the attachment of Israelis and many diaspora Jews to the ‘Holy Land’ and above all to Jerusalem."
But Jerusalem and most of the Land are no longer lost to Jews -- possession, it is said, is nine-tenths of the law -- but lost to the Palestinians. Zizek and the Palestinians should know it, and in that light think over what he says next: "The present troubles are supreme proof of the consequences of such a radical fidelity, when taken literally." Isn't that a better description of Palestinian maximalism, the Three Nos of the Khartoum Conference, the "right of return," the Second Intifada, and the current Arab proposal for a return to the pre-1967 borders and a redivided Jerusalem? Why shouldn't Zizek wag his finger at the Palestinian nation and the larger Arab world and suggest in his magnanimity that it "come to terms with its loss"?
Posted by: Dabodius | Aug 31, 2006 9:25:42 PM
I disagree most emphatically with the writer of this article in the London Review of Books. Like so many Europeans, he overlooks Europe's responsibility for the impossible situation that exists in the Middle East, nor the debt we in the West owe to the Hebraic conceptions that underlie our own liberal institutions, and which alone can lead to peace in that part of the world.
It was a centuries old European tradition of anti-Semitism after all, culminating in but by no means limited to the Holocaust, that drove European Jewry out of Europe; and it was European statesmen who, in the aftermaths of two world wars, decided to solve their "Jewish problem" by giving someone else's land away.
If the European community would face up to its responsiblity, it would see the need to do the one thing that can ever truly settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: indemnify the Palestinian community for everything it has suffered. What might this take? Well, in the final throws of the Oslo process, when every last issue had been settled save one -- that of the Palestinian refugees, who are for all intents and purposes coequal to the Palestinian people themselves -- it was proposed by their representatives that a $500 billion package of aid and investment might suffice to bring negotiations to a satisfactory conclusion. Of course their American and Israeli interlocuters laughed at this seemingly outlandish proposal, as well they might: why should they be obliged to pay such a large sum, and by what standard would it be justified?
To take the latter point first, this is roughly the amount of investment it would take to create a Western standard of living for a new Palestinian community on the West Bank, and which would make it possible for such a limited area to absorb several million additional inhabitants. It would put the new community on a par, materially speaking, with its Jewish neighbor, and would serve as a credible incentive for the Palestinian side to honor any commitments it makes as part of a final settlement, assuming that the ongoing payment of this indemnity would be contingent upon their good behavior.
As to the second point, justice requires that the responsible party pay the damages caused -- which in this instance means the European community. America has already spent many hundreds of billions of dollars trying -- unsuccessfully -- to bring peace and stability to this strategic corner of the world. And as for Israel, she has neither the resources, nor the moral onus, to make such a restitution.
The idea of substituting principles of justice and equity for force and violence is the founding principle of the Jewish religion, judging by the behavior of the founding patriarchs of that tribe when it first entered the promised land, long before Moses and his God of Battles. As Abraham said, "I will not take a shoe-lace that is not mine, lest anyone say I have made Abraham rich." Everyone needs to go back and read those precious middle chapters in the book of Genesis, with particular attention to the treaty between Abimilech and Abraham at Bersheba.
As the prophet said (I forget which one): "Israel shall be redeemed by judgment." And, truly, there is reason to believe that either Israel shall be redeemed in just this manner, or the entire civilized world as we know it may come crashing down in moral blindness.
Let Europeans look into the mirror if they want to find who is responsible for all this. Stop scapegoating Israel, which is doing as best it -- or anyone -- can in an impossible situation.
Posted by: Luke Lea | Sep 1, 2006 12:49:52 AM
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