Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism

Judith Butler’s Parting Ways can be read in two complementary ways: as a work of political theory and as an intervention in the political discourse surrounding the IsraeliPalestinian conflict. Butler’s political position is well known and can be seen as the backdrop to this work. She is a consistent critic of Israeli policies concerning the Palestinian issue and what she understands as the Israeli “colonial subjugation” of the Palestinian (19). The concrete political suggestions in Parting Ways continue along these lines, e.g. in Butler’s claim that the Law of Return—allowing each Jew or descendant of Jews to immigrate to Israel—should be abolished or at least suspended until a similar Palestinian right of return is recognized and guaranteed (209). These positions are substantiated in this work with theoretical reflections on Jewishness, Zionism, and the political. The enquiry into these categories is made through a discussion of several major Jewish writers, including Emmanuel Levinas (chs 1–2), Walter Benjamin (chs 3–4), Hannah Arendt (chs 5–6) and Primo Levi (ch. 7). These interpretations are accompanied by analysis of works by Edward Said (ch. 1, ch. 8) and Mahmoud Darwish (ch. 8). The bringing together of these writers reflects Butler’s indebtedness to two intellectual strands: postcolonial theory and Jewish thought. Out of the many close readings that her work offers, two concepts emerge as viable alternatives to the dominant political discourse: cohabitation and binationalism, which are based primarily on her reading of Levinas, Arendt, and Said. The main idea Butler draws from Levinas is that from the encounter with the face of the other emerges an ethical responsibility. She perceives this responsibility not merely as a precondition for the political, as it is often understood, but as emerging within the political (57). Butler intentionally reads “Levinas contra Levinas” in order to detach his thought from his Zionism and commitment to the State of Israel. Yet if the ethical indeed emerges within the political as Butler claims, it becomes all the more exigent to address Levinas’ Zionism in order to understand the relation between what he considered a great event in modern Jewish history, namely the foundation of the State of Israel in 1948, and its ethical implications. Zionism for Levinas is a political idea that is grounded on the ethical and should be judged accordingly. It exemplifies the tension between the work of the state and the work of justice and therefore might contain injustice while at the same time striving, in its ideal form, to minimize the suffering of the other even at the price of sacrificing something of its own. This means that for Levinas there is a possibility of critiquing the State of Israel, while at the same time recognizing its importance and indispensability. This is a position Butler will unequivocally reject, which might explain why she does not deal with this aspect of Levinas’ thought. Based on her understanding of Levinas, Butler locates an affinity between Arendt and Levinas. This affinity is based on the idea of cohabitation in Arendt’s work, which is described by Butler as a condition “prior to any possible community or nation or neighborhood” (125). It is a situation one finds oneself in and may not withdraw from, similar to the face of the other in Levinas. Butler makes explicit the political implications of the 384 Studies in Religion / Sciences Religieuses 42(3)