Deliberating the Holocaust and the Nakba: disruptive empathy and binationalism in Israel/Palestine

This article develops a theoretical framework for shared and inclusive Jewish and Palestinian deliberation on the memories of the Holocaust and the Nakba. It argues that a joint Arab-Jewish public deliberation on the traumatic memories of these two events is not only possible, however challenging and disruptive it may be, but also fundamental for producing an egalitarian and inclusive ethics of binationalism in Israel/Palestine. In order to develop this conceptual framework, we first present some examples, most notably Elias Khoury's epic novel Gate of the sun (Bab al-Shams), which bring the memories of the Holocaust and the Nakba together in a fashion that disrupts the dominant, antagonistic and exclusionary Israeli and Palestinian national narratives. We then interpret Dominick LaCapra's notion of ‘empathic unsettlement’, which transforms ‘otherness’ from a problem to be disposed of into a moral and emotional challenge, as a political concept that best captures and explains the disruptive potential of a joint deliberation on these traumatic events. The figure of the refugee, constitutive of Palestinian and Jewish histories and identities, we suggest, serves as a herald of this binational and disruptive ethics. We conclude that ‘empathic unsettlement’ also has a productive and transformative potential which gives further (however partial and initial) meaning, shape and content to the ethics and democratic politics of binationalism heralded by the refugee.     

Beyond Holocaust Studies: rethinking the Holocaust in Hungary

This article argues that the ideological and emotional meanings of the terms ‘Holocaust’ and ‘antisemitism’ have obstructed their use as analytical concepts in Holocaust scholarship. It claims, specifically, that they frame the persecution and annihilation of Jews during World War II as unique, placing these events and processes apart from essential historical and political contexts. The destruction of Jews in wartime Hungary underscores how histories of state and nation building—in this case the drive to realize ‘Greater Hungary’ with a marked Magyar majority—generated multi-layered mass violence against non-Jews as well as Jews. Focusing on the multi-ethnic borderland of Subcarpathian Rus’ before the German invasion of Hungary in March 1944 illuminates the links in the state's multi-layered attack against the region's society and sheds new light on the particular victimization of Jews, also after March 1944. Almost all the scholarship on the Holocaust in Hungary has addressed the period after the German invasion, dealing with ghettoization and deportation to Auschwitz. This perspective has provided important insight, but it has also overshadowed significant dimensions in the history of wartime Hungary. The histories of the state's borderlands, which have received limited attention, challenge this account of ‘the Holocaust’ in Hungary. This article uncovers how anxieties about disloyalty and foreignness played crucial roles in the exclusionary campaign against Jews, Roma and Carpatho-Ruthenians in Subcarpathian Rus’. The Hungarian authorities planned and carried out discriminatory and violent measures against them and, whenever national and international opportunities permitted, mass deportations. The examination of these related processes of mass violence lays bare the meaning of ‘antisemitism’ in a specific political context, highlighting connections between anti-Jewish policies and the persecution of other groups. Viewing this violence as it unfolded, rather than backward from the ‘final solution’ and Auschwitz, opens new paths to rethink ‘the Holocaust’ in Hungary.     

Between Apartheid,the Holocaust and the Nakba: Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s Pilgrimage to Israel-Palestine (1989) and the Emergence of an Analogical Lexicon

ABSTRACT

On 22 December 1989, the anti-apartheid activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Archbishop Desmond Tutu conducted a Christmas pilgrimage to Israel and the Occupied Territories. Tutu used his visit to relay political messages in support of the Palestinian liberation struggle and to criticize Israeli-South African ties, and his statements evoked sever criticism on the part of Zionist Jewish constituencies. Through a tighter focus on Tutu’s various public statements and their reception in the years leading up to the visit, this article traces the history of different sets of interlocking analogies in Tutu’s thought, positioning his 1989 visit to Israel-Palestine—neglected thus far in the critical literature —as a landmark in his thinking. In so doing, it offers a critical analysis of another instance of the Israel-apartheid analogy in the political struggle against the Israeli occupation. At the same time, it points to the genesis of the analogy in Tutu’s ongoing engagements with the suffering of Jews during the Holocaust.     

‘Sites of memory’ of the Holocaust: shaping national memory in the education system in Israel

Abstract. This article attempts to understand the development of the national memory in Israel and the stress on the Holocaust as the constitutive representation of the national identity in the last decades. In the first three decades of the existence of the state, at a time Israeli society was embedded in an ‘environment of memory’ due to the presence of a big proportion of Holocaust survivors, the subject of the Holocaust was almost neglected in schools. On the other hand, since the 1980s, when the ‘environment of memory’ of the Holocaust started to fade naturally, ‘sites of memories’ of the Holocaust started to blossom in the education system. The national memory is meant to support political and social arrangements in the present; thus, in order to shape national subjects, the education system has to adapt the official memory accordingly. While in the past, the memory of the Holocaust was counterproductive to the formation of the ‘new Jew’, it became an appropriate response to the crisis of the national subjectivity unleashed after the Yom Kippur War.     

Purity and Power: Anthropology From Colonialism to the Global Hierarchy of Value

These four books focalize the links between sociocultural anthropology and the national or cultural identities of its theoreticians and empirical practitioners. Historically caught between the forces of nationalism and colonialism, the subdiscipline has largely transcended its now rejected past, of which significant traces nonetheless remain embedded in its conceptual inheritance. Ranging from vernacular as well as English-language Indian writings to the compromised achievements of German scholars and to the sharp divergences within and among the dominant traditions, the material of these books indexes the emergence of a self-conscious marginality that has engendered a distinctive and productive idiom of sociocultural critique.     

From Zero-Sum to Value-Added Strategies: The Emergence of Knowledge-Based Industrial Policy in the States of the United States

State science policy is industrial policy, shaped by local research and industrial strengths or, conversely, lack of same. States with research strengths relevant to local declining industries attempt to link them in an effort to revive the latter; states lacking research strengths attempt to develop them, especially in areas relevant to local natural resources that have the potential to be the basis of new high-tech industries. Such knowledge-based industrial policies supplement, even if they do not replace, traditional strategies focused upon: (a) creating economic activity based upon natural resources such as harbors or mineral deposits, (b) improving the business climate by lowering taxes, or (c) attracting industry to relocate by offering subsidies. The role of the federal government in science-based industrial policy is still controversial even as it is widely accepted in the states as part of traditional responsibilities for their citizen's economic welfare.