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Prophetic Justice in a Home Haunted by Strangers: Transgressive Solidarity and Trauma in the Work of an Israeli Rabbis’ Group
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Prophetic Justice in a Home Haunted by Strangers Transgressive Solidarity and Trauma in the Work of an Israeli Rabbis’ Group Bettina Prato Trauma, Identity, and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict What does it mean to practice a peace activism simultaneously rooted in Judaism and in human rights, in a context in which trauma-influenced readings of Jewish identity are invoked to justify violating the rights of other people(s)?1 How can the language of universal rights be reconciled with a belief in Jewish uniqueness that includes a history of exceptional suffering and a divinely granted claim to a Promised Land inhabited by others? And, most importantly, what are the theoretical and practical consequences of affirming not just the possibility but the need for such reconciliation in the name of Jewish identity itself, when the latter is routinely interpellated via trauma discourses and institutions? Rather than address these questions in the abstract, this essay sets them in the context of today’s Israel/Palestine, where identity is not just a matter of borders, citizenship, or religious heritage but also the terrain on which traumatic investments born of past and present history are negotiated. This is particularly true in the past two decades, as public references to moments of exceptional suffering in Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian histories—notably but not exclusively the Shoah and the Nakbah2 —seem to have acquired growing significance in discourses on the two ethno-national identities. In particular, and in parallel with a growing popularization of the vocabulary and institutions of psychic trauma in both societies, such moments are increasingly included in national identity narratives as paradigms of ‘‘unspeakability,’’ in line with psychoanalytic views of trauma as suffering that overwhelms people ’s ability to turn events into objects of speech.3 Despite the very different realities of Jewish Israelis and Palestinians , for both peoples the public and private articulation of ethno5 57 B E T T I N A P R AT O national (or ethno-religious) identity takes place today in spaces pervaded by narratives of victimization, partly but not exclusively fed by ongoing conflict.4 In consequence, experiences of suffering seem to acquire a certain inescapability in contemporary narratives of Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian identities, ranging from personal memoirs to the rhetoric of political parties and religious groups. Even when that is not so, the recurrent affirmation of past victimization in authoritative spaces of socialization and identity formation makes it difficult for individuals to at once claim loyalty to one’s ethno-national identity and stand outside the ‘‘national consensus’’ to be critical of narratives of ‘‘innocence’’ and ‘‘victimhood.’’ In addition, the recent popularization of a variety of trauma discourses (from psychotherapeutic discourses to secular and religious discourses of ethno-national trauma) and their integration into narratives and practices of Jewish-Israeli identity has resulted in certain temporal disturbances. In particular, the discursive centrality of a genealogical bond between today’s Israelis and the victims of ‘‘unspeakable’’ and in a sense ‘‘unwitnessable’’ past episodes of Jewish victimization (notably the Shoah) sustains a temporal logic in which past and present insecurities lend each other exceptional urgency. In this context, a possible repetition of the past sometimes seems to outweigh narratives of historical progress, such as those linked to the early phases of Zionist and Israeli history, as if Jewish and Israeli past and present were condemned to merge in the endless repetition of certain moments of ‘‘unwitnessable’’ violence. Taken to its extreme, the temporal logic of collective trauma may lead to the identification of any possible ‘‘content’’ of Jewish-Israeli identity with (past) victimization, as the traumatic elusiveness of events such as the Shoah enables them to be rhetorically transmuted from historical facts into a sort of genealogical ‘‘essence’’ of identity. In today’s Israel, the essentialist merger of ethno-national identity and trauma is for the most part only a possibility, though one that seems at times implicitly affirmed by certain institutions feeding into contemporary discourses of ethno-national Jewish-Israeli trauma. These include psycho-social institutions offering assistance to terror victims, civil-society organizations helping terror survivors and their families, a variety of institutions targeting Holocaust survivors, and certain political and religious groups justifying their political projects with reference to the traumatic ‘‘fate’’ of Jews. More than a mere possibility, however, is the affirmation of a sort of Jewish-Israeli ‘‘calling,’’ a set of ethical, political, and affective obligations advocated as a corollary of ethno...