Anachronism and Morality

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DOI: 10.1177/0263276412460697 2013 30: 29 originally published online 25 March 2013Theory Culture Society

Joyce DalsheimHuman Liberation

Anachronism and Morality: Israeli Settlement, Palestinian Nationalism, and

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DOI: 10.1177/0263276412460697

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Article

Anachronism andMorality: IsraeliSettlement, PalestinianNationalism, andHuman Liberation

Joyce DalsheimUniversity of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA

Abstract

This article is concerned with how the idea of anachronism can interfere with our

thinking about social justice, peace, and human liberation. In the case of Israel/

Palestine the idea of anachronism is deployed among liberals, progressives and radical

theorists, and activists seeking peace and social justice who express animosity

toward religiously motivated settlers and their settlement project. One of the

ways in which they differentiate themselves from these settlers is by suggesting

that settler actions belong to the past. They also pity Palestinians conceived of as

stuck in an oppressive system of settler colonialism that also belongs to the past,

preventing them from moving forward. Both perceptions of anachronism limit the

ways we can think about human liberation and peace. This article sheds light on a

conundrum about who or what belongs to the past, and how thinking in such terms

can contribute to the production of a particular moral collective and to the produc-

tion of enmity. Both perceptions of anachronism frame history as a kind of progress

in which peoples or groups might be ranked according to their levels of civilizational

attainment, an idea we abandoned long ago as an analytical tool, but seem to have

retained as a matter of practical political sympathy and judgment. This temporal

conditioning can interfere with the thinking of even some of the most progressive

social theorists, and mimics a colonial impulse.

Keywords

Benjamin, citizenship, conflict, Fanon, Israel, morality, Palestine

Corresponding author:

Joyce Dalsheim, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 9201 University City Blvd., Charlotte,

NC 28223-001, USA

Email: [email protected]

http://www.sagepub.net/tcs/

Global social movements, like the unprecedented global movementagainst the Iraq war in 2002–3 or the ongoing World Social Forumgatherings, already herald a world that is beyond the logic ofnational liberation – even as the settler colonial hold overPalestine remains as a relic of an antiquated era, and thereforeappears especially intolerable. (Mohammed Bamyeh, 2010: 62)

One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of pro-gress its opponents see it as a historical norm. (Walter Benjamin,1968[1940])

This article is concerned with some of the ways the idea of anachron-ism interferes with our thinking about social justice, peace, and humanliberation. This idea is deployed unevenly and with differing outcomes. Inthe case of Israel/Palestine, the idea of anachronism is sometimesdeployed among liberals, progressives, radical theorists, and activistsseeking peace and social justice, who express animosity toward reli-giously motivated settlers and their settlement project. While activistsand ordinary Israelis frame this animosity as a response to land theft,unequal distribution of resources, violence against Palestinians and over-all social, economic, and other injustices, there is another level of ani-mosity that is largely unconscious and often unspoken. It is this deeperlevel that concerns me here. Beyond describing the violences and injust-ices suffered by Palestinians, this level of analysis touches on an unspo-ken temporal framework that often eludes us as we operate from withinit. Focusing on this level of analysis reveals yet another reason why thesearch for justice is so difficult. There is a sense that within the world ofreal politics, a very limited set of options is available. The Occupationseems to be something temporary that will give way to something betteras history unfolds in stages, but particular political options seem to be allthat is available or possible ‘right now’. Even among the self-describedradical left1 there is a sense of limitation, of all that can be accomplishedfor now; a temporary-ness that requires stages of progress toward ananticipated better future, even though that temporary ‘now’ has beenwith us already for more than 45 years.

One of the ways in which some liberal or left-wing theorists and activ-ists differentiate themselves from religious Jewish settlers in the OccupiedTerritories is by suggesting that settler actions belong to the past.2 Theidea of anachronism is applied differently to Palestinians, who are pitiedfor being stuck in an oppressive system of settler colonialism that belongsto the past, preventing them from moving forward.3 Both perceptions ofanachronism limit the ways we can think about human liberation andabout peace. Both perceptions of anachronism frame history as a kind ofprogress in which peoples or groups might be ranked according to their

30 Theory, Culture & Society 30(3)

levels of civilizational attainment,4 an idea we abandoned long ago as ananalytical tool, but seem to have retained as a matter of practical politicalsympathy and judgment. One result of this temporal framework is afailure to engage with people we see as despicable Others, in this case,religious settlers. This failure prevents us from seeing some of the ways inwhich settlers, generally conceived of as radical, right-wing ultra-nation-alists, might embody ideas that are outside the limited imaginings ofpolitical frameworks based on territorial nationalism and human sover-eignty. My central point, however, is that ultimately, seeing the dilemmaof the settlers and the dilemma of the Palestinians as linked to historicalprogress undermines the objectives of those who seek peace and socialjustice, foreclosing possible ways of imagining futures and reproducingenmity instead of liberation. This is not to suggest that the terms liber-ation or peace or justice are somehow self-evident, nor is it to point tosome pre-existing state of human freedom. To fully interrogate theseterms is beyond the scope of this article. Instead I use them as theyarise in the field, including their use by scholars, activists and ordinaryIsraelis.5

If we substitute the word ‘nationalism’ for the word ‘Fascism’ in thequote above from Benjamin, the statement continues to make sense. In abroad way, this article considers the difficulty of thinking outside cur-rently available models of political belonging as we consider solutions toviolent conflicts and seek social justice. It is difficult to move away fromthinking about the state as the guarantor of rights and liberties, andbeyond thinking of such states as territorially defined. I would like topropose that this difficulty is partly conditioned by the ways in whichmorality is intertwined with ideas about time. I will argue that the mostpowerful contemporary discourses of conflict and its resolution arefounded on a progressive temporality that sections off that which belongsto the present and future from that which ought to be relegated to thedustbin of the past. Walter Benjamin was acutely aware of the hazards ofsuch thinking. He warned us that naıve beliefs in progress always movingus forward through time to a better future might undermine even revo-lutionary thinkers.6 Speaking of Fascism, he explained that ‘the amaze-ment that the things we are experiencing are ‘‘still’’ possible . . . is notphilosophical. This amazement’, he wrote, ‘is not the beginning of know-ledge – unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives riseto it is untenable’ (Benjamin, 1968[1940]: 257, emphasis in original). Inmany ways, we have yet to fully assimilate Benjamin’s prescience, and wethereby run the risk of following a path toward the very horrors we seekto eliminate.

In this article I will focus on how such temporal conditioning leads totwo contradictory positions. One position prevents people from engagingwith others outside their moral collective because those others’ ways ofliving are considered a thing of the past. The other prompts those inside

Dalsheim 31

the moral collective to suggest outdated modes of liberation for peoplewho are imagined to have been unjustly left behind as history sweeps bythem. Who or what constitutes that moral collective should becomeclearer as this article progresses; however, I would like to emphasizethat it is a fluid collective without clear or consistent boundaries. It isa collective that might be described as Western, secular, liberal humanist,leftist, peace seeking, or liberationist, keeping in mind that all of theseterms have multiple definitions.7 The point is that this moral collective isproduced, reproduced and negotiated in part through processes of dif-ferentiation that include the kind of temporal thinking under consider-ation here. Some ‘people out of time’ arouse anger, revulsion andcondemnation, while others inspire sympathy. That revulsion not onlyprevents engagement with the despised, but it also mimics the very colo-nial impulse that progressive and radical theorists and activists struggleagainst.

My examples of how left-wing activists deploy the idea of anachron-ism against religiously motivated settlers and in favor of Palestiniansovereignty come primarily from my fieldwork among religiously moti-vated settlers in post-1967 Israeli occupied territories and movementsopposed to them within Israel (Dalsheim, 2005, 2008a, 2008b, 2011)and from additional visits in 2010 and 2012 (Dalsheim, 2010, nd) andreports from the field. To illustrate the problem of a secular progressivetemporality deployed toward the goal of liberating Palestinians, I willprovide a close reading of some of the work of Mohammed Bamyeh(2003, 2010), as an example of scholarship by a social theorist who hasbeen thinking deeply about issues of liberation, particularly in Palestinein the context of contemporary globalization. Such a reading, I pro-pose, could easily be extended to numerous other scholars and activists.In the quote above, Bamyeh characterizes the logic of national liber-ation as a thing of the past, or as something that will soon pass asglobal social movements herald a new stage in history. His underlyingbelief in ‘progress’ is signaled by his fury or amazement that settlercolonialism is still possible in Palestine. As I will explain later in thearticle, Bamyeh problematizes nationalist liberation as a universalistsolution, while highlighting current local struggles that make up aglobal social movement as the wave of the future. The universal (athing of the past) is replaced by the local; however, as we shall see,the local solution Bamyeh offers for Israelis and Palestinians is definedby nationalist parameters (a thing of the past). His local solution alsoparticipates in producing enmity as it marginalizes particular peoplethrough an alternative narrative of the past on which to base collectiveidentity.8 Bamyeh’s idea of a single new collective narrative, and thespecific details of that narrative, ultimately undermine his own goals of‘recognizing the humanity of ourselves and others’ in the spirit ofFanon that he invokes.


I will return to Bamyeh later in the article. First I will illustrate someof the ways in which the idea of anachronism helps constitute a moralcollective in the space of Israel/Palestine, how that idea complicates thepolitics of conflict and injustice, and then consider some of its unexpectedoutcomes. I will suggest that the anger and revulsion at religiously moti-vated settlers in the Israeli occupied territories, partly expressed throughdeployment of the idea that they belong to the past, prevents us fromseeing them fully. When we turn away we fail to notice how some of thesesettlers think or rethink their relationship to territory in ways that mightmove beyond territorial nationalism. While this analysis might beextended to other radical religionists in Israel/Palestine, such as membersof Hamas or Islamic Jihad, these groups are marginalized in differentways from religiously motivated Jewish settlers.9 The case of radicalPalestinian Islamists has lost its ability to stand entirely outside the com-pass or to test the limits of liberal theories of politics. We perceive themas subalterns with legitimate reasons for rebelling against Israeli oppres-sion; we may abhor their use of violence, but guess that it might dis-appear were they liberated, and then engaged as national actors withinthe larger international community. Having fitted them into a broadercategory of political liberation movements, we have difficulty using themto look critically at the elements of political thought they mightchallenge.

But when we look at Israeli settlers, we often react differently.Although some liberals and progressives express empathy forPalestinian radical religionists – perhaps abhorring some of their tacticswhile understanding their plight – religious Jewish settlers remain Otherswith whom most of the left can feel no such empathy. For liberalIsraelis, as well as for progressive international scholars and activists,they remain an unredeemable problem, a bone stuck in the throat.Both their actions and their goals anger us. Rather than people seekingliberation, we see them as land thieves. Rather than subaltern national-ists, we see them as imperialists, a political category we cannot takeseriously as a moral option. The example of Israeli settlers retains itsability to shock, to disquiet, to unsettle, and to challenge the politicalpositions we take for granted. And in so doing, they allow us to see newthings.10

Elsewhere (Dalsheim, 2011), I have explored the processes throughwhich Jewish Israelis in favor of and opposed to settlement in post-1967 Occupied Territories constitute their collective morality through adiscourse of conflict, and I have conceptualized these processes as a‘desire to differentiate’, pointing to the commonalities among settlersin a settler-colonial social formation. What I will concentrate onhere is how that differentiation works through ideas about time. Theacademy is not immune to the collective constitution of moral selves,nor to deeply ingrained epistemologies that form our thinking and

Dalsheim 33

that may interfere with the goals we set for ourselves. This article doesnot argue for or against the moral or political positions of Israelis,Palestinians, or scholars and activists who have taken positions on theIsraeli–Palestinian conflict. Instead, it tries to shed light on the strangepuzzle of how thinking about people as anachronisms contributes to theproduction of a particular moral collective and to the production ofenmity.

The puzzle of anachronism in this case consists of three simultaneouspropositions:

1. That religiously motivated Jewish settlers in post-1967 Israeli occupied terri-tories are an anachronism for at least three reasons: their actions belong to apre-state past, their beliefs are not modern, and their temporal ideology isabhorrent.

2. That territorial nationalism belongs to the past. In an era of globalization,national belonging is becoming less important as a form of identity on the onehand, and less reliable as a guarantee of human and civil rights on the other.Nationalism is no longer the best means for achieving human liberation.

3. That Palestinians still need national liberation, national identity, and ethno-national territorial sovereignty. Israelis opposed to post-1967 occupation areoften in favor of national liberation for Palestinians, as are scholars whodeconstruct ideas about national belonging and activists in the internationalcommunity and the global social movement. Even when nationalism is notnecessarily recommended for Palestinian liberation, ‘the Palestinians’ remainimagined as a national group.

What these propositions share is an underlying notion of the natural-ness or taken-for-grantedness of the nation as the basis of social or pol-itical order, the ground on which to make claims and to guarantee rights.(This is the secular position: it is men who guarantee men’s rights andwho have the sovereign power to do so.) The three propositions are,however, also differently nuanced depending upon whether the conflictin Israel/Palestine is conceptualized as a struggle between two nations fora particular piece of territory, or as a post-colonial struggle for independ-ence. These are currently the most widely rehearsed conceptualizations;each is limiting and each produces settlers and Palestinians as anachron-istic for different reasons. Before we get to the details of that puzzle, I willbriefly introduce the field and some of the ways in which temporality isdeployed in Israel, in particular in processes of differentiation.

The Israeli socio-political-religious scene tends to be depicted in bothpopular and academic discourse in sets of binary oppositions: right–left,religious–secular, in favor of–opposed to settlement in post-1967 occu-pied territories. These complex and overlapping divisions are often con-flated to the simple opposition of left-wing secular versus right-wingreligious, and are considered a part of what is known locally as the‘rift among the people’.


The so-called rift among the people became exacerbated followingthe 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. That eventbrought the split into focus with media attention on the religious com-munity from which the assassin came, and a collective soul-searching inreaction to the shock of one Jew purposely killing another for politicalor religious reasons. However, the commonly understood political dis-tinctions between left and right, secular and religious, have a longerhistory.

The ‘left’ of Israeli Zionist politics emerged from the socialist or laborZionist movement that arose in Europe in response to a growing sensethat Jews could never become fully assimilated or fully accepted inEurope. Today, it tends to be associated with a liberal humanism, withthe secular kibbutz movement, and with what is known as the ‘peacecamp’ in Israel. It generally includes those Israelis who are opposed tothe occupation of territories gained in the 1967 war. This left, however, isnot exclusively secular. It includes shades and variations of secularity andreligiosity, including some orthodox Jews, particularly those often called‘modern Orthodox’ who are generally viewed as distinct from Haredi orultra-Orthodox Jews. In addition to the Zionist left, there is a moreradical, non- or anti-Zionist left that includes Israelis who may agreewith many of the left-wing Zionist positions like opposition to post-1967 occupation, but are opposed to the Zionist project, which manysee as the colonization of Palestine.

The ‘right’, on the other hand, which cannot be divorced frommodern discourses of liberalism, is historically associated with a morehawkish position, with a belief in the right of the Jewish people toestablish a state on what is known as ‘greater Israel’ or ‘the whole ofIsrael’ (Eretz Israel ha-Shlema). This position has historically beenopposed to relinquishing territory occupied following the 1967 warand has often been aligned with more traditional or religious Jewswho share a belief in the right to settle on the ancient biblical Landof Israel. Of course, the right is not exclusively the domain of thereligious, and it includes its own versions and shades of religiosityand secularity. In addition, there is an Orthodox Jewish communitythat rejects modern political Zionism and therefore does not fit intothe left–right spectrum of Israeli politics (Rabkin, 2006). Ethnicity,class, and other dimensions of social identity further complicate thesecategories. These categories have a disciplining power, marginalizing orsilencing those whose beliefs and actions do not fit easily into such left/right and secular/religious distinctions, and leaving little room toaccount for what appear as unusual alliances. I have written in greaterdetail about such positions and the difficulty of expressing or actingupon them elsewhere (Dalsheim, 2011: ch. 7).11 Part of my goal here isto understand the nature of deeply embedded frameworks that makesuch positions difficult to articulate or recognize.

Dalsheim 35

Space, Time, Morality: The Nation and AnachronisticSettlers

The former Jewish communities in the Gaza Strip portrayed themselvesto the outside world in a number of ways through newspaper articles,public protests and private discussions, museum displays, and films.One particularly interesting example was a film produced by thepeople living in the Jewish communities of Gaza before they were for-cibly removed by the Israeli government in the summer of 2005. Thefilm, Between the Sand Dunes, was primarily employed as part of thecampaign to garner support among Israelis for their cause; however, itdid not inspire a sense of solidarity among left-wing, secular Israelis.Indeed, it provoked quite the opposite reaction. When I showed thisfilm to left-wing kibbutz members who lived near the Gaza Strip and toleft-wing political activists in other parts of the country, it infuriatedpeople for a number of reasons, including the idea that these settlersand their project belong to the past.

Between the Sand Dunes is a carefully constructed and edited repre-sentation of the religious settler community. It was one of the produc-tions shown to visitors, including school children, who came to amuseum and visitors’ center in the Gaza settlements prior to the disen-gagement, which is where I first saw it. The film depicts images andscenes that evoke a specific positive self-image, one that creates a senseof comfort, solidarity, or ‘home’ among like-minded viewers, includingmembers of the nationalist religious camp in Israel and some more right-wing secular Israelis as well.

Between the Sand Dunes depicts life in the settlements of Gush Katif,focusing on the beautiful seaside landscape, the crimson sunsets, androws of palm trees. It emphasizes the industrious settlers who workedhard developing agriculture in the arid and non-arable sand dunes, show-ing vast expanses of greenhouses. The film tells of the special techniquesof planting and raising vegetables and flowers in the sands of the Gazaarea. It zooms in with close-ups of the innocent faces of young children,with their large, deep brown eyes and endearing smiles. All the while amelodious song in the background lends an atmosphere coinciding withthe innocence in those eyes. A voice sings:

Here is a strip of land that kisses the waves. Here, where people livewith love, and in their hearts there is hope . . .here people preservethe sanctity of the land . . .Here in the Land of Israel!

There is one short scene of horror and burning. This was an incident inwhich Palestinians from the surrounding area had attacked the settlers.Otherwise, there were no Palestinians in sight, no large brown eyes ofPalestinian children or men and women at work. Their presence, the


enormous population, so much greater than the Jewish population ofGaza, was hidden from view.

The images in Between the Sand Dunes provoke outrage among thoseopposed to the settlement project in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.For example, I was once invited to speak about the impending disen-gagement, then an issue of current events, to a group of fifth graders at aschool in Jerusalem. When I showed this film to the class their historyand civics teacher, who is also a left-wing political activist, told me of hisoutrage, and methodically analyzed the film with his students andpointed out the problems of how the film represents the issue. Notonly did the film make it appear as though there were no Palestiniansexcept for violent terrorists, but the Israeli flag was also repeatedly shownflying above it all as though this was the story of the entire nation, of allIsraelis. The teacher was offended by this representation that certainlydid not reflect his position, nor that of all the children in the class, whichincluded Palestinian citizens of Israel.

The gap in emotional responses to the sights portrayed in this film isan indication of the cultural training of the senses. Reading the land-scape, like reading any text, involves interpretations that are based inprevious training, learning, and reading experiences (Starrett, 2003).Interpretations are intertextual, drawing on previous knowledge andcodes, and falling back on learned narratives. Variously situatedgroups read their own moral superiority into these representations asthey create and re-create their identities in the process. Religious settlersand their supporters identified positively, seeing the settlers as hardwork-ing, pious people carrying out the work of God against all odds. Secular,liberal, and left-wing viewers expressed outrage and identify themselvesas diametrically opposed.

Left-wing, secular Israelis were infuriated by the images in the film firstof all because the force and military might that made those settlementspossible is missing from the depiction. Kibbutz members I interviewedwho lived in the surrounding communities, some of whom protestedagain the Gaza settlements, explained that such force was necessary inpre-state years to ensure the survival of the Jewish people but was exces-sive and unnecessary now.12 They were infuriated by the particular waythis story is told because it so closely resembles the way the pioneeringsocialists depicted themselves in pre-state years.13 The film depicts ahard-working, honest people who till the soil and make the desertbloom. The people in the film have built a beautiful, simple, idyllic com-munity, for which they have made many sacrifices including physicalinjury and loss of life as they stand firm against a violent enemy. Thereis something uncanny about this film that the uninitiated might miss. If itwere in black and white, some of the clothing were different and thereligious elements removed, this film could be a portrayal of kibbutzlife in pre-state and early state years. From the point of view of kibbutz

Dalsheim 37

members, descendants of the Socialist Zionists who established the state,these settlers have stolen and perverted their pure and honorable story(Dalsheim, 2005). These settlers are living practices that belong in thepast, practices that had to take place in the years before there was a stateand an army. In the early days, settlement was essential, there was nochoice, and while there was force and violence involved, that was neces-sary then to establish a state and preserve the Jewish people. Now, there isa state and an army, and these practices are excessive, activists whoprotested against settlements told me. The settlers are an anachronismand must be brought into the present of the national collective by beingremoved from their homes and moved across the geographical divide intomorally acceptable territory. Some of those who protested against thesettlements carried signs that read ‘and the sons (children) shall return toour borders’, a play on the biblical quote (Jeremiah 31:17) ‘vay shavubanim l’gvulam’ (literally ‘and the sons return to their borders’, alsotranslated as ‘and your children will return to their territory’), implyingthat these settlements are beyond the legitimate borders and constituted amoral transgression. This idea also ironically seems to imagine thesesettlers as somehow in exile. It is almost as though the political redemp-tion of the nation hinges upon returning these sons of Israel to the pre-1967 borders.14 Of course, the residents of Gush Katif in the Gaza Stripwould quickly point out that the establishment of their communities didnot require the removal of Palestinians. Unlike some of their brethren inthe kibbutz communities inside the borders of the pre-1967 Green Line,they did not build their homes on the ruins of Palestinian communities.15

Despite the obvious continuities of the Zionist project on both sides ofthe Green Line, the notion that Zionism itself could be deemed ana-chronistic is somehow protected by deploying the idea of anachronismagainst religiously motivated settlers and against settlement in theOccupied Territories.

Seeing settler actions as out of place in the contemporary world is oneway in which they are portrayed as belonging to the past. There are atleast two other ways in which these settlers are marginalized as belongingto an earlier time, outside the contemporary liberal moral collective.First, certain kinds of religious beliefs and practices are often imaginedas holding society back from advancement or turning it backwards, limit-ing personal freedoms that are the signs of an open, modern societywhere individuals can pursue their own paths and fulfill their owndesires.16 These ideas are part of what Charles Taylor (2002, 2007) hascalled a ‘modern social imaginary’, based on the idea that human beingsare ‘rational, sociable agents who are meant to collaborate in peace totheir mutual benefit. This underlying theory provides an idea of moralorder, of how to live together in society’ (Taylor, 2002: 92).

Two other temporal frameworks, and the moral and political assump-tions associated with them, are embodied by settlers, and impinge on


Taylor’s secular ideal of living together. The Jewish community ofHebron, for example, has been described by secular and left-wingIsraelis as reminiscent of the Jewish ghettos of Europe. The HebronJews are a tiny community of about 50 families and yeshiva students(estimated at between 500 and 800 people) considered among the mostradical, violent and aggressive in the effect their community has had onthe Palestinians who lived and owned shops in and near the Jewishsettlement.17 It is a place where the injuries of settlement are still freshand palpable. The Palestinian shops on what was once a bustling shop-ping street have recently been shuttered, displacing businesses and inter-fering both with freedom of movement and with Palestinians’ ability tomake a living (see Freedland, 2012).

‘Why would they want to live like that?’ one father of three in his mid40 s, who lived on a kibbutz, asked disparagingly of the Jews in Hebron,expressing a sentiment I heard over and over when I spoke to secular andleft-wing Israelis. Why would they want to go back in time to the daysbefore nationalism brought liberation to the Jews, creating a state wherethey could live freely, flourish economically and culturally?18 Part of thesecularist ethos of Jewish nationalism is precisely about individual free-doms in contradistinction to the world of European shtetls, and so thisfather of three asked why these people would want to live ‘as though theywere still in those ghettos’. In Israel people can run their own lives, free tobe Jewish without assimilating to a hegemonic gentile culture or to theconfining elements of Orthodox religious beliefs. One older kibbutzwoman, among the founding members of her community, was adamantabout the importance of being freely Jewish, expressing one’s Jewishnessany number of ways and still being Jewish even when one does not pray,attend synagogue or keep kosher. Israelis can wear bikinis on the beachand spend Saturday in coffee shops and restaurants rather than in syna-gogue (precisely the activities that religious settlers point to as indicativeof lack of values among the secular). They can celebrate Jewish holidaysfreely and according to their own interpretations. And they don’t have tolive in those crowded conditions, walled off from surroundingcommunities.

Another set of beliefs interfering with the secular age seems to reacheven further back in time, beyond the period of state formation andbeyond Jewish history in Europe. Many of the Israelis who support atwo-state solution see religious settlers as threatening to the possibility ofpeace with the Palestinians because their beliefs about the sanctity of theHoly Land threaten the possibility of territorial compromise. SomeIsraelis express fears that any attempt to remove settlers could result incivil war. Religious settlers see themselves as bravely redeeming God’sancient promise to the Jewish people. Other Israelis see these actions asthe theft of Palestinian land, the construction of homes in politicallycontested territory, the exercise of face-to-face violence against

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Palestinians, and the destruction of their property. Religiously motivatedsettlers see themselves as acting on the knowledge that God gave themthe Land, and that it is their right and their responsibility to live on theLand and to live there according to the requirements of the Torah inorder to fulfill their duty as Jews and hasten the coming of the messiah.However, many left-wing and secular Israelis, as well as other religiousJews, question the authenticity of these beliefs as Judaism, and disbelievereligious settlers’ belief in their beliefs. (They can’t possibly believe thatstuff, the liberal argument goes; the settlers use religion instrumentallyfor political purposes.)19 This ideology, secular liberals argue, isemployed to justify extreme territorial nationalism. Thus, LarryAbramson (2009: 284) recalls

participating in anti-occupation and anti-settlement demonstrationsas far back as the early 1970s in which our slogans equatedthe concept of sacred land with idolatry, a political theology wecondemned as diametrically opposed to true Jewish – and evenZionist – values.

In addition to perceptions that settler actions belong to a pre-state pastand violate ideals of secular coexistence, religiously motivated settlers arealso despised as anachronistic for their temporal ideology. In otherwords, their beliefs about time make them a particularly repugnant andinauthentic thing of the past.20 Even worse perhaps than recreating theghettos of Europe, religiously motivated settlers live according to a tem-poral ideology and a social imaginary in which biblical ancestors have avital role in contemporary life. Religious settlers think of themselves asliving biblical stories in the present. In this sacred temporality, time is notexclusively linear, and among the faithful Jews in Hebron as well as thecommunities of Gush Katif in the Gaza Strip, time was experienced ascyclical or as a spiral relationship between past and present. Each yearand each season, the past was repeated, yet changed, as the faithfulmoved closer and closer in their relationship to God, watching thedivine plan unfold and bringing redemption nearer. The rabbi of agirls’ high school (ulpana) in Neve Dekelim, the largest community inthe settlements of Gush Katif, speaking at a Purim event prior to thedisengagement, reminded his audience that ‘what happened then is in factnow’. The story of Esther, retold on the holiday of Purim, tells a tale inwhich all reason and logic in the world is turned on its head, and one canno longer distinguish good from evil. ‘This’, the rabbi said, was ‘preciselywhat is happening now.’ The disengagement plan was devoid of all logic;the world had turned upside down and nothing made sense when aJewish government would consider removing Jews from the Land ofIsrael. ‘There is no difference’, the rabbi explained, ‘then is now. Andanyone who does not understand this is sorely mistaken.’


Secular narratives that are constrained by the contours of a particularlinear progressive temporality cannot contain the ideas expressed by thisrabbi, and the behavior of those settlers who did not make practicalarrangements for their removal from the land could then only be inter-preted as either irrational or purposely defiant.21 Although parallels canbe found, for example, in social scientific thought that seeks patterns orrules to explain human history and uncover a greater truth in ‘humannature’, or predict the ways in which these forces will eventually beworked out,22 the rabbi’s predictions of repeated patterns – then isnow – seemed absurd from a specifically progressivist temporalperspective.

During my fieldwork, I interviewed a number of left-wing secularIsraelis who explained their disdain for religiously motivated settlers byrecalling their interactions with settlers while guarding them as soldiers inthe reserves. These recollections illustrate conflicting temporal ideologies.Some of the most disturbing stories came from Hebron, where soldierstold of settler children throwing stones at an elderly Palestinian womanladen with packages. Why don’t these children, who are being raised in adeeply religious manner, offer to help the old woman with her packages?One soldier who grew up on a kibbutz, but now lives with his wife andchildren outside Tel Aviv, said he asked the children what they weredoing; why were they throwing stones? What had the woman done todeserve this? The children explained that they were throwing stones inretribution for the Arab massacre of Jews in Hebron. That was in 1929;now it was 2005. The soldier was confused and outraged. A stonememorial placed in a wall of the Muslim quarter in the Old City ofJerusalem marks the site where a Jewish man was killed in the 1990s,presumably by local Palestinians. The placard reads: ‘On this spotElhanan Aharon Atteli was murdered by the evil ones . . .By the spillingof his blood, we shall live on.’ This is followed by: ‘Remember whatAmalek did to you on your way’ (Deut. 25: 17). The Amalekites aredepicted in the Bible as a tribe of nomadic people who attacked theIsraelites during the exodus from Egypt (Exod. 17: 8–17). They appearin other places in the text and the interpretations of what is required bythe injunction to ‘remember Amalek’ are varied. In this case, the term hascome to stand for any and all those who are considered ‘enemies’ of theJewish people.

Time, in this case, is not the linear, progressive time – or historicism –that some critical scholars have argued leaves no room for representingsubaltern Others, and that I am arguing creates certain blind spots.23

This time is cyclical and spiraling, and place is spiraling too. The pastis the present and Amalek is the Palestinian woman in Hebron.

Thinking about religiously motivated settlers as anachronistic, morallyrepugnant and threatening to security has a disciplining force for inter-national scholars, activists, and liberal Israelis. It prevents engagement

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with them, even making research difficult because the researcher’s ownmoral integrity can be called into question as somehow supporting occu-pation or as sympathizing with settlers and not with Palestinians.24 It isoften considered morally acceptable to cross the border into occupiedterritory to meet with Palestinians, but wrong to have anything at all todo with religious settlers. It is wrong to make any purchases in thesesettlements because doing so supports the settlement project. But themoral community being created by these judgments is a fragile one, forit ignores the deeply entangled nature of economic systems. If it is wrongto make purchases that support the post-1967 settlement project, then itmust also be wrong to pay taxes in Israel and wrong to purchase prod-ucts in Tel Aviv and, if we really want to trace the sources of funding, itwould ultimately be unacceptable to work and pay taxes in the UnitedStates, which provides economic, material, military and political supportfor Israeli settlement policies. Is it then also wrong for Palestinians them-selves to work in the settlements in agriculture and in construction? Suchcomplications, of course, are very problematic for practical politicalmobilization and unsettling to the constitution of moral selves amongprogressive Israelis and left-wing activists, and scholars in the inter-national community.

Lack of engagement with settler communities can prevent us fromseeing the range of ways of being and sets of beliefs found amongthem, including some ideas and practices that move beyond the limitedimaginings of territorial nationalism, even though the settlers are oftendepicted as extreme nationalists.25 Even when these ways of being arereported in the news or in academic texts, we tend to delegitimize them.These are exceptions, fringe beliefs and behaviors, the actions of a smallgroup of crazy people, I have often heard left-wing Israelis or scholarsand activists in the international community comment. But my researchand reports from the field suggest otherwise. Indeed, the ideas expressedby some religiously motivated settlers about national sovereignty seem tobe becoming more porous than they were in the past and more flexiblethan some of the nationalist ideas currently found among many secularZionists. These ideas might be taken to be variations on some currentways of theorizing about ‘flexible citizenship’ (Ong, 1993), and mightcompare to progressive political positions that also consider nationalismand national liberation a thing of the past in the current context ofglobalization.

Flexible Citizenship of the Settler Variety

Contrary to popular ideas and representations of the monolithic, fanatic,uncritical mindset of religious settlers, my research reveals a range ofpositions and beliefs among these settlers, including various ideasabout living with Palestinians (Dalsheim, 2011). Prior to Israel’s


unilateral withdrawal in 2005, a number of religious settlers sought waysof remaining in the Gaza Strip even if the Israeli government decided toimplement the disengagement and withdraw from the territory. I encoun-tered a range of ideas among the Gaza settlers and some of their sup-porters who were thinking about how they had been living on the sacredland and about their relationship with Palestinians. While many settlerswere angry at those Israelis they thought did not understand how import-ant it was to the future of the state for Israel to maintain sovereignty andfor the settlers to remain in their homes in the Gaza Strip, there wereother ideas as well. For example, one weekend a group of women met totalk, think and pray together about the impending disengagement. Inthat meeting I heard suggestions that maybe the settlers had been placingtoo much emphasis on the commandment to live on the sacred land andhad neglected some other important commandments. There were somewho thought they had not been paying enough attention to their rela-tionship with their Palestinian neighbors and some who thought theknee-jerk response to remain steadfast and strong in the face ofPalestinian violence was aggressive, and that God was sending messagesthat this was not the way His people should behave. Some settlers I spoketo were seeking ways of arranging to remain on the sacred land withPalestinian agreement. Some thought they might retain Israeli citizen-ship, but live beyond the borders of Israel. They would be in Palestine,but not citizens there. Although this idea never came to fruition, nor wasit clear that it would have broad appeal, there were those who wanted tolive in the Holy Land with the people God placed together with them;surely God must have meant for them to live on that land, piouslyupholding the commandments of the Torah with the Palestinians Godhad also placed there.

Recent visits to the Jewish community in Hebron suggest some peoplethere and elsewhere in the West Bank (Mayne, 2012) are also thinkingabout how to live with Palestinians, remaining in Hebron whether or notit remains under Israeli control. In addition, there are religiously moti-vated settlers who have demonstrated against the construction of theseparation barrier/wall, a move that might be seen as reflecting sharedinterests with some Palestinians. In light of current ideas about territorialcompromise and the establishment of a Palestinian state, some people areseeking ways to continue living on the sacred land. They speak aboutwanting to live in peace and cooperation with their Palestinian neighbors(Ettinger and Lior, 2011).26 Jewish settlers have been contemplating theirrelationship with Palestinians, and for some the importance of livingunder Israeli sovereignty may be secondary to their insistence on remain-ing near the biblical ancestors who are buried in Hebron, or staying inother places in the West Bank/Judea and Samaria. This is not because ofa newfound fondness for the Palestinians, nor does it mark an end tosettler violence against Palestinians; however, some settlers have begun

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speaking out publicly about their interest in improving cooperative rela-tionships with their Palestinian neighbors. But according to many left-wing and secular liberals, these settlers don’t mean what they say. Theyare just manipulators. Many of these disbelievers are also seriously con-cerned that the growth of settlement has created a new reality that willmake separation into two states practically impossible.27 In other words,the idea that settlers might not be wedded to traditional ideas aboutnational sovereignty threatens the possibility of reconciling conflictthrough national liberation.

Flexible citizenship is an idea borrowed from Aihwa Ong (1993, 2006),who is concerned with minority identity formation at the intersections ofnational and transnational political arenas.28 My adaptation of the termhere is intended to suggest that religious settlers also negotiate shiftingdiscursive terrains as they are produced as fundamentalists and asspoilers to peace through the processes discussed in this article. Ong(1993: 771) explains that her

notion of flexible citizenship, linked to flexible accumulation andmobile investors, suggests that the citizenship concept should beexamined in the context of the global economy and the range ofmeanings it can have for different groups of people. While peoplecontinue to fight and even die for their particular visions of citizen-ship (Anderson, 1991[1983]),29 as in the ‘ethnic cleansing’ campaignin Bosnia, for many wealthy Overseas Chinese, citizenship in theprofound sense of duty toward or identification with a particularnation-state is minimal.

In the case at hand, we find religious settlers placing less value on theiridentification with the nation-state and the particular kind of nationalistcitizenship loyalty Ong adopts from Anderson. Perhaps this is not aresult of economic interests, at least not on the part of the settlers, butit has been suggested that the current peace process and ideas of terri-torial compromise are directly influenced by the forces of global capital-ism.30 For example, Israel can remain competitive in the global economythrough developing its high-tech industries that do not require additionalland as agriculture would. And, recently, Bank of Israel GovernorStanley Fischer was quoted as saying that Israel could become a leadingeconomy globally if a Middle East peace deal is reached, partiallybecause it could spend less on its military (Scheer and Rabinovitch,2010). Thus, one might argue flexible ideas about citizenship among reli-giously motivated settlers can be construed as part of the disarticulationof the elements we tend to think of as coming together to form contem-porary citizenship: rights, entitlements, territoriality, a nation (Ong,2006: 6).


Beyond the Logic of National Liberation

The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amaze-ment is not the beginning of knowledge – unless it is the knowledgethat the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable. (WalterBenjamin, 1968[1940]: 257, emphasis in original)

Religiously motivated settlers in post-1967 Israeli occupied territories areeasily depicted and despised in abstraction. They are essentialized Others.Their presumed extreme territorial nationalism combined with deep faithin the righteousness of their path – along with the direct acts of violenceand expropriation in which some of them engage based on this faith – isdisturbing to progressive Israelis and activists and to scholars in theinternational community, a disturbance which prevents us from under-standing that some of these settlers remain committed to territory but notnecessarily to ethno-territorial nationalism.31 Yet some who oppose thesettlement project do so precisely in order to protect territorial national-ism as the ground of liberation.

This brings us back to Mohammed Bamyeh’s quote at the opening ofthis article. Bamyeh is not alone in arguing that national liberation is athing of the past, that this is no longer the way to achieve human liber-ation. Nor is he alone in understanding that nationalism itself, particu-larly ethno-nationalism, is rife with dangers and violences, with roots infear and hatred of the ‘other’, and affinities with exclusionary practicesand racism, even if territorial nationalism is still the norm in worldaffairs. The question, then, is why this thing of the past – a social for-mation that has been criticized as cruel, whose quests for post-colonialliberation ultimately led to what David Scott (2004: 2) describes as ‘acuteparalysis of will . . . rampant corruption and vicious authoritarianism’ –would still be recommended or wished for on behalf of solidarity withPalestinians? In other words, what happens when some anachronisms(the ideas and practices of the settlers) provoke revulsion while others(the Palestinian quest for national sovereignty) inspire sympathy? Whathappens when the idea of belonging to the past on the one hand, andhaving been left behind by a presumably progressive movement of his-tory, on the other, are deployed in the constitution of moral collectives?What other ways of thinking about time might allow us to ‘bring aboutas much equality as possible, given differences’, as Sari Nusseibeh, thePalestinian president of al-Quds University, recently suggested(Watzman, 2011), or to ‘recognize the humanity, in all its complexity,of our own selves and others’ (Bamyeh, 2010: 53)?

I would like to reconsider Bamyeh’s insights about struggles for liber-ation in what he describes as the ‘post-colonial and globalized world’, inrelation to the puzzle set out at the opening of this article. That puzzle,

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you remember, consists of three propositions: (1) religiously motivatedJewish settlers in post-1967 Israeli occupied territories are anachronisticfor their supposedly extreme territorial nationalism; (2) territorial nation-alism belongs to the past: in an era of globalization, national belonging isbecoming less important as a form of identity and less reliable as a guar-antee of human and civil rights, and is no longer the best means forachieving human liberation; and (3) Palestinians still need national lib-eration and ethno-national territorial sovereignty, or at the very leastneed to continue to be imagined as a national group.

Bamyeh (2010: 62), in thinking about a world that is ‘beyond the logicof national liberation’, writes that ‘the settler-colonial hold over Palestineremains as a relic of an antiquated era, and therefore appears especiallyintolerable’. Why is it especially intolerable? Is it that settler-colonialismshould have long since passed from this world? That would depend onhow one conceptualizes a settler-colonial social formation.32 Settler-colonialism has been conceptualized as a structure formed by invasion(Wolfe, 1999). While such a structure might undergo transformations, itcannot pass like an event imagined on a timeline, followed by anotherevent. That structure is still in place in the Americas, in Australia, andelsewhere. Or is it especially intolerable that this particular group ofpeople has not passed through the stage of national liberation, a stagethat has been called both cruel and a failure in other contexts? Why, ifIsrael has been so widely criticized for its ethno-nationalism, should wepromote another ethno-national state alongside it? And more to thepoint of this article, how does an insidious secular progressive temporalideology interfere with the thought of even such an insightful theorist asMohammed Bamyeh?

‘This is the twenty-first century, how could this be happening now?’The words belong to a resident of the town of Jenin in the WestBank, reached by a radio station on his cellular phone in the springof 2002 amid the slaughter wrought by the Israeli militaryOperation Defensive Shield . . . In an age of globalization andreduced sovereignty, the time of nations and their states seems tobe passing. Yet over Palestine today hovers a logic fully out of jointwith its times. The old-fashioned colonialism that had devouredPalestine shows no signs of relenting. If anything, the opposite ishappening. Today we witness a far more fanatic religious attach-ment to a greater ‘Eretz Yisrael’ than had been the case half acentury ago.

The tragedy of modern Palestine, beyond all the horrors and suf-fering associated with it, is doubly tragic in that it appears to have


been caused not by any necessary logic of history but rather bycountertimely events. (Bamyeh, 2003)

The entire tragic situation belongs to the past, and it is this temporalplacement that makes the situation especially intolerable. But WalterBenjamin teaches us that asking how these things can still be happening‘is not the beginning of knowledge – unless it is the knowledge that theview of history which gives rise to it is untenable’. In other words,Benjamin warns against precisely the kind of temporal ideology thatlies behind Bamyeh’s words. On the one hand, the religious zeal forEretz Yisrael, which of course refers to beliefs and practices traced tothe influence of religiously motivated settlers, is an abhorrent thing of thepast. And, on the other, Palestinians have been left behind by the sweep-ing tides of history which have granted to most other nations the realityof territorial sovereignty.

Thus it would seem natural to argue that Palestine must be allowedto resume its rightful but long-postponed march along the path ofdecolonization and independence. Yet, in Palestine we confront thepossibility that even this seemingly modest proposal may now beout of date. (Bamyeh, 2003: 826)

Bamyeh suggests that the language of nationalism is indeed not theanswer for Israel/Palestine. Instead, he recommends reimagining the col-lective through an agreement on a common narrative that might form thebasis of any possible resolution.33 Indeed, he recalls the work of AmmielAlcalay (1993), who writes about an alternative past preceding the con-stitution of distinct categories of Jews and Arabs as enemy Others. Inmany ways, this is precisely the kind of move that Benjamin’s theorizingcalls for, recalling a different past, an alternative that can provide a basison which to rebuild the present. However, remaining entrenched in cate-gories of national belonging, Bamyeh calls for justice to right the wrongsof the past and for a new collective narrative that would bring these twoseparated nations together. What is most problematic in Bamyeh’s the-orizing is that, in order to arrive at that new collective historical narra-tive, he imposes a particular progressive temporality in calling for theremoval of ‘culture’, to concentrate on concrete grievances arising frompast injustices and ‘dismantling the blinding religious mythology withwhich this concreteness of things is covered up’ (Bamyeh, 2003: 828).

Such dismantling, of course, removes the cultural meanings of some ofthe people involved while it retains the cultural meanings of others. Thismove, I think, has the potential to continue cycles of violence because tomake amends for having silenced and oppressed Palestinians, it requiressilencing or marginalizing other groups. The common narrative Bamyehrecommends would include an understanding of Zionism as the removal

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of Jews from Europe, a cruelty that should be understood as havingcontinued the work of the Nazi Holocaust while also creating a newtragedy.

The common narrative that Bamyeh suggests, along with many otherswho call for alternative histories, might provide a new collective narrativefor some of the variously situated people directly involved in this conflict.It might work for some secular and left-wing Israelis and Palestinians inparticular locations. But there are others, including some religiouslymotivated settlers and likely religiously motivated Palestinians as well,who would be removed from this narrative, or left behind, as it were.Bamyeh, like many left-wing and secular Israelis, understands the reli-gious idea of the right and responsibility of the Jewish people to the Landof Israel as a strange perversion. Indeed he speaks about religiousextremism among Palestinian Muslims and Israeli Jews as resultingfrom the mistakes of politics and diplomacy – like Gramsci’s (1971)idea of the ‘morbid symptoms’ that appear in the interregnum betweenchanging hegemonies. This then provides the alibi for ignoring, margin-alizing or neutralizing them, a move I see as not only potentially leadingto additional violences, but undermining Bamyeh’s own goals of humanliberation as it dehumanizes those morally repugnant ‘others’ (Harding,1991) whose beliefs and practices are perceived as belonging to the past.

Bamyeh asks that we reconsider what Fanon’s thinking about humanliberation from colonial domination might have to teach us about thestruggles for liberation faced today. These struggles are both inescapablyglobal, he explains, and intensely local. At one instance, the main strug-gles of our time are waged against unimaginably abstract forces ratherthan ‘old, clearly discernible agents of colonial power’ and, at anotherinstance, they are ‘deeply earthly and even personal’ (Bamyeh, 2010: 53).Yet, despite these differences, he suggests that Fanon’s concern withliberation involving ‘all sectors of the personality’ (Fanon, 1963: 310,in Bamyeh, 2010: 53) provides a useful framework in which to thinkabout current struggles for liberation. The challenge, according toBamyeh’s interpretation of Fanon, is to focus on the disorders thatimpede our ability to ‘recognize the humanity, in all its complexity, ofour own selves and others’ (Bamyeh, 2010: 53). Liberation, he writes, is amatter of ‘introducing a perspective into the world that makes such waysof seeing possible.’ Would such a perspective not also have to includerecognizing multiple temporalities?

While reiterating the intolerability of the anachronism of thePalestinian situation, Bamyeh also calls for a different strategy to achievehuman liberation. He writes about the global social movement and theidea of local actions and solutions rather than a universalist appeal (suchas uniting the workers of the world, or anti-colonial nationalism). Histheorizing is compelling and, if the repugnance for certain anachronisticOthers could be set aside, one might consider applying his insights to


local situations in the space of Israel/Palestine in ways that would notnecessitate a reversion to the anachronistic strategy of national liber-ation. Indeed, one might take a cue from the flexible citizenship ideasfound among some religiously motivated settlers who have suggestedthey might remain in Palestinian administered/sovereign territory, butwithout Palestinian citizenship, living there as resident aliens but underthe sovereignty of God.34

Recognizing humanity in all its complexity must surely include recog-nizing the humanity even of the despicable anachronistic Others who livein the past, surrounded by walls among biblical ancestors. However, theidea of focusing on the local that social theorists and activists promotefor liberation in the globalized present holds the potential to make roomfor all kinds of differences that would not have to be submerged in asingle unifying temporal narrative, nor in a single universalist resolutionto the local conflict in Israel/Palestine.

Bamyeh and other social theorists turn to local struggles that areunited not by a particular version of a new world order, but by localpeople struggling to take back control of their everyday lives (local food,micro-investment, environmentalism, native peoples’ claims).35 Butsomehow, in Bamyeh’s Palestine, ‘local’ seems to mean reconfiguringthe social order in a singular, unified way for all the various populationgroups that would be directly affected by such a solution. He suggests anew collective identity that would emerge from a new historical narrative.If local is the new global, why remain within the parameters of a prede-fined location? A resolution and way forward for the residents of Gazaand Sderot might not be the same as what the residents of Jaffa and TelAviv require. The people who identify as Bedouin in the Negev andGalilee might have different ideas about the past, present and what recog-nizing their humanity might mean. And, of course, those who identify asJewish and Palestinian residents of Hebron surely have their own ideas ofhow they might go forth together or separately. Indeed, some members ofthese communities have begun meeting to discuss issues of mutual con-cern, which often does not include agreeing on or even proposing anoverall solution to ‘the Israeli/Palestinian conflict’ but instead focuses onlocal matters, everyday issues, and shared interests (Ettinger and Lior,2011; Lazaroff, 2012; Other Voice: http://www.othervoice.org/).

The idea of multiple local solutions might be unappealing to those whoare concerned about the relative power relations of those involved. Butthere are many different kinds of asymmetries. That those asymmetriesare not taken into account when we talk in bare terms about ‘power’ doesnot mean they are not central here; because if we only take some kinds of‘power’ into account, the goals we have for social justice will alwayscontinue to be blocked. Some will argue that in order to achieve justice,‘the powerful’ or those who have benefitted from the settler–colonialformation must give something up, return something, or make amends

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to those who have primarily been the victims of settler colonialism. Yet,this might be another version of avenging the ancestors that Benjaminwarns us to be cautious about. Benjamin’s (1968[1940]: 260) writingabout the training of thought that was ‘nourished by the image ofenslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren’ suggestswe should take care not to simply act in ways that we think might ensurethat the ancestors will not have suffered, struggled, fought or died for noreason.

What look like distinct binary divisions between categories of settlersand natives, colonizers and colonized, or even powerful and powerless,are never quite that simple or straightforward (Cooper and Stoler, 1997).Settlers in the occupied territories are in a position of relative power vis-a-vis Palestinians, because they are supported by the Israeli state and itsarmy and by Israeli governments from both the right and left, which havefor decades built infrastructure, permitted the construction of homes andcommunities, and protected those communities (Zertal and Eldar, 2007).But the population of Israelis who make their home in the OccupiedTerritories includes people of greater and lesser means, those whocould not afford housing elsewhere, and those who are un- or under-employed (Dalsheim, 2008a). Oren Yiftachel (2006) calls such commu-nities development towns rather than settlements, even though some ofthem are located in the Occupied Territories. Development towns arecommunities primarily composed of members of weaker populationgroups (Khazzoom, 2005), including Jews of Middle Eastern andNorth African descent and heritage (Mizrahim) and more recently immi-grants from Ethiopia and the former Soviet Union, many of whom strug-gle with ethnic and economic discrimination in Israeli society. Thinkingin terms of Fanon (1967), it is important to bear in mind that, even if wecould easily distinguish between the powerful and the oppressed, thepeople who fit into each of those categories should be thought of asnegatively affected by colonization in different ways. Fanon, likeMemmi (1967) and later Nandy (1983), understood the importance ofthe effects of colonization on the colonizers.

As Bamyeh (2010) points out, Fanon argued that decolonizationincludes healing the disorders that prevent all of us from recognizingour own and each other’s humanity. Post-colonial scholars haveargued that the ‘decolonization’ of the colonizer (like the colonized)would require a radical psychological shift and deconstruction of a cer-tain narcissism based on illusory identity. Decolonization involves achange of mind and not only the end of the colonizer’s control.Colonizers have to recognize the humanity of the colonized, which inthis case might mean recognizing that the injustices suffered byPalestinians involves their colonizers having to give up their homes,their sovereignty, their privilege. The idea is that colonialism, becauseof its brutality and inherent injustice, creates ‘monsters’ out of men.36


It results in the colonized who hate themselves because they internalizethe way the colonizers see them. They hate their ‘primitive, uncivilized’selves and want to become like the colonizers, but since they never can,they continue to hate themselves. It creates colonizers who accept thecolonial system and believe it is right, but also colonizers who refuse –who feel bad about the situation and think it’s wrong, but participate inthe system anyway, sometimes justifying this as a lack of choice.37 Ratherthan think about domination as a vertical hierarchy of power, Bamyeh’sinvocation of Fanon to recognize the fullness of humanity and heal thedisorders that prevent such recognition requires recognizing the scatterednature of hegemony (Grewal and Kaplan, 1994) that would allow us toconsider gender, ethnicity, class or other differences that complicatesimply binary divisions of power.

An important part of post-colonial theorizing has been to show thatdomination has worked through colonial knowledge that produced thecolonized as an homogenized, undifferentiated horde of uncivilizedprimitives, while the colonizers could be individuals with differencesamong them. Thus, Memmi (1967: 88) wrote that ‘the colonized isnever characterized in an individual manner, he is entitled only todrown in an anonymous collectivity’. To recognize ‘humanity’ thenmeant to see beyond that binary distinction and see the colonized ashaving their own culture that is not necessarily less, but different, andalso to see them as people with individual differences. So to turn thetables and paint the colonizers as an undifferentiated, primitive hordeis precisely to mimic that very colonial impulse that Fanon, and laterBhabha (1994), wrote against.

The call to recognize our own and others’ humanity has primarily beenabout the ‘colonized’, or about whichever group the critical theoristthinks is being dominated. But to take this idea seriously really requiresmore. As I have suggested, the difficulty of taking this call seriously ispartly conditioned by the ways in which morality is intertwined withideas about time.

Relegating our despised Others – Jewish settlers – to the past is onlypossible if we subscribe to a linear historicism in which human destinyflows inevitably toward liberation through territorial ethnonationalism.By accusing settlers of temporal derangement – their actions, theirbeliefs, even the kinds of communities in which they live have been super-seded by more acceptable forms of being and belonging – the secular lefthopes to pull the Jews of Israel back within their proper boundaries38 andthus redeem history by setting in place those two last, small pieces of theworld map of nation-states: Palestine and Israel. (It makes little differ-ence whether these last pieces are two ethnonational states, one bina-tional state, or one state for all its citizens; the point is that such states areboth inevitable and desirable as culminations of a necessary logic ofhistory that has been freed of the untimely blockages of settlement and

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allowed to flow freely once again.) Only the dismantling of settlementswill accomplish the goal of pulling both Jews and Palestinians into theright places on both the landscape and the timeline.

But those who want to commit themselves to thinking beyond modelsof rights and belonging organized around state formations must recog-nize the puzzle and the opportunity that thinking about religious settlersprovides. Expelling them from the moral community by condemningthem as anachronisms that have halted the flow of history means thatwe lose the critical ability to question the nature of history and the his-torical narrative of ethnonationalism, the destructive nature of which wecondemn in the idealized Other of the settler just as surely as we hold itout as a bright promise of civilization and progress to thedisenfranchised.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to numerous colleagues for our challenging discussions of the ideas I grap-ple with in this article, and to those who read and commented on earlier and different

versions. People whose critical comments have helped clarify my thoughts include GilAnidjar, Louise Bethlehem, Jonathan Boyarin, Rebecca Bryant, Asaf Harel, and espe-cially Gregory Starrett. Thanks to Charles Kurzman and the Middle East Center at

Chapel Hill for providing a forum in which to present these ideas. I am especially gratefulto the editors and anonymous reviewers at Theory, Culture & Society.

Notes

1. Scholars in Israel who consider themselves the radical left, and who have beencritical of the Occupation or of the government, are vulnerable to attacksfrom both the right-wing and the Zionist left. Members of the Zionist lefthave also been feeling increasingly vulnerable recently. While some left-wingactivists in Israel and in the international community advocate boycottingIsrael, including the academy, the Israeli right has a website called theAcademic Monitor which, much like Campus Watch in the US, posts thenames of left-wing scholars and calls on its constituency to protest againstthem. Some scholars have received personal threats and at least one had apipe bomb explode in the doorway of his home. All of this makes analysis ofleft-wing positions a treacherous road to travel.

2. This is not to suggest that anachronism is the only way or even the predom-inant way in which people differentiate in this case, nor am I suggesting thatreligiously motivated settlers are the only group who are conceptualized asbelonging to the past. However, I think it is worthwhile concentrating on theparticularities of this mode of differentiation first because of the racializingimplications associated with a linear progressive temporality that measurespeoples in term of civilizational attainment, especially in the context of col-onization (for example, see Uday Mehta, 1990). Second, because of how suchtemporal thinking produces a moral community among those making theassessment, while potentially undermining their goals of achieving social just-ice and human liberation.


3. Of course, neither Palestinians nor Israelis should be considered as single orhomogeneous groups. Indeed, I will argue that it is additionally problematicto homogenize sub-groups, like religiously motivated settlers. It would alsobe interesting to analyze the ways in which those Palestinians consideredradical religionists are marginalized as spoilers to peace processes in com-parison to religious settlers, but such a project is beyond the scope of thisarticle.

4. See William Connolly (1999: 79) on John Stuart Mill and the progress ofcivilization.

5. The term ‘liberation’ makes its way into this conversation through an articleby Mohammed Bamyeh on Frantz Fanon that I will be discussing in somedetail. I share the skepticism expressed by Foucault (1988[1984]) who wrote:

I’ve always been a little distrustful of the general theme of liber-ation, to the extent that, if one does not treat it with a certainnumber of safeguards and within certain limits, there is thedanger that it will refer back to the idea that there does exist anature or a human foundation which, as a result of a certainnumber of historical, social or economic processes, found itselfconcealed, alienated or imprisoned in and by some repressivemechanism.

6. Benjamin’s concerns about messianic thinking and its dangers are reflectedin a recent debate between Talal Asad and George Shulman (in Scott andHirschkind, 2006). Asad (2006: 237) warns against the danger of ideas ofredemption and messianic thought when such thought is transposed fromthe spiritual to the political: ‘The idea of political redemption is grotesquelyout of place in the secular world, a danger to politics and a parody ofspirituality’. Benjamin is critical of messianic thinking on the one hand,yet was also interested in new messianic possibilities that could subvertpredominant ones. In this sense, Benjamin complicates the separation ofspiritual from political that Asad invokes.

7. I will sometimes use the pronouns ‘we’ or ‘us’ in referring to this collective.This is an invitational ‘we’ with which readers may or may not identify. I amindebted to Hussein Agrama for suggesting the use of the first person pluralin this way.

8. This marginalizing further limits our vision. We cannot see the ways inwhich religious settlers demonstrate against the controversial separationbarrier/wall in a move that coincides with the interests of somePalestinians. Nor do we think about why those considered ‘settler light’ –Israeli Jews who live in post-1967 Occupied Territories for economic reasons– are considered less threatening than religiously motivated settlers(Dalsheim, 2008). What is it that the one threatens and the other doesnot? Is it the national order (territorial nation-states) or is it the globaleconomic order? Religiously motivated settlers – those considered the realhard core or ‘ideological’ settlers – live in dilapidated housing; they care lessabout making money and consumption than about living on the Land.

9. One might begin to consider, for example, Muslim concepts like dhimmi, anon-Muslim governed by Muslim law, or the notion of millet and the

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organization of confessional communities employed during the OttomanEmpire. These ideas could equally be seen as marginalized non-nationalistideas emanating from religious concepts, ideas that cannot be easily recon-ciled with the limited imaginings of territorial nationalism. However, adetailed comparison of the deployment of anachronism marginalizingMuslim and Jewish ideas is beyond the scope of this article. The point ofthis article is not to redeem settlers, to prove their moral worth, or to sup-port their actions. It is simply to say that when we do not interrogate ourresponses to them, we miss what is being accomplished through thoseresponses, and how such oversights might lead us to undermine our owngoals.

10. As Saba Mahmood (2005: 39) wrote, I ask that

we – my readers and myself – embark upon an inquiry in which wedo not assume that the political positions we uphold will necessar-ily be vindicated . . .but instead hold open the possibility that wemay come to ask of politics a whole series of questions that seemedsettled when we first embarked upon the inquiry.

11. The positions that did not fit comfortably within existing categories of reli-gion and politics described in Unsettling Gaza include those self-identified asthe radical left who opposed the disengagement and those self-identified asleft-wing settlers.

12. It should be noted that there are also self-identified members of the (Jewish)Israeli left who consider themselves the radical, anti- or non-Zionist left whowould not agree that settler practices were necessary in the past. A well-known scholar/activist representing this position is Uri Davis, who recentlygave up his Israeli citizenship to become Palestinian. The AlternativeInformation Center (www.alternativenews.org/) is a good source for thosewho want to read more opinions including those from the radical left. Forexample, see the recent book by the director of that website: MichaelWarschawski’s On the Border (2005). Another good source is EphraimNimni’s book, The Challenge of Post-Zionism (2003).

13. For an in-depth analysis of the similarity of these depictions and the furygenerated among left-wing Israelis see Dalsheim (2005). See also Dalsheimand Harel (2009).

14. I am indebted to Assaf Harel (personal communication) for this idea. Herethe messianic temporality of secular nationalism disrupts a neat spiritual/political divide.

15. In many ways, the practices of today’s religiously motivated settlers mimicearlier, pre-state settlement practices including the ways in which kibbutzcommunities were established, sometimes illegally and under cover of dark-ness. Of course, then the Jewish settlers were avoiding detection by theBritish mandatory government.

16. For example, consider the story Peter van der Veer (2006) tells about theNetherlands and Dutch reactions to pious Muslim immigrants. The Dutch,he explains, understand their national past as moving ever forward toincreased human liberation, happiness and enjoyment that is contrasted toan earlier time when the role of the church was much greater. The piety of


Muslim immigrants, he explains, feels like a threat to that forward move-ment, to the increasingly free society the Dutch have achieved and to theirpersonal freedoms and happiness. See also Judith Butler (2008) on powerfultemporal ideas and Muslim migrants in the Netherlands.

17. Jerold Auerbach (2009), whose work is referenced on the website of theJewish community in Hebron, opens his book about the contemporaryJewish community in Hebron by exclaiming: ‘No Jews are as relentlesslyreviled as the Jews of Hebron.’

18. Of course, the irony of statements such as this is that separation is preciselythe underlying logic of ethno-nationalism, thus the underlying logic of theJewish nationalism that makes such freedom possible. See Boyarin (1996) onthe work involved in producing such separateness.

19. Roxanne Euben (1999) writes similarly about Muslims whose beliefs aredisbelieved and considered instrumental. In a very different way,Elizabeth Povinelli (2002) shows cases in which the liberal state throughthe courts in Australia does not give credence to the beliefs represented bysome Aboriginals about their relationship to the land.

20. Part of the inauthenticity attributed to the current Jewish community inHebron derives from their representing themselves as the continuation ofan earlier Jewish community in Hebron. Michelle Campos (2007) writesagainst this representation.

21. For a powerful (and controversial) argument on the ways in which modernnarratives are contained by linear conceptions of temporality, see HaydenWhite (1987). Max Weinreich (1980) offers an explanation of a particularJewish way of being that understands all of Jewish history as one indivisiblewhole – exact periodization is not attempted and events in the ancient pastcan be understood through the lens of the present, just as the present can beunderstood as motivated by the ancient past. Just as Jacob is Israel, identi-fied with the people of Israel, Esau is Edom and Haman descended fromhim. Edom is also Christian Europe, and its opposition, and Jews andMuslims are prefigured in Isaac and Ishmael. What is taken by modernlinear thought to be problematic or anachronistic is a different sense oftemporality that Weinreich (1980: 208) calls panchronism. See IanLustick’s (1994) description of how acts of violence such as that perpetratedby Baruch Goldstein are often taken out of their religious context and inter-preted as ‘deeds of madmen’.

22. See Karl Popper (1959) for an early critique of this kind of prediction as asocial scientific method.

23. Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000) demonstrates the impossibility of representingcertain subaltern voices within Western historiography because of the reli-ance on a particular linear narrative. Judith Butler (2008) argues that linearprogressive understandings of modernity create particular divisions thatpreclude potential alliances between groups, thus interfering with some peo-ple’s freedoms for the benefit of others.

24. One of the anonymous reviewers of this article suggested as much, writing:‘the author simply refuses to acknowledge that the settlers appropriate landfrom others’. The reviewer seemed to think I was missing the point. He orshe wrote: ‘Maybe it has nothing to do with . . . anachronisms and all to dowith the fact that the settlers are land thieves!!?’ However, my point is

Dalsheim 55

precisely that the notion of anachronism is deployed in such situations inorder to differentiate, and that such differentiation works to produce aparticular moral community. I am not suggesting that either Palestiniansor settlers are anachronistic, nor do I take sides for or against either com-munity. Instead, I am concerned with how such categories of belonging anddifferentiation are constituted and how this limits the possibilities of recog-nizing our and others’ humanity, which ultimately undermines the goal ofachieving human liberation in the contemporary context in which recogni-tion matters so much. On this last point, see Taylor (1994).

25. Palestinian Muslims who espouse ideas that move beyond the limited ima-ginings of territorial nationalism are generally not construed as ultra-nation-alists. Indeed their imaginings might be considered trans-national and thusmarginalized for threatening the national order.

26. There are a range of ways in which settlers are speaking about livingtogether with Palestinians. Eretz Shalom is a new organization that includesreligious settlers and Palestinians. See their website: http://www.eretzshalo-m.org/. I have spoken to others who also speak of ways of living withPalestinians but do not belong to this organization.

27. Opposition to a one-state solution is also voiced by members of the left whofear this would maintain current inequalities in resources and opportunities.

28. Bamyeh also discusses ‘multiple and flexible affiliations’ in his bookAnarchy as Order (2009: 218).

29. Benedict Anderson, in his seminal work on nationalism, wrote about thekind of temporality that was required for imagining the nation. His ideas areheavily influenced by Walter Benjamin’s writing. Anderson wrote aboutsimultaneity, about people being able to imagine others at the same timedoing different things in different places as somehow connected to them.This simultaneity is contrasted to a medieval simultaneity (Anderson,1991[1983]: 24–26). He also writes of the nation as imagined to be movingthrough time, progressing as it were:

The idea of a sociological organism moving calendrically throughhomogenous, empty time is a precise analogue of the idea of thenation, which is also conceived as a solid community moving stead-ily up (or down) history. (p. 26)

30. There are a number of other ways of thinking with Ong about flexible citi-zenship in relation to Israel/Palestine and possible cases that illustrate trans-national belongings. One might consider, for example, ultra-Zionist citizensof the US whose allegiance to a particular nation (the US, Israel) might beless meaningful than their support of Jewish settlers. And, of course, thereare additional questions about the transnational quality of Islamists thatmight be considered here. Unfortunately, it will be impossible to considerthis question in greater detail in this article.

31. It is a disturbance that also prevents us from seeing the similarity of actionsgoing on inside the Green Line. See the interview with Yehouda Shenhav(De Martino, 2010; Shenhav, 2010) on his book The Time of the Green Line(in Hebrew), forthcoming in English as Beyond the Two State Solution:A Jewish Political Essay.


32. For more on Israel as a settler-colonial social formation, see Shafir (1989).33. This is the idea of an alternative history. I suggest that what might be called

for are not only alternative histories (and I stress the plural here) but alsoalternatives to history based on Ashis Nandy’s (1983) ideas about rethinkingthe past and the problems of historicism.

34. Similar ideas, in a secular version, have been made by Sari Nusseibeh (2011)in a very controversial book. Nusseibeh, who previously supported a two-state solution, now suggests that Palestinians could remain in the West Bankunder Israeli administration but without the full rights of Israeli citizenship.They would have freedom of movement, the right to live or work anywhereand the benefits of municipal and other services, but they would not vote inIsraeli elections.

35. See David Graeber (2002) on what he describes as the ‘new anarchy’.36. The word ‘monsters’ comes from Sartre’s famous introduction to Fanon’s

Wretched of the Earth (1963).37. See Don Handelman (2004: 13) on the rhetoric of ‘no choice’ among Israelis

as an example of the practices of colonizers who refuse.38. While critique of an insidious progressive temporal framework that under-

mines those seeking peace, justice and human liberation seems problematicin the case at hand, the idea of producing moral selves by differentiatingthrough time is hardly new. Perhaps Johannes Fabian (1983, 2006) is bestknown for bringing this issue to the attention of anthropologists, demon-strating how we differentiate ourselves from the subject of our analysis.Holding up such a critical mirror remains important more broadly, espe-cially when the view in the mirror is unsettling.

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Joyce Dalsheim is a cultural anthropologist and currently AssistantProfessor of Global, International, and Area Studies at the Universityof North Carolina at Charlotte. She has carried out extensive fieldworkin Israel/Palestine, studying controversies over historical narratives,nationalism, religiosity and the secular. She is the author of UnsettlingGaza: Secular Liberalism, Radical Religion, and the Israeli SettlementProject (Oxford University Press, 2011). She is the Associate Editor forIsrael and Palestine for the Review of Middle East Studies and hasrecently published in Social Analysis, Journal of Historical Sociology,Social Identities, and Comparative Studies in Society and History. Sheis currently working on a new manuscript, Producing Spoilers:Peacemaking and the Production of Enmity in a Secular Age, under con-tract at Oxford University Press.


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Anachronism and Morality