Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence

This chapter begins with then-president of Harvard University Lawrence Summers’s remark that criticism of Israel and calls to divest from Israel are actions that are antisemitic “in their effect, if not their intent” (101).

Butler thinks that it is right of Summers to be concerned about antisemitism. However, Butler also thinks that, historically, Jews should not be seen only as “presumptive victims” and insists that no political ethics should start with the assumption of Jewish victimhood. Sometimes Jews are survivors of violence, and sometimes they are perpetrators of violence.

The accusation of antisemitism is a particularly loaded one, especially for progressive Jews like Butler, and Butler argues that this charge is used not only by Summers but is part of a discursive force that disallows any criticism of Israel. Israel’s formation in 1948 was grounded in Zionism, which dislocated 700,000 Palestinians and violently appropriated their lands, creating a “dehumanizing basis” for the formation of the state. Criticism of the establishment and maintenance of the state of Israel is thus necessary. The charge of antisemitism is particularly unbearable for progressive Jews, a group in which Butler includes themselves, and conjures up the traumatic history of Jews who colluded with the Nazis. The Jewish critique of Israel, though often portrayed as insensitive to Jewish suffering, resides in the experience of Jewish suffering, “so that suffering itself might stop, so that something we might reasonably call the sanctity of life might be honored” (104).

Butler also insists that, even if criticisms of Israel were generally heard by the broader public as antisemitic, it would be the ethical job of everyone to make the distinction between legitimate criticism of Israel and real hatred of Jews. For Butler, the criticism of Israeli occupation and the continued violence against those the state has displaced is not only grounded in the experience of Jewish suffering but also in a Jewish Talmudic tradition of criticism and, more broadly, cultural and religious traditions of objection to unnecessary violence. Criticism of Israel’s violence against the Palestinians, then, is deeply Jewish in many ways.

The identification of Jewishness with Israel, which then assumes that criticism of the state of Israel is by default antisemitic, homogenizes Jews and bypasses the many Jewish-led movements for Palestinian rights and justice in Israel. This is the move that Summers makes, which, ironically, is the “very tactic of anti-Semitism” (123). This is a reduction of Jewishness in which all Jews are conflated with the state of Israel.

Butler concludes with a discussion of the “tactical use” of the term antisemitism to mark progressives and force them to live with this terrible mark. To remain silent, however, is to assume that Zionism and Jewishness are one and the same, when it is “precisely the separation between the two that guarantees the conditions for critical thinking on this issue” (123).

To be “threatened” with the label of antisemite is an experience of “profound psychological consequence” (127) and thus threatens political speech, making criticism of Israel unspeakable. A “collective courage” is the only way to create a critical public discourse, which cannot be done in isolation, as a lone speaker, but can “only be done with the support of other actors” (127).