What the Palestinians think or don’t think about the Jewish question, or even the Holocaust, is immaterial to the question of historical injustice—they are neither its perpetrators nor its beneficiaries. What Jewish Israelis think or don’t about the Nakba is entirely material—they are both its ongoing perpetrators and beneficiaries.
Anti-Zionism cannot begin from Zionism’s own genealogies or its intellectual history. Ideology critique that stays on Zionism’s terms invariably produces knowledge limited by Zionism’s own omissions and exceptionalism. Take, for example, Jacqueline Rose’s The Question of Zion, in which all of Zionism’s key dynamics and structures of feelings—its catastrophism, tragedy, and so on—emerge from its own immanent contradictions. They are either drawn from Jewish millenarian-messianic traditions or else forged in the historical crucible of European antisemitism and racial nationalism. Palestine and the Palestinians are almost mere background in Rose’s account. Rose writes an entire psychoanalytic book on catastrophe, trauma, and memory in Zionist political subjectivity and does not name the Nakba once. Ideology critique of this kind not only often fails to really come to terms with the thing itself—the zero-sum struggle with native Palestinian life—but also continuously risks our ensnarement in Europe’s or the West’s political and epistemic worlds.
In turn, counter to much of the enduring theoretical and philosophical trends, anti-Zionism need not—indeed must not—begin with Europe’s Jewish question or with the tragic melodrama of the figures of the Arab and the Jew. In other words, anti-Zionism need not revolve, as is often suggested, around an ethics of the Other. Work invested in this kind of relational ethics as the substance or method of a critique of Zionism not only typically begins with continental philosophy and the ethical failures of its canonical figures (e.g., Levinas, Derrida, Sartre, and Habermas, who all infamously failed to recognize Palestinians as victims—and that’s really all they were ever being asked to do) but also reproduces the problem of implicit epistemic capture. This is the effective insistence that the Palestinian question cannot actually be thought of independently or even to the side of the Jewish question but must be thought in direct relationship to it. In this capture, the Palestinian question cannot think itself.
