Butler, Judith 2012 Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism reviewed by Lisa Bhungalia | Society and Space - Environment and Planning D
▻http://societyandspace.com/reviews/reviews-archive/judith-butler-parting-ways-reviewed-by-bhungalia
Rarely foregrounded in analyses of this ‘conflict’ is the reality that Palestinians continue to live in a political and ideological context in which they are deemed a demographic problem to be contained and controlled, in which their lives are taken with impunity, and in which they are disenfranchised, divided and placed under siege. We are instead given sensational and easily digestible tropes of violence on ‘both sides’, ‘war’, and unrelenting ‘age-old religious conflict.’ In the absence of context, a false symmetry emerges – Israel and Hamas, it is commonly said are ‘at war’ (and if not Hamas, then any other number of Islamic and/or Palestinian ‘threats’ and ‘spoilers’ to peace). Such a framing erases the multiple qualitative and quantitative differences at play between Israel and the Palestinians – and even more crucially, it masks a political project predicated on the privileging of Jewish life, and correspondingly, devaluation of the life of the non-Jewish other. It is this context that has inspired Judith Butler’s most recent book, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism.
Butler’s central task in this book is to develop a Jewish ethics of ‘cohabitation’ that might help pave the way for what she calls a radical democratic politics of binationalism. The political vision she puts forward diverges sharply from the ‘wretched forms of binationalism’ that currently exist in Palestine/Israel, whereby Jewish privilege is maintained through ongoing Palestinian dispossession. Taking Said as a point of departure, Butler calls for a binationalism that transcends exclusive Jewish claims to citizenship and territory and embraces the invariable heterogeneity of what is now Palestine/Israel, including those expelled from it. On this score, Butler’s argument is, as she observes, largely descriptive. Binationalism, she contends, is not something that we might hope to arrive in the future, but exists today as a ‘wretched fact’ that is ‘being lived out as a specific historical form of settler colonialism’ (2012, page 30). This book is but one effort to transform this wretched binationalism into a new polity inherently more just, one in which history would be confronted and all citizens, irrespective of ethnic or religious belonging, would be afforded rights and protections against illegitimate forms of legal and military violence.