My argument is actually that the distinction between “Jew” and “Arab” (which includes the distinction between “Jew” and “Muslim”) was never quite settled in Western consciousness—which is to say in the self-understanding of Europe. The distinction rather oscillated, often serving a strategic purpose. It still does. It functions by distinguishing two enemies of Europe, of Western Christendom – one allegedly internal, namely, the Jew, the other allegedly external, namely, the Muslim or the Arab – in order to manage what is first and foremost an internal difference (the difference, roughly, between religion and politics). The distinction is also a projection and a separation that aims to defuse a threat, which may have been real at times but was always dominantly imagined. You may recall that there were times when the distinction between Jew and Arab was abolished entirely, where the Christian and secular imagination simply equated Jew and Arab under the newfound category of “Semites.” Given the theological (Christian) and colonial history which determines the way the distinction was produced and sustained, one may ask, for example, whether the current separation of anti-Semitism from Islamophobia (or of the Holocaust from the history of colonialism) does not continue to serve similar strategic purposes. The affirmation that Islamophobia is more or less justified because it is part of the struggle against anti-Semitism is part of a long series of “divide and rule” moves, which turns Jews against Arabs as if the Christian West (and the modern state) had nothing to do with it (think of the colonial state and its avatars in the case of Hindus and Muslims in India or Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda). So yes, there is a specifically Western dimension to the problem, an old logic which, though transformed, continues to govern the brutal management of populations in Europe and in the US, but also in Israel and Palestine and in much of the rest of the world.
I learned much of what I say from Jacques Derrida’s reflections on the “Abrahamic,” in the context of which Derrida explains the fundamental “Latinity” – that is, Christianity – of the very notion of “religion.” In the recurring figure of three monotheisms, Derrida discerned something else than a peaceful unity among equals, something else than a “clash of civilizations.” Instead, Derrida signals toward a different configuration where the vast inequality that reigns – the hegemonic dominance, in other words, still exercised by Western Christendom and its heirs – could be interrogated, rethought, criticized. This is what Derrida called “mondialatinisation” (aptly translated by Samuel Weber as “globalatinization”).
On the basis of internal distinctions, as I was saying, the West has wrought havoc on much of the surface of the globe. By means of the dissemination of its legal system, economic ideals and practices, and peculiar knowledge drive, it has erected local divisions, indeed partitions that constitute and buttress the afterlife of the Christian and civilizing mission, its enduring rule. “Jews” and “Arabs” are only two among other prominent figures (“Hindu” and “Muslim” would be another one, as I have said, which also reproduces fantasmatic, if powerfully concretized, distinctions between “Aryan” and “Semite”). Learning from this history, from what Walter Benjamin called “the tradition of the oppressed,” requires that one recognize the enemy for what he is, namely, the victor. The murderous walls that are being erected today to “protect” Fortress Europe, the United States or Israel are tools of war, an economic, legal and religious war waged with the help of postcolonial elites against the poor (who used to be called not so long ago “the darker races”). They are walls of separation and of aggression erected by the powerful against the powerless, by the oppressor against the oppressed.
I would like to think that I have remained faithful to Said through and through. It is from him that I learned about the shared history of Orientalism and of anti-Semitism (both of which should be opposed equally vehemently). It is also from him that I learned that secularism is an Orientalist – that is, a Christian – invention, a moment in the internal development of the West which coincides with the “discovery” of other religions. This discovery took place at the same time that “religion” was conveniently asserted to be a thing of the past (like those “soon to be extinct races” which had to be helped and hurried on their way to their mass graves). Again, there is an internal dynamic at work, a transformation of Western Christendom into a number of “projects” that emerge from something that was always much more than just “theology.” Christianity as it was shaped in Western Europe during the Middle Ages was not just doctrine and belief. It was the coagulation of systems of meaning, legal, economic, and political regimes, and structures of behavior. It had a capacity for transformation, which it exercised on numerous occasions (the Reformation being a well-known one, so-called “secularization” being another, less acknowledged one). Still, it is a small part of the world that ends up inflicting itself onto the rest of the world by military, economic and theologico-political means. It adapted itself as well, of course, using local elites and developing “local cultures.” But the hegemonic centers of power, the centers of decision (somewhere between London, Paris and later New York and Washington) have remained fairly stable for quite a while now. And yes, they include economic and financial institutions, but they continue to deploy religious and racial mappings that were invented and disseminated in Western Europe (and incidentally first tried on the populations of the Americas). The problem, therefore, is not with “religion” but rather with Christianity (which always conceived of itself as the only “true religion”) and its legacies, of which global capitalism is obviously a part.
There are a number of things about Zionism that are becoming more and more difficult to hear at the same time that they are more and more necessary to point out. One of the issues I was trying to address in this essay (and I am by no means the first one) has to do with the Western investment in what is after all the birth site of Christianity. Now, that Zionism originates in Christian Europe is hardly news. That it is the result of a radical transformation of Judaism whereby the historical and theological dispute between Jews and Christians was refigured as what is now called the “Judeo-Christian tradition” has been demonstrated by a number of historians. Zionism is not so much in conflict as in agreement with a European, indeed, anti-Semitic argument that imagines a Europe free of Jews (and of Muslims – an endeavor that has been equally long over the course of the centuries – even if it has taken a different shape), now a “race,” now a “religion” (the two terms being contemporary in their modern sense). For what is it precisely that constitutes “emancipation” in this national and nationalist dream? The reduction of a rich and diverse tradition (the study of which I was trying to contribute to in my first book on “Kabbalah, Philosophy and Literature in Arab Jewish Letters”) to an ethno-religious category would, under any other circumstances, be recognized as continuous with destruction rather than with emancipation. Let us not forget that in accord with colonial and other legal antecedents, the state of Israel distinguishes by law between “Jews,” “Arabs” and others, identifications which it locates as pre-political, as belonging to “nationality” (in Hebrew, le’om) and distinct from “citizenship” (Heb. ezrahut). On the basis of these distinctions, different rights are unequally distributed. And this is only one of the colonial legacies preserved by a state that defines itself not as the state of its citizens, but as “the state of the Jewish people,” a de-territorialized collective that has otherwise no legal existence. This collective is on principle enlisted in a political, nationalist project that equates “Judaism” and “Zionism,” an equation that is simultaneously decried as being “anti-Semitic.” One must be careful, of course, not to amalgamate the two, but the genealogical and phenomenological connections between Zionism and anti-Semitism are, I am afraid, numerous.
Well, yes, the perspective that sees Israel as a modern, Western-style democracy – perfectly in line with the Western imperialist project in all its modern forms as I was saying earlier, but strangely denied when convenient – and “political Islam” as a kind of fanatic aberration is, to my mind, simply the reversal of a long history that saw Jews as theological enemies and Arabs or Muslims as political or military ones. Recall that for centuries, Islam was not considered as having any theological standing, much less theological validity. It was not considered a religion, therefore, but a heresy or worse. Today, we hear instead the politically expedient lament that Islam should remain a religion (in the modern, Christian sense of the term) and not be “politicized.” The division between religion and politics remains operative, indeed, normative when it comes to engaging those who resist the hegemony of the West (a hegemony that is ideological and economic, political and – look at the work of missionary movements all over the globe – religious). But the focus on Israel and Palestine, over-determined as it is, is still indicative of larger issues. After all, the fostering of a paranoid understanding of Islam as a threat to civilization has already served to advance a vast project of population control, a not so novel redefinition of “immigration” in cosmetically altered racist terms and practices, an alarming reduction of civil liberties and an overall and dramatic expansion of police and military apparatuses (not to mention the penal system) all over the world. Israel may have been the first state to build a “protective” wall, but it is hardly the most significant instance of the rise of the security state (or multi-state as Schengen demonstrates). Have you noticed what is happening to the Roma and Sinti populations at the so-called “borders” of Europe? I worry as much about Jews and Arabs in Israel and Palestine as I do about “immigrants” – many of whom are marked as “Muslims” – throughout Europe.
I do not oppose the identification of Judaism with an ethnicity (or ethnos), as if it were for me to adjudicate on collective perceptions. I am rather concerned with the function this identification plays, the interests it serves, and what it indicates about the historical and political changes that have occurred in the not so distant past. One thing seems to me quite clear, namely, that we have long been enlisted in a particular theological and political tradition, by which I do not simply mean “doctrine” and “faith.” As I have already said, “religion” – and particularly the religion (or the ethnicity) from which people have sought to emancipate themselves– is much more than what is opposed under that name. Not going to church is not quite the end of one’s Christian identity. Too many European secularists seem to think that religion is just about faith (they are not alone in thinking in this way). Strangely enough, this is a very narrow, if indeed Christian, notion of religion. It is not what religion (i.e., Christianity) has been for centuries. If one accepts these premises, if one treats religion the way Heidegger relates to metaphysics, for instance, then it seems to me that we will have to agree that a critique of Christianity has barely begun. To that extent, the renewed attention of which you speak can only be seen as a positive development. Yet, interestingly enough, the critical thrust continues to be directed at “fundamentalism” much more than it is “self-directed.” I would put this somehow crudely: we who live in this Christianized world, we are Christians, whether we admit it or not. We have been Christianized and are partaking of the further Christianization of the world (Derrida’s “globalatinization”). I suppose that this may be considered by some to be a good thing, although I have to say that the historical record hardly warrants such positive evaluation. It may then also be a terrible thing, much more terrible than the threat that politicians, experts, and media outlets (who greedily feed on generalized paranoia) identify as the “return of the religious,” or “political Islam” or whatever. Walter Benjamin warned us (and his warning resonates, without echo, in the chambers of colonized, Christianized and global elites everywhere) not to empathize with the victor. To criticize Islam today (or to criticize a generic “religion”) is, to my mind, to do just that: to take the side of the victor.
From Il Manifesto June 2007