Thank you very much. Okay.
So we are in the last tunnel. And my name is Valerie.
I'm from King's College, London, and I'm really happy and honoured to be the chair of this panel of two of my colleagues,
friends, teachers and and in many ways,
I think the two first panels that we had really serving as a great foundation
do both conceptually and and I think theoretically and historically in a way,
a and and I want to start with presenting officially,
but of the speakers and then I will start maybe beginning with an entering point
because the title of our conversation is Is it just a minute or just a fraction?
Yes. Israel on the uses and misuses of a discourse in Judaism, in Israel.
But this kind of topic have really a lot of many entry points.
So I would suggest one entry point and then we'll start our conversation.
So our first speaker is professor who doesn't have he's a professor of sociology at Tel Aviv University.
And in my opinion, and not only mine, he's one of the most important and influential critical terrorist in Israel.
His main research areas are social theory, sociology of knowledge, translational studies, postcolonial theory with specific interest on nationalism,
ethnicity and religion in the past eight years is specialising in translation studies and in translation practice from Arabic to Hebrew,
already published dozens of books and and short stories.
And he's the founder of MK2.
It's a book series and translator and translators form and Yehuda published in numerous books and articles that I not have time to mention.
All but in the context of our discussion, I want to mention two and one is the Arab Jews postcolonial with the reading of Nationalism,
Ethnicity and Religion, published by Stanford Press 2006 and Beyond the two state solution,
a Jewish political essay was published in 2012 Polity Press.
And the second speaker in our panel is most of you know better a coffee.
Edgar is the Stanley Lewis professor of Israel studies here at Oxford.
Is research a revolve and revolves around issues of Jewish identity, religion, politics and secularism.
His focussed on placing Israel in theoretical and epistemological frameworks that bears obvious relevance beyond the specific case history.
His scholarship is multidisciplinary in context encompassing Jewish, political, cultural, religious and media studies is a constant.
It concentrates on Israeli social politics, and especially Israeli Judaism,
and on the epistemological, historical and political dimension of Israeli Israeli identity.
In the context of our discussion, it is important to mention two of his recent books one Sovereign Jews that was already mentioned Sovereign Jews,
Israel, Zionism and Judaism, and it was published in 2017 and the others.
Is the book on traditional? I don't have now a very important book on traditionalism.
It will be, I think, very important to our discussion.
So I want to start with the entry point to our discussion.
And I'm in the recent several years, mostly outside of Israel, and I'm following from outside mostly, but coming to visit quite often.
But what's happening in the Israeli discourse, and we are in a very political time,
but in the I would say in the last six, seven years, I met I noticed that the word or the term had attached.
That means regionalisation in the making something we will talk about the step because it's very specific
but it's it's yeah a simple translation would be religion zation but it's becoming very common.
You see it in newspapers when you're coming to dinners with family and so on and so forth.
So it's caught my eyes because I knew that the first one that coined this term was You Shouldn't Have in this book in 2003 in Hebrew,
both Jews and had the really specific meaning into it.
And it was part of the post-Cold War secular criticism and the criticism of the binary between religion and secular.
So it was and I knew that, funny enough in 2006 because it became very.
It's sort of a spread.
It was that the official naming authority in Israel that these were the Hebrew academia and Hebrew language academia had to address,
determine and define a new meaning into the term.
Even though they gave reference to your vote. But I think they had the reverse definition that they took it as the opposite of secularisation.
So indigenisation is the opposite of leadership. And in many ways that put, again, this division between religion and secular that you try to avoid.
And I think the new re-emergence of this world in the public sphere in Israel is taking the second formation of the formation into it.
And it's not it's not surprising that they're out of there.
They're the leading force in this kind of conversation is the most liberal newspaper that maybe some of you know, it's out.
It's that if almost daily you can see in the leading in the world and that that will be
there every almost every day daily and even version of our what in the Hebrew and English.
The one person they do, they will translate. Oh, that's interesting. So it's more very it's not a bit wistful.
So but but for them in that and again, it's it's I think it's a panic.
We will talk about it later. It's it's okay. We can call it the panic.
It's it's a panic that now the new elite of the religious community or the religious
forces are taking over and they're making all of the Israeli to education,
to the army, to politics. They're making all the Israeli society become religion or religious and more accurately and and and by by doing so,
they are changing the character of the secular Jewish state, of the Jewish of Israeli society that we all cherished and was from the beginning.
So that that that the threat to our, you know, liberal European,
secular and and I even joked with you that in one of our conversation that even because it was you can count
thousands of times that the water that that was UNICEF told him because he he coined the term if you get to,
you know, commission for every time someone will he will be really a rich person.
So I want I want to start with this that but I want to put it because I think both of you what's interesting
about it it's something that you but we only the leading scholars about the topic that we're going to talk.
Yeah both of you are public intellectuals you address this kind of issues from
not only from an academic distance election and by is involved intellectuals and
determined that that for you it's it's it's have a political meaning for you you a
hope it will be salty the traditional it's another political it's not only academic.
So I want to if you can both of you to start talking about the issues that we're going to address is,
of course, the connection between religion, secularity and nation state in Israel.
But from from this point of view and from your own experience.
So, you know, thank you you first for this introduction.
Yes wife the had a business doesn't work it doesn't work in English.
Well it's what you call secularist anxiety earlier or a moral panic or I mean, there is a panic.
There is a panic. And interesting, interestingly enough, the carrier of of that campaign is mainly HIV-AIDS,
which is the maybe the Israeli equivalent of The New York Times or whatever, the most liberal newspaper.
And you see that often on a daily basis, we measure the student of mind measured.
Daniel The measure, the amount or the extent of discourse in different newspaper,
of course of it's by far leads the campaign of the of power which means we are.
Becoming a society in which religion overrules the public space.
And I go online there.
I have my version of the Holy Land Travel. I see, you know, the secular forums and meet to campaign.
I also experience the type of real digitisation.
So you go online and you punch in the case in which you experienced at the.
Me too. So students, pupils in schools.
Right. The teacher asks, who believes in God?
Who doesn't believe in God? I raise my hand. Ever since he doesn't.
She doesn't turn to me and doesn't let me participate in discussion in class.
So it was she was kind of complaining that she was harassed by the teacher because she doesn't believe in God or they took us on a trip to Jerusalem.
They show us the Wailing Wall and never mention the parachutes that occupy the Wailing Wall.
I mean, it's just kind of contradictions that shows us something is embedded in that whole discourse which need to be deciphered.
If I may. Because history, you know, begins at home.
I think that whole notion of Haditha, I got into that accidentally.
It was serendipity because I was not interested in religion and secularism.
In retrospect, I remember my childhood.
I'm a I'm of Iraqi descent. Like my friend and colleague here.
Obviously, we identify ourself in solidarity now as Iraqis.
You know, I grew up in a synagogue. I grew up in a synagogue.
We were used to go to synagogue. I used to put fill in every day.
I used to live in a in a small town in the vicinity of Tel Aviv.
And there were ultra orthodox Ashkenazi Jews who seemed to be much more religious than I am.
They had this pass and observe the Shabbat, etc., etc., etc. And we did not we have haven't been so observant and so orthodox as they are.
So I'm not really as religious as they are.
On the other hand, there were those secular. Jews who were secular.
They read secular literature. They didn't have all the superstitious thing that we did.
So my grandmother would I would not call it I never.
And the hazards of it for women, even I even I, my mother, my grandmother would call me and to this ceremony forever I.
Every month due to kick the. So I'm not completely secular.
So what am I? I'm not. Truly religious.
I'm not really secular. I'm something somewhere in between.
Only when I became a sociologist and I joined the Department of Sociology at Tel Aviv University, I have a dear colleague who passed away in Paris.
We used to measure degree of religiosity.
Do you often do so? Huh? People do that.
People do that. So there is a I don't know if, you know, statistics.
I talked with Avner about that. There's what we call in sociology a dummy variable, which ranges from 0 to 1 with lots of ranges in either zero one.
So it had zero for seculars and one for religious.
And he doesn't know what to do with them. So we were half on this continuum.
So I was wasn't really this and was not really this.
So what am I? Later on, when Yaakov watched his book on Masorti among traditional, he tackles this by taking that out of this continuum.
That is, I'm not on this continuum of being either religious or secular because this is a binary.
I mean, regarding again, it was this binary, we are all against the binary ism.
So but that was trapped in this binaries, you know, as a personal experience.
And. And that's how I get into that subject.
Yes. So maybe you can when you consider this is fascinating because again,
we have a point in history where the word came into Hebrew and this was in your book.
What did you mean by it? Well, I was writing this my Arab Jews book.
Yes. And I went to the archives and found one big folder of emissaries, Jewish, Zionist,
Zionist emissaries who went to Baghdad to try and recruit Iraqi Jews to immigrate to Israel or to Palestine.
Back then, that was after the Fort Hood in 1941.
There was a war in Baghdad during the war, and the Zionist movement thought that that would be a great,
if not a great good opportunity to mobilise, to mobilise the Arab Jews, to join the Zionist movement and to immigrate to Israel.
And the Jewish population in Iraq, particularly in Baghdad, was very affluent.
Nobody wanted to. I mean, you were.
I mean, your family were all merchants and, you know.
The Iraqis, you know, know how to get themselves in the right class, in the right relationship with the colonial government.
They did well, the Iraqis always and nobody wanted to to to emigrate to Israel or to Palestine, Victor.
And in this folder, I find reports I mean, they were writing extensively reports on the ground and sending them back to their Zionist institutions.
And many of the reports had to do with the religiosity or lack of of the Baghdadi Jews.
So they would go to synagogues. People who would be adamant.
Secularists adamant. Allegedly secularists like Inter Sydney, who died later on in Auschwitz.
But, you know, people from the kibbutzim, the socialists who claim to be secularist,
visit synagogues and argue that this is a fake religion that the Baghdadi Jews lost.
Tradition they don't do the heck of walked in in in in in silk had to wear properly disguised not made by the right thing.
And they play backgammon and play of blaming them on Shabbat smoke on Shabbat.
And therefore they are, you know. You know, the issue at stake is what being Arabs.
So what what distinguishes them from being Arab is being Jews.
And, you know, it's it's funny, after the the occupation of Iraq in 2003, one Israeli journalist goes one one show goes into Baghdad.
There are nine people left, nine Jews cut.
The first man he shot is 95 years old.
Can you do smite sad as if this is a an indication I mean it's like what is it like?
Do you have to express your affinity to religion?
I mean, I don't know myself. Why would this guy in Baghdad with no smiles, I mean, my heart.
So there's something here to be decipher, something very energetic.
What is it that secular. I mean will be see momentarily that I don't find it don't define them as secular.
But what is it that people that think that they are secular are obsessed with lack of what is sufficient religiosity of other people?
So I have a chapter in the book on how did the Arab to become religious and Zionist.
So this is the context. So and you will read this, I can say from, you know, having a conversation of people who were critical of this work.
This was read back then as arguing.
He did not argue. But the argument that was read is that they should have says that these Arab Jews
were secular and they were made religious by people like shahs or whatever.
So they were it was represent as an attempt at reclaiming some authentic secularism of the book that the experience
that some of my colleagues sat on so making as they adamantly argue that Baghdadi Jews were symptomatic.
Yes. Yes. No. Yeah. Had that to I use the term in Hebrew because it's easier for me because that doesn't make sense.
The English translation had that to.
What I mean by Haditha is not that what is the Israeli Academy of Hebrew language defined as Haditha?
They refer to my book, but they define Haditha is turning into villages.
Religious people like this is the reverse of the secularisation thesis.
That's not what I meant. And what I meant is and here I have to go into some theory, if this is the point.
I don't know if that's given to you because I speak a lot.
So you know what? Let me interject you. In a matter of less than a decade.
The term is then shift. The object of the process is now viewed as not those underprivileged, almost by definition,
uh, quote unquote, primitive or not what are called primitive Arab Jews.
But now the object of this scene is the process of making someone or something religions religious or making it a religion.
Was the Israeli elite, the secular liberal, mostly Ashkenazi elite people whose, uh, innocent children are sent to secular schools,
the state sponsored main stream of education in Israel, and they come back with clear signs of indoctrination into religiosity.
Now this becomes a campaign, and then they are fighting against it, marking themselves as a persecuted minority,
basically, um, and again, receiving this really loud chamber of echo from the Israeli leading liberal newspaper, Haaretz.
Now, the fascinating thing is to to question what's going on here.
I mean, how do you see yourself as having become a victim of a process of indigenisation?
So first, you have to see yourself as a secular. You have to assume that the schools to which you send your kids at the beginning was secular.
It was teaching you when you were there, before it became religious.
An agent of religion is the car. It doesn't work yet before it became an agent of making something or your kids religious.
It was supposedly a proper secular school.
And when you read what these people are complaining against, for example, in this website that you that was mentioning where they are,
uh, uh, crowdsourcing reports on uh, uh, cases of, uh, of religion these days.
You know, I've had the, to the text, I was just, uh, I don't know, they're just fascinating because they make no sense.
People would complain on and this is the point they will complain on what in proper
mainstream Zionist ideology or horizon of understanding are nationalist secular symbols.
And they are educated for this in school.
I mean, they could hit on this in school if you would ask them, what's the logic of the educator without any shred of a sense of religiosity?
They are educated to do all of this in order for them to grow up, to be good nationals,
to be good subjects of the sovereign who happened to identify itself as the sovereign nation state of Jews.
Now, here, obviously, we come to this problem of what would it mean for Israel to identify as a nation state of Jews, which is secular?
And it goes back to this complicated notion of, well, obviously lack of a definition, which I don't want to go into right now.
So the last point I want to make in this regard, and this is again to go back to your, uh, through narrative, the, the picture that is drawn in this,
in this panic, in this clear moral panic on data is,
is binary throughout in which many different positions, polities are all collapsed into two camps.
So if you are enlightened and tolerant and rational, obviously secular, you also have to be Zionist and leftist.
So any other position is simply impossibility.
So being Judith Butler, to go back to the previous session is an impossibility because you cannot present
a Jewish critique of Zionism or of of Judaism because the two are the same.
If you believe in some sense, or if you adhere to some sense of loyalty to tradition,
then you are by definition undemocratic and intolerant and so on and so forth.
And then the debate that ensues on the pages of arts and in other venues is fascinating in this that you get to,
um, two main positions within the Israeli liberal Zionist camp.
One says we have to, uh, hard press the Zionism button to save ourselves from that.
So the solution to religion ization is Zionism because it is right to be secular by definition.
The other option that is presented is we have to give up on Zionism all together so far in order for us to be and so on, Judaism all together.
You see, I trip to my detriment.
We have to give up on Judaism altogether because the other, the other term that goes with the same stream of uh of binaries is of, is non-Jew.
If you're Jewish, then your right wing, the nationalist, intolerant chauvinist and so on and so forth.
So the only option for us is to either give up altogether on our particular identities.
But this is a very small minority that would call for this and they usually are not heard or we have to redefine an anti-Jewish,
not non-Jewish, an anti-Jewish Israeli ness, which would not make any sense in the context of the conflict.
And if I think connected to what you said, the lack of an end to that, because I think when you said that the tides encapsulate and that's,
I think what you wanted to start doing with the theoretical it's encapsulate other dimensions of ethnicity, race, nationality.
It's not only the binary. Of course, we could be secular, right.
And it's not it's not surprising that now when the current use of the term is only used for Jews because Muslims have become religious,
there will be some reason they wouldn't be at the top in that case.
So it's very unique in this cup select of race, ethnicity and nationality.
So and you start with it in Baghdad in the fourth going back.
So, I mean, what is Judaism? Well, I mean, for the sake of a simple form.
And think about the triangle in which you find Judaism as nationality, as a religion, as an ethnicity.
And this is the great success of Zionism, is to be able to divert.
One category into the other. And you you never know what it is that you refer to at this particular point in time.
I remember when in 1992, when the four foundational laws were legislated.
92? Yes. And there was. Huh.
The basic laws. The basic law that what's got is thought that it was a coalition between ultra religious party and an ultra liberal.
She knew it party. It says, let's have a law for a Jewish Democratic state.
So what do you mean by Jewish? So one thing is Jewish is a Jewish state in terms of religion.
The other is a Jewish state in terms of nationalism.
So this cap coalition yields a very ambiguous definition of what Judaism is all about.
Now, if you go back home to my beloved grandmother, she I mean, she was Orthodox Jew in terms of not Orthodox in terms of the current definition.
But she was very observant. Every holiday she would replace, not only on this Passover, she would replace, you know, the plates for food.
For food, for for for the for the holiday and the food and everything.
But we were smoking on some Friday night with different car, but the equivalent is that we went ride the car to the synagogues, etc.
There's no such a binary ism as the war over religion in Europe generated two camps, rivalry camps that are really in a fierce struggle between them.
And when my grandmother came to to to to to Israel and to ask her, are you religious or secular?
And she looked at her sons and girls and she didn't know what to do, what to say about it, because there wasn't such a category.
This is one of the reason I never defined myself as secular, although I eat seafood and whatever.
It's a statement. It's a political statement because the definition of the binary is in between religion and secularism,
and Israel is entangled with colonial and oriental discourse.
So when one of the liberal artists says, oh, they kiss the mezuzah and therefore that primitives the God was affair.
Yes, I kiss the mezuzah. I am a primitive.
So it's a it's a it's a it's a response to that discourse.
And and a few weeks ago, a Palestinian student came to my office.
She was completely secular by whatever she were parents and whatever.
And then. And I said, tell me if are you secular or religious?
She said, I'm not secular. I asked her, how come?
He said, respect to my. Family.
Because secularism is a liberal category.
In which it's in which.
Which is correlated with Orientalism. Now go going back to the definition.
And here I've learned because I want to lead that. If I can lead the discussion, I want to bring the discussion into that other side of the picture.
What is secondary because and here, honestly, I've learned from Peter Bergen.
I've learned of Peter Berger. One that's one footnote in his The Sacred Canopy, which is well known book.
There's a footnote on page 128, which refers to methodological atheism.
How do you create? Artist. How do you create after ism and sociological thinking?
I'm a sociology. And as Talal Asset said, you know, I've seen all syllabuses in America sociology of religion, anthropology of religion.
There's nothing of sociology, of secularism as if secularism is the natural state.
There's something you said converted into atheism.
You said that. I mean, this is brilliant. This is it.
I mean, we never been converted into activism. Yeah.
And where was my mother once?
Oh. So he mentions methodological at practice.
And how do you create methodological anti-racism phenomenology?
Theology is never on the ground. Right. It's in your mind.
Now, when you say phenomenology, it depends which kind of phenomenology.
I would, in a simplistic way talk about two kinds of phenomenology Kantian.
Husserl, which is phenomenology is the size of consciousness.
Or Hegelian, which is a different story altogether.
And and bit embarrasses you know when you come you know slide down topologies who come to bill who
comes to some tribe and try to understand and they have all dancing to to have rain for the you know,
for prosperous season, whatever. And it succeeds in this way.
And the observer says it's not because of the dancing, it's just nature.
So you have that's why I meant earlier, the look, the logic of the observer and the logic of the observed.
That that this is all in their minds.
I don't identify with their language with a logic.
I have an external objective language to describe it.
It's not there. Same thing here in sociology we have a field called sociology of whereas team to where you can see is behind us here.
Sociology of Sociology of religion. Sociology of religion is a current in not to talk about theology.
Because everything there is about.
Phenomenology in the pantheon since. So it's like, you know, the analogous would be if I teach introductory sociology and I put gender.
It's a separate topic. I can currently engender.
So gender is not in other topics, right?
Have like sociology of delinquency, sociology of economics, a sort of society of gender, as if gender is a separate ghetto.
We would say rightly so. Gender should be in every topic, right?
So sociology of religion is a current attempt to put to put to put theology and issues of theology in a current.
And we are free from there. We are free to talk about everything but reality, objectivity, empiricism, all this kind of thing.
We can deal with theology and exist from God and all this kind of thing.
What's his name? The guy. MILBANK John milbank, for example, I don't know if you know his work.
I mean, it's very hard to read, really hard to read. But I identify with this project because I like provoking, for example,
other great student tell, you know, invisible hand of the market with the economists avenue.
Well, who? Who's who? Whose work? Whose hand is this?
Of course, the hand of God. It was never a secular argument in Adam Smith.
And or sovereignty. I mean, the reborn rebel army and rebel.
Not so sovereign. The sovereign God. It's a theological argument.
It can't. Smith says all the concepts of major concepts in social science are secularised theological concepts.
So in this, in essence, what we do is by using the term and going back to how the duck is,
that's how you define yourself as secular, because there are two binaries in this topography.
There are many positions. And we don't have a stable position for secularist and religious people.
And that goes back to what the anchor says. Can you say that the Zionist is a secular person?
I mean, Zionism is a religious movement, is a reformist movement.
Zionist are reformist Jews. Now it's a Protestant movement.
Why? Zionism is a Protestant movement.
A because it's emerged within what is Stanthorpe and because I go back to Peter Berger half a year before he died,
he had an interview where he says the entire Christianity is walking.
That was Protestantism. He would you even and say the entire world is going towards Protestantism, which is another word to say modernisation.
But in the context of Judaism, which is a public religion and Islam is a public religion.
I would say differently in.
Who mentioned the Jewish problem earlier. Somebody mentioned the Jewish problem.
Right. Well, it's a good record.
Was what what was the Jewish problem? One of the aspects of the Jewish problem in Europe, which was a real problem.
Although I do not define myself as a Zionist. The Jews were really persecuted at the time.
Nobody denies that, and nobody even denies the fact that the Jews deserved a national movement at the time.
But what was the problem? The problem starts after this failure.
With the protests Protestant ization of the state.
And what is the Protestant position of the state? If you think about Luther.
What is Sola Scriptura? Is the individualisation of religion.
Jews could not individual religion, individualised religion.
What does the Jewish ghetto. That's the problem.
The Jewish ghetto, a way of life.
Judaism was not only a religion, this was a way of life that's referring back to my grandmother.
So the Jewish ghetto is a pain in the ass in the in the new modern Protestant state.
And if it this is the last religion and basically secularism is equated with Protestantism.
Because when Moshe Mendelsohn says in Germany in early 19th century, be a Jew at home and individual outside it's a how can you be a Jew at home?
You cannot. You need the public. And what is the outside?
The outside is a Christian space. It's not a neutral space.
So this was an attempt. Two, two, two, two, two, two, two, two, two, two.
To generate a Protestant version of Judas, which never worked.
By the way, I wouldn't only put it into a colleague, both of you and mine to it.
I'm going to ask a question that was supposed to be here. You have a great title for one of his articles that do not exist, but he promises the land.
Right. And in many ways, this is within this oxymoron of the secular.
By the way, that's kind of. Schmidt about about the bourgeoisie.
Okay. They said God doesn't add up. Of course, it's a take on Carl Schmidt's argument about the bourgeoisie.
And I wanted to bring it in because I think what you that you started to do is start talking about
categorisation from the knowledge from like a deeper level of how we construct categorisation,
how we explain the situation. I think that your work on traditional society is doing that work as well.
And how, if we can talk a little bit about how this category traditional is working on the other more common and of secular and religious.
So I think this is a wonderful case where I but first of all, first and foremost,
academic concepts that then permeate into common language and of creating something in the real world.
But it starts with in the power of knowledge relationship.
It starts with knowledge or the creation of light, and it shifts into power.
So the term emerges. My thought is, is it is in Hebrew translation of traditional as the opposition of modern.
So a nicer word for for primitive and Israeli sociologist who've studied labour and built this
toolkit of concepts to study the newly formed population and other problematic talk by the term.
But now does the Israeli population all or largely immigrant societies that now needs to be measured by a field manual and others.
But primarily then we're not Eizenstat who approach the subject, the objects of study,
and they ask them, so what are you are you secular or are you religious?
Are you modern or are you traditional? The modern tradition, they judge for themselves, but they divide the people along these lines.
And religiosity is taken to be a marker of, uh, of primitiveness or traditionalism.
So Jews who come from or just arrived at Israel from, uh,
Muslim countries are taken to be almost by definition premodern or non modern and then traditional.
And then it is observed that their lifestyle when it comes to matter of religiosity is,
if anything, inconsistent, confusing, whatever you want to call it.
It doesn't fall into the categories. So traditional becomes then a marker of religious identity.
It is the marker of the neither nor identity, neither religious nor secular or uh, both religious and secular.
It's those people who yeah. They have along the binary and from both sides it was looking down to Oh yeah, yeah.
And, and the narrative that this is still in the narrative that they say is that they have to be this socialisation and raise a civilisation.
We break down the communal structure that they brought with them from the pre-modern countries.
We educate them into nationalism.
So we in a sense teach them that now they have the proper option of either either being a proper Jew by being a national Zionist subject,
or if they do want this is a democratic country or culture.
They still have the option to adhere to religion, but then they have to be properly religious.
As we know, those black hat, uh, people from our uh, European past.
So they have to be and their own religion.
And this is how actually I think part of your work was read to be suggesting that this was happening, that we were forced into this.
But then contrary to predictions, uh, and second and third generations of people who hail from, uh, these Arab,
uh, Jewish heritage do not become secularised or not, as would be expected by, uh, by the sociologists.
And they end up in this sense, appropriated the term to identify this position of outside of the binary,
sort of like what you describe your student saying.
But then the context, the context against which is this is happening is that there is already agreed upon culture,
camp culture, war, a binary that describes that sets the scene of what Israeli society is all about and.
And they have to, in a sense, play along with it and you'll get.
Well, some friends of ours who are involved in the politics of it, who try to suggest another form of Zionist politics that would go along this.
So the problem then would be, is there a way at all to, uh, critique and suggest alternatives to an Israeli,
uh, uh, reality that would be self perceptively, Jewish and not necessarily Zionist?
So is there a room in Israel for that, for a Jewish critique of Zionism or for the Jewish critique of,
uh, um, of the nationalisation of Jewish identity by, um, by the state.
And obviously there is one clear example, a living example of that practice, the ultra-Orthodox objection to Zionism,
which in a sense defines itself as anti-Zionist and reconstruct itself and its identity along its opposition to the state.
Uh, I think one of the interesting projects to be, uh,
to be carried collectively is exactly to think about these matters that would fall under the categories of religious I'm sorry, of Jewish politics,
of uh, of Jewishness, of uh, of Jewish identity against the nationalisation or against the state is the sovereign construction of these terms,
as was suggested in Muslim context and underway.
That would be and this is the most important I think would be intimately familiar with the traditions it claims, uh,
to adhere without falling into the binary trap of either becoming an al reflexive support
of the UN reflexive and not loyalty conservatism of a certain notion of tradition or uh,
giving up when it goes together, which is.
But I wanted to bring another thing into that I think that is connected is you said you that it's a Judeo-Christian question.
And I want to say that the Arab Jews and the traces of their tradition bring an
echo into their Muslim tradition into that that is all forgotten in this point,
because now we all we are part of the Judeo-Christian civilisation when it comes to the Islamic world and and what is there.
And then in some of it, one of the scholars said, you know,
when when they are advised the Jews in Israel, they forgot to close the door of the synagogue,
because inside the synagogue you have some practices, even the culture, even the right wing of Jewish synagogues will have still Arabic music.
And you have the Egyptian music and Kalthoum will be inside Friday night and you have some
of that and the oral tradition that stays and some of the traces of the Judeo Muslim.
So it's interesting for me because, you know, part of your work,
you there now is a language to an Arabic in Hebrew that this kind of and but but you
know part of it is of course and the and I think part of the problem of the people that
took in our traditional resources that forgetting the Palestinian issue is another division
between internal Jewish problem between Islamic Ashkenazi or secular and religious.
But it's not connected to the Palestinian. Palestinian is a different issue, is a national conflict.
But I think that we need to and you do it in your Jews, in your book, you need to cross between ethnicity,
nationality and of course, I think that you don't think if it's a thought, you don't have to.
I think it's I think we can connect it to maybe to the nation state, a new law.
And I like to quote my mother now, not my grandmother.
So when I wrote this Arab just book, my mother wanted to know why I'm against my own people.
I'm not an academician. So why?
What do you mean by we are not Arabs?
We've never been Arabs. Okay.
And then I use this quite often.
So she calls me up 11 at night.
Pick up the phone. My mother is on the line.
Upset. Really upset. Without greeting me or anything.
She tells me in Arabic Wala buss, Uncle Tom Catlett.
A smile, which means only Uncle Tom.
So Uncle Tom is to blame that Usman that died a smart was a singer in 1944.
She drove off a bridge in an Egypt.
And she realised in 19, you know, in 2019 that it was Uncle Tom who killed Usman.
And she tells me that she's not Arab. This paradoxes, this contradictions.
Are endemic, endemic to Israeli nationalism.
And I think that what you describe I mean, it's really paradoxical.
We just conducted a survey among Israeli Jews to find out the extent to which.
Israeli Jews speak Arabic or understand Arabic.
And the results are astonishing and astonishing.
Less than half percent of the Jews in Israel can read a text in Arabic.
Less than half percent. This is where you have a territory surrounded by 200 million Arab speaking people.
In a society where half of the Jewish population come from Arab countries, let alone the Palestinians.
20% Palestinians are left after that state after were allowed to stay after 48.
This is insane. This doesn't make sense. But.
Don't say something. No, finish your sentence. It doesn't make sense.
Cause if you're.
If you're a dog and you love Palestinians and want peace and all this kind of thing, you must be able to converse or interact in Arabic.
Or if you're a hawk and you want to kill the Arabs or understand the enemy.
So that means to have a percent of the pressure there in a non-Arab.
So how come only the last didn't you laugh?
Because your book, I mean, the parable about the use of Arabic language in Israel, it doesn't make sense.
Even more so if you look at the differences between ethnic groups.
The picture become even more complicated and interesting among Mizrahi Jews, those who come from our countries.
Approximately 14% would argue that they are able to speak and understand Arabic as opposed to reading a text.
Now we you when you pin it down, it's not really a command of Arabic, but they those are the people who have hurt their grandmothers.
Now, the for example, when I started to learn Arabic, before I knew Arabic.
I could tell you if a word is pronounced correctly, because I've heard it.
So when you. Cut down this population.
Turn out that most of them are residuals that are claiming that are able to to speak or understand.
Among those who the bulk of the less than half percent point 4% amongst Ashkenazi Jews.
Who can read text. So there is a fragmentation, an interesting fermentation that the Israeli Jews carried the orange tradition.
And Ashkenazi Jews carry the textual tradition.
What is the textual tradition? Internal intelligence services, army?
Those kind of thing. And as my friend and colleague Johnny Mathis says, Arabic in Israel became latinised.
You either hear it or read it. You don't speak the language.
Most 99% of Avid.
Correct me if I'm wrong of people who study Middle Eastern histories, Arabic, whatever can read texts.
None of them can speak. None of them can dialogue with Arabs as Palestinians.
How did it happen? I mean, there are sociological processes.
This is very interesting thing, if I can elaborate.
That was fascinating. 1971, there's a big meeting between the Israeli military and the Ministry of Education.
A big problem crisis. Why? Because the generation of my parents.
Though,
people who came from Arab countries I'm not referring to nor Northern Africa because they had different dialect and languages than the Middle Eastern,
which are needed for today is probably different.
And they got a, uh, a golden gift, a whole population, 150,000 people, 30,000 people who speak perfect Middle Eastern Arabic.
And they were recruited into the services.
My father was one of them.
The second generation, my generation, they want to cooperate with us either because many a reason, but we do want to cooperate.
So what do we do, by the way, because of that Arabic?
The Iraqi Jews made up the upper echelon more than other Mizrahi Jews because they have jobs all the time connected with Arabic,
particularly after 67.
And I don't know if you want to tell this person story about you even knows exactly what I referred to because his father was one of them.
All Iraqi Jews got jobs because of the 67 occupation, not only in intelligence, agriculture, whatever.
Where I'm going to lead this. I don't know. Nowadays they want to.
Second generation. Second generation. They want to cooperate with this stuff.
What did they do? They decided to open Arabic tracts in well-off neighbourhoods.
So what is well-off neighbourhoods? Matter, Sean?
Matter. Vive Aliya de la, all of them.
Ashkenazi neighbourhoods. So Arabic turned into an Ashkenazi occupation.
People who never heard Arabic at home are now experts of Arabic who can remind you listen, because you listen to radio or read texts cannot speak.
And then Mizrahi, who can ostensibly or allegedly speak or hear but cannot read or write.
And this fragmentation is mind boggling. Anyway.
I don't know if I want to. So I just want to make one small.
I want to open this. So one of the interesting conflicts, one where the issue of language comes up is the the nation state,
the new, where famously Arabic is demoted from being an official language to being a special status language.
And one of the fascinating elements of it is the state's, uh, negation of the Jewish history that was written in Arabic.
And my friends here are signees of a petition to the Israeli Supreme Court to, uh, to change the law exactly on this, on this ground.
And I want to mention the law in this context, because this is a fascinating case.
The the whole debate on the law and the ultimate result that was last summer was a wonderful expression of the
inability of a discourse on Jewish identity to take place within the context of the nationalisation of Jewishness.
The law was driven by, uh, something that has nothing to do with Judaism or with Jewishness or with Jewish tradition.
So with history, it had to do with one group's attempt at securing its privileged position in the context of conflict.
It was aimed to reassert Israel's identity if you want, to Israel's constitution as a state of Jews and if no one else.
This was, I think, uh, brilliantly expressed by, uh, the current Prime Minister Netanyahu in this uh,
uh, public debate he had with uh, a TV actress of all people with a TV actress.
What's her name?
I don't I'm sorry that someone who commented, why would the public discourse what would the public people in Israel would not allow for a possibility?
Were parties represented representing the Palestinian minority within Israel to be part of the governing coalition is indeed the state of them too.
And his answer was basically no. They are equal citizens, but it's only the state of the of the Jews.
This is what the law has been aimed to do.
However, two countries that they can. Yes.
And they have other countries to go. Yeah, that was my that was his call. Yeah.
Now the thing that the interesting thing that happened is what that when people were sitting to ideologies,
this notion through a law, they found themselves compelled to uh,
uh, articulate what it means for Israel to be Jewish, which is, it's a, it's a,
it's in a sense, it's, if you consider what, uh, Jewish traditions understand and tell us,
it's something different than just being, uh, biologically or I don't know what racially or ethnically,
whatever we call it, born into a Jewish descent, Jewish is a normative,
uh, even judgemental concept where, uh, some did, some believes, some ways of life,
some being in the words are understood to be more or less authentic or corresponding.
And this was projected to the state.
But every time they tried to bring this into legal language to league,
legislate something that would make proper sense in terms of Jewish politics, it was immediately read as being religious.
So they, uh, they backtracked. They backtracked.
And many of the interesting references to Jewish religion,
tradition and heritage that are found in the first drafts of the law were cut out, and they're not in the last drafts.
The only thing that remained from beginning to end is the preference of one group over the other.
The declaration that Israel is the Jewish is the state of the Jewish people and if no one else is.
So, um, yeah, I think that, that, before we updated,
I think that the petition against the law that you and I was part of a group of five Jewish executives against the law.
One of our argument is that Arabic is a Jewish language, but Aramaic is an Arabic settlement.
So so, so again, the Judeo Muslim traces that that was before is coming up.
And you can tell about the story maybe after that.
Let's go now a story of a Palestinian scholar translating back into Israel that was written by a very famous subject.
A book was written in Arabic, in Hebrew characters, through the Arabic into Arabic,
in Arabic character being stopped in their in their border because they were suspicious
when it did this big project and was published in Germany and to bring it to Palestine,
Israel few years ago it was stopped in the border because it may be is is suspicious.
This is a literature from an enemy country. The book was printed and this is the reason that this book in Arabic.
So. Hysterical. Whatever.
Go ahead. You know me. Yiddish is a wonderful language.
I wasn't even mentioning this. No, I'm saying. And it is regrettable.
It was a waste. In other languages, like Arabic.
However, there's one difference. Arabic is not the language of the diaspora.
Arabic is the language of the place. That's a big difference.
I'm not saying more than that, but it's a difference.
I agree. I'm just saying that is. I know. I know of ethnic.
No, no, no, no. I'm saying it was a project of erasing all diasporic languages.
This true erasure of Arabic was part of it, but the erasure of Arabic was also part of another project.
That's what I'm saying. Avner and I had a discussion earlier about how do you distinguish between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi and all this?
It's also true. You're right. When we established in the nineties the political movement of Jews from our second generation of Americans,
that means that because of them, the Rainbow Coalition.
The Rainbow Coalition. 20% were Ashkenazi Jews who defined themselves as Mizrahi as men would define themselves as feminists.
That's how I see it. We are not Hitler. It's not biology that determines.
It's the. The the political ideology or orientation.
20% were Ashkenazi Jews. Now you may argue that I cannot be a true feminist.
That's a different story because I'm not a woman. I don't know. But there are arguments like this, and I might accept, because as a man, I do learn.
I have to learn this sort of dramatic magic. I know how what feminism is about and how, you know, you learn.
You have to learn. You have to educate yourself. Huh? So the woman women.
But. But, but, but but but let me tell you something very shocking.
Today in Israel, the disparities between Ashkenazi Jews and Mizrahi Jews are larger than 40 years ago, not the other way around.
Now how is a can be how it can be, for example, in education?
I mean, I don't want to take the whole discussion.
I can send you stuff about it, statistically speaking.
In education. Income ownership.
Off of houses. Intergenerational transfer of wealth.
Disparities are larger, partly because the Gini coefficient or the disparities between classes is larger.
This is part of the reason. But but the problem is that, for example, the Israeli census does not allow to ask in the census about grandfathers.
Listen. They start from my mother and father.
And this is ideological because it says follow the money to do it.
Melting pot. The melting pot put, grandfather said.
Because today when you study, all parents are Israeli.
I mean I mean, except for the big immigration from the Soviet Union itself.
So how do we know? Now it's it doesn't seem possible because we know intermarriages and all this further,
because we are close within the same bubble of class based common class.
But deficits are widening. Or at least they are larger than I don't know if widening now, but they were larger.
They are larger than 30 and 40 years ago.
A. And the reform is something very interesting about the reformists.
When we were children, when I was a child, they were called.
Christians. I you know, I'm you know, we were thought to believe that these are Christians.
But his head has been changed completely because the reform movement today in Israel and that links to what Army says earlier,
is a platform in which many,
many people enter, including Mizrahi,
because people want to have like a bar mitzvah and a wedding and whatever in a in a traditional way, but they're not.
So the entire demography of the reform movement in Israel is current.
There's a new book that came out that describes it in detail.
Bette, how is it related to what Naomi says?
Because you're white. And that relates to the collapse of the binaries and the so many, many movement and parties and sects.
I have a student who is finish a dissertation on secular women, leftists who believe in God,
not believe in God, in the sense that, you know, when the plan falls down, I stop praying.
They believe in God as a as an ideology.
And they meet together and they talk about God.
I mean, all the kind of crazy things of hybrids that there's another reason to collapse those categories.
And obviously, my friend Israel is an apartheid state.
I agree with you. And that's one of the reasons I think I wrote this book about it against a two state solution,
because I think a two state solution would increase the apartheid.
For example, I think that, God forbid, if there would be a two state solution.
Israeli Palestinians. Oh, because in many ways, you correct me, are up to many European, Palestinian to many Arab and Arab in the dark.
And there are many, many kinds of identity that will be pushed out in a transfer to the Palestinian state.
So do you want to be a nationalist? Go there. Otherwise, if you want to be the Jewish state, be the Jewish settlers individual, not a collective.
And in any way we are not. It's not possible.
It's not reversible. It's not plausible to have a two state solution because they talk about territory.
Exchange is not territory to exchange. It's all [INAUDIBLE].
Now. I'm not I'm a Jew. I'm not in a position to tell a Palestinian.
You live leapfrog over the fantasy of having a state.
Let's live together in one state. But realistically, Merlin been banished.
You mentioned him was first to see that in the eighties.
And my book is following his argument. Partly it's irreversible.
Irreversible. No government can evacuate the settlements.
It's a fact. And I think that the whole idea I mean, I'm talking about something else now, the whole idea of evacuating the settlements.
Dee Dee. Dee Dee. You know, 450 villages were destroyed in 48.
This is the Labour Party did it. And as my friend Hassan Jabari says, there was no settlement.
The suffocates. The Palestinians s call me in.
And Nazareth. The ladies within the green line.
So it's all crooked. It's all upside down. Israel is an apartheid state.
And I was finished with a story that I told last night because it's an anecdote.
And I. Anyway, we had a delegation to South Africa,
Palestinian delegation that had the honour to be a Palestinian delegation, went to South Africa to learn about 1994.
Gwen would be the 1994 of the middle east. How did it happen?
I went there. I came back. I never understood what happened there in 1994, the moment that a regime collapses, a particular kind of regime.
And what have denied. They tell me. They tell us this.
In this I forget the name. The Minister of Defence of the Apartheid State in South Africa wants to meet with you.
So I. You know, I object. No, I'm.
I want to meet with him as a criminal. Whatever, blah, blah, blah. They said no, he's a reformed liberal now.
He went through this. Truth and reconciliation, whatever.
Whenever we met with him. It was one of the most fascinating conversation I've had ever.
It was like after midnight. Told you this story after midnight.
And I told him I forget his name. I tell him, let's say let's say his name is John.
John, tell me something about the party that inspired. So I'll tell you a story.
I remember the eighties and the divestment said yes.
They said, Well, the third world divested South Africa and at that sense, divested.
And we had only just from Durban.
You want to send it to Europe. So what do we do? Shimon Peres and Yossi Beilin, the leftist, told us, sent us to us.
They sent boxes of oranges from Durban to Jaffa Stamp at Jaffa and sent back to Europe.
So that's how apartheid worked. This is an anecdote.
You don't have to generalise from that. But say something.
Thank you. I just want to touch a few points from this.
First, let me regarding your question, your question regarding religious Zionist,
the category of religious Zionist in which seems to be now but it is growing in influence is is fascinating
because it is read mostly as a religious phenomena but it is primarily a nationalist phenomenon.
What's going on with religious with the Religious-zionist camp, I think is a further heightened nationalisation of Judaism,
more Jewishness of Jewish tradition than happened in the secular.
So if the secular Zionist or the Zionist a bit confused about what what's their claim to Jewish identity is
for the religious gap is very obvious because for them theological politics or politics is a proper noun.
It is what should be done. So the state is deified, not as if and not is correct, but.
But it's all about the state. It's not about what it's all about.
To the degree to which the highest form of worship is service in the army, hence the increase in the you know, it's a concept,
but in a sense all they're doing is to play a more one dimensional, as in convinced and less conflictual a nationalist game.
So and this is a this is a big tent that can include the, you know, different.
Yes. While in essence, when it comes to the way, uh, this uh, uh, new kind of Judaism,
what kind of Jewishness understand itself is primarily through Hasidic European history.
So I mean, its roots, the roots to which and its, you know, founding fathers are specifically of, you know, of of a specific Ashkenazi heritage.
But it is, yeah. Since it defines itself through the state.
And the state is supposedly ethnically or, you know, ethnically it is into ethnically Jewish neutral, then it can be more, in a sense, inclusive.
And many Mizrahi Jews would feel more comfortable there than with, uh, with other forms of, uh, and Jewish identity in Israel.
I know that. Support your argument. Half of the settlers now are mizrahim.
Yeah, it wasn't like that. Yeah.
So, I don't know. Getting to the question of the Zionist movement relation to um, um,
reform or liberal Judaism or to the Liberal government and then the Israeli or Israel, the,
the state of Israel as relation to uh, reform is obviously, you know,
has a long history of support and I think maybe this would be a nice place to go back to.
The first, the first step of this whole discussion, Reform Judaism emerges following from Moses Mendelssohn.
But some delay exactly is the argument that Judaism is only a religion.
Exactly. And religion and nothing else but religion. So it is not a nationality, it's not a polity, it's not an ethnicity.
It's something that someone does. And it is the privacy of Islam or where it goes to the place of worship,
which happens to be called the synagogue, but is really functioning like it functions now,
having been reformed like a German Protestant church or whatever it like is, you know, it it needs to be reformed so the organ and well right.
But it's about religion. No, it's about. And it's not about law and it's not about sorry.
Yeah, no. And Zionism.
Zionism at this point is Reform Judaism is the most important rival in the
European context for the redefinition or the modernisation of Jewish identity.
The alternative would be assimilation and giving up completely on identity or redefinition, and the Zionist argument is exactly against that.
Judaism is not a religion and it's so fascinating to see this argument being, uh, pointed once and time and again.
But this already, uh,
being trapped in the discourse that is built on religious and or the religious Zionist or the religious secular or the secular religious,
the uh, narrative where the only options are these two.
So what we are by this understanding, what we are claiming for is a, is a Jewish nationalist movement, is a secular form of Jewishness.
Um, so it obviously changes the interesting factor to mention a sociological fact to mention in this.
Regard is to this day when people run surveys and birth like you.
I don't appreciate a service and I really most of my work is to say see how wrong they are.
But an interesting observation about how people react to this question is that those
who identify as reform do not check the box religious because in Israeli Hebrew,
as you said, just to reiterate it, the three,
which would be the contemporary translation of religious is understood as orthodox orthodox and order though they bit.
Yeah I think it's yeah and it is I mean so many people see the blame immediately in the Orthodox establishment and the gains it has from this.
Again, what Beth referred to earlier, this division of power,
where they gain this monopoly over the definition of what is religiosity, and they are happy with it.
But I mean, I go to pains to stress that the secular in this context, the state has an equal interest in doing that,
in pushing away Reform Judaism, because it at least in the past, it had the possibility of being a critical perspective on Israel.
And I think this goes back to butter, because butter was she's not a secular Jew.
She doesn't identify as a sacred a Jew.
She goes she she nourishes on what would be a reform, um, tradition, I think in reading the meaning of, of Jewish, you know, yeah.
We need to thank you very much for that.