So graciously, thank you for agreeing to spend time with us.
I speak of is Atelier Omer, who is a professor of religion, conflict and peace studies at the Cato Institute.
I'm sorry for international peace studies at the Kiel School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame in the United States.
Professor Almer is also the Dermo T.J. Dunfee, visiting professor of Religion,
Violence and Peacebuilding at Harvard University and a senior fellow at the Religion
Conflict and Peace Initiative at the same university's Religion and Public Life Programme.
She earned her Ph.D. in religion, ethics and politics from the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University.
And most importantly, her research focuses on religion, violence and peacebuilding with a particular focus on Palestine,
Israel, as well as life, as well as theories and methods in the study of religion.
Professor Ohmar was awarded the Andrew Carnegie, the prestigious Andrew Carnegie Fellowship,
in 2017 to complete a manuscript titled Decolonising Religion and Peace Building,
amongst other publications, or is the author of When Peace Is Not Enough How the Israeli Peace Camp Thinks About Religion, Nationalism and Justice.
And there is of all, reimagining Jewishness and solidarity in solidarity with Palestine.
She is also a co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of of Religion, Conflict and Peacebuilding.
And the title of her talk of her talk today is Pathways towards a Jewish Israeli Restorative Ethics Today.
Thank you so much for coming in.
Thank you so much for inviting me and for hosting me today and taking me to the Harry Potter's dining room, like the version of the Oxford Themepark.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's I'm really excited to be here also because, you know,
I had conversations with you and I'm glad that that finally those conversations are not only in my head.
So thank you for all your scholarship, too. And and really for for being here for all of you.
So I revised the title of my talk just a little bit.
I call it Jewish non Jewish Restorative Pathways in Palestine, Israel.
So in my most recently published. Oh yeah.
Sorry, I kind of anyway.
OK, so in my most recently published book, which was just mentioned, Days of ah Reimagining Jewishness in Solidarity with Palestinians,
I examine American Jewish solidarity and its relation to reimagining American Jewishness as multiracial,
multi gender and anti-racist as well as relatedly other centric rather than ethnocentric.
Today I will examine how Jewish Israeli restorative justice practises, including those articulated by the feminist organisation,
the support and the petition of Jewish Israelis against Israeli apartheid,
propelled by the escalation of violence in May 20 21 just now,
and settle in trouble and move to the diasporic as the primary Jewish source of ethical critique of Israelis.
OK, so first, what is restorative justice?
Restoration and reparation constitute interrelated processes designed to redress harms and injuries and imagined pathways for alternative futures,
informed by the concreteness of historical realities and intergenerational relational patterns.
For the present reflection, it is important to underscore what restoration and repair are not in the context of Palestine Israel.
So the reigning paradigm interprets Israel, the supposed Jewish state,
as a response to the to the Shoah or itself a form of repair or atonement for question.
Europe's crimes, as Mahmood Mamdani writes recently called,
This claim makes sense only if we accept secular rather than immigrant logic and of course,
obscuring of settler colonial logic by religious language and biblical claims.
As the Palestinian Israeli scholar Nadim Rohana sees,
it enables Jews to make nativist arguments about their link to the land, namely that finally, quote unquote, restored.
They are the real indigenous people of Palestine in the same way in which the settler colonial.
Tournament model displays historical responsibility for genocide of Jews from European Christians to Palestinians.
So does the discourse of restoration of the Jews in the land of Zion has deep Christian roots where the
restoration of the Jews has constituted an important move for Christian eschatology kind of end times theology,
while also serving Western Christian colonial designs in the MENA region.
So the concept and practise of restoration, often relying on the mechanism of biblical archaeology, as Nadia Abu Alhaj has demonstrated,
classically therefore needs to be reclaimed from this theological imagination and or what Mark Ellis,
Jewish Palestine Liberation theologian, has called the ecumenical pact.
This is restoration, to reiterate, that has exhibited the settler colonial logic.
Patrick was captured.
This logic with the often quoted phrase invasion is a structure, not an event which seeks replacement and elimination of the natives.
Unsurprisingly, this confluence of geopolitical agendas and Orientalists underpinnings has also involved projecting the empirical
presence of Arab Jews in the region over centuries to as fossilised proof for Jewish claims of indigeneity.
Of course, Arab Jews were marginalised from Europe, Zionism and continue to be marginalised within Israeli Ashkenazi hegemonic discourse,
even if they do participate in and benefit from Jewish supremacy.
Hence what many Jews lament as the hijacking of good old secular Zionism by
religious settler and annexationist discourse is both misplaced and myopic.
Since the settler colonial Christian atonement model and the Jewish restorative approach both reveal a reliance
on theological imaginations and blindness to Palestinian experiences at the receiving end of such grammars.
They are neither restorative nor reparative in their claim to be pair, quote unquote,
and restoration of the Jews in the land fall short of the sine qua non of restorative justice approaches,
namely such approaches and victim centricity and intentionality in bringing into the circle all those affected for their justice.
Part of restorative justice. To be meaningful, it needs to be multi perspectival and robustly account for the human rights of all those affected here.
Intercultural human rights norms constitute deskin qua non for in interrogating Jewish and non Jewish critics of Zionism.
Next, not only about the Jewish moral exile, bringing Europe, so to speak,
into efforts to develop a new ethical grammar for peace and justice paradigm is precisely what recent academic efforts.
And here I'll only cite the book by Bashir The Work of Bashir, Bashir and Almos Goldberg,
who build on all their intellectual genealogy dating back to,
at least to Edward Said, and their effort to think about the relationship between the Shoah and the Nakba.
As interweaved, such scholarly interventions exemplify relational restorative justice potential because of their resistance
of erasure and their centralising of the imperative to redress historical injustices and memories.
Not surprisingly, they emerge from within Israeli the Israeli academy,
where increasingly there is a coalescing of scholarly output by Palestinian Israeli scholars deploying the lens of settler
colonialism to interpret their realities and potential future finial cite a few reached Sabawi LANATA tour via Facebook.
Just a few examples of Palestinian-Israeli scholars who are thinking in those spaces.
But the loudest voices come from the US. Peter Beinart, a self-described repentant American Jewish liberal Zionist,
concludes his widely circulated piece, Teshuvah A Jewish Case for Palestinian Return,
addressing exclusively the broader English speaking Palestine solidarity movements as well as American,
but not at all necessarily Israeli Jews with a sense of agony over the Jewish moral exile.
Accordingly, his appeal to the Jewish practise of CUV or Jewish return qua repentance ought to translate into concrete policies of Palestinian return,
at which point he refers to some attempts by Palestinian and Israeli Israelis
to imagine even concretely the possibility of Palestinian return of refugees,
the engine for the practise of repentance, but which in return is the Jewish desire to undo the moral exile, according to Beinart,
that the idolatry of Jewish power represents for Boehner the depth of Chuvash
as undoing this moral exile therefore functions ultimately to restore Judaism.
Save It from Israel LATISM. Well, this is certainly a critical task.
Undoing the moral exile is not the same as the concept of restorative justice,
which is grounded in the victims and their needs and in the moral imperative,
along with actual hermeneutical or interpretive task for Israeli Jews to be imagined their home.
OK, so started by Israeli journalist Ron Rapoport and Palestinian activists only al-Mashhadani and Xiaoying.
In the case of Jewish Israeli interlocutors, Boehner's aspiration to end this moral exile Avieson manifesto called a land for all two states.
One Homeland presents a vision of fluidity and a Tumnus across the space for, quote, both peoples because quote another quote,
Both have a profound connexion to this land or parts of it, whether they call it Earth, Israel or Palestine, and both consider their homeland.
Jewish Israelis and Palestinians live side by side, sometimes intermingle throughout the land and of quote,
what is opening lines of a section title we are meant to live together do is to accept
as axiomatic the supposedly equally valid claims of Jews and Palestinians to the land.
The words meant to live together may sound generative of alternative scripts for an
egalitarian cohabitation in the space from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea,
but immediately begs the question meant to live together by whom and whether
such a construct obscure any race rather than redressing Jewish nationalisms.
Reliance on settler colonial structures.
The draughters point of departure for their vision of reconciliation or repair is the familiar a competing nationalisms one land conundrum.
Well, not in itself a settler colonial atonement or resurrection paradigm.
A land for all. This manifesto normalises the notion of men to be as an ethical foundation for the manifestoes justice script.
The reconciliatory schema, therefore doesn't amount to a restorative justice opening, but rather expresses a desire,
especially of Jewish Israeli signatories, to feel at home both territorially but also, as we saw in Boehner's case,
ethically in terms of their self perception as enlightened Democratic and committed to international laws and human rights norms,
Israel leaves them manifesting in communism, in apartheid, expel them from this self understanding which they seek to restore.
They depart from the separationist ethno religious nationalist peace formula of the Oslo
Accords by articulating the connexion of both peoples to to the entirety of the land.
And here is another quote. No intentional borders could change this connexion, this identity.
No international borders could ever could sever Palestinians ties to Jaffa,
Haifa or LOD any more than they could sever Jewish ties to Hebron, Nablus and Bethlehem or Bethlehem.
And of course, so despite the stated aspiration to preclude supremacy by one nation over the other,
a land of parallel construction that just that in the quarter they just read that analogises Hebron and Nablus or Bethlehem on the one hand,
and Jaffa, Haifa or Lod on the other,
normalises the aggressive Jewish Israeli colonisation in a striking departure from international legal norms of the.
Territories occupied in 1967. Now Jaffa, Haifa and lot, of course,
refer to Palestinian cities now binational cities occupied and partly depopulated in 1948 and thus within the jurisdiction of Israel proper.
This analogising simply exposes that the principles of reconciliation build on a settler colonial act of erasure.
I therefore referred to a land for all as an obscuring the conciliatory frame.
The settler colonial erasure is an axiomatic starting point to establish that two people, one land problem,
otherwise a land for all justice vision relies not on Jewish ethical principles but
on supposedly secular narrativity and in international human rights conventions,
seeking explicitly a European model of fluidity, of territorial fluidity and movement across space.
Others to whom I now turn seek to ground their ethics of plurality and inclusion in Jewish sources and traditions.
OK, so living ethically as Jews in Israel.
So Professor Yagur questions in his recent Israel's Jewish identity crisis.
What is the meaning of Jewish sovereignty in Israel? He then laments, I think in his own response to the question that it relies on biological,
quasi racial exclusionary logic reverberating are based on a different register.
Both this question and response Jewish Israeli anti occupation activists Mikhael Manekin articulates
an aspiration for Israel to become meaningfully and ethically Jewish in its political ethics,
not merely in its demography. After serving as the executive director of Breaking the Silence and organisation
of veterans that educate the Israeli and other publics about the occupation.
The testimonies of soldiers and tours, Manekin found that the Alliance for Israel's Future and directed Mullard,
which is a think tank dedicated to Israeli democracy.
Both the Alliance for Israel's Future and Molad channel resources to deepening and
strengthening relationships across Jewish and non Jewish Palestinian communities,
as well as recognising the plurality of the Jewish Israeli sectors,
encouraging progressive activism of communities traditionally not recognised as candidates for pluralistic social outlooks.
Manekin opens his recent book, Dawn of Redemption, which sounds nothing like the Hebrew title, by the way,
with an anecdote from his military service where he felt ashamed and blasphemous in a moment of confrontation with the
direct gaze of a Palestinian woman whose home mannequin's unit of her took for security reasons during the year 2000,
which is kind of that the start of the second intifada. The soldiers violated the place.
And this violation was embodied in a moment when, due to a backed up toilet in the house, he had manakin went to urinate outside.
The woman who was standing outside looked straight at him, not with fear, but with disgust.
At that moment, Manekin became acutely aware of the keepa on his skull.
He knew in no uncertain terms that he violated everything Jewish,
that his presence there was an act of ululation, of blasphemy, even if the mission, quote unquote,
he and his fellow soldiers were sent to accomplish was framed in Jewish terms
with excessive symbolisms and righteous claims in the opening pages of his book.
He therefore possessed the nagging question and the one that echoes Professoriate Garthe enquiry.
What is the link between Jewish belief and ethics and political power?
He asked. Is it the case that his Israeli ness sentence sentences him to be an entirely different view than his gentle diasporic grandfather,
one who can never be compassionate and justice loving like his grandfather was in the shtetl?
He longs for that gentle diasporic Jew in the midst of an Israel that prides itself in a Judaism of Faust.
At the same time, Manakin distinguishes himself from Jewish powerlessness.
He underscores that he doesn't want to erase and deny his Jewish Israeli life.
He feels comfortable, nor does he want to unwind their power, make people accumulated over the past decades.
And of course, in other words, he repeats a tenet of a Zionist ethos, but wants to inject it with substantial rather than superficial Jewish content.
I'm angry because the power of the state was intended to serve the Jews and their ways of life,
but instead the Jews became subjugated to power, he writes.
And that's my translation. This, quote, telegraphs manikins outlook as a Jewish Israeli critique of Zionism qua Israeli ism,
who contemplates the possibility of subverting the aggressive Judaism of religious
Zionist with an ethical and non-belligerent Jewishness of his grandparents.
Gentle. Still, this reclaiming of gentile Judaism unfolds within an Israeli frame, not a diasporic one of powerlessness.
Therefore, mannequin's task is to reconfigure the past,
as he says it is to reconfigure or define for the first time Jewish Israel leanness that doesn't rely on Zionist masculinised discourse.
Such a Jewish Israeli ethical critique of Israel ism is not unlike Banaz aspiration to rescue Judaism from its moral exile.
Once again,
the point of departure is how bad it makes Manekin and Beinhart feel about their cherished understanding of their Judaism and how Israel ism
makes it so ugly and grotesque in Judaism and embodied in the person of the keepa wearing IDF soldiers urinating in a Palestinian garden.
Manikins, Jewish Israeli critique of a Jewish Israeli nesse, drunk on power and embedded in narratives of self-defence and powerlessness,
nonetheless doesn't amount to a critique of Zionism as a settler colonial
discourse that cannot be nice about its displacement slash replacement agenda.
As someone who has been long dedicated to anti occupation work, Manakin is not an apologist.
But his starting point for critically engaging with Israelis is not from the perspective of the real victims on horseback,
Jewish returned to and your Christian atonement to its crimes against Jews that happen instead.
Like Beinart, mannequin's starting point is his own shame and sense of diminishing Jewish
authenticity and moral exhale for one and a moral transgression for another.
Clearly, there is a relational sense of obligation and responsibility to the Palestinians in both interventions.
However, the overall task is to repair the Judaism of Yavne in the case of Beinhart,
meaning the Temple Judaism, the decentred Jerusalem, and we imagine Jewish Israeli ness.
In the case of Manekin,
Manekin writes that Jewish sovereignty exiled traditional ethical modes of reasoning that had shaped previously Jewish thought and ways of life.
Yet unlike Diaspora Jews,
whose ethical outrage with the militaristic sovereign Jewish state can translate into an outright rejection of Israel is an Israeli ness.
Manekin doesn't and cannot forgo his Jewish Israeli ness.
He simply wants to make it more truly Jewish and more a move which takes him in the opposite direction to them,
in his view, to the mass killer trajectory of religious Jewish Zionism, but situates him in broader Israeli Jewish trends,
preoccupied from across a spectrum with imagining a truly Israeli Judaism that is
both kookiest suppost messianic and diasporic diasporic mannequin's intervention as
an Israeli Jewish critique of Zionism shows the limits and Blinder's blindspots of
a Jewish ethical response that is not relational nor reparative in distinction,
a thinker who has been propelled by a relational encounter with the realities and grievances of Palestinians as a
source of herher critical Jewish critique of Zionism is the philosopher Judith Butler bucklers book Parting Ways,
that was published in 2012, offers an important intervention in contemporary Jewish ethics.
For Badler, justice is not something Jews can access only by re-examining Jewish sources and traditions.
Her argument reflects that the concept of justice as relational,
which constitutes a central dimension of a victim centric restorative justice approach,
Butler argues that unless Zionism is fully dismantled, it is impossible to articulate a Jewish account of justice in Palestine.
Israel, if battler's ethical intervention is reparative in its relationality,
manikins critique seeks to repair Zionism itself from the perspective of the Jewish tradition and its ethical principles,
even if the source of his critique is the the repeated confrontation with the ugliness of
Israeli occupation and is experiencing the occupation as something fundamentally and Jewish.
His main concern is with repairing, as I said, Judaism or imagining an Israeli Judaism.
He will feel more at home in this vision of repair lacks in the kind of relationality Bagla demands.
At the same time, bucklers ethical intervention lacks manikins insight that a shift in the justice
discourse cannot simply happen through a priority dismantling of Zionism,
but has to be the outcome of reimagining Jewishness in Palestine, Israel and in conjunction, embodied political belonging is not an abstraction.
Mannequin's reflection on Jewish ethics in an era of Jewish power seeks to centralise Jewish ethics as regulative political norms for their,
quote, Jewish state. He is critical of the position of the of the late, often known faith to refer to him as the conscience of Israel.
This is the real Liebovich whose secular confinement of the religious life of the individual's relation with God facilitated
the manipulation of Jewish sources by other self-appointed interpreters or religious authorities for Leibovitch.
No holiness whatsoever can become attached to the state because this serialisation necessarily sanctifies its power.
The power of the state and its institutions. Further, he rejected the validity of the construct Jewish ethics.
For him, conduct was either ethical or not, and this does not need to be qualified through appeals to the Jewish tradition or not.
Liebovich therefore rejected any political content to the Jewish tradition.
What gives content to Judaism for him is simply observing the mitzvot, the commandments and to the degree that Jewish ethics emerge.
This was merely contextual, contextual, historically located.
The suspicion of power accordingly was merely a function of Jewish powerlessness and marginality for most of European Jewish history.
Manekin, in contrast, wants to imagine the possibility of an ethical Jewish state, Israeli Judaism and Jewish politics.
But a myopic normalisation of the settler colonial underpinning of the Jewish state precludes, and nonetheless every operative ethical grammar.
This is where I finally come to a few loci where Jewish Israelis articulate restorative pathways by naming their position
ality as beneficiaries of and complicit with a Jewish supremacist regime as well as their agency or our agents.
Because she's really assiduous in resisting and transforming its logic.
The sources of a restorative ethical Israeli Jewishness are like in Bagla relation
with a relationality with Palestinians and their narratives of displacement,
oppression and suffering, as well as aspirations for political freedom.
At the same time, like in mannequin's account, they refuse.
Indeed, they cannot afford any Batia of the realities and contents of Jewish Israeli ness and simply reclaim a diaspora belonging further.
What makes restorative practises Jewish is precisely the resistance to the logic of Jewish supremacy.
As Jews and Israelis, I now will turn to an analysis of Israelis against apartheid,
which was released in the midst of the violent escalation of May 20 21.
So hashtag Israelis against apartheid. Israeli Jews call Stop Israel's Apartheid is subtitle an open letter to the international community and.
Constitutes a plea. A call almost 20 years after a Palestinian civil societies call for the international community to engage in boycott,
divestment and sanctions tactics to stop the Israeli occupation and the manipulative use of the court
peace process as a mechanism to further entrench the occupation and annexationist policies of Israel.
Launched by the campaign group Jews for Decolonisation,
the Jewish Israeli plea to the international community comes with a realisation that the only truly costly consequences
in diplomatic and economic Avina and thus a disruption of the almost total impunity Israel has enjoyed internationally,
especially under the patronage of the US, can actually change realities and dynamics on the ground.
The letter opens with a declaration, quote,
We Jewish Israelis oppose the actions of the Israeli government and hereby declare our commitment to act against them.
We refuse to accept the Jewish supremacist regime and called upon the international
community to immediately intervene in defence of the Palestinians in Gaza,
in the West Bank, Jerusalem, the Galilee, the Negev, and lead Yaffa, Ramallah, Haifa and throughout historic Palestine.
This opening statement accomplishes multiple tasks, first, inhabiting the particular identity of Jewish Israel ness.
The signatories to this call explicitly subvert the Zionist logic that weaponize US anti-Semitism to silence criticism of Israeli policies.
Then the call unsettles the settler colonial logic by underscoring a refusal of the Jewish supremacist regime and defragment in 48,
67 and other Palestinian communities.
Their enemy, in other words, is the regime itself, just like it was for white Africans who joined the struggle against apartheid in South Africa.
Identifying the Jewish supremacy needs to be dismantled and that this will also necessarily require international sanctions to
pressure Israel and to remove its cover of impunity reveals an effort to think of imperatively on the ground from the ground.
This reparative work entails first, recognising how Palestinians have been harmed over decades,
which is a principle of restorative justice to see what, what, where the harms done.
So the culprits. Jewish supremacy is the cornerstone cornerstone of the Israeli regime,
and its consistent objective is to transfer and obliterate the Palestinian people, their history and their national identity.
This objective manifest in continued acts of ethnic cleansing by means of evictions and home demolitions,
brutal military occupation, denial of civil and human rights,
and legislation of a series of racist laws culminating in the nation state bill
defining the state as the nation state of the Jewish people and them and them only.
The fact that the call for international sanctions comes from people who inhabit Jewish Israeli identity
itself constitutes a source of an ethical Jewish intervention with concrete political ramifications.
The letter reveals Jewish Ethical Agency, in a clarion sense for Badler.
For a concept of justice to be derived from a specific tradition means that there must be some way
for it to depart from that tradition to demonstrate its applicability outside that tradition.
She, then Judith Butler, appeals to a process of departure from the tradition as a precondition of any tradition yielding strong political principles.
This point has tangible explanatory force for a far engagement with manikins,
Jewish Israeli ethical critique of Israeli ism as a source of more just and inclusive political practise.
It exemplifies a refusal to relinquish a Jewish exclusionary paradigm, a refusal that obscures the settler colonial paradigm upon which it relies.
Bagla captures the dilemma astutely, quote, If the critique of state violence relies on principles or values that are finally
exclusively or fundamentally Jewish understood variously and broadly as.
A religious, secular or historical set of traditions, then Jewishness becomes a privileged cultural resource and the Jewish framework
remains the only or privileged one by which to think the critique of state violence.
End of quote. For Butler, any articulation of an exclusionary Jewish critique of Zionism fails to recognise the settler
colonial mechanisms and realities that Zionism has inflicted on its Palestinian victims.
Therefore, the clarion approach is imperative in this centralising of Palestinian perspectives within the settler colonial grammar.
She and, of course, equality, justice,
cohabitation and the critique of state violence can only remain Jewish values if they are not exclusively Jewish values.
That, according to Badler, the language of the call by Jewish Israelis exemplifies, therefore,
the clarion point regarding ethical self departure as an important relational process that destabilises identity as ontology.
Butler further underscores dispersion itself as an ethical rather than geographic modality.
This is where bucklers intervention is also distinctively Jewish in her reclaiming of Altegrity and dispersion as pivotal for Jewish ethics.
This is not an ontological claim about Jewish authenticity, but rather a plastic account of relationality with non Jews critically.
And this is a quote from Badler The kind of relationality at stake is one that interrupts or challenges the unitary character of the subject.
Something happens to the subject that dislocated from the centre of the world.
Some dimin from elsewhere lays claim to me, précis itself upon me, or even divides me from within.
And only through this fissuring or of who I am do I stand a chance of relating to another end of quote.
The call captures what Butler means by her articulation of Altegrity and interruption
dispersion as ethical sources for V4 imagining a justice discourse in Palestine Israel.
It amounts to what she calls Jewish non Jewish ethics, by which she means that Judaism as a source,
as a resource, only becomes available for ethical purposes.
If it first enters into a field of translation and transportability, it means that what begins as a resource apan one draws upon one.
DROs undergoes a set of changes in the process of being drawn upon.
This is Butler. So unlike Manakin, the call, the plea of Israeli Jews doesn't make an appeal to specific Jewish traditions and hermeneutics.
Nor does it make conceptual arguments about what makes their criticism of Israeli policies and Jewish supremacy particularly Jewish.
Indeed, the very realities the signatories embody as Israeli Jews make their criticism of Israel ism,
Jewish supremacy, Jewish, but also non Jewish in the clarion sense as in land.
For all this manifesto, the explicit grammar of the of the core are global norms, or at least they appear to be of equality, democracy and justice,
which themselves constitute a field of translation and possibility,
not belonging to any one tradition in the same way that democracy is not owned by the Greeks, unlike unlike land for all.
But like Butler,
many of those same on the call articulate their ethical outrage and departure from ontological claims and criticism of state violence.
Relationally confronted with the ongoing realities of the Nakba,
the call also capture the recognition that what is the enemy of justice is a regime of Jewish supremacy,
which also demonises the signatories, the oppressors and those who benefit from this regime at the expense of their humanity,
like the urinating soldier in the Palestinian garden where the call of Jewish Israelis expen and departs from the battlecry and formulation
of Jewish non Jewish ethical intervention is in the signatories concrete realities inhabiting Jewish Israel leanness relationality for them.
It's not a matter of a textual elitist discourse with the likes of Edwards,
Saeed and Mahmoud Darwish from the Palestinian landscape and the usual European Jewish stars such as Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin,
but rather a politically concrete interaction and exposure of the settler colonial
grammar that persists regardless of their efforts to shift the discourse within Israel.
This is not to discount the Bulgarian intervention, but to illuminate the degree to which the call of Israeli Jews conveys a more
historically located and embodied interruption of Jewish supremacist frames.
Such a Jewish Israeli critique of Zionism is Jewish specifically because it's its non Jewishness.
Another blind spot in backlots account. Most reflective in her interlocutors is the lack of engagement with the other victims of European Zionism,
namely non Ashkenazi Jews, Muslim Ethiopians and other marginalised communities.
Many of the signatories of the call are also people who work to bring to bear an expansive account of victimhood,
inclusive of Mizrahi dispossession and marginalisation,
as well as cultural ambassadors as they are linked to the ongoing Nakba of Palestinians without equating those processes because Muslim,
for instance, have to become beneficiary's and executioners of the settler colonial entrenchment.
Still,
a reparative and restorative justice prism must bring into focus the interrelatedness of narratives of victimisation and targeting by state violence.
Those multiple communities experience and such and such work on intellectual and
sociological registers cannot simply be confined to a conversation with Levinas,
Binyamin Arend and Primo Levi or Bubar. This is where the profound butlering and insights remain diasporic.
The Diaspora that I.
The prism of her account is not in her introduction of dispersion as an ethical principle of Altegrity constituting a source of political ethics,
but rather in her confinement of the discourse of Jewish non Jewish ethics to the European Jews,
European Jewish canon of the early to middle 20th century.
Finally, to Noah, the organisation's work literally they remember in the female form conjugation emerged as an intentional effort to
excavate the memories of the Nakba and educate the Jewish Israeli public about Israel's definitional creation moment,
the Nakba. As an organisation, it engages in research and public outrage and education to dispel myopia and force
Israeli Jews to confront their mythologies and presumed presumed innocence.
The formative years of the world focussed on researching the stories and events of the Nakba.
As I said, taking Israelis and others on tours of depopulated and destroyed Palestinian villages,
collecting oral testimonies of Palestinians and creating an app sarcastically
referred to as a GPS to nowhere of the land and its lost villages and their stories.
And in towns and with those lost towns are lost.
Lost are Palestinian indigenous lives and practises. The more recent time,
and partly because of the kind of global patterns of linking the Palestinian struggle to transnational and global struggles of
indigenous peoples as they intersect with a critique of settler colonialism and white supremacy supremacist ideologies globally.
The turn to interrogate concretely Israel's own enmeshment in European settler colonial discourse.
A campaign, a recent campaign targeting the settler colonial institution and mechanism of the Jewish
National Fund J.A. captures that this deepening of the so-called restorative justice work.
It doesn't only confine Zionism as an abstract, but its concrete and sacred institution,
the JMF and its sexualised bluebox, circulated for weekly donations amongst Jews the world over for over a century.
This focus conveys an intentional decolonising work and settling a pillar of the concrete mechanism of the Zionist project,
demystifying its function, exposing its violent character.
So using the hashtag. Exposed kale with kale, referring to the Hebrew acronym for the JMF,
the hot social media campaign that is ongoing now September, October, 2021 explicitly pushes the story itself far beyond 1948.
In 2021, it tells a story of one hundred and twenty years of Jewish intentional policies of dispossession targeting Palestinian lands.
The campaign exposes the systematic dimensions of this process of dispossession, its violence and its ongoing nature.
In describing the hashtag Expo's scale campaign,
Zuhause acknowledges that this arm of Jewish colonisation is still romanticised amongst Jewish publics.
It is time finally to confront it for what it is, Zahoor argues it.
It's spearheaded and implemented the systemic depopulation of Palestinians, framing its work from its inception as redeeming the land.
Get Willapa Owlets. You look at the map through land purchase and an establishing Jewish settlements.
So you think the concept of Ethiopia and later which later became hit include this framing of hashtag KCL begins with asking a question,
otherwise not asked because of the unquestioned status of the JMF in Zionist discourse in Jewish Israeli life.
Why is this foundation still in existence? Ask for instance, now Bingara Aluf.
In an article that provided in an alternative media outlet the campaign's background,
she quotes Ecuadorans description of the systematic purchase of land in the late 19th century in Palestine,
where he underscored that this is neither an easy nor cheap task, but ultimately it constitutes a good economic deal for the natives.
The JMF, however, purchased the land from offenders who lived in major centres of the Ottoman Empire.
This is a well-known story.
Once lands shifted ownership, the Palestinian peasants were forcefully expelled from the lands they worked for sometimes centuries,
leaving them in poverty, but also in a state of this uprootedness.
What Bingara Aluf does here is to emphasise that this is the starting point of a restorative approach is not 48,
1948 or the Nakba, but comprehending what a venerated institution such as the JMF was designed to do.
So hashtag Expo's K.K Ill is not yet another Jewish Israeli critical engagement with Zionism Khoi Israel ism.
Calling the JSF a settler colonial instrument constitutes atemporal, but also conceptual shift of focus.
The deepening of its vision and analysis of the Janette's role in redeeming the land one land purchase at
the time therefore constitutes a significant move that exposes an overarching continuity between the early,
systematic colonisation through real estate and contemporary realities of evictions.
In occupied East Jerusalem, for example, the principle of redeeming the land has been remarkably constant in expanding
Jewish territorial presence and minimising Palestinian presence on the land.
The practises of demographic engineering that manifest in the territories Israel occupied in 67 are no departure from
the settler colonial logic that had informed the JMF and its explicit agenda of today's judaisation of the land,
the judaising of space. So Lence century Jewishness has been entangled since the late 19th century with blood based Judaism,
but has converted politically and sociologically in recent decades.
Very clearly, very explicitly.
This manifests in policing communal boundaries, as in the highly gendered discourse of protecting Jewish girls and women from Arab men,
a rhetoric that defines Jewish Israeli gangs such as Laravel but also echoes and reinforces the increasing
mainstreaming of communism with its racial logic and its obsession with Jewish power and blood,
purity and continuity. What can be identified?
Therefore, it is a blood and lence centric Jewish nationalism.
While the violence of Zionism and messianic messianic settler ideologies is clear for
many Jewish Israeli critics of such of such expression of Zionism or Jewish nationalism,
their critical interrogation, as well as proposals for rescripting futures in the land, remain beholden, as I highlighted.
To a settler paradigm and the example of land fall is is one,
so even if a land for all constitutes an attempt by Palestinians and Israelis to imagine an open land, namely two states, one homeland,
the very conceptualisation of the space as the homeland participates in erasure of how indeed it became a home for third,
fourth, fifth, sixth generation of Israeli Jews who colonise.
And today's the space. This is where the hashtag Boscastle constitute a Jewish, non Jewish ethical interruption of ontological claims,
thereby illuminating a restorative and therefore relational justice pathway.
Zuhause approach as a Jewish Israeli critical interruption of Zionism is restorative
in that it confronts and names the root causes of injustice for Palestinians,
thereby decolonising the peace discourse and exposing its myopia.
And in ways reminiscent of the battalion intervention to conclude bringing the bringing in the language of restoration
or reparation as an exercise in reclaiming Jewish authenticity is not only counterproductive and reactionary,
it is also a story and abstract. More often than not, Jewish critics of Zionism or Israelis are more preoccupied with the hurt,
the Israeli occupation, annexationist agenda and settler colonial dynamics inflict on the Jewish tradition itself.
Indeed, such Jewish critics are more concerned with how to repair Jewishness or restore
it into diaspora ism by undoing its moral exile or moral transgression,
rather than concretely redressing the harms done to multiple publics,
including non Ashkenazi Jews within the racialized framework of Jewish Israeli discourse.
The focus on Palestinian experiencers or on the victims of this set of relationships and
structures will also then generate a set of reparative practises to attempt to right the wrongs.
In contrast to a settler colonial atonement paradigm, a grounded Jewish,
non Jewish Israeli reparative outlook cannot incr itself on a biblical restorative grammar
that transforms the settler into native through acts of displacement and replacement.
Thank you. Thank you so much.
Let me press the button.