Jewish-Israeli National Identity and Dissidence

The Contradictions of Zionism and Resistance

K. Attwell

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137429025
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A critical examination of Zionism and its internal resistance by Israeli Jews, this book employs a unique perspective on Israel/Palestine by eschewing presenting identities as concrete and, rather, examining their creation through discourse.

Part I

Context

1

Ressentiment and the State

Introduction

Since the dissidents’ political context needs careful elucidation, this is the first of three chapters developing the problematic situation depicted in the Introduction. In this chapter, my focus is theoretical, and I begin by identifying my approach to nationalism, which Calhoun (1997) suggests can be understood as discourse, project and evaluation or ‘ethical imperative’. I primarily engage with nationalism as discourse:

the production of a cultural understanding and rhetoric which leads people throughout the world to think and frame their aspirations in terms of the idea of nation and national identity, and the production of particular versions of national thought and language in particular settings and traditions. (p. 6)

Nationalist discourses necessarily underlie the projects that they may give rise to; projects of nation-and state-building captured by Gellner’s (1983) famous definition of nationalism as the ‘political principle that holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent’ (p. 1). We can understand ‘nations’ – which nationalist projects construct and reify – to exist within the discourses that create them. However, states may also be involved in constructing and circulating these discourses; states reify the nations invoked by nationalist discourses and turn ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson, 1991) into legal entities. Yet discourses imagining the nation may also precede the establishment of the state.

We need a coherent way of thinking about the relationships between these factors inasmuch as they are relevant to our study of the dissidents’ problematic situation. Here, I consider how a type of discourse can lead political activists and actors to see themselves and Others in a certain way. Such perceptions then inform state-seeking or state-building aspirations and the kind of state implemented if the opportunity arises. The first section of this chapter explains and charts the development of what I call a ressentiment ethnic nationalist discourse. The second section explains the incorporation of such a discourse into the state. I argue that we should conceive of the resultant ‘ethnocratiser state’ as the institutionalisation of ressentiment ethnic nationalist discourse, rather than as the property or product of an ‘ethnic group’.

Ressentiment ethnic nationalist discourses

This section elaborates the concept of a ressentiment ethnic nationalist discourse. Ressentiment, a term originally employed by Nietzsche, describes a process in which individuals, in order to cope with the frustration and confusion arising from dissonance and subordination, undertake ‘imaginary revenge’ (1996, p. 22) by means of a ‘radical transvaluation of values’ (p. 19). They turn the qualities that appear to explain their repression into markers of virtue, denigrating those perceived as dominators by depicting various aspects of those people’s culture in a negative light.¹

Though Nietzsche’s original subjects were the Jewish priestly class under Roman subordination, ressentiment has broader applicability. A ressentiment discourse generates a sense of being superior to, and wronged by, an Evil Other. The discourse appears to resolve, for those using it, unpleasant feelings of envy, inadequacy and victimhood. However, since the ressentiment discourse actually amplifies these unpleasant feelings, it offers an illusory remedy.

We could talk about numerous ressentiment discourses in contemporary society. Consider someone identifying as homosexual who says ‘straight people discriminate against me’. Consider a wronged woman who says ‘all men are bastards’. These examples demonstrate that there can be an apparent truth to the sense of slight invoked by the discourse. Some heterosexual people do discriminate against those who don’t follow their norms. Some men do harm women in our patriarchal societies. However, what is not true is the universalised depiction of the Evil Other; stereotyped to depict an entire category of person as all the same. In truth, not all heterosexuals are homophobes, and not every man is a bastard, but this collective demonisation of Others is intrinsic to ressentiment discourses.

The sociologist Liah Greenfeld has most convincingly elaborated the linkage between ressentiment discourse and nationalism. Greenfeld uses ressentiment as a partial explanation for the development of nationalism. She depicts what I call culture-makers – intellectuals and elites seeking to make sense of their places in a changing world – formulating nationalist discourses and, in the process, inadvertently shaping whole societies.

According to Greenfeld, the interplay of structural, cultural and psychological factors upon these culture-makers results in them crafting either a ‘civic’ nationalism not grounded in the conception of a unique cultural community, or an ‘ethnic’ nationalism that is collectivist, illiberal and defined according to mythical histories, symbols and legends.² This second type – ethnic nationalism – is formed through the psychological factor of ressentiment. Culture-makers compare themselves to nearby civic nations, generating feelings of inferiority. Their ‘suppressed feelings of envy and hatred (existential envy) and the impossibility to act them out’ generate a ressentiment ‘transvaluation of values’ (Greenfeld and Chirot, 1994, p. 84).

Notably, according to this model, ressentiment only occurs in the development of ethnic nationalisms. Yet civic nationalisms are equally significant, since they provide the original source of inspiration and envy for ressentiment-afflicted culture-makers. Greenfeld argues that ressentiment-afflicted culture-makers adopt an ethnic paradigm to define themselves as the moral and intellectual opposite of civic nationalisms. Writing with Chirot, she presents the ‘reactive’ nature of ethnic nationalisms as a response to the civic self-understanding of the first nationalisms: England and France. In these encounters, as I shall demonstrate, Greenfeld depicts the ressentiment transvaluation of values as a conscious shift from civic national identification to its opposite in ethnic nationalist identification.

In the Russian case, she argues that Peter the Great’s experimentations with Westernisation dislocated nobles. When these individuals subsequently sought a new, dignified identity in nationalism, their country’s objective backwardness imperilled their attempts at pride and self-worth. Thus, says Greenfeld,

Russian national consciousness was defined almost wholly on the basis of the transvaluation of the Western ideals. The axis of the transvaluation was the rejection of the individual – indeed the central Western value. Community took the place of the individual, the mystical Slavic soul was substituted for reason, and liberty was redefined as inner freedom. (Greenfeld and Chirot, 1994, p. 94)

According to this account, the nobles, through their transvaluation of values, adopted an ethnic paradigm specifically to differentiate themselves from the civic West, which they envied but failed to equalise.

Greenfeld and Chirot make the same argument as they tell the German story, sourcing the rise of nationalism in the eighteenth century to ‘middle-class intellectuals’ (p. 98) who did not enjoy the social mobility that they expected their university educations to deliver. Initially forming part of the Enlightenment tradition and seeing themselves as equal to their peers in the West, when the intellectuals were unable to enjoy the same fruits, they turned on the values they had formerly embraced. Ressentiment drove them from individualism and universalism to the unique German nation. Again, Greenfeld and Chirot depict the transvaluation of values as pertaining to the content of the nationalism.

This argument recurs in Greenfeld and Chirot’s analysis of contemporary post-colonial ethnic nationalisms as well. In that context, they posit ressentiment deriving from encounters between colonised elites and Western educators who teach them that they are inferior (p. 103). The colonial subject experiences civic nationalism offering illusory opportunity alongside seemingly permanent subjugation. He responds by rejecting the promises of universalism for the unique properties of ethnocultural identification.

Greenfeld and Chirot thus portray ethnic nationalism in a variety of contexts as the ressentiment backlash to unfulfilled, disappointing or hypocritical civic nationalism. However, their focus on the civic ideal overstates and universalises a set of contingent experiences, limiting the applicability of ressentiment to situations in which we can locate the civic source of disappointment. It also tells us that ressentiment must be about ideas, when ressentiment is also about identification. Rather than a civic-to-ethnic shift being at the heart of the transvaluation of values, then, we should think more about what ressentiment enables individuals to do. Understanding ressentiment as a boundary-making exercise allows us to engage with nationalisms like Zionism, which arise in highly ethnicised contexts. Far from being engaged in thinking premised on the civic–ethnic distinction, actors experiencing ressentiment are engaged with a far more fundamental problem: trying to understand themselves as Good, and their Envied Other as not-Good, when the observable state of affairs appears to indicate the opposite. Discourses constructing and reifying ethnic categories help ressentiment-afflicted culture-makers to carry out this moral reversal. It is precisely the utility of ethnic categories to boundary-making and the associated demarcation of virtue that explains ethnic identification as the basis of nationhood. In short, ethnic nationalism is adopted because it is useful, not because it is civic nationalism’s opposite.

Thus, the values redesignated in the transvaluation of values are not the actual values about self and society, relating to themes of the Enlightenment and the visions of Man therein. Rather, they are far more basic values of Good and Evil, applied to ourselves and those whom we envy. We augment moral demarcation by drawing ethnic boundaries, since these appear to tell us where we end and our Others begin. This is important, lest in denigrating our Others, we inadvertently diminish ourselves. Ethnic boundaries appear to delineate – for those invoking them – fixed and immutable categories. Good and Evil can be attached to these categories and appear as unshifting and long-lasting, enabling the ressentiment formula of Good Us, Evil Other to be applied with the illusion of permanence. Physical or cultural properties observable in multiple individuals enable us to group those individuals together and stereotype them. From here, it is easy to forget that they possess any other qualities – we see only their exaggerated differences from Us. Ironically, the promise of clarity and permanency in ethnonational categories is illusory. In practice, there is always a degree of permeability to the boundary, since ‘as a discourse, identification is a construction, a process never completed, always in process, always conditional’ (Lentin, 2010, p. 157, paraphrasing Hall). But these vagaries do not matter to those articulating ethnic nationalist ressentiment discourses. (They do, however, demand a more trenchant commitment to the ‘truth’ of the discourse in the face of contrary evidence.)

So, if we consider that ressentiment might not involve a transvaluation of values like Enlightenment liberalism, but rather values like Good and Evil, we can see why ethnic boundaries would be useful for the first ethnic nationalists Greenfeld and Chirot describe. These culture-makers sought to understand themselves as unambiguously Good compared with the objects of their envy. Crucially, in order to make this happen, they needed to draw a boundary around themselves, because otherwise no such boundary existed. The hazy universal values out of which English and French nationalisms were crafted might theoretically apply to the German or Russian man – in fact, this was the source of envy in the first place. Thus, these early culture-makers differentiated themselves in order to label the objects of their envy as Others. However, they had to begin by drawing the boundary; they had to craft an Ethnic Us before they could understand their Other.

The role of boundary-making in the ressentiment transvaluation of values in nationalism is also applicable to situations in which ethnic (rather than civic) nationalist discourses inspire the production of new ethnic nationalist discourses – the scenario this book explores. In these cases, since the envied nationalism already employs ethnicised terminologies, culture-makers experiencing ressentiment have less creative work to do. The boundary – so craved by those seeking to depict their own absolute virtue against an Other – already exists. Culture-makers simply have to invert the moral content of categories already in place.

The formula is so simple and effective that it spreads easily, like common sense. A ressentiment discourse inculcates many individuals with values informed by the experiences of its creators, changing over time as new circumstances are woven into the interpretative framework. In depicting the virtuous Us as being harmed by the Other, a ressentiment discourse constructs a lens through which the world is viewed, and encourages individuals to act in ways that bring about the cataclysmic events foretold. This affirms the discourse’s apparent truth, turning the reified Us and the envied or hated Other into actual ‘conflict protagonists’ (Drexler, 2008). Identification with the ethnic nation depicted by the ressentiment ethnic nationalist discourse provides the basis for perceiving slights enacted by Others. The apparent existence of ‘conflict protagonists’ obscures the process of their construction; people experience them as pre-existing and enduring.

Subsequent participants in ressentiment discourses therefore need not have experienced the pain, anomie, envy or humiliation of the original purveyors, nor even met the Other[s] denigrated by the discourse. Instead, the discourse schools individuals in historical examples of slights and encourages the search for new examples. Perhaps there will be a truth to the belief in past or imminent harm, but the status of the oppressor is extrapolated onto an entire category of person rather than the actual actors, agents or systemic features involved. The discourse constructs this ‘reality’; its common sense becomes the only one available, and thus, as Drexler (2008) declares with regard to what she calls ‘conflict narratives,’ it becomes

impossible to separate the discourse from the materiality of the conflict. Conflict situations are produced and perpetuated by various narrations of successive events that stand, not as object and description, but as spirals of interpretation and action. That some narratives come true is not evidence that those particular narratives are correct representations of the conflict, but rather signs of their discursive power to reproduce it. Historical events attain their importance through policies and successive acts that are shaped by discursive constructions of the conflict. (p. 27, her emphasis)

Ressentiment discourses offer cogent, self-evident explanations for why things are the way they are. What they obscure, however, is that the explanation generates the circumstances it seeks to describe. This malaise affects not only the actors in the conflict but also those who comment upon it. ‘[E]thnic and national frames are readily accessible, powerfully resonant, and widely understood as legitimate. This encourages actors and analysts alike to interpret conflict and violence in ethnic terms rather than other terms’ (Brubaker, 2004, p. 17). Hence, regardless of how objectively correct they are in their claims to victimhood at the hands of an ethnic Other, individuals using a ressentiment discourse can find supporting evidence. They may then adopt a pre-emptive approach, which looks more like aggression to those depicted as their Others, who meet it accordingly.

On this basis, ressentiment discourses encourage the formation of ressentiment pairs; two ressentiment discourses playing a game of hateful tennis in which actions and reactions repeatedly affirm their respective ‘truths’. Targeted Others may go through their own ressentiment experiences; hence new pairs might emerge, or one ressentiment ethnic nationalist discourse might, like a cheating lover, conduct ressentiment relationships with more than one Other. However, each ressentiment discourse is likely to have a ‘significant Other’ (Triandafyllidou, 1998) with which it forms a ressentiment pair – in targeting this significant Other with aggression, it invites the return of similar ‘a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Part I  Context
• Part II  Dissent
• Appendix: The Dissidents at a glance
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index