Response #2 to the postscript

In September 2020, under the title “Anti-Anti-Semitism,” the German art journal Texte zur Kunst published its 119th issue, a volume that is devoted primarily to associating the Palestine solidarity movement ‘“Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions’” (BDS) with antisemitism. Within a climate of increased intolerance in Germany toward anti-colonial voices, the magazine’s editors explicitly and deliberately decided to exclude any counter positions. Following stinging criticism from members of the magazine’s advisory board, contributors, and readership, the volume’s editors retroactively rushed to solicit contributions for an online “postscript,” including from previous Texte zur Kunst contributor David Lloyd, professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. With his permission, we are publishing an edited version of Lloyd’s response.

Declining to Respond

David Lloyd

In the wake of controversy predictably generated by Texte zur Kunst’s issue #119 on “Anti-anti-Semitismus”, I was, like others, invited to contribute a response to the online “Postscript”. After spending as much energy with the contents of the issue as time and other pressing commitments allowed, I declined to post such a response. To do so in a kind of ancillary appendix would merely compound the sense that issue 119 sidelined the voices and the principles of BDS activists and, far more important, the rich and diverse intellectual and cultural contributions of Palestinians on these issues—including the question of anti-Semitism.  Nonetheless, both the contents of the journal issue and subsequent conversations with the editors and critics of the issue alike persuade me that making my reasons for refusing to participate in the afterthought of a postscript should be made public along with others’ statements.

My disinclination to engage with these essays—which I had planned to do only in relation to their characterizations of the BDS movement of which I am a long-standing proponent—is not based on any sense of intellectual incapacity on my part. On the contrary, along with many others, I have numerous times and in various formats published articles that have sought to elaborate a principled critique of the state of Israel as a settler colony whose practices of apartheid as a distinct category under international law have been amply documented, from the more than sixty laws discriminating against Palestinians within Israel to the separate and unequal conditions that the mechanisms of settlement and dispossession have imposed on the occupied and blockaded territories. This reality is not a matter of the embarrassing excesses of recent right-wing governments but is the outcome of the shared policies and practices of governments of the right and the left since 1948 and of Zionist ideology from its origins. That those who have researched, documented and recorded these facts and advocated for nonviolent means to redress them have regularly been censored and harassed or, in the more insidious manner of some of the essays in this Texte dossier, been grossly misrepresented, does not change the situation. Nor can it absolve Israel’s advocates from the painful contradiction that support for this state and the denial to its victims of the means to redress has always required them to carve out an exception from their otherwise liberal or left commitments.

There is now a voluminous literature on Israel as a not untypical settler colonial and racial state, if with distinctive characteristics; on the principles, logic and practice of BDS; on the history of Zionism and its relation to the larger European colonial projects from which it stemmed and learned. Far from being monolithic or “totalitarian”, this literature and the movement that inspired it have been exemplary in their self-critical flexibility, their willingness to engage with criticism and refine their terms in relation to general principles of justice, human rights, anti-racism and, yes, the unqualified rejection of anti-Semitism (which the language of BDS documents makes clear that it does not regard as just another racism). On the global left that has actually engaged with the Palestinian struggle for justice and for elementary survival as humans and as a people with its own distinct cultural, intellectual and political traditions, there have been quite extensive and fully articulated critiques of the limits of BDS as a strategy, or of its adherence to a discourse of rights whose colonial roots are ever-more apparent. And proponents of BDS have engaged imaginatively and rigorously with such critiques, whether they emanate from within the broader context of Palestinian civil society, from anti-colonial Israeli or Jewish intellectuals, or from the global solidarity movements, in an ongoing process of theoretical reflection and refinement.

From the essays and interviews published in Texte, virtually none of this would be apparent. By and large, they seem a tired rehearsal of well-worn talking points, every one of which we have long seen demolished in the increasingly rare public debates that the defenders of Zionism and the state of Israel now generally shun on account of the awkward facts they bring to light. The kinds of argument presented in Texte, with the insidious aim of tarnishing not a few individuals but a whole movement, its tactics and aims with anti-Semitism, read as if they have been rehashed from the hasbara generated by ministerial committees and the troll farms that pester us. What is more surprising is that these modular talking points, full of clever clichés and press-ready “topics”, should have been adopted by the essayists in seeming obliviousness, as if they represented something resembling insightful thought, the labor of actually thinking through the contradictions and uncertainties that would be worth responding to.

Equally surprising is that a journal of the caliber and reputation of Texte should have thought it appropriate or intellectually respectable, let us say, to publish such essays apparently without serious editorial review. Having recently undergone the beneficial rigors of TzK’s editorial review process, I find it astonishing that the editors would have permitted publication of any work that has not been subjected, at the very least, to the expectation that it be accountable to the literature—factual, historical, theoretical—that relates to the topic. It feels, indeed, like a betrayal of the rigorous standards that have drawn many of us to the journal’s pages in the past.

It is difficult not to conclude that the journal allowed itself to be captured by ideological agenda—and a confessedly western-centric one with all the problems this implies—that is the antithesis of thinking through and the active responsiveness it demands. The outcome was always predictable. Unfortunately in the United States we are all too familiar with the discourses of supremacism that have a longer history than the Zionism that has so often learned from and embraced their tropes and their practices. Supremacism—as Albert Memmi so lucidly demonstrated in The Colonizer and the Colonized—cannot abide thinking. Unable to dwell with the contradictions that every settler colony generates, unable to acknowledge the constitutive erasure or—as Zygmunt Baumann once put it—“moral eviction” of the colonized that is the condition alike of their discourse and their domination, the supremacist arrests thought in disavowal and substitutes slogans and talking points.

It’s ironic, and perhaps a little sad, that in the guise of advancing dialogue, Texte should have lent itself to a project whose upshot, wittingly or unwittingly, spells the end of thinking, much as, as Adorno once so wittily observed, a snail retracts its horns from unpleasantness. It’s hard to see how what feels like a lapse in judgment could be redeemed. Certainly a little, easily ignored online section of belated responses will only compound the injury to intelligence with disavowal masquerading as dialogue. It forces those who might respond but have nothing to apologize for into the invidious position of reactive defensiveness. That is not something I wish to perform. Beyond the format, I regret that I can find almost nothing in Texte zur Kunst 119 that warrants response, given that what that would entail would be a sentence by sentence rebuttal of the illogic, factual distortions, disavowals and half-truths that its contributions perpetuate. Furnishing the arguments that have been amply made elsewhere in rebuttal of arguments that have not deemed it necessary to engage with what they dismissively, and actually quite violently, critique is an unappealing exercise.

Indeed, as it stands, the belated Preface to the postscript already compounds many of these issues. Distancing oneself from the policies of the Netanyahu regime serves as a convenient disavowal or displacement of the fact that the policies the Right are forwarding have been carried though, if less ostentatiously, throughout the history of the Israeli state, and in ways foreseen by the pre-’48 Zionist movement in its planning—all well documented by Palestinian, Israeli and international scholarship. This is what makes Israel a classic “racial state”: It is the whole structure and apparatus of the state that operates on racial discrimination, expressed legally, materially, infrastructurally, institutionally. To take that on is not to make a strange exception of Israel among other causes, but rather to apply to it the same standards of analysis and principled contestation that we have leveled at states like Northern Ireland, South Africa, East Timor/Indonesia and the United States—to mention only a few struggles that I have sadly had to be engaged with over the years. In each case the strategies and tactics differ according to the exigencies of the specific conditions created by the modes of articulation of each racial state, but the fundamental principles that call for justice and equality remain the same. If Israel finds it hard to work out how to conform to such fundamental principles of justice as the BDS movement asks of it, and to realize its aspiration to be, at last, a democracy with equality among all its citizens, that’s a problem of its constitution, not by any means an expression of anti-Semitism or even a desire to destroy that state. It will require its transformation if it is able to find a way to abolish its ethno-supremacist logic.

Some of the editors have complained of the defamatory responses the journal issue has elicited. This is something we are all too familiar with in the world of Palestine solidarity. Defamation, including the charge of covert or overt anti-Semitism, operating under the cover of the preposterous and widely repudiated “3 Ds” version of that term that one of the authors cites with a straight face, daily lands in our mailboxes and assaults us in public media from Facebook to the Wall Street Journal. In publishing issue 119, the journal offered a platform that helps to make such defamation intellectually respectable. Accordingly I find that I have to decline the invitation to respond. Carving out an exception from the analytics of ongoing colonialism and racial structures for Palestine alone casts permanent doubt on the integrity of a supposedly anti-racist project such as the journal has in the past entertained.