David Theo Goldberg

Racial Palestinianization

For Tanya Reinhart 1943–2007

Palestinians as a people, and Arabs more generally, regionally first emerged as a pan-national self-identification in modern terms in the earlier decades of the twentieth century as expressions of anti-colonial and autonomous sensibilities, interests, and commitments. The heterogeneity among Arabs living throughout the region sought a more cohering identity in the face of intensifying British and French colonization after World War One, the discovery of large holdings of oil, growing anti-colonial movements in Africa and Asia and ultimately the founding of Israel. The name 'Palestine' was reinvoked by the British in the early 1920s upon receiving a League of Nations mandate to rule over the territory after Ottoman imperial control in the late nineteenth century had folded it into the southern extension of Syria.

Thus British modernization, as Salim Tamari has pointed out (1999), transformed a complexly secular, cosmopolitan, broadly communitarian order under Ottoman rule – especially in cities such as Jerusalem and ports such as Jaffa and Haifa (but also more regionally in Beirut and Damascus) – into a more segregating, ethnoracially and religiously discrete and divided set of communities in contest with each other for resources, space, and political favour; in other words, classic colonial divide and rule, ethnoracially fuelled. This regional transformation of heterogeneity into the logos of an assertedly homogeneous ethnoracial ethnoraciality is what I trace here in the name of racial palestinianization.

Producing racial palestinianization

Israel was an anomaly at its founding, reflecting conflicting logics of world historical events between which its declarative moment was awkwardly wedged. On the one hand, it mimicked rather than properly mirrored the logics of independence fuelled by decolonizing movements, though perhaps curiously closer in some crucial ways to Pakistan than, say, to India or other decolonizing societies of the day. On the other hand, it embodied in potential, by the structural conditions of its very formation, some key features of what was coterminously emerging as the apartheid state. In what follows, I am less identifying Israel as representing the apartheid state as tracing the ways in which, in conception and practice, it has come not just to embody apartheid elements but to represent a novel form of the racial state more generally.

In the latter spirit, Palestinians were the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine. They were indigenous in the sense of being 'found' in the area, both by the nineteenth-century colonizing powers and by the increasing convergence of Zionist-inspired Jews in the territory after the Balfour Declaration of 1917, and especially in the wake of World War Two. Identified as the direct kin of biblical Philistines, Palestinians as a people were often seen as philistines as much in characterization as in scriptural name, conceived in the representational struggles as bloodthirsty and warmongering, constantly harassing modern-day Israelites, debauched and lacking in liberal culture. Terrorists, it seems, historically all the way down to the toe-nails of time, Goliath cut to size by David's perennial craftiness and military prowess.

Israel came to be seen as an exemplary instance of what Michel Foucault, though in a different context, memorably has called 'counter-history' (2003), as a historical narrative of insurrection, against the grain, establishing itself in the face of formidable and threatening power directed against it. Israel is forged out of a 'biblical history of servitude and exiles', as a 'history of insurrections' against state-imposed or -sanctioned injustices. In this, Israel held out hope and the promise of justice. Its founding narration, in short, is a complex of the history of struggles (Foucault uses the term 'race wars' but it is clear from the examples he cites that he really has in mind group, even class, struggles) in which Jews were invariably the quintessential pariah, they who did not belong, but mixed with the civilizing European imperative, the white man's burden, of what I have elsewhere characterized as 'racial historicism' (Goldberg 2002).

Moses Hess, important for introducing Engels to the socialist fold and one of the first to articulate the Zionist vision, implored 'the Jewish race' in 1862 to

be the bearers of civilization to peoples who are still inexperienced and their teachers in the European sciences, to which your race has contributed so much. ... [Jews are to be] mediators between Europe and far Asia, opening the roads that lead to India and China – those unknown regions which must ultimately be thrown open to civilization ... [Jewish] labour and industry [in Palestine] will turn the ancient soil into fruitful valleys, reclaiming it from the encroaching sands of the desert (Hess 1995 [1862]).

Theodor Herzl, the father figure of the Zionist social movement, concurred: 'The immigration ofJews signifies an unhoped-for accession of strength for the land which is now so poor; in fact, for the whole Ottoman Empire' (1997 [1897]). The Zionist vision for Israel, as Ella Shohat has remarked (2003), represents the modernizing imperative in a region seen as still marked by the biblical backwardness of its Arab inhabitants.

Israel, it is accordingly apparent, has been thought of – has thought of itself in part precisely – from its initiating modern conception explicitly as racially configured, as racially representative. And those insistent racial traces persist despite the post-Holocaust European repression of the use of race as...