Diasporic Philosophy, Homelessness, and Counter-Education in Context: The Israeli-Palestinian Example

Abstract

Under current historical conditions, as Israelis, Jews are structurally almost prevented from facing the possibility of living in light of the Messianic impetus, as the world's universal moral, intellectual, and creative vanguard. This special Jewish mission was made possible by the Jews' unique homelessness – a Diasporic existence as a realized ideal of a community that is not a collective. Diasporic life is ultimately a kind of life in which the yahid (individual, not found in liberal terminology) is afforded, as an ecstatic way of moral life, an existence that allows a universalistic moral responsibility and intellectual commitment to overcome any dogma and content with the world of ‘facts' and to reject the promises of mere power, glory, and pleasure. All this has changed in face of the successes of Zionist education and its political realizations. Unreserved siding against injustice inevitably endangers the very existence of Israel, not solely its current policies. As a genuine dialectical realization of Diasporic philosophy, counter-education in Israel cannot become instrumentalized, cannot become a collective self-imposed mass immigration. It is not solely a moral-political concrete dilemma facing us nowadays; it is fundamentally a philosophical and existential antinomy. Ultimately, it begins and ends in and by the individual, who is willing to overcome his or her self and to open the gates to the nomadic existence of a brave lover of Life and creativity. The new exodus is from Israel and the Zionist nation-building project as a present-day ‘Egypt’ as a home. It is an exodus from a distorted concept of Diasporic life, from the concept of ‘Egypt’ in the form of all versions of ‘homecoming’ and a monotheistic way, to rebuild or go back to the Garden of Eden. In the face of the new anti-Semitism as the meta-narrative of the new progressive thinking there is a special role to the present challenge of the unification of an ongoing moral struggle for the realization of the essence of Judaism, and transcending it into a universal alternative human existence.