Response to Eric Cheyfitz's “The Force of Exceptionalist Narratives in the Israeli—Palestinian Conflict”

Abstract

NAIS 1:2 FALL 2014 Response to Eric Cheyfitz 147 STEVEN SALAITA Response to Eric Cheyfitz’s “The Force of Exceptionalist Narratives in the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict” I WAS DELIGHTED to read Eric Cheyfitz’s “The Force of Exceptionalist Narratives in the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict” and am excited to offer this brief response. This conversation is one that must necessarily continue. It is appropriate for a variety of reasons that it happens in a space of Indigenous reflection and theorization. I found it of particular value that Cheyfitz begins with analysis of the Balfour Declaration, which, beyond its obvious historical importance, is profoundly interesting as a rhetorical document. It promises a classically humanistic version of coexistence but is simultaneously a promissory certificate of colonial intent, attempting to assuage the anxieties of those its drafters were secretly planning to displace. In these contradictions we find ample opportunity to imaginatively assess the modern history of Palestine. In many ways, the state of Israel has indeed failed to live up to Balfour’s discourse. In that most important way, however, the behind-the-scenes conflation of “homeland” with “nation-state,” Israel managed to fulfill the declaration’s unspoken logic. It did so in large part through the exceptionalism Cheyfitz so ably explores . Here the colonial discourses of the United States and Israel exist in close proximity, if not in juxtaposition. I am interested in the ways that the Nazi Holocaust helped enact the performance of Israeli exceptionalism, because of the fruitful narratives of religious persecution as a precursor to settler colonization. One comment that Cheyfitz offers requires, I think, further conversation: “While the field of American studies, within which I include Ethnic and Native American studies.” Drawing from my readings of Robert Warrior, Jodi Byrd, Dale Turner, and others, I would argue that it’s useful to complicate the positionality of these fields in relation to one another. The move toward disciplinary independence—which is not to preclude interdependence—draws from (and contributes to) a particular narrative of decolonization that deeply informs the material politics of North America and Palestine. While Norman Finklestein, from whom Cheyfitz draws significant supporting material, has produced important work, I’m fond of the recent Steven Salaita NAIS 1:2 FALL 2014 148­ writings of Waziyatawin, J. Kehaulani Kauanui, and Steven Newcomb. There is a body of scholarship emerging that more robustly situates itself in decolonial paradigms that Finkelstein either ignores or refuses to engage. Those paradigms are crucial because Natives and Palestinians seek forms of self-­ determination that move beyond the conventional frameworks of Western human rights or international laws. Cheyfitz writes movingly in his conclusion of a Jewish presence in the Middle East that is integrative rather than isolated. This vision is one that advocates of decolonization should pursue vigorously, for it provides a model not only for a democratic Palestine but also for the engagement of Indigenous communities in North and South America with the institutions from which they have been excluded and from which they have endured considerable violence . In order for these forms of democratic engagement to become reality, they must, as Cheyfitz notes, disengage themselves from the ethnonationalism of the settler state. This is not an easy or especially realistic task. But I find any scholarly or material aspiration that stops short of this desired result to be unworthy of our time. And I’m quite unmoved by the hegemony of realism. I hope that our pieces can move beyond conversation with one another and into a broader discussion of what it means to dismantle and recreate the histories of our dispossession. I stand firm in my belief that it won’t happen in Palestine unless it happens in North America. STEVEN SALAITA is an independent scholar. ...