"The Zionist mythology of making the desert bloom and a land without people for a people without a land was so powerful in terms of the imaginative conditions under which Zionism could justify to itself its own ruthlessness, that to challenge that would provoke a kind of generalised melancholia."

*Jon Bailes & Cihan Aksan, met up with her to discuss her latest book, The Last Resistance.
Jon Bailes & Cihan Aksan: You clearly value literature as a form of resistance; for its ability to give shape and an audience to realities often excluded from our vision of the world and to force both the reader and the writer into the minds of others, to attempt to connect with them. What do you think is the current state of Western literature, in terms of its critical content and social influence?
Jacqueline Rose: I would never make a comment on the general state of Western literature. I'm interested in specific writers who I feel have something to say about post 9/11 culture on the one hand, and on other writers who I feel have had a particular value in exposing the underside of political realities which were sedimenting from the ‘30s onwards. Into that first category would fall people like Nadine Gordimer and David Grossman, and into the second category would fall writers like Arnold Zweig and Ze'ev Jabotinsky. So rather than make a broad statement about Western literature, I can say that I think these writers, especially in the case of someone like Ze'ev Jabotinsky, are speaking about things that are intolerable for a certain kind of political discourse to hear, and in his case intolerable for his own political persona to hear - that's what makes him such a fascinating test case.
My argument has been for some time that Zionist rhetoric and indeed any fixed political rhetoric is always inherently unstable, even if it spends an awful lot of its time, rhetorically speaking, denying that inherent instability in the name of a certain kind of political logos or certainty. The reason why Jabotinsky is so fascinating is because he was a founder of the most right wing revisionist Zionism there is, but in his fictional writing it's as if he's exploring the path not taken or the unlived life of his own political fanaticism. Therefore he becomes an internal critic of himself, and I'm very interested in how that happens in his case. For someone like Arnold Zweig however, it's much more that he is exploring with his fiction a refusal of emergent nationalist identifications, both in Germany for a Jew and in Palestine for a Jew, which will become the terms through which Jewish history is going to be played out; tragically in Europe and redemptively but also ultimately tragically, certainly for the Palestinians, in the Middle East as well. So that's what interests me about those writers. And Grossman and Gordimer are critical thinkers for whom fiction is a way of challenging orthodoxy. So that's about as general as I feel I can get.
J&C: So you wouldn't make any sort of general evaluation as to whether there has been a decline in critical literature when compared to past generations?
JR: I don't think I'd want to say that because it would depend on whom we're talking about. I mean if we take someone like Coetzee, who I also discuss in my book, I think in his early writing he was one of the most brilliant exponents of the underside and the unconscious of apartheid. But I think he's lost his way now, although he remains of course the most gifted explorer of what that means. This is to do with the end of Apartheid and the failure of a certain kind of possible identity, or counter identity. But that's very specific to post-Apartheid South Africa.
J&C: One of the key themes of The Last Resistance is a psychoanalytic definition of resistance, as opposed to a political definition. This is essentially a resistance in the mind to change - a blockage of outer influences. You analyse David Grossman's idea that an Israeli consciousness which accepts the status quo is more a result of this kind of denial than a hegemonic cultural illusion, which has by now disintegrated. To what extent do you think that in Israel there is a psychological denial of the horrors of real world events rather than control of consciousness by a ruling ideology?
JR: It's interesting you should raise this because of course in Israel there is a wider disparity of views and a stronger set of dissident voices about Israel than there is, say, in America. Or rather in Israel it is more easily spoken. It is actually a very articulate culture about its malaise, and Ha'aretz is more critical of Israel than any newspaper in America is and so forth. So there is surely a culture of dissent in Israel. The sad thing is that it is, certainly at the moment, politically ineffective. In The Iron Wall, Avi Shlaim argues that this is in fact grounded in the founding ethos of one dominant strand of Zionism that precisely starts with Jabotinsky's articles on the iron wall of 1923 which argued that the Jews in Palestine must be invincible in order to survive, and the Arabs, as they were then known, must bang against the wall of that invincibility as a first stage to any sort of solution to the conflict. It is also, paradoxically, to his credit that he acknowledged, unlike so many of the early Zionist leaders, that the conflict would necessarily entail violence. Shlaim argues that this is the mindset that has triumphed against dissident voices over and over again. The classic example he gives is the silencing or the failure of Moshe Sharett in relationship to Ben-Gurion, and the triumph of Ben-Gurion's vision of what Zionism and Israel should be. So it's important to say that on the one hand there is a strong dissident culture but on the other hand it has been politically ineffective and that seems to be more and more to be the case.
However, Grossman is talking, as far as I understand him, about something rather different. This is not outside censorship or coercion by the state, but is to do with some forms of internal constitutive blindness in a certain Israeli mindset, which means that it cannot see what is happening to it and it cannot see that it has become - and here I'm quoting him - a more ‘militant, nationalist and racist' country than ever before (he was talking in 2002). He reiterated that sentiment in his speech at the Rabin Memorial in 2006. After his son had died he gave this incredible speech in Olmert's presence about the missed opportunities and the failure of what is still for him a miraculous vision. But he has used expressions like scotomisation and sleepwalking and marching towards the abyss, as if the nation blinds itself.
Now my way of understanding this is that the Zionist mythology of making the desert bloom and a land without people for a people without a land was so powerful in terms of the imaginative conditions under which Zionism could justify to itself its own ruthlessness, that to challenge that would provoke a kind of generalised melancholia. It really is a matter of a survival, not of the state in terms of external threats, but the internal survival of the nation to go on imagining itself in a certain way. And that's why there's been such terrible fights about the New Historians and whether they should be taught or not, because what's at stake there is a damage to the internal self image of the nation, for example in acknowledging the violence of the army towards the Palestinians in 1948. There are many Israelis, as I understand it, who are happy to say, "Things went wrong in '67 but don't touch '48 - we mustn't go there, we mustn't talk about it." Or else you have someone like Benny Morris who was one of the first historians to expose the awfulness of what happened in '48. People made the mistake of thinking he therefore believed it shouldn't have happened, but in fact what he believes is it should have happened more - that there should have been complete ethnic transfer of peoples in 1948.
So I am using psychoanalysis to talk about the way in which a nation constitutes a collective vision of itself, which becomes intractable because the psychic price to be paid for damaging or fragmenting it would be too high. I'll give you an example: one of the people to whom the book is dedicated, Ronit Tlalim, an important scholar of Tibetan Buddhism, appears in Asher Tlalim's film Galoot - Asher Tlalim is a very distinguished Israeli filmmaker and this is a documentary about exile. In the film Ronit Tlalim is interviewed at length and she says something along these lines, "If I went back I would have to put myself in a state of denial to live there." For her it is almost impossible to live there and take on full accountability for the birthing of the state in a moment of constitutive violence against another people. This is of course true of many nation states let it be said, not only Israel, but nonetheless she says there is a real impasse there. And I think psychoanalysis can help us think about things which are not just state censorship or a refusal to acknowledge reality imposed from the outside, but things that are too psychically painful to deal with, which involve a different kind of clampdown in the mind.
J&C: You describe Freud's notion of the "misdirected piety" of Zionism - that the symbolic value of the land of Palestine was magical, ‘omnipotent' in quality to the point where the Jewish settlers could ignore the Palestinian people who stood on it - again the idea of psychological resistance. How has it managed to survive the constant reminder that the Palestinians have always been in truth very much a presence?
JR: Well they didn't ignore them of course. That formula ‘a land without a people for a people without a land', nobody ever really believed it. If you read Weizmann and Ben-Gurion and so on they were fully aware of the presence of the Palestinians, as indeed was Balfour. So I don't think it was blindness. But the question of the land and the investment in the land is a very complex one. There is a biblical investment in the land, which I think can help explain the reluctance to relinquish the settlements, because actually the lands which constituted the original nation state of Israel in 1948 were relatively thin in biblical connotations. It was the land occupied in '67 that really fulfilled the biblical destiny of the Jewish people, which is why certain right wing Zionists will refer to the occupied territories as Judea and Samaria, wrapped as they are in invoking their biblical investment.
Having said that, even the secular Zionists saw the biblical history as constitutive of Zionist identity. Ben-Gurion said "The Bible is our mandate", and a number of early Zionists said they would not get the Jews to go to any land other than Palestine - this was when the debate was about the Uganda option, which in fact Theodor Herzl supported, pragmatically - because this was their ancestral home, this was the site of some form of early nationhood, this was where the temple was destroyed, this is where they could reconstitute themselves therefore as a people rather than as a minority inside other nation states. So this is a people constituting its own imaginative history and there's no nation that doesn't do that. The peculiarity is that for someone decisive like Ben-Gurion, history consists of 2,000 years ago and the Shoah and there's nothing in between. What needs explaining therefore is not blindness, but the complete dismissal, despite that lack of blindness, of the Palestinian presence on the land, which was justified, not just in terms of this Biblical history, but also on the ground that they were not adequately working or transforming the land. It became an argument about labour as entitlement on the one hand, and a fully colonialist vision of the indigenous peoples as primitives on the other (the two supporting each other), that is, a barren, undeveloped, land with an undeveloped backward people. Weizmann repeatedly said that he believed you possess something by building it with your own hands. This is pragmatic, labour Zionism - the slow incremental working and transformation of the land gives you your entitlement to it. So the Zionists weren't blind, they knew there were Palestinians there, but they believed that what they were doing to the land gave them a right to it. If you sanction that with biblical tradition, then that is pretty forceful when you think about it - quite hard to budge.
J&C: So has this biblical tradition always retained the same strength?
JR: It got much stronger after 1967 of course, because, as Daniel Barenboim said in a conference on dissent on Edward Said in the European University of Budapest a few years ago, ‘67 changed everything because the miraculous nature of the victory was such that the religious parties, many of whom had been very hostile to Zionism up to that point, came on board. The orthodox had been very hostile to Zionism because it meant the hastening of the advent of the Messiah, for which one should only ever prepare and whose arrival one should absolutely not force. Naturei Karta, many of whom are based here in the East End of London, see it as sacrilege and are very anti-Zionist. So one reason why it became so hard to budge after '67 was because it felt like this miraculous victory. I think the biblical tradition has always been there, but it's intensified since '67 and the religious discourse of the settlers has increased.
In their new book, Lords of the Land, Idith Zertal and Akiva Elder point out there has not been a government since '67 which hasn't been completely complicit with the process of settlement, even when the discourse of the settlement went against the secular rhetoric of statehood. There's a strange complicity, if not a vocabulary of intent, which has meant that the settlements have gone on expanding with this biblical underpinning. Even if the governments haven't necessarily bought into that language, they've bought into the process, which you could argue means they've effectively bought into the language as well. Of course, when Gaza was evacuated two years ago that biblical rhetoric was defeated in some sense. I remember people writing in Ha'aretz and so on saying, "This is the beginning of the end for a certain biblical conception of the land and a beginning of a new pragmatism." I'm not sure, however, that that's what's happened. After all, the evacuation from Gaza has simply created a prison, and the claim to the land is still being evoked in ancient terms.
J&C: The goal of nationhood for Israel has been a paradoxical one - it was a separation, an escape from assimilation with other peoples, but at the same time a desire to become like other peoples by having a home nation. Is it this psychology which problematises Israel's position in the international community - as a country which, to be a real nation, must assimilate itself with other nations, but which also, perhaps understandably, wanted to distance itself from the dictates of the rest of the world?
JR: Well, the assimilation issue is a very difficult one. I think the person who writes about this issue most interestingly is Hannah Arendt, who says in fact Zionism was a form of assimilationism, because it wanted Jews to be like other nations, and the anti-Zionists were in fact the anti-assimilationists, because they wanted to remain as Jews inside these other nation states. And Martin Buber of course argued that Zionism should not be assimilationism because Israel was to be a nation unlike other nations. Neither wanted Israel to be a normal nation - Buber wanted Israel to be a model of nationhood, if that was the right word, but not statehood, which would precisely differ from the nation states of Europe. So this is very complex because it was the failure of assimilation, in a way, that provoked the desire for a national self determination for the Jewish people. I don't think Israel can be judged for that, I think it's wrong to judge it for that desire.
The paradox was always that it transposed into the Middle East a notion of nationhood based on religion, ethnicity, land and descent, which was of course the very concept of nationhood the Jews were fleeing from in Europe. This is not to say that Zionism is the same as National Socialism at all, but to say that there is a certain concept of romantic nationalism which it lifted from out of Europe and transposed into the Middle East. And that's been a tragedy and a huge problem. So, for example, in Israel today Sharon can say at the commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz that the Jewish people can only rely on themselves (forgetting the occasion one might say) and anybody who criticises Israel is criticising the right of the Jews to defend themselves. This isolationism is then coupled with another, the peculiar isolationism of Israel wanting to be a European nation in the Middle East. The writer and critic Yitzhak Laor has said that it's because the Jews could not be Europeans in Europe - they were the Semitic other in Europe - that they came to the Middle East where they could be the Europeans, in relation to another Semitic element called the Palestinians.
J&C: To return to the theme of psychoanalytical resistance; to what extent could it be said that the support of the international community for Israel's policies has helped prolong this condition? Clearly there are economic and military gains, but what about the psychological influence of such encouragement?
JR: Well, I think the outside support is terrible, and playing a key, if not the decisive role, in perpetuating the conflict. Israel is the fourth most powerful military nation in the world and it gets more money from America than any other country bar Egypt. And that money is completely unconditional. As Chomsky pointed out after the outbreak of the second Intifada, there had been a certain amount of stone throwing by Palestinians to which Israel responded with an attack on civilian structures, and Clinton then responded by making the biggest deal of helicopter parts for a decade with Israel. There is something profoundly disturbing about this. Also Israel benefits from favoured European trading status with the European Community and so on. I think these things allow it to go on thinking it can do what it wants, and the belief that it can do what it wants is a very complex belief to do with feeling it is the nation of a uniquely persecuted people who are still uniquely persecuted, which allows the state to ignore the fact that it is the agent of violence. This is a point that Mark Ellis has been making for a long time - he's an American theologian who Sara Roy discusses in her wonderful new book, Failing Peace - that it is very hard for Israel to think about itself as the agent of violence; it always thinks of itself as the potential victim of violence, despite the fact that it enjoys such strong, more or less unconditional, Western support, such a huge influx of funds and military backing. It becomes a cycle - we need the support because we are threatened, and the more support we get the more it shows that we are threatened and the more it justifies the amount of hardware and power that we are being given. This links to the Zionist idea that the Israeli Jew was to be the opposite of the Diaspora Jew; that he or she must be a new non-passive Jewish.
I think that it is massively over determined, to use a psychoanalytic word, but it does mean that Israel can go on doing what it wants. Also, just to make a very simple point, it was only when Bush senior threatened to withhold some of the money for the settlements that the Madrid Peace Conference took place. That's what sparked it off and then led eventually to Oslo. But the current administration has not done this, and it looks as though the likely next President - which could well be Hillary Clinton, but I don't want to presuppose that - is going to be no different on this issue.

*Jacqueline Rose is Professor of English at Queen Mary University, London. Her books include The Question of Zion (2007), On Not Being Able to Sleep (2003) and Albertine: A Novel (2001).
* Jon Bailes & Cihan Aksan are the editors of State of Nature Journal