The Apocalyptic Sting and the Rise of Israeli Unrealism: Toward a Negative-Dialectical Critique

Abstract

This paper explores Gershom Scholem's notion of an ‘apocalyptic sting’—a messianic political theology which, he feared, haunted Jewish and Israeli politics through the Hebrew language. The paper makes four key moves. First, I unpack Scholem's ‘sting’ in relation to contemporary Israeli religious radicalism. Second, I tie that notion of a sting to Frankfurt-School discussions of reification and its political effects. Third, I survey attempts to critique this notion of a sting, through the work of Israeli International Relations (IR) Realist Yehoshafat Harkabi. Drawing on the negative dialectics of Theodor Adorno, I then draw out and deepen Harkabi's reflexive stance, with an eye to setting out a vocation for critical IR-realism in the context of contemporary Israeli security discourse.

EXTRACTO

Este documento explora la noción de Gershom Scholem sobre un “Aguijón Apocalíptico” - una teoría política mesiánica que, tememos, persiguió las políticas judías e israelitas a través del lenguaje hebreo. Este documento realiza cuatro movimientos clave: Primero, desempaca el “Aguijón de Scholem en relación con el radicalismo religioso israelita contemporáneo. Segundo: se anuda la noción de un Aguijón a las discusiones de la Escuela de Frankfurt sobre la reificación y sus efectos políticos. Tercero: Se revisan intentos para criticar la idea del Aguijón a través del trabajo del Realista (R) israelita de las Relaciones Internacionales Yehoshafat Harkabi. Sobre la base de la dialéctica negativa de Theodor Adorno, se realza y profundiza la instancia reflexiva de Harkabi, con una mirada a la creación de vocación para un crítico realismo de las relaciones internacionales en el contexto del discurso contemporáneo israelita de seguridad.

Keywords:

• critical realism
• classical realism
• critical theory
• ‘apocalyptic sting’
• Yehoshafat Harkabi
• Gershom Scholem

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to Elisabeth Anker, Jeremy Arnold, Ilan Baron, Jane Bennett, Shannon Brincat, Wendy Brown, Anthony Burke, Naomi Choi, Teresa Cribelli, Bill Dixon, Simon Glezos, Jairus Grove, Nina Hagel, Piki Ish-Shalom, Utz McKnight, Ted Miller, Daniel Monk, Andrew A. G. Ross, Terry Royed, Jan Ruzicka, Mark Salter, Brent Sasley, Kamila Stullerova, Mira Sucharov, and Lars Tønder for stimulating discussions on earlier versions of this paper. Particular thanks are owed to Julie Cooper, to the anonymous reviewers, and to the students of my Spring 2014 seminar, ‘Israel-Palestine and the Politics of Jewish Fear’. The usual disclaimer applies.

Notes

1 We do well, however, not to take a determinist view of Zionist thinking in this period: a self-sustaining ‘national home’ did not universally mean a sovereign Jewish state. On this point, see Lavsky (1996).

2 I am indebted to Ben Halpern's translation, see Hazaz (1956).

3 This is known as Shlilat ha-golah, or ‘negation of the diaspora’; see, inter alia, Raz-Krakotzkin (1993), Schweid (1984), Walzer (2013), and Zerubavel (1995, pp. 17–33).

4 Here following Habermas, Lennox, and Lennox (1974, p. 50): ‘a sphere which mediates between society and state, in which the public organizes itself as the bearer of public opinion[.]’

5 See, for instance, Avineiri (1981), Baron (1928), Gartner (2001, chs. 6–8); Halpern and Reinharz (1998, ch. 1); Hertzberg (1977, pp. 22–32), Laqueur (1976, chs. 1–2); Sachar (1996, chs. 1–3), Shapira (1999); Vital (1999, pp. 366–475) and passim, and the collected essays in Modern Judaism, 18:3 (October, 1998). But note Frankel's (1992) critique of this consensus.

6 Recalling Arendt (1968, p. 54): ‘Equality of condition, though … a basic requirement for justice, is nevertheless among the greatest and most uncertain measures of modern mankind.’

7 To make sense of this, consider a well-known passage from the Babylonian Talmud (BT Ketubot, 111a) attributed to Rabbi Jose son of Rabbi Hanina, known as the ‘three adjurations:’ that so long as Jews neither sought to end their diaspora, nor rebelled against the nations of the world, God would intercede on their behalf with the rulers of the world ‘that they shall not oppress Israel too much’. Jews’ dispersion among other nations was not, in other words, itself to be equated with existential abandonment; that would come only with the ‘sundering’ experience of modernity. I am here indebted to Cooper (in press) and Ravitzky (1996, pp. 22–25).

8 Or recall Golda Meir's comment: ‘I, of course, do not believe in God; I believe in the Jewish people’ (Arendt, 2007, p. 467).

9 ‘The sovereign is the representative of history [i.e., in the Trauerspiel, DL]. He holds the course of history in his hand like a scepter.’ ‘This view’, Benjamin asserts, ‘is by no means peculiar to the dramatists’. Rather, ‘it is based on … constitutional notions’ which emerge from a very particular historical and political moment. The sovereign embodies a curious tension: ‘the disproportion between the unlimited hierarchical dignity with which he is divinely invested and the humble state of his humanity’. This tension gives rise to its own distinctive form of ‘apocalyptic sting’: a sub-genre of the in which fictive sovereigns—interestingly for our purposes, often dramatized in the person of King Herod!—fall into rampaging paroxysms of destruction. With no force in the world or beyond it able to punish or stop them, they are felled only by the involutions of their own madness. Translated into the idiom of a mass political movement, this tracks Scholem's fear closely (Benjamin, 1998, pp. 65 and 70, respectively; see also Barouch, 2010, 2012).

10 Strauss (1997, p. 6): ‘[I]n the religious sense, and perhaps not only in the religious sense, the state of Israel is part of the Galut [Diaspora]. Finite, relative problems can be solved; infinite absolute problems cannot be solved’.

11 Ravitzky (1996, p. 1) aptly captures this sort of perfectionism and its disappointments:It was a dream of utter perfection: the day would come when the entire Jewish people … would reassemble as one in an undivided Land of Israel … the Jewish people would free itself completely from its subjugation to the great powers. It would then be a source of blessing for all nations … .Thus did the messianic dream persist for a hundred generations. Compared with this dream, the actual historical realization that has taken place in our own time seems truncated … the concrete fulfillment wrought by Zionism remains relative and contingent[.]

12 ‘The first flowering of our redemption’ [raishit tzmichat ge'ulateinu] is a phrase drawn from the official Prayer for the Welfare of the State of Israel. On ‘the finger of God’, see Oz (1982), and Ex., 8:15. On dispensationalism see, inter alia, Gorenberg (2002).

13 Scholem, it should be noted, admired Benjamin's work on language, and had attempted to translate the essay cited here into Hebrew; see Jacobson (2003, pp. 123–125).

14 This discussion is necessarily foreshortened, but draws on Levine (2012, ch. 1). For lengthier discussions of reification, see Bewes (2002), Habermas (1984, ch. 4), Honneth (2008), Lukács (1971), Ollman (1971), Pitkin (1987) and Said (1983, ch. 10).

15 Adorno (1973, p. 5): ‘To think is to identify. Conceptual order is content to screen what thinking seeks to comprehend. The semblance and truth of thought entwine.’

16 Adorno and Horkheimer (2002, p. 66):Science stands in the same relationship to nature and human beings in general as insurance theory stands to life and death in particular. Who dies is unimportant; what matters is the ratio of incidences of life and death to the liabilities of the company. See also Adorno (1973, pp. 126–127).

17 Harkabi (1988, p. 83): ‘[R]eliance on an event is compatible with the religious expectation of divine intervention in a world-shattering act.’

18 Aronoff (1986, p. 121): ‘[Prime Minister Begin] reminded his audience that it had been the Roman Emperor Publius Aelius Hadrianus who had given Judaea the name Palestine, “a name that still haunts us.”’ Jerusalem, for its part, was renamed Aelia Capitolina, after Hadrian.

19 Harkabi's use of the term primitivization bears more consideration than can be given here. When used in conversational Hebrew (primitivi), the word is racially overcoded: it denotes the unreasoning traditionalism that was ostensibly endemic among Jews of Middle Eastern and North African descent. Those same ‘Arab Jews’ were a key node in Likud's electoral base. See Chetrit (2009), Khazzoom (2008), Shenhav (2006), Shohat (1988), Smooha (1978), and Yiftachel (2006). Aronoff (1986), for his part, suggests openly what Harkabi only implies: that increased interest in Bar Kokhba was tied to a concerted attempt by Likud to ‘reconstellate’ the pantheon of Israeli heroes in the wake of its 1977 electoral victory.

20 And elsewhere: ‘Many [contemporary] Israelis maintain that “the most unrealistic approach is the most realistic.” Desires and yearnings are accepted as if they were a political program; and fantasy is enthroned as vision … ’ (Harkabi, 1983, xiii–xiv).

21 On the Peloponnesian Wars (in particular the ‘Melian dialogue’) as a parable for IR-Realism, see Levine (2011); for contemporary versions of such parables, see Lebow (2003, ch. 1) and Dauphinee (2013). On Harkabi's motives and the public debate that ensued, see Zerubavel (1995, ch. 10).

22 Namely, Ezra 9:14: ‘ … would You not be angry with us even unto utter destruction, till there was neither remnant nor escape?’

23 If not, then he is, even so, in good company; for neither did Morgenthau (1982, p. 80):The war of 1967 proved Israel was a nation, that its people could fight and stand on their own feet … That war, in relation to the experiences of four thousand years, worked its magic. [ … ] The pride of ’67 was based in part on a military victory, but also upon the type of military victory. I mean the triumphant way in which Israel overcame all its surrounding enemies. It was a kind of biblical victory. You could imagine the cohorts of God fighting the battle of the Jews.Thanks here to Mollov (2002).

24 Adorno (1973, p. 12):That the concept is a concept even when dealing with things in being does not change the fact that on its part it is entwined with a non-conceptual whole. Its only insulation from that whole is its reification—that which establishes it as a concept … .To change this direction of conceptuality, to give it a turn toward nonidentity, is the hinge of negative dialectics.

25 Inter alia, Avishai (2008), Beilin (1999) Benvenisti (2012), Burg (2008) Goodman (2005), Gorenberg (2011), Beinert (2012), Sand (2010), Kaniuk (2012), Shavit (2013) and Van Creveld (2004). ‘What Must be Said’ is the title of a 2012 poem by Günter Grass, itself one such critique. See http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/apr/05/gunter-grass-what-must-be-said, last accessed 10 June 2014.

26 Yerushalmi (2014, pp. 290–291):After one of Israel's reprisal raids … in Gaza … one of my acquaintances said to me that Israel is no different than any fascist aggressor. By what criterion, I asked. “We judge Israel,” he replied, “not by the standards of the Middle East, but by what we would expect from a Scandinavian country.” Yet what do we know of how the Swedes or Danes would react if they were perpetually vulnerable to sworn enemies, not armies but invisible individuals that are difficult to identify as such … No, I suggested, your standard is not Scandinavian but unconsciously messianic, with no room for Israel's imperfections or effort to comprehend them.

Additional information

Daniel J. Levine is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Alabama. He is the author of Recovering International Relations: The Promise of Sustainable Critique (Oxford, 2012).