"Nineteenth-century Europe turned the political status of its Jewish communities into the ""Jewish Question,"" as both Christianity and rising forms of nationalism viewed Jews as the ultimate other. With the onset of Zionism, this ""question"" migrated to Palestine and intensified under British colonial rule and in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Zionism's attempt to solve the ""Jewish Question"" created what came to be known as the ""Arab Question,"" which concerned the presence and rights of the Arab population in Palestine. For the most part, however, Jewish settlers denied or dismissed the question they created, to the detriment of both Arabs and Jews in Palestine and elsewhere.
This book brings together leading scholars to consider how these two questions are entangled historically and in the present day. It offers critical analyses of Arab engagements with the question of Jewish rights alongside Zionist and non-Zionist Jewish considerations of Palestinian identity and political rights. Together, the essays show that the Arab and Jewish questions, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in which they have become subsumed, belong to the same thorny history. Despite their major differences, the historical Jewish and Arab questions are about the political rights of oppressed groups and their inclusion within exclusionary political communities-a question that continues to foment tensions in the Middle East, Europe, and the United States. Shedding new light on the intricate relationships among Orientalism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, colonialism, and the impasse in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this book reveals the inseparability of Arab and Jewish struggles for self-determination and political equality.
Contributors include Gil Anidjar, Brian Klug, Amal Ghazal, Ella Shohat, Hakem Al-Rustom, Hillel Cohen, Yuval Evri, Derek Penslar, Jacqueline Rose, Moshe Behar, Maram Masarwi, and the editors, Bashir Bashir and Leila Farsakh."
Edited by:
Bashir Bashir,
Leila Farsakh
Imprint: Columbia University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Volume: 43
Dimensions:
Height: 229mm,
Width: 152mm,
ISBN: 9780231199216
ISBN 10: 023119921X
Series: Religion, Culture, and Public Life
Pages: 320
Publication Date: 15 December 2020
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Acknowledgments Introduction: Three Questions That Make One, by Bashir Bashir and Leila Farsakh Part I. Interrogating Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and Colonialism 1. Jackals and Arabs: Once More on the German-Jewish Dialogue, by Gil Anidjar 2. An Emblematic Embrace: New Europe, the Jewish State, and the Palestinian Question, by Brian Klug 3. Palestine in Algeria: The Emergence of an Arab-Islamic Question in the Interwar Period, by Amal Ghazal Part II. Beyond the Binary Division Between “Jews” and “Arabs”: Revisiting National Constructs 4. On Orientalist Genealogies: The Split Arab/Jew Figure Revisited, by Ella Shohat 5. Returning to the Question of Europe: From the Standpoint of the Defeated, by Hakem Al-Rustom 6. Between Shared Homeland to National Home: The Balfour Declaration from a Native Sephardic Perspective, by Yuval Evri and Hillel Cohen 7. Toward a Field of Israel/Palestine Studies, by Derek Penslar Part III. Stubborn Realities and Alternative Visions for Palestine/Israel 8. Apocalypse/Emnity/Dialogue: Negotiating the Depths, by Jacqueline Rose 9. Competing Marxisms, Cessation of (Settler) Colonialism, and the One-State Solution in Israel-Palestine, by Moshe Behar 10. Dialectic of the National Identities in Palestinian Society and Israeli Society: Nationalism and Binationalism, by Maram Masarwi Bibliography List of Contributors Index
Bashir Bashir is associate professor in the Department of Sociology, Political Science, and Communication at the Open University of Israel and a senior research fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. He is coeditor of The Politics of Reconciliation in Multicultural Societies (2008) and The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History (Columbia, 2018). Leila Farsakh is associate professor and chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her books include Palestinian Labour Migration to Israel: Labour, Land, and Occupation, second edition (2012).
Reviews for The Arab and Jewish Questions: Geographies of Engagement in Palestine and Beyond
The invention of Arab and Jewish 'questions' in Europe and their importation to late Ottoman societies ruptured mutually constitutive relationships that defined a distinctive civilizational pattern of coexistence. In interrogating the national(ist) identities that lie at the broken heart of todays' political imaginaries, this timely book points to a future beyond their separatist terms. -- A. Dirk Moses, author of <i>The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression</i> These thoughtful essays help us to understand how the destruction of ways of life (and of life itself) by pan-Arabism and Zionism-each claiming to assist the rebirth of a victimized people-and how the self-definition of 'a new Europe' after the Holocaust by repressing the memory of its murderous colonial history, has helped to shape our menacing present. This book is essential reading for all who wish to think productively about a human future beyond the nation-state, the modern collectivity whose ability to generate hatred toward 'enemies' is not unique but whose power to bring about catastrophe is. -- Talal Asad, author of <i>Secular Translations: Nation-State, Modern Self, and Calculative Reason</i> Original and thoughtfully articulated, this volume will become the first port of call to illuminate the relationship between the Jewish and Arab Questions: a must read for scholars of Palestine, Israel, Jewish and Palestinian studies, Zionism, and the modern European history of racism. -- Alon Confino, author of <i>A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide</i>
