ABSTRACT
Too often one finds oneself attempting to use realpolitik to make sense of Israeli policies towards the Palestinians of Israel and the territories it has occupied since 1967. Here I will argue that such policies, rather than being based on practical political strategies, are founded on an ontological project, operating from the earliest days of the Zionist project, in which the non-Jewish population of a Jewish state is treated, at best, as invisible and, more generally, as an internal enemy which must be contained, controlled, and eventually expelled. I contend that, before we can consider “matrices of control” or “states of exception,” we need to assess the distinctions on which practices of inclusion and exclusion are based; those between what Giorgio Agamben would term bios (human life) and zoe (bare or animal life).1 In this chapter I will, by examining the work of Theodor Herzl and its legacy to the state it played a key role in generating, show that Israel was initially conceived as a strategy for the extirpation of anti-Semitism via the isolation and reformation of a particular category of Jew. In this the local non-Jewish populations were to be extraneous, expelled wherever possible and ghettoized when that proved impossible. In time Herzl’s program of producing the “new Jew” was to backfire, producing in the contemporary times a “Jewish state” so internally heterodox that the category “Jewish” can be given commonality only through a politics of fear based on the constant invocation of anti-Semitism. It is here, I will contend, that the state’s Palestinian population became essential to its functioning, being conceived as an antagonistic interiority whose threat had constantly to be revealed, counteracted and, one might say, provoked.
