214 L ANGUAGE

Judith Butler: No, no.

Udi Aloni: OK, thats totally different. Third: when we were working on
the Toronto Declaration, I felt that lively Tel Aviv functions precisely
in order to present the native as the barbarian at the gate. This liberal,
beautiful place is used to describe the Palestinians as savages whose
lives are not of equal value. Im curious as to whether you agree with
this structure. It seems like the West uses its high culture to construct
an image of a people with minor importance, such that its easy to see
them dying. So there are really two questions.
Judith Butler: Theres the question of Jewishness and theres the
question of Zionism. I grew up in a very strong Zionist community
with very strong beliefs about Israel as a postwar sanctuary, Israel as
a democratic state, Israel as under siege by forces of antisemitism. I
certainly learned, as a very young person, that the legitimation of
the state of Israel followed from the Nazi genocide against the Jews.
And it took me a long time to understand that the basis of the state
was discriminatory, that the Palestinian inhabitants had been forcibly
removed, and that there had been substantial debates about how best
to make a state and what form that state should have. Some of those
debates happened within Zionism, and some of them were anti-Zionist
debates. In my early twenties my mind started opening up to a critique
of Zionism.
But let me just say this as a way of being succinct about it: as a Jew, I
was taught that it was ethically imperative to speak up and to speak out
against arbitrary state violence. That was part of what I learned when
I learned about the Second World War and the concentration camps.
There were those who would and could speak out against state racism
and state violence, and it was imperative that we be able to speak out.
Not just for Jews, but for any number of people. There was an entire
idea of social justice that emerged for me from the consideration of the
Nazi genocide.
I would also say that what became really hard for me is that if one
wanted to criticize Israeli state violenceprecisely because as a Jew
one is under obligation to criticize excessive state violence and state
racismthen one is in a bind, because one is told that one is either
self-hating as a Jew or engaging antisemitism. And yet, for me, it
comes out of a certain Jewish value of social justice. So how can I fulfill
my obligation as a Jew to speak out against an injustice when, in speaking out against Israeli state and military injustice, I am accused of not

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