Reinventing Identity: Jewish Dissenting Rhetoric in Support of Palestinian Rights

Abstract

This dissertation asks:

• How does dominant rhetoric in support of Israel continue to negate Palestinian history and identity?
• What are the boundaries of legitimate political speech in American Jewish discourse regarding Israel?
• Who crosses them, and what are the consequences?
• What leads certain Jewish dissenters to cross intracommunal boundaries about Israel? How do these boundary formations shift according to context?
• What does reinventing Jewish identity in solidarity with Palestinian rights look like?

According to the corpus that I examine, not only are dissenters speaking out in support of Palestinian rights, but they are also asserting for themselves what it means to be Jewish. Such assertions of reinvented self-understanding challenge the dominant narrative of Jewish identity as unequivocally Zionist: “Israel, right or wrong” (Waxman, Trouble 55).

Through textual analysis, I show how this rhetoric of dissent redraws the contours of Jewish identity as a mode of ethical relations that heeds the call for Palestinian freedom. At the heart of this reinvention of identity, Jewish dissenters reframe Holocaust memory and the threat of antisemitism as interconnected with other forms of ethnic and racial prejudice, not uniquely separate from. Through this reframing, the call for justice from the Palestinian “Other” becomes audible.

As a method, rhetorical criticism is the analysis of the symbolism and their effects in discourse. In chapter one, I start by delineating a rhetorical genealogy of Zionism’s erasure of Palestinian life and history. In chapter two, I continue to trace the rhetorical genealogy through the trope of the antisemitic Arab terrorist Other, an effect of what I refer to as Zionist rhetoric of existential threat. Situated in genealogical context, the case studies of dissent show the imperative for reinventing identity as a way toward justice.

Chapter three examines first-person identity reconstitution by critics Peter Beinart and Sara Roy. First-person identity constitution analyzes how authors and speakers constitute their identities in discourse through narrative about their personal realities, or what Dana Anderson calls “expressible self-interpretation” (11). I show how a critical rhetoric of first-person narrative can be a transformative cultural resource that reinvents identity as an ethical practice in relation to otherness. I look to the work of Judith Butler for a philosophy of ethical relations.

Chapter four examines the rhetorical refusal of ethnonationalist birthright through the lens of the universal audience. For rhetorical theories of the universal audience, I draw upon the work of Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, Janice Fernheimer, John Schilb, and Antonio de Velasco. In chapter five, I turn toward in the practical application of audience-based pedagogy in the writing classroom as a way to cultivate rhetorical awareness in students.

While Holocaust-centered Zionist rhetoric continues to claim that Jews in the Diaspora need the State of Israel for Jewish security, Israel also frames its geopolitical position as constantly under antisemitic existential threat and attack. Regardless, for many Jews, the State of Israel represents a necessary place of safety and refuge.

In the artifacts that I examine, dissenters call into question the exclusionary ethnonationalist notion of Jewish safety and reframe Jewish security as bound up with the freedom and rights of all oppressed people. Jewish dissenters utilize first-person narrative, rhetorical refusal, and dissociative techniques to break the links in dominant discourse that attach the threat of antisemitism to the need for a hypermilitarized Jewish state.

As much as ethnonationalist discourse would like to dictate and cement a certain type of identity narrative as fixed and final, scholarship across the humanities and social sciences for decades has shown us that identity is no such thing. Identity is not a fixed entity but rather an iterative process that is always open to change. We see this fact when dissenters refuse the erasure of Palestinian life and history and work to integrate Palestinian perspectives in Jewish narratives of self-understanding about Israel.

Reinventing Jewish identity in solidarity with Palestinian rights means incorporating Palestinian narratives into Israel education, not as an empty gesture of inclusion but as a fundamental restructuring that understands Zionism from the perspective of Palestinian history and dispossession.