Decolonial Particularity or Abstract Universalism? No, Thanks!: The Case of the Palestinian Question
Abstract
Taking “capitalism itself as the ultimate horizon of the political situation” enables us to reframe binationalism and the Palestinian question (Jameson 2006). It helps to underscore binationalism as a universalist project, engaged in a fight against domination and exploitation. Seeking economic justice at home invariably links the Palestinian plight to other labor movements in Israel and elsewhere in the region. The solidarity of workers can effectively challenge the interests of the few, denaturalize their exploitation (that is, contest the ways exploitation is effortlessly built into the functioning of the economy), and foreground binationalism as a socio-economic project, not limited to its own particularist interests, but “grounded in the ‘part of no-part,’ the singular universality exemplified in those who lack a determined place in the social totality, who are ‘out of place’ in it” (Žižek 2012: 831). If decoloniality and others fetishize the enemy (“the elevation of Zionism into the neo-imperialist racism par excellence”), over-emphasizing his or her exceptionality (Israel as the embodiment of modernity/coloniality and its racist ideology), and thus always risk reifying the antagonism, binationalism, if it is to be transformative, must embrace its role as a supplement to the Palestinian/Israeli antagonism, taking the task of co-existence, of living together with each other’s (real) neighbor, as an urgent ethico-political challenge, fully cognizant that there is no guarantee of success (Žižek 2014a: 108). And each is killing the other by the window.
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