In recent years, leading scholarly critics of Zionism have turned to the concepts of exile and diaspora to challenge Jewish attachments to Zionism and the State of Israel. Some of these approaches have received significant public attention and support since the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks and subsequent Israeli assaults on Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran (see, for instance, Tracy Reference Tracy2024). This scholarly literature also has an affinity with political orientations advanced by leading organizations on the American Jewish left, such as Jewish Voice for Peace, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, and Jewish Currents: these have all generally positioned a turn toward diasporic history and experience as a contradistinction to Zionism (Jewish Currents “About,” n.d.; Jews for Racial & Economic Justice, “Our Core Values & Principles,” n.d.; Jewish Voice for Peace “JVP’s Approach to Zionism,” n.d.; “Our Vision,” n.d.).
In this article, I argue that accounts of exile or diaspora predicated on disaggregating Jewishness from Zionism cannot sustain the nonsovereign Jewish politics they endorse. To make this critique, I focus on leading theoretical accounts of exile and diaspora from Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, Judith Butler, Daniel Boyarin, and Shaul Magid. Their accounts have provided normative grounding for new Jewish critiques of Zionism and the State of Israel—a crucial maneuver given ongoing Israeli state violence, subordination, expulsion, and genocide. They have illuminated the possibility of a Jewish identity and culture not grounded in state sovereignty.
But in focusing on dissociating Jewish identity from Zionism, these accounts generally prioritize a Jewishness that is not implicated in Palestinian subordination. This approach, though, can facilitate disavowals of Jewish political responsibility for this violence. As a result, these accounts carry a more contingent relationship to binational political equality between Jews and Palestinians than their authors generally acknowledge.
This limitation is apparent both in the literature and empirically. Exile and diaspora underpin an emerging constellation of non- or anti-Zionist Jewish political, cultural, and religious spaces in the United States. But many of these spaces do not—or, in some cases, refuse to—think about either the future institutional arrangement of Jewish politics in Israel/Palestine or the political relationship between the State of Israel and diaspora Jewry.
My concern with these approaches is thus both tactical and existential.
To address these issues, I offer a normative alternative: a creolized account of Jewish nationality. By creolization, I refer to a process in which “opposed, unequal groups” enact a shared politics (Gordon Reference Gordon2014, 3). I argue that a creolized nationality, which uses the imbrication of Jewishness and Zionism to locate and motivate a Jewish political responsibility for Palestinian subordination, can better support a Jewish communal turn toward egalitarian binationalism—what Bashir Bashir (Reference Bashir2021) defines as an institutional arrangement that would place Jews and Palestinians within a single political unit under conditions of political equality.Footnote 1
Nationality is the political grammar of Jewish identity that is promulgated by the State of Israel: it captures the current binational constitution of Jewishness. By this I mean that insofar as Zionism and the State of Israel are central to global Jewish politics and experience, then a defining aspect of Jewish identity today is a political relationship to Palestinians based on Jewish supremacy. The binational constitution of Jewishness is most evident in the “Zionization” of diaspora Jewry: the historical and political process by which a relationship to the State of Israel has become a defining principle of diasporic Jewish identity (Magid Reference Magid2024a; Reference Magid2024b).
Rather than seeing Zionization as an obstacle, as in existing exilic/diasporic modes, a creolized approach would use it to support new Jewish political practices and institutions capable of motivating a Jewish turn toward egalitarian binationalism. This approach would frame the State of Israel as a threat to Jewish politics not because it abrogates an idealized notion of Jewish identity or ethics but because it is hostile to the egalitarian, binational partnership on which any such politics today must rest.
Orientation and Framing
The theorists of exile and diaspora I review here do not reject the terminology of nationality outright. But they either use it incidentally (as in the term “binational”) or as a framework through which to theorize the normative content of Jewish identity (see, for instance, Boyarin Reference Boyarin2023).Footnote 2 I use the term differently. I do not offer an idealized Jewish identity or ethics. Moreover, unlike other nonsovereign critiques of diaspora, I do not advocate for a turn toward diasporic Jewish “political tradition” to anchor a nonsovereign politics (e.g., Cooper Reference Cooper2016). For that tradition does not provide sufficient insight into the binational constitution of Jewishness today—a definitionally modern problem rooted in the logic of the nation-state.Footnote 3
A creolized nationality is not inherently irreconcilable with ideals of exile or diaspora. Yet, it is incompatible with those approaches that condition egalitarian, binational politics on the dissociation of Jewishness from Zionism. The current emphasis on this approach is misdirected not only because it overlooks questions regarding the institutional future of Jewish politics (as identified by Cooper Reference Cooper2015) but also because it obscures the resources for egalitarian binationalism present within existing modes of Jewish identity. For that reason, of the scholars reviewed here, my intervention works most closely with the works of Raz-Krakotzkin (Reference Raz-Krakotzkin2011a; Reference Raz-Krakotzkin2011b; Reference Raz-Krakotzkin2024), who consistently emphasizes the theme of Jewish responsibility. He also recently reevaluated his approach to consider an Israeli Jewish turn to an exilic binational politics grounded in Zionization (2024). Unlike Raz-Krakotzkin, however, I understand Jewish nationality and political responsibility as encompassing both Israeli and diaspora Jews (while acknowledging the diversity and differential positional statuses within and between these groups). I also do not see exile as necessary for anchoring either a sense of Jewish responsibility or binational politics.
I recognize that turning to Jewish nationality to contest Jewish statehood may seem counterintuitive, or even misguided, to those who either argue that the concept of nationhood is anti-Jewish or that conceptions of Jewish nationality are an obstacle to Palestinian liberation and justice. But rather than contributing to unfolding efforts to dissociate Jewishness from Zionism, I seek to pause that conversation and emphasize that such a separation is not a necessary precursor for overcoming communal investments in supremacy and Palestinian subordination.
As such, a creolized Jewish nationality is neither “Zionist” nor “anti-Zionist.” This binary disables my specific intervention, which asserts that the grammar of Jewish nationality as it is affirmed by the State of Israel can anchor nonstatist Jewish politics amenable to Palestinian freedom and justice; that is, political projects often associated with anti-Zionism. This does not mean that a creolized nationality is “Zionist.” It is not. Today, the Zionist movement and the State of Israel position ethnonational statehood, Jewish supremacy, and concomitant Palestinian expulsion or even annihilation as the solution to antisemitism, as the condition of Jewish emancipation, and as the raison d’etre of Jewish politics. Given this, I do not believe that nonstatist Jewish politics can be supported within the present conceptual field of Zionism.Footnote 4
But a creolized nationality is not “anti-Zionist” either. I recognize the importance of anti-Zionism as a crucial organizing frame for Palestinians. This article is motivated by a deep sense of responsibility for, and opposition to, the unfolding genocidal violence and expulsion being perpetrated by the State of Israel in the name of the Jewish people—and by a commitment to Palestinian freedom, justice, and equality. But within Jewish politics specifically, I worry that an anti-Zionist terminology, especially when grounded in the treatments of exile and diaspora discussed in this article, can prioritize an oppositional approach that denies or does not leverage the binational constitution of Jewishness for nonstatist politics.Footnote 5
The Limits of a Jewishness beyond Zionism
Zionization and the Binational Constitution of Jewishness
Today, Israeli and diaspora Jewish identity are irreducibly constituted through (1) a relationship to Zionism and the State of Israel, (2) the legal and political privileges afforded to Jews by the state, and (3) the Palestinian subordination and expulsion on which those privileges and the state itself rest. I introduce the term binational constitution of Jewishness to encapsulate this threefold dynamic and, with it, the idea that it is politically immaterial to speak of a Jewish identity today that is not, in some way, made visible through the subordination of Palestinians.
This relationship is largely self-evident in the contemporary Israeli Jewish context. Existing within a one-state reality defined by apartheid and Palestinian expulsion, Israeli Jewish identity and experience are made legible precisely through these projects (Azoulay and Ophir Reference Azoulay and Ophir2012, 11–22; Raz-Krakotzkin Reference Raz-Krakotzkin2024). In a similar vein, Butler (Reference Butler2012, 213) notes that Israel/Palestine is structured up on a “wretched binationalism.” This term encapsulates how the “colonizing practices” of the State of Israel constitute the state itself and affirm a political relationship between the state and Palestinians. Seen in this light, to be an Israeli Jew is, fundamentally, not to be Palestinian. (This polarization was also crucial to the historical development of Israeli Jewish identity.Footnote 6) As Edward Said identified in Reference Said1979, the “irreducible and functional meaning of being a Palestinian has meant living through Zionism first as a method for acquiring Palestine, second as a method for dispossessing and exiling Palestinians, third as a method for maintaining Israel as a state in which Palestinians are treated as non-Jews, and from which politically they remain exiles” (52). Said focuses on the relationship between Palestinian identity and the State of Israel, but he gestures toward how Israeli Jewish identity is constituted through the political right to benefit from and participate in the subordination of Palestinians.Footnote 7
The centrality of the State of Israel and Zionism to diaspora Jewish politics and experience means that the binational constitution of Jewishness extends beyond Israel/Palestine. For instance, Magid offers a critical analysis of the relationship between Zionism and diaspora Jewish identity. “Zionism,” he writes, “has moved from a political ideology of sovereignty to the very core of diasporic Jewish identity, to the point that it has arguably become more central than religion” (Reference Magid2023b, 93). For Magid, Zionization marks the collapse of a distinct, diasporic Jewish identity into one defined through the prism of the State of Israel.
As a process of identity formation, Zionization extends beyond self-proclaimed Zionists. Magid (Reference Magid2024a) suggests that today’s diaspora anti-Zionists, like Zionists, accept the centrality of the Jewish state to Jewish politics, culture, and life. “Anti-Zionist Judaism is arguably focused on Israel as much as the Zionist position is, except in the inverse,” he claims. “Anti-Zionism is still caught in the Zionist orbit. It’s still a product of Zionization even in its calling for its dismantling.” Even those opposed to the existence of the state, Magid argues, remain captured by a constricted conception of what Jewish identity is or can be—one that is predicated on some relationship to the state. Zionization articulates how the State of Israel became the defining principle of Jewish identity today, shaping its political, cultural, and religious expression accordingly.
Magid’s treatment of Zionization suggests, but does not name, the binational constitution of diaspora Jewish identity. But insofar as Zionization structures contemporary diaspora Jewish identity, it is crucial to consider its relationship to Palestinian subordination. This is a “transitive property” argument. That is, if (a) diaspora Jewishness is defined through a relationship to the State of Israel and (b) the State of Israel is predicated on Palestinian subordination, then (c) Palestinian subordination must be seen as crucial to the formation and legibility of diaspora Jewishness.
The binational constitution of diaspora Jewishness speaks to the affective relationships between Jews and the state. Yet it also encompasses legal and institutional dimensions. The State of Israel’s representative claims on world Jewry, in both the Israeli Declaration of Independence and more recently in the 2018 Nation-State Basic Law, implicitly read every Jew as a proto-Israeli citizen (“Avalon Project: Declaration of Israel’s Independence 1948,” n.d.; Wootliff Reference Wootliff2018).Footnote 8 The Law of Return institutionalizes this representative claim and transforms it into a political right (“Israel’s Law of Return,” n.d.). This is a right that, as Butler (Reference Butler2012, 209–10) notes, depends directly on the State of Israel denying an equivalent right of return to Palestinians. The rights and privileges available to both Israeli and diaspora Jews rest on the perpetuation of Palestinian exile and the denial of their rights. Even if diaspora Jews never exercise these rights, Zionization suggests that diaspora Jews have come to incorporate into their sense of self, at some level, a relationship to the institutions that promise these rights.
Theorizing Exile and Diaspora
Given this framework, it is perhaps not surprising that the theories I review in this article generally see Zionism’s rendition of Jewish identity as an obstacle to egalitarian politics. In essence, their approaches are based on an understandable, but audacious, political gamble: that the most promising vehicle for engendering a Jewish embrace of egalitarian, binational politics is by transcending the current relationship between Jewishness and Zionism. They recover exile, diaspora, or both from the pre-Zionist Jewish past to serve as conceptual frameworks for moral (Raz-Krakotzkin), ethical (Butler and Boyarin), or phenomenological (Magid) alternatives to Zionism’s account of Jewish identity.
Butler and Boyarin use diaspora to denote the empirical and historical reality of Jewish dispersion and nonsovereignty. From this, they identify a Jewish ethical commitment to the place they live—and, on this basis, to Jewish/non-Jewish partnership (Boyarin Reference Boyarin2023, 31–34; Boyarin and Boyarin Reference Boyarin and Boyarin1993, 720–23; Butler Reference Butler2012, 6–7). Boyarin (Reference Boyarin2023, 34) also turns to the concept of doikayt, Yiddish for “hereness”; this term has been embraced by many “diasporist” Jews today. Exile, meanwhile, is used by Raz-Krakotzkin and Magid to denote both the political experience of nonsovereignty and a broader sociocultural and theological orientation. Their turns to exile also emphasize the idea that it can be experienced within the Land of Israel (Magid Reference Magid2023c, 21; Raz-Krakotzkin Reference Raz-Krakotzkin, Benite, Geroulanos and Jerr2017, 397; Wander Reference Wander2024). Exile and diaspora are etymologically linked in Hebrew (galut and golah). Yet they are distinct in the theoretical alternatives they ground.Footnote 9
Raz-Krakotzkin, Magid, Butler, and Boyarin’s approaches all rest on a critique of the “negation of exile” or “negation of diaspora” (שלילת הגלות/הגולה)—a core precept of Zionist ideology that imagines Jewish return to, settlement in, and sovereignty over the Land of Israel as preconditions for Jewish self-actualization and emancipation (Raz-Krakotzkin Reference Raz-Krakotzkin, Benite, Geroulanos and Jerr2017, 393–95). As described in Raz-Krakotzkin’s foundational critique of the concept, negation of exile frames exile as a period of Jewish “passivity,” “deficient existence,” and cultural emptiness before the inevitable return to the land (see also Schweid Reference Schweid1984). Negation of exile appropriates traditional Jewish theology—which tethers a Jewish return to the Land of Israel to the arrival of the Messiah—by framing Zionist settlement and sovereignty as actualizing this messianic promise (Raz-Krakotzkin Reference Raz-Krakotzkin, Benite, Geroulanos and Jerr2017, 402–4).
In articulating Zionism’s overturning of exilic Jewishness as the realization of Jewish redemption, negation of exile animates the nationalization of Jewish identity. Exilic Jewishness is a theological and political obstacle to the logic of Jewish national sovereignty because its dialogic structure impedes any conception of Judaism as a closed sociocultural or political framework (Raz-Krakotzkin Reference Raz-Krakotzkin, Benite, Geroulanos and Jerr2017, 399–404). In effect, the negation of exile secularizes the Jewish relationship to the land and instrumentalizes Jewish messianism and theology to rationalize nationalist sovereignty (Magid Reference Magid2023d, 135–37, 143–54). It is on this basis that Raz-Krakotzkin (Reference Raz-Krakotzkin, Benite, Geroulanos and Jerr2017, 399) claims that Zionism, although Jewish in name, is actually the “negation of ‘Judaism.’”
There are both substantial similarities and crucial differences between Raz-Krakotzkin, Butler, Magid, and Boyarin’s approaches. Raz-Krakotzkin and Butler use exile and diaspora, respectively, to consider how a turn to Jewish history can disrupt Zionism’s reading of Jewish identity and prompt a turn toward binationalism. Raz-Krakotzkin (Reference Raz-Krakotzkin, Benite, Geroulanos and Jerr2017, 409–11) imagines recovering exile through a “Benjaminian turn” to the pre-Zionist, exilic past. Such a “turn” might recover the dialogic nature of exilic Jewish experience and advance Jewish acknowledgment of Palestinian national claims on this basis. Exile would displace ideals of sovereignty by offering a theological—not political—relationship to the Land of Israel amenable to Jewish presence there through the aegis of “shelter.” In so doing, exile would allow for a renegotiation of Jewish self-consciousness such that it is amenable to a “moral” binationalism (416–17).Footnote 10 Raz-Krakotzkin (Reference Raz-Krakotzkin2024) has also recently considered how exile could anchor an Israeli Jewish responsibility for Palestinian exile; this is “a deep responsibility determined from the political power” of Jewish sovereignty.
Butler (Reference Butler2012, 180, 205–24) imagines that Jews could embrace their own histories of exile to ground a non-nationalist cohabitation with Palestinians. Emphasizing the concept of diaspora over exile (15), Butler envisions that Israeli Jews might “set aside their Jewishness in any account of citizenship and the rights of refugees…by drawing precisely on their own exilic histories in order to extrapolate a set of principles that would defend, without qualification, the rights of all minorities and refugees” (215). For Butler, such an ethics could emerge through a Benjaminian “flashing up” of the repressed, exilic Jewish past that, if recovered, could facilitate a Jewish acknowledgment of Zionist anti-Palestinian violence (99–113). In turn, such a “flashing up” might allow for Jews and Palestinians to “establish principles of social justice on the basis of their converging and resonant histories of dispossession” (113). Thus, Butler’s diasporic Jewish ethics grounds the binational futurities they envision.
Magid focuses on the phenomenological dimensions of exile, emphasizing the potential of exile to anchor a nonsovereign, theological relationship to the Land of Israel. He (2023c, 21) harnesses exile’s theological dimensions to read it as a “phenomenological category and even an existential posture or state of being in the world” that would allow Jews to overcome the present centrality of Zionism for Jewish identity and politics. He hopes that a turn to exile could help “reconceive Jewish national and collective identity” (22). Magid (Reference Magid2023d) imagines that exile could allow Jews to transcend Zionism—specifically, the “proprietary” relationship to the Land of Israel it imposes—without delegitimizing the Jewish homeland.
Boyarin bridges the phenomenological and ethical dimensions of diaspora. Writing with his brother Jonathan, he argues that diaspora can ground a Jewish identity predicated on a relationship to others that is also amenable to “radical causes of human liberation” (Boyarin and Boyarin Reference Boyarin and Boyarin1993, 720). Unlike Butler, they place greater emphasis on religious tradition in their accounting of diaspora. The specificity of diasporic Jewishness, they argue, is situated within a relationship to difference: “Jewishness disrupts the very categories of identity because it is not national, not genealogical, not religious, but all of these in dialectical tension with one another” (721). They endeavor to recover this framework and use it (as Butler does) to animate a Jewish ethics amenable to the political commitments and futurities they prefer.
Distinguishing Politics from History
For all these theorists, negation of exile abrogates exilic/diasporic Jewishness. Accordingly, their theories suggest that both self-identified Jewish Zionists and anti-Zionists are caught within a notion of Jewish identity incompatible with the political outcomes these authors endorse (although Magid suggests that Jewish anti-Zionists may not be fully alert to this problem). In effect, these accounts suggest Jews must transcend Zionization if they are to approach their preferred politics. Yet this framework uses history and ethics as a substitute for politics.
Prioritizing the dissociation of Jewishness from Zionism has the effect of raising the personal, identitarian costs for Jews of reimagining the institutional future of Jewish politics beyond statehood. This is a point Cooper (Reference Cooper2015) suggests in her critique of Butler and Boyarin; she argues that efforts to theorize a non-Zionist Jewish identity elide more critical questions about the institutional future of Jewish politics. I am very sympathetic to this critique. But my concern is less about the focus on identity as such. It is not the impulse to renegotiate Jewish identity, but rather the desire to divorce it from Zionism, that circumscribes the political imaginaries of these accounts of diaspora and exile. In abrogating Zionism’s claims on Jewishness, these accounts suggest that it is possible and preferable to build a politics that circumvents what their authors generally acknowledge to be the defining features of Jewish identity today.
But if global Jewish identity and experience really are Zionized, then presumably this extends to how the concepts of exile and diaspora are themselves understood, thematized, and used by Jews today. Yet this is exactly what these theories do not explore. Indeed, they cannot do so insofar as their entire effort is designed to isolate Jewishness from Zionism. As a result, these theories do not examine how the very recovery of exile and diaspora from the negation of exile is shaped by Zionization in the present. In using history to animate their preferred politics, these treatments of exile and diaspora do not consider how history itself is shaped by politics. There are no exilic or diasporic pasts that are unmediated by the current political conditions in which we examine them.
The Essentialist Impulse in Turns to Exile and Diaspora or, Identity at the Expense of Politics
Accordingly, isolating exile/diaspora from Zionization can produce essentialized readings of Jewish identity that lack a determinate relationship to the binational constitution of Jewishness. It is true that the grammar of Jewish nationality, especially as it is defined by the State of Israel, brings its own issues of essentialization, especially given its affinity with racialized concepts.Footnote 11 But the creolized nationality I propose conditions identitarian reformulation on a binational politics whose rationale is immanent to the current binational constitution of Jewishness. The exilic/diasporic approaches reviewed here, excepting Raz-Krakotzkin’s Reference Raz-Krakotzkin2024 reevaluation, function inversely: they condition binational politics on the dissociation of Jewishness from Zionism.
The reformulated Jewishness these approaches offer is generally said to be inherently hybridized or capable of anchoring a preferred ethics/morality of Jewish/non-Jewish partnership. But in reading Zionized Jewish identity and exilic/diasporic Jewishness as mutually exclusive, they are left defending some essential content to their preferred Jewish identity—if only to preclude an exilic or diasporic Zionized Jewishness. The content of this identity is imputed to be either a Jewishness distinct from European notions of nationhood or religion (Raz-Krakotzkin), an ethical/moral position (Butler and Magid), or both (Boyarin).Footnote 12
As Cooper (Reference Cooper2018) identifies in her generative critique of the emphasis on ethics in diasporic Jewish thought, there is a risk in presuming a determinate relationship between identity, an idealized Jewish exilic/diasporic ethics, and politics. For as she argues, there is no such relationship: “The ethics of particular identity does not provide sufficient resources for non-sovereign political thought, because philosophical conceptions of subjectivity do not yield determinate political stances” (117).
Butler’s account most clearly exemplifies the issue of essentialization. They endeavor to recover a specifically Jewish critique of Israeli state violence and of the state itself. As a result, Butler deconstructs Jewishness as a stable identity to defend a clear relationship between diasporic Jewishness and binational politics. “The point is not to stabilize the ontology of the Jew or of Jewishness,” they write. Instead, it is “to understand the ethical and political implications of a relation to alterity that is irreversible and defining.… Such a relation, which is surely not singular, will be the obligatory passage beyond identity and nation as defining frameworks. It establishes the relation to alterity as constitutive of identity…and this interruption is the condition of ethical relationality” (Butler Reference Butler2012, 5; emphasis mine).
This quote neatly encapsulates the tension at play. Butler recovers a Jewish ethics within diasporic Jewish/non-Jewish partnership that is said to destabilize the closed framework offered by Zionism. But this relationship is, in their own words, “obligatory” and “constitutive” of Jewishness; it is the very “condition” of their preferred ethics. Butler (Reference Butler2012, 127; emphasis mine) argues, “If Jewishness mandates this departure from communitarian belonging, then ‘to belong’ is to undergo a dispossession from the category of Jewishness.” But if Jewish/non-Jewish relationality is mandatory and “constitutive” of Jewishness, then we have not escaped the “belonging” (e.g., an essentialized reading of Jewishness) that Butler critiques in the first place. It is a reading of Jewishness grounded on a diasporic ethics, to be sure. Yet, it is one still premised on an axiomatic standard: an ethical relationship to non-Jews.
In recovering a Jewish essence found in the past and insulating it from the present, turns to exile/diaspora rest their proposed Jewish politics on the same question that Zionism answers through turns to descent and race: Who or what is a Jew?Footnote 13 But in asking this question without answering it through the praxis of binational politics, such treatments of exile/diaspora risk introducing a chauvinism of their own: one that militates against the hybridity found within the binational constitution of Jewishness today.
The emphasis on divorcing Jewishness from Zionism can help illuminate how predominant forms of exilic/diasporic Jewish expression in the United States have generally taken one of two forms: (1) Jewish political spaces (such as Jewish Voice for Peace) whose opposition to Zionism is defined as and enacted through solidaristic partnership with non-Jews or (2) self-described non- or anti-Zionist religious or cultural spaces (e.g., minyanim).Footnote 14 These spaces have introduced welcome plurality, spiritual depth, and cultural richness to the communal fabric of American Jewry. Yet their structure allows them to avoid examining themselves as products of Zionization. Instead, they can reject Zionization as un-Jewish. As the violation of either a diasporic Jewish ethic of solidarity or an exilic/diasporic religiosity whose practice is said to be, ipso facto, non- or anti-Zionist.
My point is not that Jews should abandon exile or diaspora or that it is impossible for Jews to transcend Zionization. Raz-Krakotzkin, Magid, Butler, and Boyarin’s interventions have created the intellectual foundations for a Jewishness no longer overdetermined by state violence and the subordination of non-Jews. That is a remarkable achievement on its own terms. My own critique is, in many respects, situated within the intellectual traditions they have inaugurated.
Some might reasonably counter that it is preferable to normatively ground Jewishness on ethical partnership instead of a nationality defined by the State of Israel. I understand this impulse at an immediate, personal level. The promise of a Jewish identity no longer defined through the subordination of Palestinians is normatively appealing. But this effort elevates fraught questions about the boundaries of identity and community over the political imperative for Jewish action directed toward egalitarian, political transformation in Israel/Palestine.
Diaspora, Exile, and Political Responsibility
Jewish Implication and Political Responsibility
Without an account of how politics generally, and Zionization specifically, shape accounts of exile/diaspora, these theories are vulnerable to engendering disavowals of Jewish political responsibility for Palestinian subordination. At some level, this is an acknowledgment-for-disavowal argument: the idea that an acknowledgment of injustice can (if only inadvertently) sustain disavowals of political responsibility to act against it. Writing about the limits of acknowledgment for sustaining white American political responsibility for racial injustice, for instance, Jennie Ikuta (Reference Ikuta2022, 439) argues, “Acknowledgment is unlikely to motivate individuals to act for racial justice because it does not sever the very thing on which whiteness depends: attachments to racial dominance.” In circumventing the binational constitution of Jewishness, what is lost is an account of Jewish political responsibility.
This is a communitarian reading of political responsibility that I adapt from Hannah Arendt’s account of the subject in her 1968 essay “Collective Responsibility.” There, she writes that political responsibility is a “vicarious responsibility in which the member of a community is held responsible for things he did not participate in but which were done in his name” (Reference Arendt and Kohn2003a, 154). Setting aside critiques of Arendt’s notions of “community” and membership (see for instance Young Reference Young2011, especially chap. 3), my point is that the binational constitution of Jewishness suggests a measure of Israeli and diaspora Jewish implication in, and political responsibility for, the actions of the state. This is not a responsibility that can be adjudicated either legally or morally—Israeli and diaspora Jews are not collectively guilty. On Arendt’s reading (Reference Arendt and Kohn2003a, 150–51), political responsibility is not defined through reference to legal or moral frameworks.
Nor am I suggesting that Israeli and diaspora Jews carry the same degree of political responsibility: there must be some added measure of responsibility for Israeli citizens. For instance, following Arendt’s framework, we might consider the possibility of an additional, Israeli Jewish political responsibility distinct from the broader Jewish political responsibility I theorize here. Many Israeli Jews may also carry personal responsibility for Palestinian subordination that diaspora Jews do not hold. By this I mean a responsibility for actions they have directly taken (e.g., by serving in the Israeli military).Footnote 15 Yet the binational constitution of Jewishness suggests that there is meaningful diasporic implication in, and political responsibility for, the subordination of Palestinians.Footnote 16
None of the authors I discuss here explicitly seek such disavowals of Jewish political responsibility. In many respects, their intention is the opposite. Boyarin, Magid, Raz-Krakotzkin, and Butler all acknowledge Zionism and the State of Israel’s culpability for anti-Palestinian violence and expulsion. But except for Raz-Krakotzkin, their theories lack a theoretical account of how Jews are politically responsible for it.
Again, Butler’s approach most clearly illuminates this issue. In grounding their binational politics on a turn to the Jewish history and ethics of nonsovereignty, rather than the present political experience of state sovereignty, they elide the current institutional relationship between Jews and Palestinians contained within the ongoing, co-constituted experiences of Palestinian exile and Jewish statehood. Butler is deeply concerned with Jews acknowledging the realities of Palestinian subordination and exile. But if there is no necessary relationship between acknowledgment and political responsibility, or between ethics and politics, then there is no Jewish rationale for the binational politics Butler endorses.
The result is that such approaches can be read as attempts to restore (an exilic or diasporic) Jewishness, rather than efforts to theorize a Jewish interest in egalitarian, binational politics (on this point, see Cooper Reference Cooper2015, esp. 94). It is also noteworthy that Boyarin (Reference Boyarin2023, 71) explicitly defines his recent “no-state” solution as a “schema to save the Nation of the Jews”—and not Palestinians. At some level, this is understandable in a moment when Jews are perpetrators of mass state violence. But it minimizes Jewish political responsibility for that violence.
Butler (Reference Butler2012, 127) goes so far as to grant that their framework might involve “departing from a communitarian basis for political judgment and responsibility.” Indeed, Butler’s broader ethical turn has been critiqued for eliding the tensions between diverse group interests that are a condition of politics (see Shulman Reference Shulman2011). But this tension in Jewish politics today, which stems from how the Zionist movement and the State of Israel institutionalized Jewish self-determination through Palestinian subordination and expulsion, demands interrogation—not elision. If Jews hope to maintain a collective presence or homeland in Israel/Palestine not predicated on Palestinian subordination, the institutions of egalitarian binationalism will require Jews to disaggregate their investments in self-determination from their current instantiation through Jewish statehood and supremacy. To suggest exile or diaspora alone can resolve this dilemma is to suggest that ethics, morality, or religiosity can overcome the current institutionalization of Jewish and Palestinian interests as unequal and oppositional.
The Underdetermined Futurities of Exile and Diaspora
Without accounting for the relationship between the concepts of exile/diaspora and Zionization, there is no necessary relationship between exile/diaspora and the political futurities these authors endorse. Accordingly, the relationship between identitarian reformulation and political outcomes is largely undertheorized in these approaches.
Although Raz-Krakotzkin’s Reference Raz-Krakotzkin2024 reevaluation uses exile to mount a critique of Jewish statehood that accepts Zionization, Butler, Boyarin, and Magid’s approaches, as well as Raz-Krakotzkin’s Reference Raz-Krakotzkin, Benite, Geroulanos and Jerr2017 account of exile, position a dissociation of Jewishness from Zionism as a precursor to binationalism. Magid (Reference Magid2023c, 19) sees an affinity between exile and nonsovereign Jewish politics and institutions and suggests that exile can serve “as a productive motif for rebuilding a humble and non-proprietary Jewish relationship to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.” But he does not explain what institutions might facilitate a turn to exile or how exile could sustain those Jewish institutions (political movements, parties, etc.) needed to contest Jewish statehood.
Similarly, Butler does not explain how Jews would make a turn to the “exilic histories” they imagine. Nor does Boyarin fully address the question of political will, although he is more alert to the content, and therefore the enactment, of a diasporic Jewishness. Presumably, a turn to ideals of exile or diaspora would be far easier after Jews have relinquished their attachments to statehood. But this possibility is occluded by the approaches of Magid, Butler, and Boyarin.
The danger of using exile or diaspora without examining their relationship to Zionization is that diasporic or exilic histories or ethics could be used to serve seemingly contradictory political ends; for instance, the renewal of Jewish statehood. Indeed, using exile for this specific end has been theorized by Rav Shagar, an Israeli rabbinic scholar. In The Necessity of Exile, Magid offers a reflective article on, and translation of, Shagar’s essay, “Religious Post-Zionism (on Yom ha-Atzma’ut).” Shagar uses exile to disrupt Zionism’s monopoly on Jewish messianism and to offer an alternative theology that does not collapse the Jewish relationship to the Land of Israel into nationalism. But Shagar’s exilic critique is partly motivated by worries about Israeli military violence against Jewish settlers, as occurred in the 2005 Gaza disengagement. Shagar imagines expanded Jewish settlements under a reformulated logic of Jewish sovereignty that, per Magid (Reference Magid2023a, 223–29), “inaugurate[s] a new phase of exile…a nation-state with an ethos of exile.” Shagar’s approach illuminates how treatments of exile/diaspora isolated from Zionization can be deployed for a broader array of futurities than Butler, Magid, Raz-Krakotzkin, and Boyarin acknowledge.
In other words, an account of the relationship between Jewish history, ethics, identity, institutions, and lived experience remains absent in these treatments of exile and diaspora. This absence is not simply a concern with the impact of history on political imagination—or the relationship between political imagination and institutions.Footnote 17 Cooper (Reference Cooper2020, 257, 283), for instance, identifies how efforts to use diasporic Jewish history to activate alternative/nonsovereign Jewish imaginaries fail to consider the question of how to “cultivate political imagination” and, perhaps more worryingly, what “advocates of a just, negotiated settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict …want, expect, and need from regime design.” This is an important critique. Theorists and activists who use exile/diaspora do generally fail to interrogate questions of regime and political will formation. But more worryingly is the implicit refusal to examine how Zionized identity and experience shape their theorization of these concepts. The inability of exilic and diasporic theorists to consider the relationship between exile/diaspora and specific institutional futurities is a downstream consequence of their reluctance to examine how the binational constitution of Jewishness shapes their treatments of exile/diaspora in the first place.
Toward a Creolized Jewish Nationality
Rather than conditioning nonstatist Jewish politics on a Jewishness beyond Zionization, my proposed use of nationality would allow Jews to use Zionization to interrogate the relationship to Palestinian subordination within the binational constitution of Jewishness and recover a particularist, Jewish interest in egalitarian binationalism on this basis. The interrogation that I describe is not a dialogic process, a moral posture, or an ethical commitment. Instead, it is a political practice. There is no determinate relationship between such interrogation and a specific institutional outcome. But there is the potential for Jews to approach more egalitarian, binational politics on this basis.
Nationality could thus be used to by Jews to begin reconfiguring their relations with Palestinians that already exist. It could allow Jews to see egalitarian binationalism as the condition for what many Jews currently see as dependent on statehood: a robust Israeli Jewish culture, a vibrant relationship to the Land of Israel and the Jewish homeland in Israel/Palestine, and a global Jewish politics based on a shared sense of peoplehood.
To use Jewish nationality in this way would be to creolize it. For Gordon (Reference Gordon2014, 3), creolization offers the promise of enacting a “shared, public good or general will” between presently unequal groups. It disturbs essentialist identitarian presuppositions through an engagement based on the unequal or even oppositional positions of the groups. It is an approach, Gordon writes, that is “painfully aware of the most salient of meaningful differences while paying equal attention to how they might be effectively synthesized in solidarities of political action” (3). To be aware of this difference in a Jewish context is simple: it involves, at the most basic level, an interrogation of the binational constitution of Jewishness. This interrogation is not a politics of acknowledgment or mutual recognition that circumvents the profound inequalities of political power and privilege between Jews and Palestinians today. Rather, it begins with Jewish responsibility for sovereignty, supremacism, subordination, expulsion, and genocide.
The Limits of Exile and Diaspora
As mentioned previously, Raz-Krakotzkin, Magid, Butler, and Boyarin do not reject the framework of Jewish nationality. Indeed, Raz-Krakotzkin’s (Reference Raz-Krakotzkin2024) emphasis on an Israeli Jewish responsibility stemming from “political power” is a reading of exile more amenable to the creolization I imagine than the other theorists discussed in this article (even though Raz-Krakotzkin sidelines the issue of diasporic Jewish implication and political responsibility). So, it is possible that exile or diaspora could help animate the nationality of which I speak. Yet I do not think these concepts are required for Jews to interrogate the binational constitution of Jewishness.
Instead of theorizing the ideal content of Jewishness, I want to focus on the political enactment of a creolized Jewish nationality.Footnote 18 In this sense, my approach is substantively different from Boyarin’s “diaspora nation” concept. Boyarin (Reference Boyarin2023, 108) sees Talmudic practice as embodying “the soundscape for Jewish culture and thus Jewish worldwide sociality.” I share, quite deeply, Boyarin’s commitment to a nonsovereign reading of Jewish identity. But I think it is possible to enact such an identity without dissociating Jewishness from Zionization. My reading of a creolized nationality is thereby one in which a Jewish homeland in Israel/Palestine remains central to contemporary Jewish life.Footnote 19 Boyarin leaves the possibility of such a politics largely unexplored.Footnote 20
Arendt’s Reading of Jewish Nationality
A creolized Jewish nationality takes inspiration from Arendt’s accounts of Jewish politics written primarily during the 1940s, which framed a Jewish ethnostate as an existential threat to the Jewish homeland. It is also indebted to Raz-Krakotzkin’s interpretation of Arendt’s approach. In a remarkable summation of her work on Jewish politics, he (Reference Raz-Krakotzkin2011b, 63) writes that for Arendt, “the rights and perspective of the Palestinians became an integral part of the discussion of Jewish rights and self-definition as well as of the vision of Jewish political emancipation.” Raz-Krakotzkin identifies through Arendt an ideal of Jewish politics that is bound to a recognition of Palestinian rights via an appropriation of Zionism’s own frameworks of Jewishness. “Bi-nationalism,” he writes, “implies a Jewish identity based on the recognition of Palestinian rights” (60). Arendt, he notes, lionized the Jewish politics fostered by Zionism while fiercely contesting the movement’s turn to statehood (Raz-Krakotzkin Reference Raz-Krakotzkin2011a, 109; Reference Raz-Krakotzkin2011b).
Both before and after 1948, Arendt worried that statehood would overwhelm Jewish politics in Israel/Palestine by subordinating distinct Jewish interests in the diaspora to the defense and maintenance of Jewish statehood. She argued that Jewish statehood would engender nationalist balkanization in the Middle East, corrode the fabric of Israeli Jewish society and politics, lead Jews to weaponize the Jewish “concept of the chosen people and allow its meaning to degenerate into hopeless vulgarity,” and destroy the relationship between diaspora and Israeli Jewry (Arendt Reference Arendt, Kohn and Feldman2007c, 450; Reference Arendt, Kohn and Feldman2007d, 396–97, 399–401; Reference Arendt, Kohn and Feldman2007e, 372–74). As an alternative, Arendt advocated after 1948 for a Jewish–Palestinian confederation that would be part of a broader Middle East federation (Reference Arendt, Kohn and Feldman2007c, 446–50).Footnote 21 She contended that this approach was more promising for sustaining the “nonnationalist” accomplishments of the Yishuv; namely, the Hebrew University and the kibbutzim (441, 450).Footnote 22
For Arendt, binational equality was the only framework that would allow for Palestinian recognition and legitimation of a Jewish homeland.Footnote 23 A Jewish state contingent on Palestinian expulsion could not achieve that outcome. This was her crucial insight in “Peace or Armistice in the Near East?” (Arendt Reference Arendt, Kohn and Feldman2007c), one of her few major works on Jewish politics written after 1948 and before Eichmann in Jerusalem. The “most outstanding” consequence of 1948, Arendt wrote, was not the establishment of the State of Israel but “the creation of a new category of homeless people, the Arab refugees” (444); in other words, the Nakba. Arendt did not try to renegotiate Jewishness outside Zionism. Rather, she illuminated how federative institutions could dislocate Jewish politics from Jewish statehood.
In “Peace or Armistice,” Arendt (Reference Arendt, Kohn and Feldman2007c, 429) argued that “for more than twenty-five years, Jews and Arabs have made perfectly incompatible claims on each other.” For Jews, these claims were for a Jewish nation-state. Arendt argued that the logic of these claims was based on the idea that Jews deserved “a righting of the wrongs of two thousand years, and, more specifically, a compensation for the catastrophe of European Jewry.” She wrote that such claims were “nationalistic because they make sense only in the closed framework of one’s own people and history” (430). Arendt’s account considers how Jews could overcome these “claims”—and the institutional collapse of Jewish politics into the State of Israel—by reformulating their relationship with Palestinians to one of political equality. Binational institutions, not identitarian reformulation, could disturb such nationalist claims. This illuminates the creolizing potential in Arendt’s account of Jewish politics.
Arendt’s approach is not without its limits. Crucially, she ignored the settler-colonial dimensions of Jewish settlement. Her lionization of the kibbutzim, for instance, entirely missed their creation through Palestinian dispossession.Footnote 24 This is a significant limitation vis a vis the issue of Palestinian justice.
But a creolized nationality is one that could support Jews to relinquish their settler-colonial privileges. Although there is no guarantee of that outcome, a creolized nationality begins, by definition, with Jewish political responsibility for ongoing Palestinian subordination. By accepting and using Zionization, a creolized nationality could thus support leftist Jewish critics in convincing more centrist/right-wing Jews to relinquish their investments in supremacy. It might allow such Jews to identify an interest in egalitarian binationalism from within their investments in a Jewish homeland, which are themselves encapsulated within the existing framework of Jewish nationality.Footnote 25 And such binationalism, it is worth emphasizing, would be the beginning, not the end, of future Jewish–Palestinian relations. In this way, a Jewish embrace of political equality could be a precursor to Jews more fully engaging with Palestinian demands for justice—including those that concern pre- and post-1948 dispossession. For if effectively institutionalized, egalitarian binationalism could provide Palestinians with the political rights needed to institutionalize those demands. And crucially, it would (presumably) also create an institutional infrastructure that could mediate against potential Jewish backlash.Footnote 26
Enacting a Creolized Jewish Nationality
How might Jews creolize their nationality? Rather than prioritizing a psychological renegotiation of the self, a creolized nationality could be enacted through localized practices of binational politics focused on opposing Jewish supremacy. In this type of politics, Jews would use the privileges afforded by the State of Israel to pursue grassroots, binational coalitions with Palestinians as a precursor to the state-level reconfiguration imagined in the egalitarian binational model. These privileges include not only the right to Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return but also the ability to enter the country, move within it relatively freely, and (in general) enjoy protection from Israeli military violence in the West Bank.Footnote 27 Each of these privileges can be an asset for local, binational coalitions.
One promising approach that uses Jewish privilege in this way has been developed by the Center for Jewish Nonviolence (CJNV n.d.). CJNV organizes diaspora Jews to participate in nonviolent direct action in Israel/Palestine under the aegis of “co-resistance.” The very term “co-resistance” suggests a Jewish interest in contesting Palestinian subordination. CJNV’s mission is to “leverage the privilege Jewish people are granted by the state of Israel to support Palestinian efforts to stay on their land and in their homes, as well as model and amplify the viability and impact of shared resistance.” It organizes diaspora Jews to participate in “protective presence” cohorts, primarily in Masafer Yatta in the West Bank, alongside Palestinians facing active threats of expulsion and settler and state violence.Footnote 28 (In my personal role as an activist, I have participated in CJNV programming twice.)
By leveraging the binational constitution of Jewishness against subordination and for the pursuit of binational equality, such “co-resistance” work could provide a way to begin creolizing Jewish nationality by creating a shared politics on the basis of present inequality. Rather than positioning identitarian reformulation as a precursor to Jewish–Palestinian coalition, this creolizing approach reconfigures existing Jewish identity through political practice.
CJNV is part of a broader constellation of Jewish organizations mobilizing diaspora Jews to engage in either “protective presence” or “co-resistance.”Footnote 29 But Jews need not emigrate to Israel/Palestine or even travel to the region to enact a creolized nationality. Transnational Jewish movements and parties, for instance, could advocate for a nonstatist Jewish national homeland in Israel/Palestine through the practice of coalitional organizing with Palestinians. Perhaps paradoxically, the model for such institutions might best be found within the history of the Zionist movement itself. Zionism seeded a plethora of institutions—summer camps, political parties, sports organizations, and other forms of associational life—that involved diaspora Jews in the project of building a Jewish state (even as many never emigrated there). I am ambivalent as to whether any of these specific institutions, even the most progressive, could be recovered from their imbrication in Zionism. But a new organizational effort now could bring Jews into the project of building a nonstatist Jewish homeland that is constituted through deep associational practices with Palestinians in Israel/Palestine and in the diaspora.
Exile and diaspora may be helpful frames for creating a Jewish rationale for participating in such institutions—but only if these concepts are grounded in the binational constitution of Jewishness. My point, then, is that a reformulated Jewish identity amenable to egalitarian binationalism will not come about through ethical commitments, religious practice, or theoretical examination but instead through the practice of binational politics itself. How Jewish institutions would motivate Jews to engage in such politics is an open question. But it is a tactical or strategic one. Not an existential one whose answer requires that Jews first reformulate their sense of self.
Antisemitism and Dual Loyalty in the Turn to Jewish Nationality
I understand that this reading of Jewish nationality and political responsibility could raise challenging questions regarding antisemitic claims of dual loyalty. Indeed, one utility of present accounts of exile/diaspora is how they can circumvent dual loyalty by rejecting Zionization. A full study of antisemitism is beyond the scope of this article. Yet I want to briefly consider how Jewish nationality could allow Jews to mount a more robust response to antisemitism that stems from or exploits opposition to Jewish supremacy and Palestinian subordination.
Antisemitic claims of dual loyalty typically seek to delegitimize diaspora Jews as citizens of the countries in which they reside. Zionism can contribute to this process by collapsing diaspora and Israeli Jewish interests into the state—into Jewish privilege—and thus undermining the principle of a legitimate, diasporic Jewishness. But reading Jewishness as inherently amenable to an ethic of Jewish/non-Jewish partnership limits political responses to this specific form of antisemitism. For such approaches can elide the distinct communal interests of diaspora Jews by positing them as essentially compatible with those of their (non-Jewish) neighbors.
In the late 1930s, Arendt identified a “shared Jewish fear” among both Zionists and assimilationists of “admitting that there are and always have been divergent interests between Jews and segments of the people among whom they live” (Reference Arendt, Kohn and Feldman2007b, 51; emphasis in original). Today, the State of Israel is one way in which those interests are institutionalized. One consequence of a global Jewish community that lives in both an ethnonational state and in diaspora is that there is a relationship between political antisemitism and the state. To be sure, this does not mean that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. This bad-faith claim, common on the political right, likewise avoids exploring Jewish communal interests on their own terms by subsuming them entirely into the State of Israel.
A creolized nationality might be a resource for Jews to theorize their distinct interests—rather than subsuming them into the State of Israel, denying their existence, or imagining them as inherently compatible with those of others. A Jewish politics that reconciles communal interests with binational equality—and recognizes both Jewish situatedness in the diaspora and the present centrality of the Jewish homeland to global Jewish life—is one that might more productively examine or oppose that antisemitism that responds to or takes advantage of Jewish supremacy. To reiterate: diaspora Jews are not legally accountable for the actions of the State of Israel. But we share a political responsibility for them. A creolized nationality could help Jews develop conceptual language for the relationship between their communal interests and their privileges in Israel/Palestine—and demand political equality as a Jewish interest.
Conclusion
A turn toward a creolized Jewish nationality cannot guarantee a more equitable or just future in Israel/Palestine. It can also raise challenging conversations about the Zionization of Jewish culture, religious practice, theology, and politics.
Boyarin, Butler, and Magid all imagine a Jewish sense of self no longer implicated in state violence. But for the sake of a shared Jewish–Palestinian future, which is to say for the sake of political responsibility, it is precisely the binational constitution of Jewishness that requires further analysis in this moment.
Zionism’s signal political achievements were an ideal of Jewish emancipation that resolved the plight of stateless Holocaust survivors; a novel vision of Jewish politics, power, and culture; and a framework of Jewish identity that filled the vacuum after the annihilation of European Jewry. Yet these accomplishments were predicated on Palestinian subordination and expulsion from the outset—a relationship that defines Jewish identity today. Rather than using exile or diaspora to transcend this relationship, Jews would be better served by reformulating those binational relations with Palestinians that already exist. They might do so by creolizing nationality through the enactment of localized, egalitarian political coalitions and finding a Jewish interest in egalitarian, binational state institutions.
The relationship between Jewish statehood and Palestinian exile cannot be sublimated by a Jewish return to ideals of exile or diaspora insulated from the present. Rather, this relationship is a fundamental and ongoing political legacy of Zionism and the State of Israel for which Jews are politically responsible. Jewish nationality cannot provide a Jewishness unimplicated in this legacy. But it can allow Jews to interrogate the binationalism at the heart of our own sense of self—and approach the possibility of political equality with Palestinians on this basis.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Neil Roberts and Melissa Williams, who provided invaluable feedback on this article at various stages, as well as Menaka Philips for her support and guidance. I am also grateful for the mentorship of Mihaela Czobor-Lupp and Stacy Beckwith, who first introduced me to the literature on Jewish politics and exile nearly a decade ago at Carleton College. I would also like to thank Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, Bashir Bashir, Emily Nacol, Agneska Bloch, Zach Hollander, Daniel Epstein, and Niklas Plaetzer, who offered generous comments on earlier drafts of the article. In addition, I am very grateful to the editors at Perspectives on Politics and to the three anonymous reviewers for their detailed and profoundly helpful comments. I also appreciate comments I received when presenting drafts of this article at the Association for Political Theory Annual Conference, the University of Toronto Political Theory Research Workshop, and the University of Chicago Political Theory Working Group. Finally, I am indebted to family, friends, and colleagues on both sides of the ocean for the conversations, inspiration, and intellectual community that hold me amidst the reckoning on these topics.
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