“The language of ‘conflict’ implies a symmetrical relationship between two opposed sides,” Liron Mor points out straightaway in the introduction to this book (p. 5). The descent of the US-bankrolled, Israeli-operated assault on Gaza into the wholesale slaughter of civilians makes it easier, cognitively speaking, to dismiss any notion of “symmetry,” but Mor shows that the conceptual frame of “two opposed sides” is much more difficult to slip out of. Indeed, the destruction of Gaza has polarized the entire world in this binary fashion: in the face of genocide, it seems, only two positions are possible.
Mor’s book was written before October 7, 2023, and the freedom she takes to explore alternative ways of framing the Palestinian/Israeli scene retrospectively feels like a memento from a comparatively optimistic time. But her excavation of local literature offers a very relevant toolbox of interpretative strategies, building on the counterintuitive axioms that the conflict is “not between two” and also “not one.” “Conflicts” is plural because this sliver of land excites many struggles, some of which involve more (or less) than two parties. Refusing a dialectical approach, Mor is also anxious not to reduce conflict to “sheer chaos” (p. 3). She accomplishes this difficult task with tools forged from the antagonistic polyphony of the country’s literatures, aided by a sensitive if not fully acknowledged ear for the ancient music that underlies the “zones of indeterminacy” between Arabic and Hebrew, languages whose “near-cognate” names both derive from roots related to passage and travel (pp. 9–10).
Mor offers readers five concepts with which to rethink this disastrous scene: ishtibāk or “clashing engagement”; levaṭim, “disorienting dilemmas”; ikhtifāʾ, “anti/colonial disappearance”; ḥoḳḳ, the “mediating law”; and inqisām, “hostile severance.” The numerous English paraphrases she provides for these terms, of which those listed here are only a sample, indicate the irreducible richness of the terms. Ishtibāk—an Arabic word with cognates in both languages meaning “net,” “thicket,” “complication,” “struggle” and “intertwining”—is derived from the work of Ghassan Kanafani, the legendary Palestinian novelist, theorist, and militant with a penetrating interest in the Israeli psyche. Mor defines ishtibāk by contrast to the “either/or logic of judgment [that] has come to dominate contemporary conceptions of conflicts” and to undergird both warfare and negotiations (p. 31). The alternative, a consciousness of the impossibility of pulling such painful intercalations cleanly apart, is exemplified in the refusal of the heroes of Kanafani’s novella “Returning to Haifa,” Palestinian parents whose son has grown up Israeli, to negotiate with his abductors-adopters.
Indeterminacy is processed in a very different way through levaṭim, the equivocations and qualms that Mor locates at the heart of hegemonic Israeli subjectivity. Reading the prose of novelist Haim Hazaz, she shows how melancholic inwardness and farcical wavering serve to constitute an Ashkenazi (European Jewish) settler subject whose deep interiority distinguishes him from both the Arab victim, whose unfortunate plight he may deeply regret, and the Mizrahi (Middle Eastern Jewish) accomplice in colonization, who is supposedly immune to such hesitations. However, Mor’s perspicacious analysis omits another settler archetype: the surly, anti-intellectual man of action exemplified by the committee chairman who sits in judgment on the hysterical protagonist in Hazaz’s story “The Sermon” and suggests that he abstain from “philosophy.” Derision of the beautiful-souled liberal who “shoots and cries,” after all, comes not only from Palestinians but also from within the settler collective. Although both derogatory perspectives might be internalized in the levaṭim of the sensitive settler, the latter strikes closer to home and has probably exerted greater influence over time.
The motif of “disappearance” in Palestinian literature and film is hard to miss, although Mor appears to be the first to remark upon it. The term appears in the (original) titles of works like Emile Habiby’s The Pessoptimist, Elia Suleiman’s Chronicle of a Disappearance, and Ibtisam Azem’s Book of Disappearance, as well as in the text of other works. In these works, Mor shows, disappearance is not primarily something that Palestinian (and some Mizrahi) characters passively undergo, but also something they do—from the space travels of Saeed the Pessoptimist to the “ghosting” of friends practiced by the narrator of Adania Shibli’s We Are All Equally Far from Love (discussed in another chapter, pp. 229–30). The root kh-f-y, as Mor notes, has derivatives meaning not only “to disappear” but also “to cover, conceal,” again in both Arabic and Hebrew (p. 112). (One is tempted to continue associating: phonetically resonant terms include khāfa, “to fear,” and ḥataf, “to die” in Arabic, as well as ḥaṭaf, “to abduct” in both languages.) The agentic nature of Palestinian disappearance allows Mor to mount an effective challenge to the now-orthodox position that presents “elimination of the native” as the zero-sum telos of settler colonialism (p. 111). Although it is impossible to deny that Zionism embodies a desire for such elimination, ikhtifāʾ says “be careful what you wish for.” This Palestinian self-effacement exposes not only the colonial economy’s ongoing dependence on indigenous labor, but also, through its ironic humor, the hollow stiffness of Israeli culture when deprived of the “Arab with the nargileh” who “sits at the end of every sentence you say in Hebrew,” in the words of singer-songwriter Meir Ariel. Mor suggests that the ample rubric of coloniality captures the subtleties of ikhtifāʾ and other forms of resistance better than the dualistic frame of settler colonialism, enabling an analysis that encompasses Mizrahim as well as refugees and migrants who are neither Jewish nor Palestinian (pp. 114–15).
Mor’s fourth chapter, which explores the concept of ḥoḳḳ, is the only one that left me unconvinced of its analytical utility. Perhaps this was due to the huge semantic field covered by the root ḥ-ḳ-ḳ, with an original sense of “to engrave” and cognates meaning “law” in Hebrew and “right” and “truth” in Arabic, or to the already voluminous literature on the colonial function of legality and exception in Palestine/Israel. It also may be due to Mor’s ambivalence toward Ravikovitch, whom she finds incapable of taking the “supra-critical step” of calling “for the (self-)destruction of the [Israeli] collective in its current form” (p. 187). The language betrays another ambivalence, not at all surprising in an anti-Zionist Israeli writer: an ambivalence toward that very collective. What does it mean, after all, to call for the destruction of Israel, but only “in its current form”? This ambivalence, which raises urgent but very difficult political questions, is distinct from the other modes of complication deployed in the book, and itself deserves to be theorized.
Inqisām—severance, schism, fission, mitosis—is perhaps the most complex and incisive concept elaborated in Conflicts: this may be the ideological ground zero where the illusion of “two sides” is produced. Mor’s reading focuses in large part on the violent rupture enacted by Zionism as it ripped Mizrahi Jewry out of its indigenous context, setting it against the Palestinians and demanding that it prove its loyalty to the Jewish state through violence. But inqisām, as Mor points out, also is enacted within Palestinian society, whether in Israel’s rending of the West Bank into Bantustans or in the longstanding split between Hamas and Fatah. In Islam as in Judaism, however, the partition of property is also understood as the obligation of just patriarchal authorities; this is the sense behind the name al-Qassam, “the divider,” given by Hamas to its armed force and its rockets in honor of the iconic guerrilla fighter ʿIzz ad-Din al-Qassam. One more translation for inqisām might be “segmentation”: in anthropological theory, the sortition of the social world into balanced and complementary oppositions, often imagined as parts of a patriarchal family. Mor discusses the sometimes literal “mirroring” of Israelis and Arabs in the Israeli television series Fauda in this context. It is no coincidence, she argues, that it is in one of the first major pieces of Zionist cultural production authored by Mizrahim that the vision of Arabs and Jews as complementary mirror images comes to the fore. The process she calls “(de-)Arabization” has turned the affinity between Mizrahim and Arabs to the advantage of Zionism, both by offloading the responsibility for state violence onto these supposedly hotheaded primitives and by manipulating it to affect an equivalence between the belligerent parties.
The immanent critique of inqisām is Mor’s most eloquent demonstration that the conflict is both “not one” and “not between two.” But, as the discussion above suggests, the notion of division as justice is a deep-seated mode of thought that may be as difficult for Palestinians to reject as it is for Israelis. Therefore, when Mor reproaches Israeli activists who chant that “children want to live” in both Gaza and the poor Mizrahi border town of Sderot for “inadvertently perpetuat[ing] a false symmetry,” she is both correct and somewhat unfair (pp. 226–27). As yet, even the most progressive decolonial imaginaries have not transcended the binarism of the “binational,” and in the foreseeable future it will probably be impossible for any of us—Jews, Arabs, and those who are both or neither—to entirely avoid such false symmetries in the fight against the horrific current state of things. Nonetheless, we will need critical concepts like the ones offered by Mor, derived from the experience of living the catastrophe, to undermine the dualism and essentialism that seem so often to emerge from struggle.
