Diasporic Philosophy, Homelessness, and Counter-Education in Context: The Israeli-Palestinian Example

Abstract

The Israeli condition has already begun to display this hard truth: after more than a hundred years of Israeli-Palestinian coexistence the Jews cannot avoid paying in the coin of worthy life to safeguard their mere existence. In other words, even if the structure of the State of Israel survives it will endure, most probably, only in the form of Sparta of the wicked (Gur-Ze’ev, 1998, pp. 73–80). It is so painful and hard for me to face this reality, as I am as much the grandson of Keyla Goldhamer, who barely survived the 1903 Pogrom of Kishiniev, and whose stories and lessons are so meaningful for me until this day, as the son of Robert Vilcek, who lost almost all his family in the Holocaust and was spared the Nazi death industry only after being thrown into the mass grave from which he literally emerged all on his own, and the son of Hanna Vilcek, who lost her marriage to her first husband as her share in the Holocaust; all these experiences are formative for my Diasporic horizons. Yet I think all of us, even the Zionists among us, should today rethink our old conceptions about Jewish life and the Jewish mission in Israel and in the Diaspora. Perhaps a good beginning would be to rethink central conceptions such as “Diaspora”, “homeland”, and “homecoming”. Such an elaboration presents us with nothing less than the present day Jewish telos and our responsibility toward its fulfillment as well as toward the overcoming of its fulfillment and of what we presently are. It is of vital importance to conceive Diasporic human possibility as rooted in Judaism only as part of richer and deeper roots of human possibilities that transcend Judaism and overcome Monotheism, Western concepts of light-truth and triumphant patriarchalism, even in the form of radical feminist alternatives in the McWorld. In the Israeli-Palestinian context, to my mind, the current historical moment already enables us critically to summarize the last hundred years’ attempt to turn away from the Diasporic Jewish goal by the Zionist barbarization of the Jewish Spirit within the projects of “annihilating the Diaspora”, “homecoming”, and “normalization”.