<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?><oembed><version><![CDATA[1.0]]></version><provider_name><![CDATA[Occupied Palestine | فلسطين]]></provider_name><provider_url><![CDATA[https://occupiedpalestine.wordpress.com]]></provider_url><author_name><![CDATA[occupiedpalestine]]></author_name><author_url><![CDATA[https://occupiedpalestine.wordpress.com/author/hajarhajar/]]></author_url><title><![CDATA[ei: Book review: From mourning to&nbsp;mobilization]]></title><type><![CDATA[link]]></type><html><![CDATA[<p><span class="text14">Raymond Deane, <em>The Electronic Intifada,</em> 26 January 2011</p>
<p><span class="content"> </span></span></p>
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<p><span class="text14"><span class="content">Ronit Lentin is an Israeli-born academic and  novelist now based in Ireland, where she teaches sociology at Trinity  College, Dublin. She describes her latest book, <em>Co-memory and Melancholia: Israelis Memorialising the Palestinian Nakba</em>,  as &#8220;a reflection on the contested relations between commemoration and  appropriation from the standpoint of a member of the perpetrators&#8217;  collectivity, whose politics align her with the colonized.&#8221; Writing it  led her &#8220;to think of the obsessive preoccupation with Palestine and  Palestinians by anti-Zionist Jews &#8230;&#8221; as involving &#8220;a deep melancholia  for the Palestine they/we destroyed and the Palestinians they/we  dispossessed&#8221; (5), amounting to &#8220;unresolved melancholic grief for  Zionism&#8217;s own original sin&#8221; (153) &#8212; the 1948 Nakba, when more than  750,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled from Zionist militias when  Israel was established.</p>
<p>That these issues are of more than theoretical import for Lentin is evident from her 1989 novel <em>Night Train to Mother</em>,  and from this book&#8217;s autobiographical/biographical (or  &#8220;ethnobiographical&#8221;) strand concerning her father who, as a soldier, may  or may not have participated in ethnically cleansing Palestinians from  Haifa in 1948. Indeed, a sense of personal trauma sometimes seems to cry  out from the text, adding a dimension intriguingly at odds with its  aspirations to &#8220;dry&#8221; academic objectivity: &#8220;I cannot stop wondering why  we do this work&#8221; (53).</p>
<p>Following Freud, who &#8220;posit[ed] memory as the root cause of trauma but  also the source of its resolution,&#8221; Lentin defines mourning as &#8220;a finite  reaction to loss&#8221; focusing on a specific object in the knowledge that  it no longer exists and constituting a step towards healthy acceptance  of that loss. Melancholia on the other hand, which &#8220;can regress into  narcissism,&#8221; is a pathology that &#8220;shifts the mourning from the lost  object to the grieving subject&#8221; (50-51).</p>
<p>She questions whether &#8220;co-memorizing the Nakba in Hebrew shifts the  object of commemoration from the colonized Palestinians to the  colonizing Israelis who use this commemorative act to construct their  own (Israeli Jewish) identity&#8221; (129). The &#8220;necessary conclusion of  commemorating the Nakba must be recognizing the Palestinian right of  return&#8221; (164), which ultimately entails &#8220;calling for the demise of  Israel as a Jewish state&#8221; (169).</p>
<p>Lentin tells us (128) that &#8220;the impetus for writing this book owes a lot to the work of <em>Zochrot</em>&#8221;  (Hebrew for &#8220;remembering&#8221;), an Israeli Jewish nongovernmental  organization founded in 2002 that aims to raise awareness of the Nakba  among Jewish Israelis by, for example, &#8220;organizing tours to Palestinian  villages destroyed in 1948,&#8221; and &#8220;post[ing] signs that commemorate  different sites in the depopulated villages &#8230; and giv[ing] details  about each of them through testimonies of refugees&#8221; (135).</p>
<p>Her chapter on <em>Zochrot</em> (127-152) begins with an account of her  uneasy relationship with the organization and its founder and director  Eitan Bronstein. He claimed she had &#8220;misrepresented the group&#8217;s work and  intentions&#8221; in a 2008 paper, in which she had also mentioned &#8220;a former  Palestinian Zochrot member&#8221; whose words she had quoted without explicit  permission, thus herself becoming guilty, in her own terms, of  &#8220;appropriating the Palestinian voice.&#8221; &#8220;This exchange,&#8221; she tells us,  &#8220;made me rethink both my methodological approach and my analysis&#8221; of <em>Zochrot&#8217;s</em> activities, which she had accused with some harshness of  &#8220;perpetuat[ing] rather than contest[ing] the ongoing colonization of  Palestine&#8221; (127-8).</p>
<p>Such harshness becomes comprehensible when one reads that Bronstein has  described his relationship with the sites of Palestinian dispossession  as a &#8220;conquest.&#8221; Lentin quotes <em>Zochrot</em> member Tamar Avraham: &#8220;I  realized he didn&#8217;t understand my problem, because &#8230; [f]or me, with my  European, anti-colonial background conquering is always negative,  whereas for him, out of Zionist tradition and language, it is something  positive&#8221; (148-9).</p>
<p>Similarly, Jeff Halper of the Israeli Committee Against House  Demolitions (ICAHD) is criticized for using the phrase &#8220;redeeming  Israel&#8221; in the subtitle of his book <em>An Israeli in Palestine</em>.  Lentin claims that &#8220;[t]he Palestinian other and his oppression by the  Israeli house demolition policies seems to be subsumed into the  anecdotal telling of the self-realization of the hegemonic Israeli &#8216;we'&#8221;  (97).</p>
<p>Machsom Watch, &#8220;a group of women who observe [Israeli army] checkpoints  and report their observations online,&#8221; while &#8220;important &#8230; in alerting  the Israeli and global publics to the checkpoint regime,&#8221; nonetheless  &#8220;arguably enables the military to maintain this draconian regime, and  &#8230; inadvertently justifies its excesses&#8221; (132).</p>
<p>Surely, however, Halper has made an exemplary journey from unthinking  Zionist to oppositional Israeli activist; his lucid analysis of Israel&#8217;s  &#8220;matrix of control&#8221; is an indispensable reference point. Bronstein and <em>Zochrot</em> have come to advocate the Palestinian right of return after an  elaborate and ongoing process of consultation and self-criticism,  scrupulously detailed by Lentin, and have indeed taken some of her  strictures on board (128). Machsom Watch, as she acknowledges, is split  between advocates of resistance versus advocates of protest and hence,  like <em>Zochrot</em>, is presumably &#8220;an evolving group&#8221; (150).</p>
<p>Lentin counterposes the anti-Zionist architect Eyal Weizman&#8217;s &#8220;potent  argument&#8221; that, as she paraphrases him, &#8220;those who oppose the state  participate in producing its oppressive policies&#8221; (possibly the most  demobilizing formulation imaginable), with the ex-Israeli British-based  musician Gilad Atzmon&#8217;s contention that to oppose Zionism &#8220;as a Jew&#8221; is  to accept Zionism. Lentin situates herself somewhere in the middle. She  acknowledges that her &#8220;own opposition does stem from [her] own Israeli  Jewishness&#8221; but has led her to a &#8220;not merely identitarian but rather  political&#8221; activism leading to advocacy of the Palestinian right of  return (163-4).</p>
<p>The issues raised by Lentin in this dense and often forbidding book are  of central importance, and one hopes that her critique of the narcissism  often marring the effectiveness of internal Israeli resistance to  Zionism will itself contribute to that resistance.</p>
<p>At times, however, I fear that the fierceness of this critique may  itself prove demobilizing, convincing Israeli activists that &#8220;they can&#8217;t  win.&#8221; I miss an acknowledgment that there is a younger generation of  Israeli activists unhampered by the shackles of memory, indifferent to  conquest or redemption, and prepared to risk life and limb alongside  their dispossessed Palestinian comrades and international militants in  resisting the actions of the Israeli military (for example, Anarchists  Against the Wall). I also miss an advocacy of boycott as the most  powerful tool to isolate the Zionist regime and convince it that there  is a price to pay for its racist and colonial policies. Perhaps  melancholia and mourning can only be transcended by mobilization.</p>
<p><em>Raymond Deane is an Irish composer and political activist.</em></p>
<p><strong>Related Links</strong></p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1560254831/theelectronic-20">Purchase <em>Co-memory and Melancholia</em> on Amazon</a></li>
</ul>
<p></span></p>
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