In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, Camelia Raghinaru talks with Jon Simons about his article “Divine Violence, Profane Peace: Walter Benjamin, Rabbis for Human Rights, and Peace in Israel–Palestine,” from Telos 192 (Fall 2020). An excerpt of the article appears below. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Purchase a print copy of Telos 192 in our online store.
Divine Violence, Profane Peace: Walter Benjamin, Rabbis for Human Rights, and Peace in Israel–Palestine
Jon Simons
Introduction: Disaffection with Peace
In this article I make a case for a Judaic conception of peace, derived from the work of Walter Benjamin, that might play a modest role in building Israeli–Palestinian peace. There is a need for Judaic notions of peace to counter significant disaffection with “peace” among Jewish Israelis.[1] “Peace” is most often associated with a binding negotiated agreement, or the “peace process.” When the Camp David negotiations broke down in July 2000, most Jewish Israelis and even peace activists blamed the Palestinian side.[2] The title of Tamar Hermann’s book, The Israeli Peace Movement: A Shattered Dream,[3] indicates as well as anything the sense of disappointment about the whole Oslo process. Hermann notes that Israel’s sociopolitical cleavage structure limits its peace movement that is mostly secular and hence has great difficulty attracting Orthodox Jews.[4] Atalia Omer criticizes Israel’s secular peace movement for its “conceptual blinders” regarding the conflict’s ethnoreligious character and the significance of religion for identity.[5] Alick Isaacs also argues from a religious Jewish perspective that the “model of peace among Western democracies” is inappropriate in Israel–Palestine because it cannot address key issues in the religious terms in which it is experienced.[6] One might say, then, that the Israeli peace movement has a “Judaic deficit” not only in its social composition but also in its conceptualization of peace.
Disaffection with “peace” among Jewish Israelis of varying opinions has a counterpart in disaffection with Western, liberal conceptions of peace among scholars of critical peace studies.[7] It has been claimed by Jonathan Schell that nonviolence “is written into liberalism’s genetic code” and that “the long march of liberal democracy is a ‘peace movement’—possibly the most important and successful of them all,” as it addresses political conflict without resorting to violence.[8] By contrast, critics of liberal conceptions of peace argue that they amount to peace as pacification, as order, and ultimately as war. Liberalism is always in some sense at war with itself and hence also with its others. In this light, the sort of peace conceivable through liberalism is a policed peace in which civil society, ruled by coercive law, is the correlate of disciplinary, biopolitical governmentality. The relationship of liberal regimes to its internal others is replicated in its enmity toward external non-liberal regimes, who also appear to threaten an international liberal peace zone. Liberalism in theory and practice has always presented war as peacekeeping.[9] A Judaic conception of peace drawn from Benjamin could serve as an alternative to the discredited liberal conception. At the same time, this essay proposes that a more nuanced approach to liberal peace should make room for nonviolent activism for rights as a feature of peacebuilding in an agonistic conception of peace that is not liberal yet not anti-liberal.
I (a nonreligious British-Israeli) put a critical reading of Diasporic Jewish thinker Walter Benjamin, especially his essay “Critique of Violence,”[10] in conversation with the ideas and practice of Rabbis for Human Rights (RHR), an Israeli organization that combines Judaism with universal liberal rights. The conversation is productive on several levels. First, Benjamin offers an intriguing, Judaically informed notion of peace through a critique of the violence inherent in liberal peacemaking, along lines that resonate with critical peace scholars. Yet counterintuitively we can derive a conception of peace from Benjamin’s thoughts about divine violence that is wholly different from the state’s monopoly on legalized violence.[11] Second, RHR has unfulfilled potential to reduce the “Judaic deficit” of Israel’s peace movement, in particular by challenging the loudness of the religious-nationalist doctrine of exclusive Jewish rights to the Land of Israel as practiced by the settler movement. Religious peacebuilding is needed in the predominantly secular Jewish Israeli peace camp.[12] Yet Atalia Omer doubts whether RHR’s voice is heard by Israeli Jews as a “genuinely” Jewish intervention, given that it tends to rely on liberal Diasporic voices to critique the Zionist articulation of Jewish identity without simultaneously reframing Jewishness in ways that suit life in Israel–Palestine.[13] Benjamin’s critique of liberal peace can serve as a useful corrective to RHR’s uncritical appeal to universal liberal rights. Reading between them enables me to identify a productive agonistic tension between RHR’s particular Judaic investment and its liberalism. At the same time, RHR’s reliance on human rights law offers a vantage point from which to mitigate what Beatrice Hanssen sees as Benjamin’s inability to distinguish entirely “pure” divine violence from “impure” legal violence inherent in the rule of law.[14] RHR’s practice of the public interpretation of Judaic texts and their nonviolent peacebuilding activism indicate that the counterpart to Benjamin’s divine violence is not “divine peace” but human, profane peacebuilding that is sustained by an agonistic relation between the human and divine, between liberal rights and critique of the rule of law. Schematically put, Benjamin and RHR share commitments to justice, peace, nonviolence, and Judaic sources. They differ in that Benjamin’s has an anti-liberal attitude to law, which he perceives as coercive, whereas RHR upholds liberal rights as way to limit oppressive state power. My reading seeks to bridge the gap between them without effacing the agonistic tension between them.
It is a key thread of my argument that Benjamin’s philosophical attempts to establish “purity” and “immediacy” are unsuccessful yet show us something deeply significant about the phenomenon in question. I am less interested in a faithful reading of Benjamin than a productive reading that brings his thought in touch with contemporary politics. In the case of violence, Benjamin’s failure is not fruitless because he nonetheless leads us to a conception of not pure and divine but human, profane peace. Divine violence, revolutionary violence, and nonviolent action are never “pure,” as Benjamin seems to hope in his critique of law as means to ends. But even as impure means they nonetheless critique liberal peace effectively and open up space for “justpeace,” to use John Lederach’s term.[15] Benjamin’s thinking can be adjusted to acknowledge the inevitability of pure means being mixed with impure means, divine violence with human violence, nonviolence with violence. This adjustment does not betray Benjamin’s thinking but binds it to a core insight in his essay that “Justice is the principle of all divine end making.” [16] Justpeace is the end of all nonviolent peacebuilding, which is also an end in itself. It is transformative justice, a peace that is not the liberal peace of war against external/internal others but an agonistic peace that tempers liberalism’s tendency to uphold the rule of law as an end in itself at the expense of a constant need to strive for justice, which is inherent in liberal law as an ideal.
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1. See for example “The Peace Index: June 2013,” The Peace Index website, July 8, 2013, http://www.peaceindex.org/indexMonthEng.aspx?num=253#.V-QwGPArKhc.
2. Eran Halperin and Daniel Bar-Tal, “The Fall of the Peace Camp in Israel: The Influence of Prime Minister Ehud Barak on Israeli Public Opinion: July 2000–February 2001,” Conflict & Communication Online 6, no. 2 (2007): 1–18.
3. Tamar Hermann, The Israeli Peace Movement: A Shattered Dream (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009).
4. Ibid., pp. 47–49.
5. Atalia Omer, When Peace Is Not Enough: How the Israeli Peace Camp Thinks about Religion, Nationalism, and Justice (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2013), p. 2.
6. Alick Isaacs, Prophetic Peace: Judaism, Religion and Politics (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 2011), p. 4.
7. See for example Roger Mac Ginty, “How Did Peace Become Order?,” Les Cahiers Paix et Citoyenneté 1 (2006) 23–29; and Oliver P. Richmond, A Post-Liberal Peace (London: Routledge, 2011).
8. Quoted in David Cortright, Peace: A History of Movement and Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2008), p. 233.
9. For a fuller version of this line of argument, see Jon Simons, “The In/Visibility of Liberal Peace: Perpetual Peace and Enduring Freedom,” in In/Visible War: The Culture of War in Twenty-First-Century America, ed. Jon Simons and John Louis Lucaites (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 2017), pp. 213–28.
10. Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken Books; 1978), pp. 277–300.
11. See Hermínio Meireles Teixeira, “The State of Exception, Divine Violence, and Peace: Walter Benjamin’s Lesson,” in The Question of Peace in Modern Political Thought, ed. Toivo Koivukoski and David Edward Tabachnick (Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier Univ. Press, 2015), pp. 199–222.
12. On the importance of religious peacemaking in general, see Atalia Omer, “Religious Peacebuilding: The Exotic, the Good, and the Theatrical,” in The Oxford Handbook of Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding, ed. Atalia Omer, R. Scott Appleby, and David Little (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2015), pp. 3–32.
13. Omer, When Peace Is Not Enough, pp. 160–64.
14. Beatrice Hanssen, “On the Politics of Pure Means: Benjamin, Arendt, Foucault,” in Violence, Identity, and Self-Determination, ed. Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1997), pp. 236–52.
15. John Paul Lederach, “Justpeace—The Challenge of the 21st Century,” in People Building Peace: 35 Inspiring Stories from around the World, ed. European Centre for Conflict Prevention (Utrecht, Netherlands: International Fellowship of Reconciliation and the Coexistence Initiative of State of the World Forum, 1999), pp. 27–36. For an elaboration of “justpeace,” see Omer, When Peace Is Not Enough, pp. 66–71.
16. Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” p. 295. For an intriguing reading of Benjamin that remains faithful to his text and addresses the paradox that Benjamin both critiques the false authority of law and nonetheless holds that we are bound by law, see James R. Martel, The One and Only Law: Walter Benjamin and the Second Commandment (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 2014). I believe my reading is compatible with Martel’s anarchist interpretation that law is legitimate when followed in the absence of violent sanctions.
