Borderwork: Towards a Different Reading of Zionism

Volume IX|Issue 34| Autumn 2020 |Articles

Abstract

The aim of this article is to disenchant the Zionist movement by studying its ideological structure. The article is built on developing the possibility of exploring the Zionist ideology from outside its discursive formations. This is done by carving observing positions with different historical genealogies other than the Zionist ones. We start with three analytical concepts: matter, space, and time as the most basic observing positions in any scientific research. We then apply these concepts to deconstruct the Zionist ideological structure into its basic coordinates, only to reassemble them to extract their organizing principle. It turns out that the Zionist ideology is built on the "blood" relation, as its matter, and the "imagined ghetto" as its space, and "sacred time" as its time. The main intervention in the article is that the interactions between these three layers cohere to build Zionism as a border state. It is not only a border in the geo-political sense, but rather a deep structure that operates as an organizing principle in the shape of borderwork. We offer several interpretations of the Zionist borderwork, psych-social, collectivity dynamics, and the intellectual and cultural conditions that enabled its construction in the first place. These interpretations lead us to one of the major formative principles of modernity\capitalism, linearity. The Zionist version of the borderwork is derivative of the of the "line" as a formative principle of modernity's mode of construction.              

Download Article Download Issue Cite this Article Subscribe for a year Cite this Article
× Citation/Reference
Arab Center
Harvard
APA
Chicago