Summary
Author of The Question of Zion (Princeton University Press, 2005), whose account of Messianism’s interweaving with secular Zionism David Lloyd relies on for the claim that Israel’s secular democracy rests on a divine or messianic exception, and that the exceptional conjunction long predates the Holocaust (Settler Colonialism and the State of Exception: The Example of Palestine/Israel, PDF p.6-7 / printed p.64-65).
Details
- As Lloyd cites Rose (pp.33, 42-43): ‘we can fairly ask whether the affinity between Zionism and messianism is too intimate and powerful to have ever been anything other than partially – and finally unsuccessfully – repressed’, and “the language of secular Zionism bears the traces and scars of a messianic narrative that it barely seeks, or fails, to repress” (PDF p.6 / printed p.64).
- Note 10 records that Rose elaborates this logic throughout the chapter ‘Zionism as Messianism’, pp.1-57, to the extent that even socialists like Ben Gurion are finally absorbed by its language (PDF p.20).
- The justification of ethnic cleansing to make way for the ‘ingathering of Jews’ is cited to Rose, pp.48-52 (PDF p.7, 20, note 11); the association of Zionism’s peculiar destructive violence with its messianic entanglements is cited to Rose, pp.42-47, in note 28 (PDF p.21).
Related pages
Settler Colonialism and the State of Exception: The Example of Palestine/Israel, Messianism, Zionism