What Does a Jew Want?

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the more radical one wanting a secular state, his mother being still a liberal
Zionist. The truth of the situation is not some kind of a synthesis, lets
have a secular state, but a little later on; the only truthful thing you can
do is to render this constellation as such. The problem here is a real one;
I say this as deeply sympathizing with the Palestinians. Im not playing
this liberal distrust of claiming of course we love Palestinians, but theyre
sometimes primitive and a little bit violent so it wont work. Its deeper.
I think that sometimes, when there truly are tensions between ethnic
groups, the first step toward reconciliation is, paradoxically, to establish a
space of minimal distance. Sometimes if you force this push toward universality too much it can backfire.
The third thing I liked is what some people find problematic. Im also
a little bit skeptical, but the movie just reports on it, it doesnt commit
itself, namely, the emancipatory potentials of this transcultural phenomena of Arab singers singing in Hebrew, Jewish singers in Arabic, and so
on. Of course one can argue that this is the worst way of multiculturalist
liberal co-opting: you take Palestinian protests and turn it into a hard
rock band and it appears radical but is really part of the game, thus every
subversive power is neutralized. Its not as simple as that. In the present
state of things, many of my liberal Israeli friends are claiming but we
tried everything, now they are throwing bombs, we cant even negotiate.
In this situation any and all links or mixtures between the two cultures
are worth their weight in gold. Its good simply to know about this.
Here truthful information itself is the best propaganda weapon. For
example, I simply didnt know that at the ground level of young people
there are still these kinds of intercultural contacts. Its extremely important that people know it, so that we can hopefully generate a positive
mechanism of self-fulfilling prophecy. To be quite naive, if we pretend
and act as if there is, at the level of rock bands and so on, alot of communication between young Jews and Palestinians, then maybe we will end
up with real communication. It is real information, which is not neutral
but crucial. It goes one step beyond information in the West, which has
been still pretty limited and downplayed, about refuseniks. As a Leninist
I like them because they went one step beyond this purely private moral
gesture of saying I refuse and then withdrawing into private life: it was
instead an organized, networked collectivity.
The fourth feature that I appreciate about the movie is its theological dimension. Im a pure, simple, old-fashioned dialectical materialist.
The point is simply to see the emancipatory potentials of a certain logic
of social, collective space of thought and action that can function in

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