Reinventing Identity: Jewish Dissenting Rhetoric in Support of Palestinian Rights

This dissertation asks:How does dominant rhetoric in support of Israel continue to negate Palestinian history and identity? What are the boundaries of legitimate political speech in American Jewish discourse regarding Israel? Who crosses them, and what are the consequences? What leads certain Jewish dissenters to cross intracommunal boundaries about Israel? How do these boundary formations shift according to context? What does reinventing Jewish identity in solidarity with Palestinian rights look like? According to the corpus that I examine, not only are dissenters speaking out in support of Palestinian rights, but they are also asserting for themselves what it means to be Jewish. Such assertions of reinvented self-understanding challenge the dominant narrative of Jewish identity as unequivocally Zionist: “Israel, right or wrong” (Waxman, Trouble 55). Through textual analysis, I show how this rhetoric of dissent redraws the contours of Jewish identity as a mode of ethical relations that heeds the call for Palestinian freedom. At the heart of this reinvention of identity, Jewish dissenters reframe Holocaust memory and the threat of antisemitism as interconnected with other forms of ethnic and racial prejudice, not uniquely separate from. Through this reframing, the call for justice from the Palestinian “Other” becomes audible. As a method, rhetorical criticism is the analysis of the symbolism and their effects in discourse. In chapter one, I start by delineating a rhetorical genealogy of Zionism’s erasure of Palestinian life and history. In chapter two, I continue to trace the rhetorical genealogy through the trope of the antisemitic Arab terrorist Other, an effect of what I refer to as Zionist rhetoric of existential threat. Situated in genealogical context, the case studies of dissent show the imperative for reinventing identity as a way toward justice. Chapter three examines first-person identity reconstitution by critics Peter Beinart and Sara Roy. First-person i