Preface

The writing and editing of the current issue of Theory and Criticism were carried out in the shadow of the war in Gaza, which evolved into a war of annihilation in the spring and summer of 2025. We now live in the midst of a disaster — a man-made disaster. This disaster includes a central site of horror and terror, and ripples that reach ever-increasing additional sites. Gaza is devastated. Hunger is rampant, consuming its residents who are on the run and in hiding, displaced from their homes a second and third time, and trying to make their way through hell on earth. Every day, many walk great distances in the scorching heat to find food, and every day, dozens of people looking for food are killed or murdered. Aid centers have become death traps. Gaza is bombed every day and occupied every day. Residents are forbidden from staying or moving around in most areas, many of which have no Palestinians left. They crowd into what remains, looking for pathways between ruins and bombings, between temporary housing and escape routes. We are the sons and daughters of the society that is inflicting the disaster on Gaza. We live in close proximity to it, but are shielded from it. There are ways to escape it: the news in Israel hardly reports on this disaster, busy with issues that distract from it and hide it. Even as the disaster looms large, as an image or a rumor, in a picture or a story, it is difficult to continue and face it. And yet, there are those in Israel who do, those who share it: some count the daily number of dead and name what they are sharing, some write about the massacres or share pictures of people who were wiped off the face of the earth. Some share videos or publicly display pictures of murdered children. Some recite poems from Gaza — poems of destruction and despair, poems of escape that convey a desire to die, a longing for severing and ending this existence in the absence of an actual life, but also an attempt to bear witness and leave a mark. Some observe images from Gaza: mass graves, bodies wrapped in blue or white plastic bags; ruins — hospitals, schools, houses of worship; ruins as far as the eye can see.

 The Gaza disaster has many names: a massacre, a war crime, genocide, extermination, and has no name at the same time. The debate now raging over its name is a substitute, a prosthesis, that seeks to cover the abyss it creates.

At the beginning of his book The Writing of the Disaster, Maurice Blanchot writes:

The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact. It does not touch anyone in particular; “I” am not threatened by it, but spared, left aside. It is in this way that I am threatened; it is in this way that the disaster threatens in me that which is exterior to me—an other than I who passively become other. There is no reaching the disaster. Out of reach is he whom it threatens, whether from afar or close up, it is impossible to say: the infiniteness of the threat has in some way broken every limit. We are on the edge of disaster without being able to situate it in the future: it is rather always already past, and yet we are on the edge or under the threat, all formulations which would imply the future—that which is yet to come—if the disaster were not that which does not come, that which has put a stop to every arrival. To think the disaster (if this is possible, and it is not possible inasmuch as we suspect that the disaster is thought) is to have no longer any future in which to think it.^[1]

We may be in the midst of this futureless disaster—standing on the brink of one that is already occurring, already happening. But its occurrence is not specific; it is not an event, it is not a given or a fact that can be proven or disproven; the disaster is difficult to know, it cannot be reached or encompassed. Yet we are surrounded by people who think they know it: policy experts and former military officers, orientalists and scientists — those who know always, every day anew. And indeed, there are numbers and data and moves and plans — this is not, as mentioned, a natural disaster that comes suddenly to mankind, but rather a concrete disaster, the result of initiative and action, with achievements and goals. But the infinity of the disaster, its unboundedness, its expansion, and the expansion of its act of destruction — destroying everything while leaving everything intact, leaving the destruction intact — this is difficult to comprehend.

The question is how to live in the vicinity of the Gaza disaster, a disaster created by the state of which we are citizens and which is being implemented by an unbridled army and supported by an increasingly barbaric society; how to live in the vicinity of death, what kind of life can be maintained?

This is an existential and ethical question, and alongside it – always alongside it and not separate from it – it is also a question about knowledge: how do we think about and study the disaster, in close proximity to it and amidst its occurrence, and in the sense that we are infected by it and affected by it.

Despite the media and the systems of denial and forgetting, the disaster that Israel is inflicting on Gaza also lies within it, close to it, in the abolition of the boundary between far and near. And we must try to know something of it, something about it, to look directly at it and sit with it.

The previous two issues of Theory and Criticism dealt extensively with writing on the disaster of this war of annihilation in Gaza. At the beginning of the war, out of the great shock that gripped all of us, the sons and daughters of this country, and as it degenerated into a bloodbath, in the face of and against the formation of an unbridled and limitless war, the emergency issue “Critique of War” was written. The following issue, “Captives of War,” was written and edited at a different time, when there was no longer any real battle but incessant one-sided fighting, except for a brief ceasefire that Israel violated, and a disaster whose dimensions are becoming clearer, the Gaza disaster, the Israeli disaster in Gaza. The initial shock developed into a prolonged shock, and under its auspices, the plan for the displacement of Palestinians, their expulsion, starvation, or extermination in Gaza, and for a governmental and existential transformation in Israel, is gradually being realized.

These two issues attempted to realize the task of Theory and Criticism as a journal for critical thought and theoretical research in Hebrew: to write about this period and to do so dialectically, from within it and against it. To examine the conditions that led to the October 2023 War and the political formations and discourse systems that existed in it, but without being swallowed by them, and while standing up to the shift to the right in various sectors of Israeli society, including academia.

Unlike the previous two issues, this issue does not focus on the disaster of the war of annihilation in Gaza. Instead, it contains two essays discussing it and a series of articles addressing other matters. This can be understood as a kind of retreat from writing about the disaster in an attempt to calibrate the tools and instruments to approach it anew, or as academic writing that, while formulated separately from the disaster and written alongside it, would be difficult for readers not to read in relation to it. The issue is not located in the midst of the war but on its edge, in the realm of its inspiration and under its threat.

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The article that opens the issue, a collaborative effort by Rafi Grosglik, Ariel Handel and, Daniel Monterescu, addresses the desire for the concept of “Baladi” — the authentic, the local, the folk — in contemporary Israeli and Palestinian food culture. Tracing the evolution of the concept, from medieval gastronomy, through modern agriculture in the Ottoman Empire, to industrial and commercialized food markets in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, demonstrates how this concept works as a boundary with many and even contradictory meanings: Baladi is a simple and sophisticated concept; it is national and popular, menial and aspirational; a concept that moves between meanings and remains untranslatable. Thus, according to the authors, discussing it requires a second-order critical reading, one that moves beyond the separation between the real and the imaginary, the authentic and the appropriated, between native and foreign, and examines the formation of a concept of Baladi that stems from contact between populations that experience conflict and struggle and yet create mirror-like relationships. Thus, the enthusiastic Israeli adoption of the Baladi concept in recent decades, while commercializing it, sterilizing it from its concrete political charge, and turning it into a “chic” practice and idea, has created a chain of resonances and reactions in Palestinian culinary culture, as a sign of indigenous resistance, fair trade, or proper nutrition. A sign that is authentic and at the same time a tradable currency. The article, which moves from a history of the region to an ethnography of contemporary Palestinian agricultural crops and a fundamental conceptual discussion, shows how a single adjective — not a story, a figure, or a material — can capture the history of this place, its cracks and patches.

Maayan Keren Raveh turns to Palestinian Christian theology and presents it as a theological-political movement that, while minor, holds importance and power at the intersection between the formation of a Palestinian national identity at the time of occupation and the formation of a religious identity as part of a global Christian discourse. Its formation, from the first intifada to the present day, positions Palestinian Christian theology as a distinct voice that differs from secular nationalism on the one hand and the Islamic awakening on the other. However, beyond the intersection of identities, Raveh demonstrates how this theology works in presenting Old Testament stories from a Palestinian perspective, thus creating a gap between biblical Israel and the modern state of Israel, and dissociating the Christian canon from its Zionist use. Palestinian Christian theology draws inspiration from the anti-colonial and postcolonial liberation theologies that developed during the twentieth century in Latin America and Africa and carried values ​​of justice, freedom, and human rights. Thus, it seeks to harness a global and quasi-universal Christian system for the national liberation struggle, and posits systems of memory and testimony that do not amount to a simple parallel between the Hebrew past and the Israeli present. In the face of widespread Christian support for Israel in Western countries, such as from evangelicals in the United States, Christian-Palestinian theology joins Christian theology in the global South. By creating a connection between the the role of the church and the Palestinian national struggle today, it can reach the point of undoing  the historical fiction of “Judeo-Christian culture.”

Sigal Nagar-Ron and her colleague Reut Reina Bendrihem examine the development cities in the south of Israel and present them as differential spaces in which processes of dispossession and accumulation of cultural and economic capital take place simultaneously. They demonstrate how the state works to realize its basic logics — the national-religious logic and the racial bias confirming logic — even in the neoliberal era. The article focuses on the higher education system and the changes it has undergone in recent decades, such as the opening of public colleges and the academization of Torah studies, and presents a comparative look at two types of post-secondary educational institutions: The seminary for religious women in Mitzpe Ramon and the Sapir Academic College, where most of the students are Mizrahi women. It demonstrates that while women from the Ultra-Orthodox Zionist (Hardali) sector receive an education in a seminar that suits their form of life, aligns with their worldview, and helps them find work and advance socially and economically, Mizrahi women are forced to deal with an educational setting that is not adapted to them and with curricula that are far removed from their values. This highlights how the academic degree they will earn with great effort will often not advance them in the job market. Thus, according to the authors, an uneven neo-liberal space has been created, in which the recently arrived Garin Hatorani (a Jewish orthodox community) is establishing itself at the expense of the veteran Mizrahi population, with the support of the state and the encouragement of its institutions. The logics of the state are persistent, and the hierarchical relations between the Ashkenazi and Mizrahi sectors, despite social changes, remain intact.

Assaf S. Bondy’s article addresses the neoliberal era and its dimensions of persistence and change as well. Bondy examines labor organizations in Israel and demonstrates that despite predictions of their weakening and even disappearance in an era of privatization, personal entrepreneurship, and temporary work, in the last two decades, they have actually strengthened and exist as a central player in the economic-political arena. Bondy analyzes how they do so by forging new and surprising alliances, such as the one between the Histadrut (the General Federation of Labour) and the Likud Party. These alliances are transforming how organized labor in Israel works: While in the past it was based on the historical alliance between left-wing parties and labor organizations, today it relies on a protectionist system based on specific interests shared by it and the populist right-wing government. This makes it possible to distribute resources in certain areas while accelerating neoliberal policies and the disintegration of state institutions. The strengthening of labor organizations is based on their adherence to the new hegemony, which dismantles the public system and weakens social cohesion.

Avraham Faust returns to the affair that stirred archaeological research in Israel three decades ago: the question of the historical existence of the Unified Kingdom of Israel — the kingdom of Saul, David, and Solomon. This controversy did not remain within the boundaries of scientific research; it made its way to the heart of the Israeli public and touched the vibrating nerves of Jewish existence in the Land of Israel. Faust “sets things straight” as he describes this issue relating to both its arenas, the scientific and the public. He explains the challenge posed by the minimalist school, the change to the dating system, and the “low chronology” it proposed. As well as the debate that was held alongside it, the changes made in the aftermath, and the great influence this school had on biblical scholarship, which adopted its skeptical approach to the existence of the Unified Kingdom. At the same time, Faust describes the public and social aspects of this debate, which took place entirely within the Zionist discourse without challenging its boundaries, but which ignited the imagination and raised questions about some of the basic conventions regarding the existence of ancient Israel. Faust seeks to examine scientific discourse in its social context, but insists that the scientific position not be reduced to the political position. His article argues for the relative autonomy of scientific concepts and the controversy related to them, and presents the various distortions it undergoes when it enters public discourse.

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After the academic articles appear two extensive essays that address the never-ending war in Gaza, which is now in the stage of starvation and genocide.

Oren Yiftachel reexamines the colonial framework for analyzing Israel/Palestine in the wake of the October 7 massacre and in the face of the subsequent arguments raised against the paradigm of settler colonialism. Yiftachel seeks to expand and refine this framework, to make conceptual distinctions within it, and to free it from simplification and moralism. He proposes a tri-part structure in which, in addition to the colonial framework, the geopolitical struggle between the various international actors and the internal Israeli ethnocratic conflict should be positioned as well. Yiftachel sees Zionism as a complex movement— colonial and national one — movement of both refugee colonialism and brutal colonialism, which went through various stages in its development until it reached its violent manifestation in the past two years. He insists on a distinction between decolonization as a project of liberation and a demand for the redress of historical injustices, the granting of full rights to indigenous peoples and civil equality, and “counter-colonialism” as a project of control that demands the subjugation and even annihilation of the colonizing people. This analytical and historical essay thoughtfully responds to claims that research within the paradigm of settler colonialism and joining the Palestinian struggle for liberation means justifying every act of massacre and violence and supporting the struggle “by all means necessary.” In its conclusion, the essay outlines an alternative vision for a joint Israeli-Palestinian existence between the river and the sea, a vision that seems very far from the bloody reality in the region, but marks a direction for the future to come.

Amalia Sa’ar poses the question of how Israeli society reached a state of committing genocide in Gaza. In an anthropological-psychoanalytic essay, Sa’ar offers a study of the concept of abjection, through which she outlines the process by which the Palestinians ceased to exist as the object of desire of the Israeli collective subject — an object of desire and anxiety that defines it and its movement — and became its abject: A repulsive existence that it assigns outside of any human framework. She claims that the legal reform and the endless war have unleashed the tension that exists between democratic and ethnic foundations in Israeli society, a tension that is now being resolved in visions of extermination and ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank. For Israelis, writes Sa’ar, the Palestinians cease to be an object that can be subjectivized, as well as one that they could be involved with in a system of mutual formation, and become abject and inhuman. However, as a result, the Israeli subject collapses into a state of abjection as well, in which its moral capacity is damaged, its thinking is weakened, and its humanity is lost. Sa’ar wonders how it is possible to reverse this process, restore Israeli subjectivity, and establish a renewed connection with the Palestinians. To do this, it will be necessary to give up fantasies of permanent solutions and reconstruct ambivalent, unstable, tense spaces that contain internal contradictions and do not resolve them.

The issue concludes with a translation of a chapter from The Cultural Politics of Emotion, the influential book by philosopher and cultural scholar Sara Ahmed, which was first published in English more than twenty years ago. At the center of the book is a different conceptualization of emotion. Not as a behaviorist system of sensing, perception, and response, nor as a psychological system of seething inwardness. Emotions, according to Ahmed, confuse the relationship between the inside and the outside because they are shaped between people, between people and things and the environment, and create surfaces and boundaries. Emotion is not discrete, immediate, and unmediated, she claims; it is always in motion and created from that motion — it passes, passes through, resonates, and is distributed; and in the process, it creates an impression, that is, it imprints itself on the subject, on their body, and carves out its place in it. Ahmed’s book is therefore a phenomenological reading of concrete social realities, of the emotional movements underlying racist and neo-nationalist movements. Of the book’s chapters, which address, among other things, pain, fear, disgust, and love, we chose to translate the chapter that Ahmed devotes to hate, in which she analyzes the reversal at the basis of hate, the mission itself as love. Love for a nation or people, that is, for the cohesive group that the infiltration of foreigners threatens. Tracing the anxiety about the harm and desecration that underlies hate, an anxiety that is tied to their infinite imagination, shows the movement of emotion that is created of fantasy, projection, likeness, and differentiation.

Vered Maimon wrote an introduction to the translation, in which she positions Ahmed’s book as a leading work in the theories of affect and discusses its fundamentals. She describes Ahmed’s extraordinary public persona, an intellectual who left established academia and exists separately from it, lecturing around the world, writing books overflowing with complex theory, and publishing popular feminist manuals. At the end of the introduction, Maimon asks how the hate movement that Ahmed outlines can help us understand the destruction that Israel is carrying out in Gaza and the public’s consent to it: The intensity of the holding on to the vulnerability of the national body and the preoccupation with the real and imagined intrusion of the foreigner into its borders; the love for the collective at the heart of the all-consuming hatred towards those who threaten it.

^[1] Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995