BETTINA PRATOwell as the common occurrence of phenomena of role reversal, where trauma scripts are
reenacted by victims, who take on the role of their past victimizers.^8
Though properly applicable only to individuals, such notions are sometimes general-
ized to entire ethno-national groups, particularly in situations of conflict.^9 In Israeli-Pales-
tinian politics, for example, some authors might emphasize the apparent ability of two
ethno-national histories marked by moments of collective trauma to ‘‘entrap’’ people into
strategies of avoidance and role reversal. A historical analysis of the role played by refer-
ences to such moments in Israeli and Palestinian politics, however, shows that there is
nothing automatic in the apparent analogy between individual post-traumatic strategies
and politics sustained via narratives of collective victimization, unspeakability, and testi-
monial crisis. Rather, the possibility of drawing such an analogy appears to be linked
largely to the progressive institutionalization of a number of trauma discourses (including
medical, psycho-social, ethno-national, and religious discourses) both in Israel and in
Palestinian society since the 1970s.^10 In this discursive context, religious discourse is also
sometimes an instrument to reinforce exclusionary attachments, whether these derive
from traumatic events themselves or from political and cultural choices concerning the
proper construction of the legacy of the past. Thanks to the overlap of religious and
ethno-national identity in Israel, religious discourse may infuse this legacy with a sort of
divine logic, so that political choices that resemble post-traumatic avoidance and role
reversal can be advocated as testimonial obligations to the nation and to God, sustaining
a quasi-redemptive attachment to the pursuit of national security and marking national
boundaries with a series of quasi-religious taboos.
But is this the only way religious discourse can play a significant role vis-a`-vis the
politics of sovereign identity in contemporary Israel? In this essay, I want to explore a
different, even opposite possibility. Through a study of the work and ideology of Rabbis
for Human Rights (RHR), a group of Israeli rabbis engaged in acts of solidarity with
Palestinians, I want to pose the question of whether the religious appropriation of human
rights discourse may generate opportunities for transgressing the exclusionary loyalties
that trauma-laden identity narratives seem to encourage in today’s Israel. Given the ten-
sion ethno-national and religious trauma narratives of Israeli identity bring about be-
tween discourses and practices that affirm the universality of human rights and those
that affirm Jewish-Israeli particularity, such an appropriation may seem bound to be
characterized by paradoxes and contradictions. Nevertheless, contradictions and nonrec-
onciliation between the supposed universality of a human rights ethics and the trauma-
laden particularity of Jewish-Israeli identity need not result in a paralysis of ethical and
political action On the contrary, my study of RHR shows that this very lack of reconcilia-
tion can be the occasion for testimonial practices of religious and political identity that
are ethically and politically life-enabling both for Israelis and, to a lesser degree, for Pales-
tinians, thanks to the creation of concrete, perhaps untheorizable spaces where the other/
enemy can be faced beyond the exclusiveness of Jewish trauma-related obligations.
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