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A HOME HAUNTED BY STRANGERS

proach to citizenship in Israel, as well as to questions of justice vis-a-vis the consequences of the Zionist project. In practice, however, the relative political neutrality of RHR’s human rights discourse and the dependence of the very notion of ‘‘strangeness’’ in the texts discussed above on the existence of a state ‘‘of the Jews,’’ combined with the limits posed by discourses of collective trauma on what kind of articulations of Jewish political- religious identity may be ‘‘heard’’ in today’s Israel, tend to prevent such a ‘‘radical’’ RHR reading of citizenship and justice. The question then is how the group can negotiate the resulting tension between its declared commitment to prophetic justice rooted in divine law and in the memory of strangeness and its attachment to a project that recalls a Levina- sian crystallization of being or ‘‘thematization’’ (which corresponds here to Jewish na- tional identity and statehood). For Levinas, thematization (like ontology) is both a manifestation and a betrayal of infinity, but a betrayal without which no responsibility, substitution—in sum, no ethics—would be possible.^55 In what follows, I will attempt to show how RHR seems to live out a practical negotiation of a similar ‘‘betrayal’’ through a systematic practice of excess of concrete solidarity work vis-a-vis its narrative references
(including human rights discourse). In this way, the group realizes what may be seen as
a series of fragile approximations of prophetic justice on the contingent terrain of multiple
acts of engagement with others, which are so many instances of ‘‘betrayal’’ of infinity and
divine justice, as well as transgressions of the closures through which such betrayal (i.e.,
exclusionary statehood) operates.

Subversive Solidarities: Working by Candlelight in Prophetic Times

As I noted at the outset, my interpretation of the work of RHR largely revolves around a
tension between its literature and its activities, a tension that is in part a product of a
discursive environment in which it is difficult to give narrative expression to acts of soli-
darity between Israelis and Palestinians save in the relatively ‘‘nonpolitical’’ languages of
human rights and of religious ethics. In the previous section, I suggested that the failure
or unwillingness of RHR and other peace groups to elaborate narratives of Jewish Israeli-
ness that could serve as alternatives to religious Zionism limits their ability to claim the
role of Israel’s ‘‘testimonial conscience,’’ at least as concerns the events of 1948. Perhaps
paradoxically, however, the very decision to refrain from giving an overtly ‘‘political’’
signification to certain activities in which the group engages seems to allow it to be con-
cretely responsive to specific violations of Palestinian rights. Thanks to its nonpartisan
stance, the group can mobilize the energies of its members and of a potentially broad
section of Israeli society sensitive to ‘‘Palestinian suffering’’ without having to confront
the implications of each initiative for the legitimacy of Israeli and Palestinian national
narratives. RHR finds ethical and symbolic coherence, as well as life-enabling power, in
the choice to invest not only in testimony but also in productive or restorative (economic)

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