BETTINA PRATOA similar, though less open manifestation of Palestinian perceptions of the ambiguity
of the stance of RHR with respect to the politics of Zionism was visible in the attitude of
a Palestinian family I visited with some RHR volunteers on the outskirts of Jerusalem in
early 2004. The family, which had received a house demolition order after having built
an additional floor to a house it had owned since 1962 (i.e., since before the Israeli occu-
pation of East Jerusalem), had contacted RHR to provide data that could be used to build
a legal case. The meeting initially concentrated on collecting details that could be used for
the case, and the family presented its situation in a language designed in part to awaken
a ‘‘humanitarian conscience’’ in its audience and in part to demonstrate its familiarity
with the grammar of citizenship and of formal rights. After the family discovered that I
spoke Arabic and was not Jewish (unlike the other group members), however, I became
the recipient of a very different kind of discourse, one that showed great political self-
awareness and a sense of shame at having to play the role of ‘‘trauma victims’’ in need of
the testimonial aid of Jewish Israelis. In addition, there was a sense of resignation (possibly
temporary and not uncritical) to the fact that making their case and securing the basic
essentials for a decent life by keeping a roof over their heads required subjecting their
situation to two systems of signification (i.e., Israeli legality and human rights) that did
not correspond to what they saw as itsauthenticmeaning (i.e., that Israelis have no right
to decide Palestinian rights to build on Palestinian land).
If we assume, like Levinas, that justice is a precondition for life-enabling work that
does not merely depend on the goodwill of individuals but is also sustained by institu-
tions, identities, and even borders as sources ofratioand of the power to discern the
‘‘countable’’ from the ‘‘uncountable’’ (to paraphrase Derrida) does it follow that RHR’s
practices are a sort of ‘‘trauma-bearing’’ surrogate of the justice preached by past proph-
ets, not to mention a poor substitute for secular justice grounded in equal citizenship?
Shouldn’t Jewish prophetic politics aim for the kind of justice that can be enforced by
institutions that do not conceal power behind trauma narratives and that do not impede
people’s pursuit of signifying economies of life by cultivating existential anxieties and
even by demanding symbolically disruptive violence?
Although this brief discussion of RHR cannot provide final answers to such ques-
tions, it does suggest caution concerning the possibility of finding better alternatives to
this sort of limited justice contrapuntal to trauma-laden narratives of Jewish Israeliness
under the present circumstancesof the Occupation. In particular, it is difficult to imagine
an alternative that could less contingently address the combined pressure of traumatic
genealogies, the covenantal faith of religious Israelis, and the power dynamics of a situa-
tion in which the capacity to transgress requires some of the privileges of sovereignty. In
the practice of RHR, the conjunction of human rights discourse and of religious Zionism
seems to make possible acts of solidarity that, by translating the biblical call to justice into
concrete life-enabling practices for the ‘‘other,’’ provisionally confront injustices that are
sometimes defended on the grounds of trauma-laden Israeli nationhood. Further explora-
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