VVI Research Meetings 2024-2025
The Palestine Exception
- Presenter: Michiel Bot; Chair/discussant: Wiebe Ruijtenberg
- Date
- Thursday 31 October 2024
- Time
- Address
-
Kamerlingh Onnes Building
Steenschuur 25
2311 ES Leiden - Room
- C0.20
On November 13, 2023, Jürgen Habermas and three of his colleagues published a “Stellungnahme” (“position taking”) titled “Principles of Solidarity.” At that point, the Israeli army had already killed more than 10.000 Palestinians, and Israel’s highest political and military leaders had made numerous dehumanizing and eliminationist statements. Yet “Principles of Solidarity” posited, in the name of Germany’s “special protection” of Israel’s “right to exist,” that “the standards of judgement slip completely when genocidal intentions are attributed to Israel’s actions.”
The statement provoked various critical responses, including an open letter by Middle East scholar Asef Bayat, who argued that Habermas contradicted his own liberal ideas when it came to Gaza. Bayat’s critique of Habermas was similar to the critique that Marc Lamont Hill and Mitchell Plitnick articulated in their 2021 book, Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics, which blamed “the American Left” for being Progressive Except for Palestine (PEP) and urged moral consistency.
This talk will explore the nature of the Palestine exception exemplified by Habermas’s “Principles of Solidarity,” with the hypothesis that this exception cannot be reduced to a contradiction or moral inconsistency. The starting points for reflection will be Walter Benjamin’s argument that “the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the state of exception in which we live is the rule” and Charles Mills’ The Racial Contract.
About Michiel Bot
Michiel Bot is Associate Professor of Law and Humanities and Program Director of the major Law in an International Context at University College Tilburg. Before joining Tilburg University, he obtained his PhD in Comparative Literature at New York University in 2013, held a postdoctoral fellowship in Politics and Humanities at Bard College (New York) from 2013 to 2015, and worked as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Literature and Society at Al Quds Bard (Palestine). Michiel Bot's recent research includes publications on the right to boycott, freedom of expression and demonstration, the politics of undocumented migrants, municipal ID cards, and race, colonialism, law, and the nation-state.
Michiel has been teaching and supervising students in the fields of fundamental rights, jurisprudence, and law, politics, and the humanities.