A state claiming to represent all Jews compels every Jew to critique its injustices

Evidence

To put it thus implicates Jews qua Jewishness as much in the necessity of critiquing the injustices in which the Israeli state engages as the refusal to criticize. More pressingly, the insistence that there be no such critique implicates silent and silenced Jews anywhere in that state’s persistent injustices. This is a particularly knotted, if not inverted, expression of the traditional tensions between universalism and particularity, of selfhood and alterity, strangeness and alienation. The Israeli state is founded in the name of all Jews. That fact alone cedes to each Jew the responsibility not simply to defend Israel, no matter what; it demands of each also the critical attention to the especially egregious injustices the state exercises in the name of all. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 581

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the universalism-particularity tension in Goldberg’s broader racial-theory project and to discussions of collective responsibility and representation in political theory.