Deleuze and the grandeur of Palestine: Song of Earth and Resistance

Tough Love: A Diasporic Critique of the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement

“…Yet, on the other hand, those who live in the diaspora can see the utopian nature of the calls for the “right of return” for all Palestinians. As Sanbar (1996) so eloquently noted after his interviews with Deleuze, when Israeli leaders like Golda Meir can declare that there “is no such thing as Palestinian people,” this creates a deterritorializing situation where Palestinians not only have no rights to land, but “do not exist” and no one “can make out that that they have existed or that they will exist” (Gleyzon, 2016, p. 402; Sanbar, 1996, p. 19). Deleuzian studies seek to put on display the way this stateless, or specific form of deterritorialization, happened discursively and materially.…”

“…To carry out our deterritorialization of the BDS, we follow the suggestions of those who have extended the work of Deleuze and Guattari (Gleyzon, 2016) so we can simultaneously critique their territorializing and reterritorialization efforts. For example, we noticed that some who support the BDS may be sympathetic bystanders who are tired of seeing the International Criminal Court hand out “advisory” opinions about the illegality of some Israeli activities.…”

“…Instead of engaging in polarizing and binary argumentation—making listeners and readers choose between joining or outright rejecting—a diasporic analysis provides pragmatic road maps that help with the critical assessment of the movement. Using social media resources and other inventional materials, those in the Palestinian diaspora can point out the essentialist nature of some Palestinian nationalistic rhetoric while recognizing, with Deleuze, that Palestinian reterritorializing struggles have had to cope with global mediatization that has left them in a state of “minorization” (Gleyzon, 2016, p. 402).…”

“…6–7). No wonder that Gleyzon (2016) noted years later that Deleuze’s readings of Kafka and his sympathy with the “becoming” of “the missing people” (p. 1) of Palestine had particular affinities with the conceptualizations of struggle, deterritorialization, and so forth that would become a part of his philosophical grammatology.…”

“…Yet, in spite of “Deleuze’s pro-Palestinian engagement,” it is fair to argue, as Gleyzon (2016) does, that oftentimes in the theoretical work on rhizomes, ruptures, and philosophical reterritorialization, his position on Palestinian suffering sometimes appeared to be a “tangent” to “his work” (p. 402). One of the theoretical contributions that we make in this essay is to demonstrate how a protracted engagement with the Palestinian BDS movement—that places reterritorialization process front and center—redresses this situation and provides a more complex way of viewing what is happening in Gaza, the West Bank, and in the diaspora.…”