Rotem Giladi. Forthcoming. “Picking Battles: Race, Decolonization and Apartheid .” In The Battle for International Law in the Decolonization Era, edited by Jochen von Bernstorff and Philipp Dann. Oxford University Press.
The contemporary mobilization of the apartheid-Israel analogy on the part of activists and academics alike obscures the fact that it has a long history of use on the part of Hebrew-speaking writers and intellectuals. Some of the earliest comparative references to apartheid arose from the Hebrew translation and stage adaptation of Alan Paton’s celebrated 1948 novel Cry, the Beloved Country. Departing from the performative focus of Eitan Bar-Yosef who uses blackface in the stage adaptation to reflect on Jewish whiteness in the nascent state of Israel, we analyse critical intellectual responses to the prose translation on the part of figures who were very differently positioned in relation to the hegemonic Zionist ideology of the period. Analysis of the commentary by the socialist Rivka Gurfein, the liberal Ezriel Carlebach, and the revisionist Yohannan Pogrebinsky, allows us to position apartheid as a heuristic device through which to chart debates internal to Israeli politics in the early years of the Zionist state. These help to expose the constitutive ambivalence of Israel as a “colonial post-colony” in Joseph Massad’s reckoning, thus touching on the very self-definition of the Jewish state.
Given that causative linguistic constructions are divisible into three parts: i) a cause (c); ii) an effect (e); and iii) the dependency (D) between (c) and (e), in studying the nature of (D), one should examine whether a one, all-encompassing, causative meaning component underlying the diverse linguistic phenomena is a justifiable position, or rather different ones should be distinguished for the various causative constructions. Only recently several philosophers argued in favor of theories of causal pluralism, allowing the co-existence of different notions of causation; some cognitive studies also indicate that people have a pluralistic conception of causation, similarly it has been proposed that the semantic content of (D) is different in various constructions, tracing whether the main verb encodes a necessary or a sufficient condition. This paper expands on this latter line of thought by focusing on the types of dependencies encoded within three verbal constructions in Hebrew, considering crucially whether these dependencies are asserted and/or presupposed. It argues, therefore, in favor of a non-unified semantic analysis for (D) denoted by the three verbal causative constructions to be passed under review here: overt causatives, verbs of change of state and caused activity verbs. According to the current proposal: Overt causatives assert necessary conditions; change of states causatives assert necessary conditions and presuppose potential sufficient conditions; and Caused activities only presuppose potential sufficient conditions.
