Papers by Liron Mor
Critical Inquiry: In the Moment, 2024
This is the time of inqisām. A time of severance, of breaking apart, of the utter destruction of ... more This is the time of inqisām. A time of severance, of breaking apart, of the utter destruction of Gaza, the dissolution of its inhabitants, its communities, and its infrastructures, of lives and everything that sustains them, of the very habitability of the land.
But this word, inqisām, names much more. Meaning “severance” or “being partitioned” in Arabic, it helps designate and illuminate several political, conceptual, social, and psychological aspects of Israel’s war on Gaza and on Palestinians more broadly, both before and after October 2023. It is, first and foremost, the proper name for an Israeli mode of segregation, which separates not only colonizers from colonized but also, and more importantly, the colonized from one another. It indexes technologies of distancing that produce Israeli blindness and apathy to Palestinian subjectivity. It accurately manifests the current stage of what is known as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a stage defined by the temporally cyclical and spatially binary logic of blood feuds and revenge, with its tendency to decontextualize and its recurrent moral rebooting of history. Finally, it helps demonstrate that what is going on at present does not constitute a break with the previous Israeli paradigm of “conflict management,” which many declared to have been shattered. Instead, this severance is simply its continuation by other means. Since “conflict management” has long involved periodic large-scale operations of mass killing and infrastructural devastation—a violence whose seasonal nature is captured by the term Israeli politicians have given it, mowing the lawn—what sets apart the current violence in Gaza is primarily its unprecedented scale.
https://critinq.wordpress.com/2024/08/05/on-severance-fragments-on-the-time-of-inqisam/
Conflicts: The Poetics and Politics of Palestine-Israel , Dec 31, 2024
Liron Mor’s book queries what conflict means in the context of Palestine–Israel. Conflict has lon... more Liron Mor’s book queries what conflict means in the context of Palestine–Israel. Conflict has long been seen as singular and primary: as an “original sin” that necessitates the state and underwrites politics. This book problematizes this universal notion of conflict, revealing its colonial implications and proposing that conflicts are always politically constructed after the fact and are thus to be understood in their various specific forms.
The book explores sites of poetic and political strife in Palestine–Israel by combining a comparative study of Hebrew and Arabic literature with political and literary theory. Mor leverages an archive that ranges from the 1930s to the present, from prose and poetry to film and television, to challenge the conception of the Palestinian–Israeli context as a conflict, delineating the colonial history of this concept and showing its inadequacy to Palestine–Israel. Instead, Mor articulates locally specific modes of theorizing the antagonisms and mediations, colonial technologies, and anticolonial practices that make up the fabric of this site. The book thus offers five figurative conflictual concepts that are derived from the poetics of the works: conflict (judgment/ishtibāk), levaṭim (disorienting dilemmas), ikhtifāʾ (anti/colonial disappearance), ḥoḳ (mediating law), and inqisām (hostile severance). In so doing, Conflicts aims to generate a historically and geographically situated mode of theory-making, which defies the separation between the conceptual and the poetic.
Theory & Event , 2023
This essay considers speculation as a colonial method. To this end, it interrogates the ideologic... more This essay considers speculation as a colonial method. To this end, it interrogates the ideological role of vision, understood as both a plan for the future and a mode of seeing, in early Zionist writing. Through an analysis of Theodor Herzl's Altneuland (Old-New Land, 1902), a work of speculative fiction published by "the visionary" of Zionism, vision emerges as a practice of political and visual speculation that overlooks what already exists in Palestine in order to see beyond the land and into its hidden future potentials. By foregrounding intentional planning and prospective economic improvements, such speculation serves as a justification for colonization and as a counterclaim to indigenous presence, racialized as inefficient and unintentional. Colonial speculation further combines this practice of overseeing with an ethos overcoming. By centering the intentional choice to be present in Palestine and improve it, colonizers not only overcome their initial compromising position-their distance from the land-but also alchemically transfigure it into their greatest political asset, as distance becomes the precondition for speculative, intentional vision and its ownership claims. In this sublime turn, the colonizers' subsequent presence is presented as superior to the "mere presence" of the indigenous population. While Zionism perceives itself as a thoroughly material project, it is thus exposed as a mode of speculative fiction, which requires distance from the land to justify colonization based on prospective rather than real improvements.
Qui Parle, 2022
This essay explores visual reading and its colonial aspects by analyzing the novel Ze ʿim ha-pani... more This essay explores visual reading and its colonial aspects by analyzing the novel Ze ʿim ha-panim elenu (The One Facing Us, 1995), by Ronit Matalon, an Israeli Jewish author of Egyptian descent. In this novel Matalon displaces the dramas of Mizrahi Jews (Jews originating from the Arab and Muslim world) to Cameroon, thus stressing her protagonists’ uneasy positioning within the colonizer-colonized, West-East divides and connecting Zionist racialization to broader, global processes of colonial capitalism. By exploring her elaborate readings of photographs in the novel, the essay reveals two rival traditions of reading the visual: the first involves what might be described, following Matalon, as a certain “intending toward” the photograph—a colonial reading practice through which a subject converts her absence from the photographic moment into a visionary, intentional presence. In this Barthesian tradition, the image is an empty land to be colonized, and Oriental subjects are racialized by being fetishistically associated with both authentic matter and theological aura. The second tradition, typified in the novel by the protagonist’s Egyptian mother, is a laborious collective practice of reading photographs that is attentive to subtext, nonverbal communication, and social codes. The essay argues that this reading practice has nothing to do with postcolonial or Levantine hybridity or with a “migratory state of mind”—concepts that govern scholarship on Matalon—and that its subsistence requires in fact a solid, counterdiasporic sense of home.
Keywords: visual theory, racialization, Ronit Matalon, Roland Barthes, Mizrahi Jews
הכיוון מזרח 37, 2020
This essay was published in a special issue of ha-Kiṿun Mizraḥ, dedicated to the memory of the Ir... more This essay was published in a special issue of ha-Kiṿun Mizraḥ, dedicated to the memory of the Iraqi Jewish author, Shimon Ballas (and edited by Almog Behar and Yuval Evri). The essay examines how Ballas, who was himself in exile from Iraq, relates the experiences of other exiles. Considering Ballas’ oeuvre, I detect his tendency to draw literary portraits—that is, to dedicate each novel to a detailed literary portrait of a single, forgotten historical figure. Unlike Albert Memmi, another Arab Jewish author who was fond of portraits (“portrait of the colonizer,” “portrait of the colonized,” “portrait of a Jew”), Ballas’s portraits were never abstract. They were based rather on true biographies of forgotten historical figures, ones who were never at home in a single nation or culture. The gallery that Ballas forms by amassing together these various portraits allows him to challenge the necessity of the Zionist narrative and to reintroduce other historical possibilities. Focusing on Ballas’ novel Locked Chamber (1980), which sketches a portrait of a Palestinian in Israel, I argue that in trying to convey Palestinian experiences Ballas does not draw on the content of Palestinian literature but rather on its form—particularly as it has been refined by the Palestinian author Ghassan Kanafani, whose work Ballas had researched and translated. By reading Edward Said’s thoughts on the episodic form of Kanafani’s writing, I show how Ballas borrows this technique both to convey the rupture introduced by 1948 into Palestinian and Arab time and to insist that he, too, is part of the Arab world.
Arab Studies Journal , 2019
Along with military oppression and border policing, Israel currently sustains its control and sup... more Along with military oppression and border policing, Israel currently sustains its control and suppresses the Palestinian struggle discursively and juridically, by reframing resistance as "incitement to terror." Prior to the 1993 Oslo Accords, Israeli discourse often framed Palestinian resistance as terrorism and targeted political organizations for their tangible actions. The current framing of Palestinian resistance as "incitement," however, widens the scope of what is considered illegal dissent by criminalizing individual intentions. This article explores the operation of"incitement," as both a legal and a discursive category, by analyzing the court case of Dareen Tatour--a Palestinian poet recently convicted of incitement to terror in an Israeli court based on a poem she posted to social media. The court translated Tatour's poem, testimonies, and statements from Arabic and recorded them exclusively in Hebrew. I argue that the court's practices of translation construct the poet's intention as fully knowable and fixed, while, paradoxically, treating her words as completely inaccessible on their own terms. I refer to this paradoxical practice as "non-translation" and contend that, by fixing the poet's intention in a single pre-conceived meaning, it produces new, disturbing, and hollowed out political subjectivities. Moreover, this non-translation's tendency to essentialize intention is structurally similar and institutionally tied to preemptive security technologies newly developed in Israel, as well as to recent changes in Israeli legislation, whereby the charge of inciting terror can now be filed based solely on assumed internal intentions. Thus, by way of discursive translation, technology, and the law itself, intention is reified and serves as a central means of depoliticizing and controlling Palestinian resistance.
Comparative Literature 71:2, 2019
This article explores the operation of humor in Palestinian author Emile Habiby’s novel The Pesso... more This article explores the operation of humor in Palestinian author Emile Habiby’s novel The Pessoptimist (1974) and compares it to Voltaire’s humor in Candide, which it explicitly cites. The differences between the two authors’ modes of humor are read as an index of their different relations to the law, and specifically, to international law as the guarantor of human rights. Voltaire’s humorous critique is limited to the current content of the law, reflecting his confidence in universalist ideals and rights attainable by legal reform. Habiby’s humor, however, protests the law as such, exposing universalist ideals as not merely unhelpful for the Palestinians’ struggle but also as complicit in the oppression and fragmentation of Palestinian society. Habiby therefore redirects the emphasis toward interpersonal manners and intimacies that are external to the realm of the law yet underwrite it. Against Voltaire’s cosmopolitanism and Enlightenment-era ideals, Habiby’s humor thus offers a differential and conflictual community that prioritizes a practice of decolonization over ideal solutions and their dichotomous logic.
תרבות חזותית בישראל (עורכות סיון רגואן שטאנג, נועה חזן), 2017
מאמר זה מתמקד באוהלי המחאה של קיץ 2011 בישראל כתופעה חזותית ושואף להבין מה סימלו האוהלים ואיזה מי... more מאמר זה מתמקד באוהלי המחאה של קיץ 2011 בישראל כתופעה חזותית ושואף להבין מה סימלו האוהלים ואיזה מין שימוש פוליטי עושה הנוכחות שלהם בסמליות הזאת. מה מייבא עמו האוהל כסמל ומהי האפקטיביות הפוליטית שלו? האם אכן מדובר בסמליות ובייצוג, או שמא היווה האוהל למעשה פרפורמנס של הנישול והדיכוי שהם מנת חלקם של המוחים והמוחות? מדוע לא הסתפקה עוד המחאה הזאת בגופים התופסים יחדיו מקום בפומבי, ונזקקה לאוהלים בכדי לאחוז במרחב? כיצד הפכו האוהלים, הנדמים כאלמנט שמחלק ומפלג את המרחב לכדי מרחבים פרטיים ונפרדים, לביטוי של פעולה מאוחדת וקיום קהילתי? ואיזו מין קהילה היא זאת? לבסוף, לאור הופעת האוהלים במחאות פלסטיניות ב-2013, מאמר זה בוחן האם וכיצד הופעת האוהלים משני עברי הקו הירוק מאפשרת לחבר בין המחאה הישראלית והמחאה הפלסטינית ולחשוב עליהן יחדיו, מבלי להתעלם מן ההבדלים ביניהן.
חלקו הראשון של המאמר פורש ארבע סוגיות הנובעות מתפיסת האוהליםכסמליים, ומראה כיצד סוגיות אלו משקפות את הביקורת שהועלתה כנגד המחאה. החלק השני פונה לבחון אילו תובנות ניתן להפיק מתפיסת האוהלים כפרפורמנס, כמעשה, ולא כסמל בלבד. על ידי ניתוח אותן ארבע סוגיות דרך עדשת הפרפורמנס המאמר מדגים כיצד ניתן לתפוס את אותם אוהלים בדיוק כדוחים את הנרטיב ההגמוני וכמייצרים מרחב ציבורי מכיל ומורכב, מרחב המכיר בהבדלים ובהיסטוריה, המבטא קונפליקטים מתוך הבנתם בלשון רבים, ושבתוכו נוצרת קהילה שאופייה נתון במשא ומתן תמידי.
This essay examines protest tents in Israel as a visual phenomenon and strives to articulate their significance. What did tents symbolize and what were their political effects? Was the tent in fact a symbol or was it rather a form of performance? Why were bodies standing up together in public no longer sufficient to stage protest, thus requiring the supplement of the tent? How has the tent—as an element that seems to divide space up into discrete, individual cells—become an instance of collective existence and action? And what kind of collectivity is it? Finally, this essay examines whether the emergence of tents on both sides of the Green Line may allow us to consider the Israeli and the Palestinian protests together, yet without denying their differences.
The first part of this essay considers the phenomenon of the tent in these protests as a symbol, both visual and political. In this part, I outline four issues that arise from this consideration of tents as representational and demonstrate how these issues mirror the criticisms that were leveled against the protest. Critics have claimed, for instance, that the protest was limited to the hegemonic elites of Israeli society and therefore excluded many segments of the population; that it was so concerned with being “a-political” that it completely ignored the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories; that it failed to produce clear demands and thus to translate itself into enduring political reforms; and that it was too concerned with the individual and with bettering her living conditions by way of private property. Following this review of the tent as a symbol and the ways it reflects criticisms of the protest, I turn, in the second part of this essay, to examine whether considering these tents rather as a form of performance, may yield different insights. By analyzing the same four issues through the lens of performance I show how the very same tents may be seen as rejecting the hegemonic narrative and producing an inclusive and conflicted public space, where differences in histories are recognized, conflicts in the plural are rearticulated, and a community is fashioned and continuously negotiated.
“Tirgum (Translation),” Mafte'akh: Lexical Review of Political Thought 2 (Summer 2010), 157-192 (... more “Tirgum (Translation),” Mafte'akh: Lexical Review of Political Thought 2 (Summer 2010), 157-192 (Hebrew).
Media Publications by Liron Mor
"את אף פעם לא חוזרת, את הולכת": ריאיון עם אליאס ח'ורי, ארץ האמורי, יולי 2013
להציל את באב אל-שמס": על כפר האוהלים הפלסטיני ומשמעויותיו הספרותיות
ארץ האמורי, ינואר 2013
Erets ha-Emori, 2012
אני לא כאן, ארץ האמורי, יולי 2012
פרויקט הפזורה החדשה
Talks by Liron Mor
A talk given at the Society for the Humanities Fellows' Conference, "Occupation: A Critical Probl... more A talk given at the Society for the Humanities Fellows' Conference, "Occupation: A Critical Problematic for the Humanities"
April 18 - 19, 2014, Cornell University
Book Reviews by Liron Mor
Journal of Palestine Studies, 2023
What is Palestinian literature? And how does one define “Palestinian,” exactly? These are the fun... more What is Palestinian literature? And how does one define “Palestinian,” exactly? These are the fundamental questions that implicitly guide two new and exciting studies on Palestinian literature—Manar H. Makhoul’s Palestinian Citizens in Israel: A History Through Fiction, 1948-2010 and Maurice Ebileeni’s Being There, Being Here: Palestinian Writings in the World. Both authors intentionally seek out an internal prism on Palestinian literature and identity, while also aiming to express local particularities overlooked by previous scholarship. They thus join current efforts in Palestine studies to recenter Palestinian cultures and his- tories instead of exploring them only in relation to Zionism.
Uploads
Papers by Liron Mor
But this word, inqisām, names much more. Meaning “severance” or “being partitioned” in Arabic, it helps designate and illuminate several political, conceptual, social, and psychological aspects of Israel’s war on Gaza and on Palestinians more broadly, both before and after October 2023. It is, first and foremost, the proper name for an Israeli mode of segregation, which separates not only colonizers from colonized but also, and more importantly, the colonized from one another. It indexes technologies of distancing that produce Israeli blindness and apathy to Palestinian subjectivity. It accurately manifests the current stage of what is known as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a stage defined by the temporally cyclical and spatially binary logic of blood feuds and revenge, with its tendency to decontextualize and its recurrent moral rebooting of history. Finally, it helps demonstrate that what is going on at present does not constitute a break with the previous Israeli paradigm of “conflict management,” which many declared to have been shattered. Instead, this severance is simply its continuation by other means. Since “conflict management” has long involved periodic large-scale operations of mass killing and infrastructural devastation—a violence whose seasonal nature is captured by the term Israeli politicians have given it, mowing the lawn—what sets apart the current violence in Gaza is primarily its unprecedented scale.
https://critinq.wordpress.com/2024/08/05/on-severance-fragments-on-the-time-of-inqisam/
The book explores sites of poetic and political strife in Palestine–Israel by combining a comparative study of Hebrew and Arabic literature with political and literary theory. Mor leverages an archive that ranges from the 1930s to the present, from prose and poetry to film and television, to challenge the conception of the Palestinian–Israeli context as a conflict, delineating the colonial history of this concept and showing its inadequacy to Palestine–Israel. Instead, Mor articulates locally specific modes of theorizing the antagonisms and mediations, colonial technologies, and anticolonial practices that make up the fabric of this site. The book thus offers five figurative conflictual concepts that are derived from the poetics of the works: conflict (judgment/ishtibāk), levaṭim (disorienting dilemmas), ikhtifāʾ (anti/colonial disappearance), ḥoḳ (mediating law), and inqisām (hostile severance). In so doing, Conflicts aims to generate a historically and geographically situated mode of theory-making, which defies the separation between the conceptual and the poetic.
Keywords: visual theory, racialization, Ronit Matalon, Roland Barthes, Mizrahi Jews
חלקו הראשון של המאמר פורש ארבע סוגיות הנובעות מתפיסת האוהליםכסמליים, ומראה כיצד סוגיות אלו משקפות את הביקורת שהועלתה כנגד המחאה. החלק השני פונה לבחון אילו תובנות ניתן להפיק מתפיסת האוהלים כפרפורמנס, כמעשה, ולא כסמל בלבד. על ידי ניתוח אותן ארבע סוגיות דרך עדשת הפרפורמנס המאמר מדגים כיצד ניתן לתפוס את אותם אוהלים בדיוק כדוחים את הנרטיב ההגמוני וכמייצרים מרחב ציבורי מכיל ומורכב, מרחב המכיר בהבדלים ובהיסטוריה, המבטא קונפליקטים מתוך הבנתם בלשון רבים, ושבתוכו נוצרת קהילה שאופייה נתון במשא ומתן תמידי.
This essay examines protest tents in Israel as a visual phenomenon and strives to articulate their significance. What did tents symbolize and what were their political effects? Was the tent in fact a symbol or was it rather a form of performance? Why were bodies standing up together in public no longer sufficient to stage protest, thus requiring the supplement of the tent? How has the tent—as an element that seems to divide space up into discrete, individual cells—become an instance of collective existence and action? And what kind of collectivity is it? Finally, this essay examines whether the emergence of tents on both sides of the Green Line may allow us to consider the Israeli and the Palestinian protests together, yet without denying their differences.
The first part of this essay considers the phenomenon of the tent in these protests as a symbol, both visual and political. In this part, I outline four issues that arise from this consideration of tents as representational and demonstrate how these issues mirror the criticisms that were leveled against the protest. Critics have claimed, for instance, that the protest was limited to the hegemonic elites of Israeli society and therefore excluded many segments of the population; that it was so concerned with being “a-political” that it completely ignored the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories; that it failed to produce clear demands and thus to translate itself into enduring political reforms; and that it was too concerned with the individual and with bettering her living conditions by way of private property. Following this review of the tent as a symbol and the ways it reflects criticisms of the protest, I turn, in the second part of this essay, to examine whether considering these tents rather as a form of performance, may yield different insights. By analyzing the same four issues through the lens of performance I show how the very same tents may be seen as rejecting the hegemonic narrative and producing an inclusive and conflicted public space, where differences in histories are recognized, conflicts in the plural are rearticulated, and a community is fashioned and continuously negotiated.
Media Publications by Liron Mor
Talks by Liron Mor
April 18 - 19, 2014, Cornell University
Book Reviews by Liron Mor
But this word, inqisām, names much more. Meaning “severance” or “being partitioned” in Arabic, it helps designate and illuminate several political, conceptual, social, and psychological aspects of Israel’s war on Gaza and on Palestinians more broadly, both before and after October 2023. It is, first and foremost, the proper name for an Israeli mode of segregation, which separates not only colonizers from colonized but also, and more importantly, the colonized from one another. It indexes technologies of distancing that produce Israeli blindness and apathy to Palestinian subjectivity. It accurately manifests the current stage of what is known as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a stage defined by the temporally cyclical and spatially binary logic of blood feuds and revenge, with its tendency to decontextualize and its recurrent moral rebooting of history. Finally, it helps demonstrate that what is going on at present does not constitute a break with the previous Israeli paradigm of “conflict management,” which many declared to have been shattered. Instead, this severance is simply its continuation by other means. Since “conflict management” has long involved periodic large-scale operations of mass killing and infrastructural devastation—a violence whose seasonal nature is captured by the term Israeli politicians have given it, mowing the lawn—what sets apart the current violence in Gaza is primarily its unprecedented scale.
https://critinq.wordpress.com/2024/08/05/on-severance-fragments-on-the-time-of-inqisam/
The book explores sites of poetic and political strife in Palestine–Israel by combining a comparative study of Hebrew and Arabic literature with political and literary theory. Mor leverages an archive that ranges from the 1930s to the present, from prose and poetry to film and television, to challenge the conception of the Palestinian–Israeli context as a conflict, delineating the colonial history of this concept and showing its inadequacy to Palestine–Israel. Instead, Mor articulates locally specific modes of theorizing the antagonisms and mediations, colonial technologies, and anticolonial practices that make up the fabric of this site. The book thus offers five figurative conflictual concepts that are derived from the poetics of the works: conflict (judgment/ishtibāk), levaṭim (disorienting dilemmas), ikhtifāʾ (anti/colonial disappearance), ḥoḳ (mediating law), and inqisām (hostile severance). In so doing, Conflicts aims to generate a historically and geographically situated mode of theory-making, which defies the separation between the conceptual and the poetic.
Keywords: visual theory, racialization, Ronit Matalon, Roland Barthes, Mizrahi Jews
חלקו הראשון של המאמר פורש ארבע סוגיות הנובעות מתפיסת האוהליםכסמליים, ומראה כיצד סוגיות אלו משקפות את הביקורת שהועלתה כנגד המחאה. החלק השני פונה לבחון אילו תובנות ניתן להפיק מתפיסת האוהלים כפרפורמנס, כמעשה, ולא כסמל בלבד. על ידי ניתוח אותן ארבע סוגיות דרך עדשת הפרפורמנס המאמר מדגים כיצד ניתן לתפוס את אותם אוהלים בדיוק כדוחים את הנרטיב ההגמוני וכמייצרים מרחב ציבורי מכיל ומורכב, מרחב המכיר בהבדלים ובהיסטוריה, המבטא קונפליקטים מתוך הבנתם בלשון רבים, ושבתוכו נוצרת קהילה שאופייה נתון במשא ומתן תמידי.
This essay examines protest tents in Israel as a visual phenomenon and strives to articulate their significance. What did tents symbolize and what were their political effects? Was the tent in fact a symbol or was it rather a form of performance? Why were bodies standing up together in public no longer sufficient to stage protest, thus requiring the supplement of the tent? How has the tent—as an element that seems to divide space up into discrete, individual cells—become an instance of collective existence and action? And what kind of collectivity is it? Finally, this essay examines whether the emergence of tents on both sides of the Green Line may allow us to consider the Israeli and the Palestinian protests together, yet without denying their differences.
The first part of this essay considers the phenomenon of the tent in these protests as a symbol, both visual and political. In this part, I outline four issues that arise from this consideration of tents as representational and demonstrate how these issues mirror the criticisms that were leveled against the protest. Critics have claimed, for instance, that the protest was limited to the hegemonic elites of Israeli society and therefore excluded many segments of the population; that it was so concerned with being “a-political” that it completely ignored the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories; that it failed to produce clear demands and thus to translate itself into enduring political reforms; and that it was too concerned with the individual and with bettering her living conditions by way of private property. Following this review of the tent as a symbol and the ways it reflects criticisms of the protest, I turn, in the second part of this essay, to examine whether considering these tents rather as a form of performance, may yield different insights. By analyzing the same four issues through the lens of performance I show how the very same tents may be seen as rejecting the hegemonic narrative and producing an inclusive and conflicted public space, where differences in histories are recognized, conflicts in the plural are rearticulated, and a community is fashioned and continuously negotiated.
April 18 - 19, 2014, Cornell University