When this conversation was conducted, Lama Abu-Odeh and Yochai Benkler were co-Presidents of the Harvard Middle East Law Students Association, and Duncan Kennedy was an editor at Boston Review.

Kennedy: We want to talk this afternoon about religion, nationalism, and, above all, post-nationalism in the Middle East. How does a post-national person respond when asked: “Would you introduce yourself?”

Abu-Odeh: In a way, I’ve always been a post-nationalist. My father is a Palestinian politician in Jordan and my mother is a Jordanian. Jordanians have always seen me as Palestinian, because what really matters in the construction of one’s identity is where one’s father comes from. Palestinians, on the other hand, have seen me as a Jordanian because my father works with the Jordanian government. I always found I could easily fit in either identity. I grew up hearing my father’s memories of Palestine, a land with which I had a more material connection through my four aunts and forty some cousins who still live there. On that level, I could see myself as a Palestinian. But I could also see myself easily as a Jordanian since Jordan was the place where I grew up and for which I developed a sentimental attachment.

However, since I always felt that my identity was rather ambiguous as far as other people were concerned, I always found myself constructing my identity as Jordanian with the Palestinians and as Palestinian with the Jordanians. I think I did that because I felt the exclusionary move of my interlocutor in identifying herself as either Jordanian or Palestinian. If it was one thing (say Jordanian) she always excluded from her identity with the other (Palestinian) and constructed herself as different, superior. That always made me present myself as that other that the speaker excluded in order to make to her the point that she’s really neither different nor superior. In other words, that part of my identity was always constructed in opposition.

I come to the US and I “adopt” the Palestinian identity, also in “opposition.” Palestinian is an identity that is embattled, denied and an object of racism in this culture, which made me adopt it, if you like, to fight for it. It was a conscious political move that I made.

Kennedy: And where does “Arab” fit into all this?

Abu-Odeh: I am not really sure. I think I have felt my Arab identity most intensely at moments when someone gasps and says, “If only Arabs would unite!” Rhetorically, that’s how I experienced my Arab identity. The commonality between me and other Arabs has always struck me when I visited other Arab countries; we were all like variations on the same theme. There were, however, moments when those variations were brought to the fore, so that this so-called one theme was foreshadowed. I guess I experienced my Arab identity both as a fact, a “thing” I had in common with millions of people, and as a screaming lack—where this commonality never materialized into a “oneness,” something one is brought up to feel an eternal nostalgia for.

I also feel my Arab identity very strongly in the United States. In this context, too, as with the Palestinian identity, it is an object of racism. That makes me adopt it to fight for it. I’ve never been so “Arab” as I am in America.

Kennedy: How would you introduce yourself, Yochai? Lama has let us know that she’s a “Jordanian/Palestinian/Arab” “in America.”

Benkler: I am very much the product of socialist Zionism. My parents were born into it, and my grandparents came to Israel with the conception that the absence of hierarchy in this land—the absence of a state structure and a capitalist structure—would permit them to take a shortcut to utopia.

Kennedy: You could be understood to be presenting yourself as a person who was born and raised as a post-nationalist. Are you claiming that your own identity was from the beginning post-nationalist?

Benkler: No, quite the contrary. Zionist socialism was linked to a use of Jewish mythology and the prophets and a conception of communal commitment. It drew on the strong sense of mutual responsibility among Jews as a group, and a justice-oriented interpretation of the Biblical prophets as a cultural pole to vault over a bourgeois state into an immediate state of socialist utopia as a Jewish state.

Kennedy: A Jewish state. Is that just socialist nationalism?

Benkler: Using that combination with respect to Jews is always very uncomfortable. It was not chauvinist nationalism because it included an internationalist component. They were in effect saying: “We are going to be a pilot of socialism. We’re going to use our social cohesion, our sense of unity, and our unique culture to get socialism going. From there on, we want international socialism.”

Kennedy: In your self-descriptions, you’ve used categories of religion, people, ethnicity, nation, and state. How do you see yourself in relationship to these categories?

Benkler: With respect to religion: for me, Judaism is not a religion. In my identity, Judaism is a people, an ethnicity, a national culture, that manifests itself in a set of behavioral rules that have been constructed by others, or by non-members, as how religion functions for them. But Judaism is not about religion; it’s not about belief. There is no “I believe” in the Trinity; there is no al-Shahadat (which says “I witness that there is no God but Allah, and that Mohammed is His Prophet”). There is no credo.

In the Bible we get the Torah, stating “we’ll do and we’ll listen.” First, there’s the deed. So, Judaism is a legal culture that pervades the life of the community. But it is not a religion in the sense of a creed, a belief. The idea of Judaism as a religion is a construction of modern Western Judaism, designed to enable “Germans of Mosaic persuasion” or “American Jews” to avoid having a double identity.

Abu-Odeh: But these are people who are members of your group. How can you ignore their cultural practices? The way they see themselves? They see themselves as practicing a religion; you want to include them as members in your group; and yet you deny that Judaism is a religion. This sounds like a power move on your part.

Benkler: I am practicing what Zionists have done since Ben-Gurion. Which is to say we’re here, we define what’s Jewish. You don’t want to buy into it, that’s your problem. I’m whole; I construct a Judaism for my modern times.

Abu-Odeh: But I am not sure whether your separation of Judaism as a religion from Judaism as a national entity makes sense. For instance, in the construction of Arab nationalism, Arabs see themselves as a national group with Islam being an important cultural element in it. So you don’t have to be religious as a Muslim to be an Arab. But you do have to recognize that Islam, as a religion, has played a really significant cultural role in Arab history. In our understanding of ourselves as Arabs, we don’t necessarily assume that Arabs are Muslim. For people outside, it’s sort of a stereotype that Arabs are Muslim. But within that community, you don’t assume you’re a Muslim, even though we do think of Islam as a very powerful cultural force.

Kennedy: My instinct, Lama, is to think that you’ve just made a move that’s the mirror image of Yochai’s. When Yochai said that Judaism really is not a religion, you claimed that he was treating his own self-understanding as authoritative for the group. Now you say that being an Arab and being Muslim really just aren’t the same thing. To which my basic reaction is: take Nasser’s great radio speeches of the 1960’s, or take Saddam Hussein’s radio speeches from Baghdad before the Gulf War. Do those speeches presuppose your division between the Arab nation and Islamic religion?

Abu-Odeh: Historically, the people who conceived the idea of Arab nationalism were all Chrisitians. Michel Aflak, Antoun Sa’ada, they were all Christian. So when I learned about Arab nationalism in school, it was an important part of the teaching that Arabs included Christians and Muslims.

I’m sure it was an attempt by a minority to include themselves, to redefine themselves as members of a majority by saying: “we’re not people affiliated to different religions, but members of a national group.” When I was taught Arab nationalism, it was an important thing to learn about being an Arab, that being an Arab includes many religions. So I was taught that there are Arab Jews: that all the Jews who left Morocco (or stayed in Morocco) are Arab Jews; that there are Iraqi Jews; that there are Palestinian Jews; that there are all sorts of Jews who are Arab. That was how I was taught. But then part of that teaching was that Judaism is a religion.

Kennedy: I wish to propose another interesting parallel, Lama, between your view and Yochai’s. Just as his concept of Judaism sounds like a power play within the community, so, too, does your version of Arab nationalism. It sounds like the move of a particular Arab intelligentsia against the fundamentalist threat of the 1950s and 60s—or maybe of the 1930s through the 60s. I mean that, from the very beginning, the nationalism that you’re describing—with its insistence that the Arab nation includes Jewish Arabs and Christian Arabs—was a move by a group which is pushing aside, or privileging its own view over a deep, culturally rooted view that understands religion, peoplehood, nationality, and statehood as synonymous.

Abu-Odeh: But Arab nationalism did not arise historically in a response to fundamentalism. It was a response to colonialism. It was started in 1914 by Shariff Hussein Bin Ali from Mecca. He wanted to have his Arab kingdom in Saudi Arabia, the greater Syria area, and Iraq. And the way he constructed the whole thing was to say: “we are all Arabs.” This construction of Arab nationalism was a response to the Muslim Turk.

Kennedy: To Turkish imperial self-definition.

Abu-Odeh: Exactly. Before 1914 the population in that part of the world constructed their identity as Muslims who were members of the Ottoman Empire. When Shariff Hussein Bin Ali of Mecca saw the Turks defining themselves as Turks, he constructed the separate identity of Arab in response to the separate Turkish identity: “you’re Turks; we’re Arabs; we want independence.”

When we were colonized by the British and the French, that Arab identity was heightened and its features were clarified. So the construction of Arab identity really was more a response to colonialism than fundamentalism. At the same time, because it was Christians who conceived it in the first place for their own reasons, and because they, too, wanted to include themselves, they said, well, we’re all Arabs, it doesn’t matter what religion you have.

The other point I want to make is that the distinction I drew between the Arab nation and Islamic religion corresponds to a major conflict in the Arab World between Arab nationalism and Islamic nationalism. Islamic nationalism is the idea that we are part of a Muslim nation which stretches over to Indonesia.; Saudi Arabia is the country that exemplifies the project; and fundamentalism is the party that’s called for it. In the self-understanding of these fundamentalists, for example, the liberation of the land of Palestine is not a question of Arab national liberation; it’s a Muslim national liberation aimed at liberating a Muslim land.

Kennedy: So Iranians can see themselves as committed to it in the same way.

Abu-Odeh: Exactly. And there are people who do believe in that. And they are countered by Arab nationalists who say, “You are mad, you are out of your mind, this is completely impossible. What connects us with Indonesians? It’s a completely different culture.” But at the same time, they ignore that Arab nationalism also denies differences among “Arabs.” I’m coming to realize that to say that you’re an Arab is actually a power move that hides differences, enormous differences within the world that is defined geographically as the Arab world. And it really does not say anything very illuminating about that group of people.

Kennedy: What do you mean when you say it’s a “power move”?

Abu-Odeh: That it tends, for example, to silence people who identify themselves as Berbers. Saying that Morocco is an Arab country is a power move that denies that there is a substantial group in Morocco that construct themselves as Berber. To make that assumption, and to go on to draw all sorts of conclusions from it is a power move.

Kennedy: I think we should ask Yochai to situate himself: first of all, to say something about Israeli nationalism as distinct from Judaism, paralleling Lama’s remarks about Arab nationalism and Islam.

Earlier you expressed hostility to this distinction between Judaism and Israeli nationalism. But it seems clear that the distinction forms part of the common understanding of some Israelis and non-Israelis. The idea of a nation or a nationality is part of the political culture of the people who live in Israel. Some agree with the idea, some not. What’s your picture, then, of Israeli nationalism as an historical phenomenon? Could you give us something parallel to Lama’s great précis of how we got an Arab nation?

Benkler: Well, I have a problem here. I do want to discuss some contradictions in Zionism. But Lama has told me in the past that what I say echoes Arab nationalist criticisms of Zionism. So I will say first that the reason I am not merely mouthing anti-Zionist propaganda is that I am a Zionist. I do see my identity as linked with being a Jew in Israel, and wanting to stay a Jew in Israel. That is my defining group affiliation, and any position I take is informed by my will to preserve the meaningfulness of that defining element in my identity.

That caveat aside, there are two major contradictions I see in Zionism. First, it is a Western ideology in a Middle Eastern space. Second, it is “Jewish,” “democratic,” and in a space populated by Arabs (whether you include the territories or not).

I see Zionism as a reaction to nineteenth century European nationalism. Nationalism presented Jews with two major options: to reject it or to be co-opted by it. Rejection had two diametrically opposed manifestations: religious orthodoxy, which involved disengagement and refusal to participate in group-identity discourse; and Marxism, which rejected nationalism in favor of internationalism. Co-optation also had two diametrically opposed manifestations: assimilation—we are Germans (of Mosaic persuasion); and Zionism—molding the Jewish people into the European mode of thinking about a people, that is, into a nation.

Orthodoxy has remained an option, although numerically it became a minority group when most of its adherents were wiped out in the Holocaust. Marxism has gone the way of Marxism elsewhere in the West. Assimilation failed because European nationalism chose to reject Jews as a race rather than accept them as a religion. Zionism has remained the most successful of the four options. But it was missing one important component in the structure of “nationhood”—territory. And so territorialism came into Zionism, with the result that a second European mode of thought dominated Zionist discourse—colonialism. All land outside the metropoles was up for grabs, and that included Palestine, the ancestral land—and so we were all set.

Herzl is a case in point. After passing through an assimilationist phase (he suggested all Jews go to the Pope and convert), he decided to create national Zionism. However, when Palestine seemed unavailable because the Ottoman Empire controlled it, he was happy to settle for Uganda. Although his view was rejected, and the majority of Zionists required that the “land” be the ancestral land, it is indicative of the “up for grabs” mentality that was pervasive in Zionism with respect to the land, and I maintain that was because of Eurocentric thinking.

Eurocentrism allowed Zionists to skirt the Arab question. Israel could in fact be a “Jewish,” “democratic” state in this space populated by Arabs. Some of the reasoning was ethnocentric—this is our ancestral land. But quite a bit of the story was classically colonialist: we bought the land; we were bringing progress; there was no one here anyway; and we settled lands that were uninhabitable before our technology and entrepreneurship made them habitable. Moreover, we didn’t need acceptance from the Arabs, because only the acceptance of the West really counted.

For the Arabs, our Eurocentrism was not a passing preference born of our cumulative personal backgrounds, but a defining property of Zionism. It was a reaffirmation that we were merely part of the historical fact of Western colonialism and should/would fade away, as a historical fact, with it. To them we really were (and probably still are) like France in Algeria. I think that the move that Zionism must make, corresponding to the acceptance by Arabs of the historical fact of Israel, and in anticipation of peace, is to reorient itself: to recognize its Eurocentric origins and then consciously to restructure its identity and political ambitions towards becoming part of the Middle East.

Kennedy: You’ve now given us a series of pictures of Judaism, Benkler: that it is not a religion; that it is the structure of the life of a people; that it is not fundamentally nationalist. We can also see that you are not a post-nationalist from birth, that you were brought up in a milieu where something that looks very much like nationalism conventionally understood was part of the culture. So who are you?

Benkler: Who I am now must be understood in terms of my development. I am much more comfortable with my position in Israel than my immediate ancestors were. I no longer need a nationalist ideology in order to feel part of it. I can comfortably, from my belly, not just as a political move, tell Lama I am from the Middle East. That’s where I was born, that’s where my parents were born; when I think of history and geography, I think of my stretch of land and my area.

But what do I do with this? Do I continue to be a territorialist, or do I say, “No, there are certain things that I like about Jewish culture that I feel are good and useful in my society, that cause me to identify myself with Judaism.” I say the latter: that being a Jew doesn’t mean dominating a specific territory. It means that I want certain functions within my society to continue to be Jewish.

Kennedy: You say some things will stay Jewish in the particular cultural sense that you’ve given to Judaism. What political intention are you expressing?

Benkler: Here we’re coming to my conception of “post-nationalism.” First of all, it has to be seen in two parallel routes: one utopian, the other pragmatic. I wouldn’t pursue the utopian side if I didn’t feel that it has pragmatic implications. Post-nationalism is a means of breaking out of the “nationalist” mode of thought in order to be able to “invent” pragmatic proposals for the relationship between Israel and Palestine that someone formulating solutions within nationalism would not come up with.

The “nationalism” that I am “post” is the nationalism associated with the modern, territorial, administrative State that performs social functions for individuals on the basis of the bare fact that they are present in its territory. Using this ethnically neutral basis to define “society” generates an ethical calculus that subordinates the “group” to the “individual” who is vested with independent moral value. At the same time, however, the territorial “State” retains an exclusionary value, by shielding the dominant ethnic group in the territory from numerical challenges to its dominance. It acts like gerrymandering.

My post-nationalism is aimed at shifting the basis of social interaction from territorial presence to functional solidarity. For that reason, I prefer “post-territorialism” to “post-nationalism.” I would break down the administrative functions of the territorial State. There would no longer be a single, cohesive form of organization that is “sovereign.” People would live in the multi-dimensional intersection of their affiliations. A women could be: a woman; a transportation worker; a Jew; and a resident of Eilat. Each would dominate a portion of her life, but none would trump the others.

The prescriptive role of the legislature and the conflict-resolution functions of national courts would devolve to the solidarity groups, each prescribing and adjudicating for its functional sphere, applying its contextual values. Physical infrastructure would be administered on a functional-geographic basis; roads around Akaba and Eilat would be administered together, not each with Amman or Jerusalem respectively. Defense will be administered to the broadest grouping—the macro-regional economic sphere, which might cover the whole of a post-peace Middle East. This least altruistic sphere will allow the broadest affiliation, robbing defense of the impetus of aggression—its ability to effect false cohesion and silence conflict and multiplicity in a “national” society.

Kennedy: You still haven’t explained how or why some things stay Jewish.

Benkler: Well, that’s why I prefer “post-territorialism” to “post-nationalism.” I don’t want to throw the baby of ethnicism out with the bath water of territorialism. I don’t want to say, “I am dumping nationalism, therefore I am dumping ethnicity and culture” as focal points of solidarity. A lesson of American society is that ethnicity and culture are very empowering. You can get things done in groups by using ethnicity or culture as a solidarity focal point. I don’t want to lose that good thing in ethnicity in my utopia.

On the other hand, I do want to get rid of the hegemony that always seem to come with ethnicity: the domination of cultural, social and political life by an ethnic majority. Breaking down the functions of the State will undercut the power of an ethnic majority in a territory to dominate all social interaction, because the territory will no longer define the space in which all of life occurs.

Abu-Odeh: I am skeptical whether you can still call ethnicity “ethnicity,” or nation “nation” once you’ve moved to eliminating the hegemony that now comes from it. What makes you secure in the knowledge that ethnicity will mean the same thing now that you’ve moved on?

In fact, I am rather nihilistic about what you call “ethnicity.” You seem to see a normative good in preserving ethnically defined groups because you see ethnicity as a locus of solidarity. Then you attempt to retain its constitution without exercising hegemony. Exclusion yes, but not hegemony. I myself see groups as only necessary in response to a political situation. People group, in my utopia, only to fight power exercised upon them, whatever the nature of the power—racial, patriarchal, nationalist, corporate. Once the particular fight is over, groups disintegrate. No grouping carries a normative power within itself. Groupings are only functional. I do not feel that there is something inherent about any particular ethnic group that needs to be preserved through political will, for no other reason than to preserve the group itself. This is like a group getting together on grounds of ethnicity and then preserving ethnicity so that it retains its raison d’être as a group.

Benkler: I’m not saying that one particular ethnicity need be preserved. I am saying that the pervasiveness of cultural-lingual affinities must be accommodated in utopia in a way that takes away from ethnic groups their tendency to hegemony. The reason for preservation is not preservation itself, but rather the power that emanates from ethnic solidarity and its role as a counter-balance to individualism.

Abu-Odeh: To my mind, ethnic groups only make sense if, as a group, they encounter a power that denies them, fights them, suppresses them, discriminates against them. If there is no such power I do not see any reason why they should exist as such. Palestinian identity is only necessary to provide a national identity to people who are denied it through Israeli occupation. Once that occupation is over, Palestinian identity should disintegrate and people should regroup on other terms in response to structures of power that they will encounter.

Benkler: But then what is your group fighting for? Why is it fighting as a group? It seems to be fighting the Israeli army today, only so that portions of it can fight an upper-class or patriarchal Palestinian police tomorrow. Your group seems to have no internal cohesion. It is simply a reaction of all those subject to a particular external power. Your groups are created by an external power and disintegrated by its absence. They are only reactive, and can be used for nothing “positive.”

Abu-Odeh: Groups are defined by the external powers they fight. But people will always encounter structures of power, so that groups will always be necessary. But the existence of particular groups is always transitory and contingent, always self-deconstructing. Self-deconstructing in that they should always be aware that groups are exclusionary: they tend to suppress differences within the group and differences within the ranks of their adversary. When I say they are constantly self-deconstructing I mean that their awareness of internal differences and differences within the “other” forces them to be very creative in the alliances they make to achieve the local and immediate objectives they seek to realize.

Benkler: You claim that the tendency to be exclusionary—to suppress differences—is created by groups as such. But that claim is really a result of your assumption that groups are created only in conflict and are good only for conflict. Conflict demands the immediate application of all the resources of members of the group-in-conflict. Because other conflicts and other groupings would threaten to siphon off resoures and sap the power of the group, one conflict must be presented as the most fundamental, as the “real issue.” That is why its members group in this, and not other groups. So you think that groups necessarily marginalize other groups because you think that groups are created only in conflict.

I can use groups because I think solidarity can be deployed not only against someone, but with someone. And when it is employed positively, solidarity can recognize the non-threatening power of other solidarity groups and their relative worth. People can recognize their own multiplicity, and simultaneously participate in various social interactions with various groups to which their sense of cohesion with others in that interaction leads them. Cross-membership shores up this sense of relative worth and alleviates inter-group tensions.

Abu-Odeh: But my view acknowledges this multiplicity. There is nothing in my construction of groups that excludes multiplicity of membership. In fact, that is part of what I mean when I say that groups are self-deconstructing.

Furthermore, I think that your inclusion of ethnicity in utopia is particularly unconvincing. Ethnicity loses its raison d’être once conflict is resolved. For instance, I cannot think of anything in particular about being an Arab that I would like to deploy a will to preserve. As far as I’m concerned, non-Arab “things” are more than welcome to play themselves out in this culture, with the result that what it is to be an Arab changes all the time, perhaps to the extent that it is no longer “Arab.” In a context free of power that threatens this particular ethnic culture, the latter should let itself be redefined till eternity.

Benkler: You’re assuming that identity is something that changes all the time, and is not a fixed solidarity focal point. My experience as a Jew is very different. Being a Jew is a focal point of solidarity in Jewish communities, no matter what else changes. But beyond my own “Jewishness” I think cultural-lingual groupings defined by inclusion and exclusion have existed throughout recorded history. I don’t accept that your wishing them away makes them ahistorical or makes it inconceivable that they exist for a prolonged period, and I think that Copts, Mayans or most of the East-Asian nations would agree with me.

Abu-Odeh: I disagree that cultural-lingual groups exist from some internal force. Constructing and preserving ethnicity for the sake of ethnicity, I believe, inevitably involves ethnic groups in acts of mythology and reification. To see itself as different from other ethnic groups, it creates its “own” past, its “own” experience, and “own” rituals that it sees as distinct from other groups. This sense of difference and distinction leads to a sense of superiority and eventually to racism.

A world where ethnicities are engaged in constructing themselves as ethnicities that are metaphysically different from each other, is to my mind a racist world. This is especially so when the group has to decide who belongs to it ethnically and who does not—this is necessarily an act of power that includes and excludes according to an imposed criterion decided by those who have the power. I think that that was clearly manifested in your construction of your identity and in your account of Judaism as an ethnicity and not a religion, despite all those Jews who see it otherwise.

Benkler: It’s true that exclusion is a power move vis-à-vis non-members. But that’s not a criticism. I just said that ethnicities, like all groups, are empowering things. The question is whether the power move necessarily exerts hegemony over you. Does it cut you off from the same type of empowerment that I draw from my solidarity group? Does it rule your life according to an agenda that excludes your input? That kind of domination is avoided in my utopia because life is compartmentalized and not territorially defined. Life does not occur in a single space susceptible to rule by a single group. Every function my solidarity group fulfills for me can be fulfilled for you by one or more different solidarity groups you belong to as regards which social interaction (as long as there are others who are willing to form a solidarity group with you to address that function).

Furthermore, you’ve turned my proposal into a profoundly conservative metaphysical statement by brining it to a utopian extreme. But I started out by saying that my utopia is intertwined with my pragmatic agenda. I don’t have a dream of eternal ethnicity. I like the fact that there exists, in the current historical moment and in the foreseeable future, a force that can be used for “good,” despite the fact that it now generates so much “bad.” In creating my utopia as a means for defining my new pragmatic approach, I use pragmatism as a contextualizing, historical force shaping my utopia. I project into utopia knowable solidarity groups, I trim them, and then use this trimmed vision to guide pragmatic reform.

Kennedy: Can both of you now encapsulate your post-nationalsim and underscore where, to your mind, it differs from the other’s?

Abu-Odeh: One moment of my universe in utopia is a configuration of interacting groupings, where the groups that individuals affiliate with depends on the power they are confronting in their lives. But this is only one moment. The next moment will carry for itself a totally different configuration, where the very same individuals will find themselves affiliated to groupings of a different type and form. I think what I see as only one moment in the universe, would become in Yochai’s world a prolonged moment, perhaps till eternity.

My world is extremely unholy. There is no God, no heaven, no hell, not even “people” if you like. The only thing that seems to have an eternal existence in my utopia is power. It never goes. It’s there with a changing face so that people need to regroup indefinitely to respond to the forever changing face of power.

Benkler: My basic assumption is that groups can be good, are good. That they are defined from within by two factors: inclusion and exclusion. And that they empower members to do things together that those members couldn’t do separately. I reject Lama’s utopia of people grouping and regrouping around ever-changing conflicts because I lack the imagination to see groups that are wildly different from those that have been created by our contexts in certain very rough, but fairly constant groupings in our history. I also can’t imagine conflicts so widely different from those we have experienced that they would generate unknowable groupings. Because I cannot imagine these new conflicts or the new groupings they shall form, I can’t use Lama’s model today.

Instead, I project a utopia that preserves knowable groups and dreams conflict away. Because the participants in the conflict I dream away are recognizable, I can use the schema that this dream generates as a way to think about real world conflicts. Resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict will require extensive institutionalized cooperation. I’m afraid of internal contradictions between the need to cooperate in these institutions and the conflictual, domination-preserving mechanisms that will be included by framers who can only think of cooperation in nationalist terms. My post-nationalism is intended to be close enough to reality so that I can use it to root these contradictions out of plans for conflict resolution in our area.