Betrayal and Revenge in Amos Oz’s Judas

Amos Oz’s novel Judas [2016. Judas. Translated by Nicholas de Lange. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt] raises the possibility that had the State of Israel not been founded in 1948, the Palestinian Nakba might have been avoided. The booklet Auto-Emancipation, a foundational text of Zionist political thought published by Leo Pinsker in 1881, proposes a solution to the Judenfrage or Jewish Question in Europe, which, in the nineteenth century, assumed the form of violent anti-Jewish pogroms. Pinsker identified the source of this violence in the liminality of the European Jew and therefore argued its solution necessarily lay in the creation of a Jewish space free of non-Jews. The importation of the Jewish Question from Europe to Palestine resulted in the realization of Pinsker’s solution, that is, the elimination of Jewish liminality in Europe through the expulsion of the Palestinians from the space of the Jewish state. The Palestinian Nakba was, therefore, an act of revenge by Jews against the non-Jews in Europe transposed to the Palestinians in the Middle East. The use that Amos Oz makes, in the novel, of the narrative of the Gnostic Gospel of Judas explains the political theology on which the State of Israel was founded as a version of the political theology of Carl Schmitt. An analysis of the rhetoric of the political theology of Zionism as a colonialist project demonstrates that it precludes the possibility that the Nakba might have been avoided, as suggested in Amos Oz’s novel.