The pivotal question running through the workshop was therefore that of legibility:. It quickly appeared that identifying specific points of passage between texts and situations was a difficult injunction. Some heated debates burst out about the necessity of close reading to achieve this objective. Interventions and interruptions often seemed more in touch with the surrounding reality than the conceptual exegesis.
Especially powerful were the papers in which Benjamin seemed to respond to a direct engagement with the historical and political situation in Palestine. But this is not to say that their use is unproblematic. Michiel Bot contended that Palestinians might be said to live under a double state of exception: that which Israel inherited from the British mandate in , on the one hand, and that which the president Mahmoud Abbas set in place after Hamas seized power in the Gaza Strip in The police are endowed with a sovereign, law-making power; their actions are essentially performative and entail their own, complete justification.
The question of justification constituted the real focal point of her paper. As she argued, Benjamin considers that violence is always already interpreted; it is always preceded by its own threat.
Indeed, any inquiry that calls into question the framework of legal violence, within which the justificatory scheme is established, would itself be called violent. Aloni screened and discussed excerpts of his film Local Angels.
This documentary about the Freedom Theatre in Jenin was made after the murder of its charismatic director Juliano Mer-Khamis. Moving back and forth between the confined space of the workshop and the hectic streets of Ramallah posed another puzzle to those who were in the occupied Palestinian territories for the first time. As days passed, the figure of Benjamin began to fade away in the presence of more pressing concerns such as making sense of where we were. For Ramallah, as we were often told, is not Palestine.
