Introduction

I have suggested that one way to understand the Diaspora's relationship with Israel is to think of it as a form of transnational political obligation. A transnational political obligation is a political relationship that exists across states, among Diaspora, transnational or trans-state communities, and which frames their relations and identity-practices. What makes them political is that transnational political obligations are characterized by multiple discourses of power. The first of these is a public account of power that associates it with people acting together in public. The roles of authority and of sovereignty are displaced in this reading of power. What unites people in relations of power is a shared purpose in their public lives. Even though the power relations among a transnational diaspora group remain tied to a like-group, the spatial character of this group reflects the fact that people who share ties do not necessarily live in the same geographical location.

The second discourse of power expands this public framing of power into the private sphere and into constructions of the self. In this regard, power in transnational political obligation is reflected and produced by the knowledge that makes up the self. Senses of identity carry with them expectations about how to behave, who to relate with, what to think and why, what community to belong to, who does not belong, and so on. All of these are clearly visible in the debates found in The Finkler Question, where Jewish identity is understood as requiring particular beliefs about Israel, and not to share in these beliefs is anathema to what it means to be Jewish. Here Jewish identity in a non-religious sense is framed by discourses of knowledge that privilege certain claims over others (which is what a discourse is), in this case about Jewish history and Israel, and then apply these discourses to constructions of identity. What matters here is not what the causes of these discourses are, but rather that identity carries with it a variety of power relations which are unseen but which are necessary for the construction of the self.