Parshah Commentary
In 1982, the majority of jurists on the international MacBride Commission concluded that Israel’s actions in Lebanon legally constituted an attempted genocide of the Palestinian people. In his 1984 essay “Permission to Narrate,” Edward Said lamented that the Commission’s damning report had no effect whatsoever on US foreign policy, asking: “How is it that . . . the premises on which Western support for Israel is based are still maintained, even though the reality, the facts, cannot possibly bear these premises out?” He notes that the MacBride Commission’s assessment that “the facts speak for themselves” is patently false. Facts, he explains, “require a socially acceptable narrative to sustain, absorb, and circulate them,” a dynamic made especially clear in “Zionism’s war against the Palestinians . . . where Israeli propaganda seems to lead a life of its own.” Said urges us to consider how certain narratives become “socially acceptable.” Who, or what, gives “permission to narrate”?
Said argues that the interdiction on narrating the reality of Palestinian history is not a discrete speech act—Thou shalt not narrate!—but a diffuse “disciplinary communications apparatus” that functions to “overlook . . . most of the basic things that might present Israel in a bad light” and “punish . . . those who try to tell the truth.” Four decades later, the Palestinian poet Mohammed El-Kurd pointed out in the 2023 Edward Said Memorial Lecture at Princeton University that Palestinian narration remains strictly foreclosed. Even those rare Palestinians granted “permission to narrate,” including El-Kurd, inevitably find that their narratives are not really their own. They have always been framed in advance by Western media and Western institutions—framed selectively, in other words, by the same apparatus that extends permission in the first place.
Parshat Vayeshev comprises a suite of narratives about the “permission to narrate.” In the first of these stories, Joseph’s envious brothers stain his distinctive tunic with blood and use it to convince their father Jacob of the false narrative—the lie—that Joseph has been mauled to death by an animal. In another, Joseph, now a slave in Egypt, is sexually assaulted by his master’s wife. “She caught hold of his garment and said, ‘Lie with me!’ But he left his garment in her hand and got away,” the text explains. The woman then uses the abandoned garment to lend weight to the lie that Joseph had sexually assaulted her. “This one came to lie with me; but . . . when he heard me screaming at the top of my voice, he left his garment and got away,” she tells her servants. Given no opportunity to share his side of the story, Joseph is swiftly arrested and imprisoned.
In Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial, the protagonist Josef K. finds himself, like his biblical namesake, accused of a crime “without having done anything wrong.” Although K. constantly narrates his innocence, his narration always takes place on the terms of an obscure juridical system whose rules and purview elude his (and the reader’s) comprehension. In the penultimate chapter, a priest tells K. a parable about a man who stands “before the Law” and seeks admission into it, and the official doorkeeper who bars his passage. In a parody of rabbinic interpretive discourse, K. and the priest debate the story’s meaning, which concludes with the priest telling K. that he doesn’t have to take everything said by the doorkeeper, the parable’s figure of juridical authority, as “true,” but he does “have to consider it necessary.” On this view, the doorkeeper may very well be lying about the Law. But nevertheless, because he has so much power over the man—“to doubt his dignity is to doubt the Law itself”—his lies are yet efficacious. It is as if they were true. As K. complains, the priest’s gloss makes “lies . . . into a universal system.”
Said observes just this disarticulation of truth and necessity in his analysis of the MacBride Commission’s effective failure. That report contained a truth: Israel’s actions in Lebanon in 1982 were genocidal. If this truth had had the force of necessity, the report would have resulted in, minimally, the imposition of some penalty upon Israel and some redress for the victims. Instead, the entity with the power to decide (the US government, playing doorkeeper to the Palestinians “before the Law”) simply ignored the report and continued arming and funding Israel, as it does to this very day. What was necessary—what power made happen in the world—bore no relation to truth.
The biblical Joseph, too, seems trapped in a universe of lies. The garments he leaves behind in the course of the wrongs done to him are cunningly deployed by his abusers as evidence for narratives that are untrue, yet nevertheless as efficacious as if they were true. Joseph never gets to counter-narrate; necessity prevails over truth.
Tamar, Joseph’s niece, features in our parshah’s third story. After she is widowed twice over by Judah’s sons Er and Onan, Judah refuses to follow custom and marry her to his next son, Shelah, convinced that Tamar herself is somehow to blame for the deaths. Disgraced, Tamar disguises herself as a veiled prostitute and sleeps with Judah—remaining veiled so he does not recognize her—and then claims his “seal, cord, and staff ” as collateral for his promised payment. After Tamar conceives, Judah, still not realizing the truth, sentences her to death for “playing the harlot.” On the eve of her execution, Tamar sends Judah’s paraphernalia back to him with a message: “I am with child by the man to whom these belong.” Not until Judah “recognizes” them does he comprehend what has happened and repair the harm he has done to Tamar.
Tamar understands that truth without necessity cannot beget justice—and in this violently patriarchal milieu, women’s narratives cannot achieve that unity of truth and necessity. Only the literal patriarch himself can give the truth the force of necessity, by an act of “recognition”: It is Judah’s narration of the facts that matters, not Tamar’s. Her triumph is thus won on the terms set by the gendered system that oppresses her. Ultimately, she may be heroic, but she is not free; she has only figured out, to borrow a line from Judith Butler, “how to work that trap that [she] is in.”
El-Kurd, likewise caught in a trap as a Palestinian with “permission to narrate,” finds his own way to work it. “I prefer to focus my talks on reporting Zionist brutality rather than on addressing the challenges of representation, because these challenges inevitably pale in comparison with the repression and violence on the ground,” he explains. “But that very violence is precisely why we should sometimes address these predicaments of representation that ensnare advocates of Palestinian liberation in the Western world.”
El-Kurd uses his permission to narrate to expose that permission for what it actually is: a ruse of Western power, a function of the Zionist ideological apparatus committed, as Said argues, to the strict separation of truth and necessity. By turning the trap of Western recognition against itself, he aims to bring about different, freer conditions for Palestinians’ self-narration, conditions not achieved by either Joseph or Tamar in our parshah: in their own words, on their own terms, without permission, necessary and true.
Samuel P. Catlin is assistant professor of religious studies at Trinity College. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.
