From Leaving to Living in the Fractures: Refining Levantine Ethics

This article refines a Levantine ethics of complex implication under perpetrator conditions in Israel. Starting from a personal dilemma about the point at which staying becomes impossible, it revisits Levantine ethics and explores its horizon through a Mizrahi identity – a hybrid, marginal yet implicated position within Israeli power. In dialogue with calls to renounce the guilty “we” or to abandon continuity altogether, the article argues that binary demands for complete renunciation of the collective “we” or full belonging risk reproducing the very asymmetries they oppose. In doing so, they erase cracks, ambivalences and conflicting identifications that are central to complex implication. In place of such binaries, the article develops an ethics of fractures and thresholds, oriented to small enclaves of non-belonging and modest practices of resistance. Drawing on autoethnographic work on activism in decline, three circles of participation under perpetrator conditions are outlined – personal-biographical, institutional-professional and social-political – and illustrated through civic, professional and institutional practices. Hope is reframed not as an image of a “happy ending,” but as a difficult, long-term process of identity transformation. It is a practice of inhabiting contradictions through small acts of struggle that acknowledge perpetration, mourn broken ideals and keep open the possibility of leaving, while living in the fractures of a conflicted “we.”