On the agony of a people finding themselves on the side of executioners

(Reply to Amanda Gelenter, “Yes, all Jews: All Jews must kill Zionism within Judaism.” https://agelender.substack.com/)

This piece is a prose poem of hate and a call for war that is easily recognized as justified. It is a call for taking sides with the victims and their military representatives, whose strategic choices and stances can be questioned, though they are circumstantially quite constrained. My fear is less about the justice of this call than its good sense as strategy. As far as the Jewish state now being in a condition of moral bankruptcy, that is obvious to most of the world, and no one of humanity and reason can deny it. Israel now is no longer merely an enterprise of violent colonization that is tragic when considered from the standpoint of colonists whose concerns were not as wholly imaginary as their ideological figuration in a redemptive nationalist project was and is, to one that can be called a form of Nazism. Franco Berardi is perhaps right in calling this sadism a psychotic reaction. Thus this prose poem with its expression of reasons for hate, for hatred is a rational to being violated, and as Jews do not believe in a Christian forgiveness that cancels injustice by tolerating crimes against humanity, we must recognize that there is a time for hatred, and we deserve it if our actions are crimes. The Jewish world is as criminal as those Germans who tolerated their nation's murderous will to power and did and said nothing when they might have taken risks to do so, and much more so insofar as most Jews today will suffer no sanction whatsoever if they speak against the chorus they are expected to follow and take no risk other than some social discomfort and perhaps the loneliness that results from lost friendships that would entail a compromised moral integrity to preserve in the name of the comfort that is quite dear to most of them and normally surrounded by pleasures that are provided positive religious sanctions. Worse, most Jews now are cheerleaders for the genocide, at least in the minimally subtle manner of acclaiming something that is theoretically benign yet has it as obvious consequence, and in Israel often as blatantly as only characterized the worst extremes of drunken sadistic cruelty in wartime Germany. It is not only the Jewish equivalent of France's Algerian war and America's in Vietnam, but far worse, because the killing and dying are so visible and the approval of this so depraved that many people elsewhere must think Jews are indeed as Satanic as this writer's prose poem of blind rage suggests.

The recourse to an anti colonial nationalism that affirms territorial indigeneity in what amounts to a connection of blood to soil, in the perfectly coherent logic of the mirroring reactive opposition to the colonialist use of the redemptive utopian notion inherited from modern European nationalism, particularly in German speaking lands where it led to both fascism and Zionism in repudiation of the universality separated from ethnic and territorial notions of belonging promoted after the French revolution and opposed by conservative forces, and that became popular across the European and colonized world by storm when the power of European empires came into question after WW1, this is as unfortunate in some ways as it was and is understandable and valid in response to the barbaric violence of the colonists that anti-colonial nationalists were opposing.

I question not the writer's cause of reproach against Jews as much as whether this tactical approach to a political situation that now is one of war provoked by regional and global powers in competition, whose principal actor is the United States, is most likely to prove useful and salutary for the people most concerned. None of us has the answer to this question. It is for the Palestinian people to find the means of struggle that works best for them. Jews who want to stay in Palestine ought to consider that their non-Jewish neighbors and other claimaints to the territory are parties to any decision on that matter.

Israel's people and those who are friends of any of them in any way ought to ask them to seek peace and a future of integration, beyond all nationalism, that of the colonizer or colonized, and the militarism that is a feature of contemporary capitalism with its local national state entities and regional warring semi- and non-state powers. We must do this by demanding an end to Apartheid, an end to a Jewish state without necessarily prejudicing the question of any possible population transfer, like that the German speaking peoples of Eastern Europe were subject to after the defeat of the Nazi state, an eventuality that would cause more pain for more displaced people, a common feature of modern war and one to which Jews and Palestinians along with many people today are no strangers. Who has a natural right to a territory? What is the property of persons in places? The right of people not to be violently displaced, and the right not to be terrorized by colonial masters, are distinct questions not necessarily solved by reference to those questions and their obvious answers taken as given. Such questions will be decided, and a South Africa type solution where the white former settlers stay under conditions of equal liberty and integration should be on the table, with all the people presently there having some say. The idea that some people have a 'natural' right to the land is problematic. No one today with any sense is trying merely to reverse colonialism. That idea has rhetorical affective appeal referencing a sense of justice that rests on historical judgment. We don't justify the massacres of the native Americans by the Spanish and Anglo Americans but what practically is to be done now? Germany was defeated. The Israelis and their friends should welcome defeat as a possibiliity if that is what it takes. That takes the rare courage that the military kind can recognize with difficulty and rarely does without being forced. It is possible that Israel is not going to be defeated miliitary (by whom?), though Americans should demand our government end funding for its military. This would greatly weaken its power and could force a change. The question of the future of this land in terms of its legal residents is weighted by the urgent demands of claimants and the justice of claims is easy to see, though the question does remain to be decided, and Israel's war like its actions from the beginning have aimed to prevent this question from being asked, even at the price of annihilating all who might pose it. Here as elsewhere the similarities to the Nazi genocide are appalling enough (notwithstanding its own singularity, which it shares with all events). In a democratic state, the people residing there will decide its future. If it has one, it will be as a state that is no longer Jewish, doubtless with many residents who are. That that question, which Jews rightly can worry about, and anyone with an interest in the territory will eventually have to face, is less urgent than the matter of opposing everything responsible for continuing a situation that has been shown to the world to be intolerable is undeniable enough.

It's easy to cheer the army that resists a conqueror, no matter what they do in defense or desperation. Rulers and generals ought to act with prudence and decency; international law, which the US and Israel flaunt, prohibits war crimes. It is a criminal for a general or leader to commit a massacre to avenge one. Israel could have protected its own people without this war, which it wanted. Hamas may have wanted it also. They have defeated Israel in world opinion, which may lead to the end of the Jewish state, a victory for their people and cause at enormous cost to them. I am not pretending to offer them strategic advice, though I can wonder what my Palestinian friends might consider the best strategy and tactics. In practical politics one always wonders that.

The writer is of course correct in calling for a rejection of all forms of Zionism. The Jewish world does not merit surviving otherwise? Easily said, hard to deny. Can one affirm any form of Judaism or Jewishness in this context? Perhaps this war poses a greater existential question for Jews than did Auschwitz, which challenged our faith in world and God but not the morality of our existence as a people, in any sense more than a religious faith and perhaps any at all. This situation does.

The affecting polemics arise when questions demand answers while persisting as questions. This one hurts. It should.