Features » August 30, 2006
Lets be Realists, Let?s Demand the Impossible! (cont’d)
A man walks down the street after an Israeli airstike in Tyre.
Arthur Koestler, the great anti-Communist convert proposed a profound insight: “If power corrupts, the reverse is also true; persecution corrupts the victims, though perhaps in subtler and more tragic ways.” Cécile Winter recently proposed along these lines a nice mental experiment: Imagine the state of Israel, as it has developed over the last half century, without the history of Jewish suffering as a rationale for its policies. It would be a standard story of colonization. So why should we, as Alain Badiou proposes, abstract the Holocaust from our judgments about Israel’s actions toward Palestinians? Not because one can compare the two, but precisely because the Holocaust was an incomparably worse crime. It is those who evoke the Holocaust who effectively manipulate it, making it an instrument for today’s political uses. The very need to evoke the Holocaust in defense of Israel’s actions implies that its crimes are so horrible that only the absolute trump-card of the Holocaust can redeem them.
Recall the joke evoked by Freud in order to render the strange logic of dreams: (1) I never borrowed a kettle from you; (2) I returned it to you unbroken; (3) the kettle was already broken when I got it from you. Such an enumeration of inconsistent arguments confirms what it hopes to deny—that I returned to you a broken kettle. Doesn’t the same inconsistency characterize the way radical Islamists respond to the Holocaust? (1) The Holocaust did not happen. (2) It did happen, but the Jews deserved it. (3) The Jews did not deserve it, but they themselves lost the right to complain by doing to Palestinians what the Nazis did to them. These conflicting positions are reflected in the views of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who recently questioned the historical reality of the Holocaust while implying that guilt for complicity in the Nazi genocide had led European countries to support Israel:
Some European countries insist on saying that Hitler killed millions of innocent Jews in furnaces, and they insist on it to the extent that if anyone proves something contrary to that, they condemn that person and throw them in jail. … Although we don’t accept this claim, if we suppose it is true, our question for the Europeans is: Is the killing of innocent Jewish people by Hitler the reason for their support to the occupiers of Jerusalem? … If the Europeans are honest they should give some of their provinces in Europe, like in Germany, Austria or other countries, to the Zionists, and the Zionists can establish their state in Europe. You offer part of Europe, and we will support it.
This statement mixes the most disgusting insinuations with a correct insight. The disgusting part is, of course, Holocaust denial or, even more disgusting, the claim that Jews deserved it (“we don’t accept this claim”: Which one? That Hitler killed million of Jews or that the Jews were innocent and did not deserve to be killed?). What is correct, though, is the reminder of European hypocrisy: Europe effectively paid for its own guilt with another people’s land. So when Ariel Sharon’s spokesman Raanan Gissin said in response, “Just to remind Mr. Ahmadinejad, we’ve been here long before his ancestors were here. Therefore, we have a birthright to be here in the land of our forefathers and to live here,” he evoked a historical right, which, if applied universally, would lead to wholesale slaughter. That is to say, can one imagine a world in which ethnic groups would constantly “remind” their neighbors that “we’ve been here before you” (even if this means more than a thousand years ago), and use this fact to justify seizing their neighbor’s land?
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The big mystery apropos of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is: Why does it persist for so long when everybody knows the only viable solution?—the withdrawal of the Israelis from the West Bank and Gaza, the establishment of a Palestinian state, as well as some kind of a compromise concerning Jerusalem. There is effectively something of a neurotic symptom in the Middle East conflict—everyone sees the way to get rid of the obstacle, and yet, nonetheless, no one wants to remove it, as if there is some kind of pathological libidinal profit gained by persisting in the deadlock.
This is why the Middle East crisis is such a sensitive point for the pragmatic politics that aims to gradually resolve problems in a realistic mode. In this case, the true utopia is precisely that such a “realistic” approach will never work: The only “realistic” solution is the “big” one, to solve the problem at its roots. Here, then, the old motto from 1968 applies: Soyons réalistes, demandons l’impossible! Only a radical gesture that has to appear “impossible” within the existing coordinates will realistically do the job. So, perhaps, the solution “everybody knows” as the only viable one—the withdrawal of the Israelis, the establishment of a Palestinian state, etc.—nonetheless will not do, and one has to change the entire frame and propose a one-state-solution where everyone has equal rights.
In the last days of July, President Bush himself admitted the need for a more substantial approach, claiming that all the partial truces and agreements didn’t work because they ignored the true cause of the troubles—which for him, of course, is the terrorist states and organizations trying to halt the progress of democracy, not the Palestinian problem. Until now, the United States vehemently rejected the leftist mantra that “we should fight not only terrorism, but also its deeper causes,” dismissing it as the same “soft” attitude as the liberal reminder that one should fight not only crime but also its deeper social causes. Now, all of a sudden, Bush adopted the language of the “war on causes,” rejecting an immediate ceasefire and advocating a solution that would bring a just and lasting peace—to which one should reply: OK, but shouldn’t we go to the end here and address the true problem, the Israeli occupation?
The underlying problem is that not only do Arabs refuse to accept the existence of Israel—Israelis themselves also do not accept the Palestinian presence on the West Bank. Recall, again, Bertolt Brecht’s pun apropos of the East Berlin workers’ uprising in July 1953: “The Party is not satisfied with its people, so it will replace them with a new people more supportive of its politics.” Is not something homologous discernible today in the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians? The Israeli state is not satisfied with the people on the West Bank and in Gaza, so it considers the option of replacing them with another people. That, precisely, some among the Jews, the exemplary victims, are now considering a radical “ethnic cleansing” (the “transfer”—a perfect Orwellian misnomer—of the Palestinians from the West Bank) is the ultimate paradox demanding closer consideration.
If ever there was a passionate attachment to the lost object, a refusal to come to terms with its loss, it is the Jewish attachment to their land and Jerusalem. And aren’t the present troubles the supreme proof of the catastrophic consequences of such a radical fidelity, when it is taken literally? In the last 2,000 years, when Jews were fundamentally a nation without land, living permanently in exile, their reference to Jerusalem was, at root, a prohibition against “painting an image of home,” against feeling at home anywhere on earth. However, with the process of returning to Palestine, the metaphysical Other Place was directly identified with a determinate place on earth. When Jews lost their land and elevated it into the mythical lost object, “Jerusalem” became much more than a piece of land: It became a metaphor for the coming of the Messiah, for a metaphysical home, for the end of the wandering which characterizes human existence. The phenomenon is well-known: After an object is lost, it turns into a stand-in for much more, for all that we miss in our terrestrial lives. When a 1,000-year-old dream is finally close to realization, such a realization HAS to turn into a nightmare.
So what would be the truly radical ethico-political act today in the Middle East? For both Israelis and Arabs, it would be to renounce the (political) control of Jerusalem—that is, to endorse the transformation of the Old Town of Jerusalem into an extra-state place of religious worship controlled (temporarily) by some neutral international force. What both sides should accept is that, by renouncing the political control of Jerusalem, they are effectively renouncing nothing—they are gaining the elevation of Jerusalem into a genuinely sacred site. What they would lose is only what already deserves to be lost: the reduction of religion to a stake in political power plays.
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