Israel is both an obsession and an abstraction—as the Jewish people have been for much of Western history.
Israel is unusual in that it existed as an idea before it existed as a nation-state. Today, it is also unusual, even remarkable, for lacking internationally recognized borders—an indispensable marker of sovereignty—and for decades it has been depriving Palestinians in the occupied territories of political rights and freedom.
But the peculiar ways in which Israel has been historically viewed—and the ways in which, in the most recent Israel-Hamas war , it was depicted as an almost metaphysical evil—have deeper, and other, roots. There are no people in it. Any useful analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict requires engaging with an unresolved, frustratingly complex, grievously resilient struggle between two national movements, each with a justified claim to the land.
Once that effort is abandoned, a vacuum ensues. It is filled by the transformation of a country into a metaphor; by the rewriting or ignoring of history; by Manichean thinking; and by the conversion of language into a means of performance rather than a description of reality. L eftist theorists have a long tradition of turning the Jewish people into an abstraction.
But this is precisely the point, and the problem: As many racial-justice theorists have pointed out, transforming a people into a concept is an act of dehumanization. Hannah Arendt and Arthur Koestler were each, in their different ways, exemplars of this propensity. Both traveled to the pre-state Yishuv and then to Israel , both had extremely conflicted attitudes toward Zionism and Israel, both can be categorized as having been, at various times, Zionists and anti-Zionists.
Arendt was a rhapsodic supporter of the Yishuv, though she opposed partition, hated David Ben-Gurion, and was a fierce critic of the Zionist movement. Her fears that Israel would devolve into ethnic nationalism, and would find itself in constant conflict with its Arab neighbors, proved astute—painfully so. But she rejected the prism of either colonialism or imperialism.
Instead, she perceived that the early Zionists had created something new: History is not merely a series of repetitions. Yet Arendt also tended to view the new state through the catastrophic lens of German history. This mistaken identification led her to prophesize a series of disasters for Israel that were wide of the mark. And her understanding of Palestinian politics—an essential part of the equation—was virtually nil.
Arthur Koestler—fervent Communist, fervent anti-Communist—became enamored of militaristic Revisionist Zionism as a university student, and in he had a brief, unhappy stint at a Zionist commune in Palestine. In fact, his comrades expelled him. Like Arendt, Koestler transferred the traumatic European politics of the interwar period—especially its leftist politics—onto Israel.
This similarity does not mean that Israel is Nazi, nor even fascist. And yet it is a member of the same terrible family, the family of evil states. The evil that Illouz attributes to Israel is not banal, it cannot happen anywhere, and it has political and social roots that are deeply embedded in Israeli society. But alongside these analyses, we must also present a brief history of evil. We must present the instances that combine to create a great and horrific picture, a picture of Israeli evil in the territories, so as to stand up to those who deny the evil.
It is not the case of the individual — Sgt. Elor Azaria , for example, who is being tried for the death of a subdued Palestinian assailant in Hebron — but the conduct of the establishment and the occupation regime that proves the evil. In fact, the continuation of the occupation proves the evil.
Illouz, Sternhell and others provide debatable analyses on its origins, but whatever they are, it can no longer be denied. One case is like a thousand witnesses: the case of Bilal Kayed.
It takes two to Tango. But Kristof does not stop there. He further says following an Israeli human rights lawyer that Israel is to blame for the situation. There is no such thing, simply because Jerusalem is the capital of the State of Israel, the core of the Jewish people and its history, and has always been. There cannot be a Christian, let alone a Muslim Jerusalem without there first being a Jewish Jerusalem. True enough, Israel did not immediately try to end Hamas from the start, but that was because its main focus then was the PLO.
But, to state that Israel created Hamas is quite a bit too much. However, not according to the Anti-Zionist tautology. A bit more complicated. Israel is not occupying the Gaza Strip. It only attempts, feebly, to prevent even more weapons from arriving there. And every time Israel grabs more land or kills more children, it likewise makes peace less achievable. And it is Israel that deliberately tries to minimize civilian casualties, while Hamas intends to maximize them.
Shut down the Iron Dome? In a war, a proportional response is such that it can be enough to end the threat by the aggressor. It has nothing to do with equal casualties. This is not a soccer match. Civilian casualties, painful as they are, are the responsibility of the aggressor.
And the latter is Hamas, not Israel, which does all it can to prevent them. Hamas needs to stop committing war crimes. If no attacks are launched from Gaza to Israel, no Israeli response will follow. More importantly, the only path to make insoluble problems solvable is to understand the facts of the case, not to use facts just to accommodate the unfalsifiable view that Israel is wrong no matter what. Walter E.
It is also a battle to establish narratives — victims and aggressors, Davids and Goliaths, oppressors and oppressed. Language and the meaning given to basic concepts form a key part of this battle. It is easy for Jewish people to establish a claim to the territory known as Judea and Samaria.
The AP has deleted a tweet about the massacre at the Munich Olympics because it was unclear about who was responsible for the killings and referred to the attackers as guerrillas.
A new tweet will be sent shortly. In the late nineteenth century, the idea of returning to those lands shifted from a seemingly intangible ideal and wistful age-old expression of yearning for freedom, to a precise, secular, political movement. The Balfour Declaration, United Nations General Assembly Resolution II , and a succession of binding instruments of international law from the San Remo Resolution to the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, had all recognised that the Jews were a distinct people with an unbroken connection to the land and a right to reform their state in some part of that land.
Zionism therefore was the foundational movement of the modern state of Israel. As such, those determined to erase an autonomous Jewish presence from the Middle East have assessed that if they can succeed in depicting Zionism as something loathsome and unjust, the case for Israel can be dramatically undermined.
The contemporary campaign to distort the meaning of Zionism and to associate it with popular concepts of evil, has its origins for the most part in the rapid deterioration of Soviet-Israeli relations, which conditioned attitudes to Israel among the political left. Sign up for our weekly newsletter. Zionism was once celebrated by the left as an organic movement of national return and a model for national liberation and decolonisation movements throughout the world.
But as Israel charted its own course, emerged from its wars economically and militarily superior to the Arabs, and became more ambitious and assertive in how it conducted its security affairs, the support of the Soviet Union and of the international left entered a sharp decline, followed by a complete reversal.
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