The Wandering Who: A Study of Jewish Identity Politics (13 page)

There is something Friedman didn’t tell his listeners in the 1970s: he himself probably did not realise the full meaning of his economic model. He did not realise that the adoption of his philosophy by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher would eventually bring the West to its knees. He did not realise that it was his own advocacy of hard capitalism that would lead Western continents to poverty and deprivation. He perhaps did not realise, back in the 1970s, that it was his model that would eventually eliminate productivity, and every positive aspect of the welfare state. Milton Friedman did not realise, at that time, that a service economy that had suited some ethnic minorities for two millennia wouldn’t necessarily be successful once adopted into a macro model. As Friedman had gathered, throughout their history Jews and other ethnic minorities were very effective operating a service economy within competitive and productive
markets. However, Jews and other ethnic or religious minorities did well because others were there to work around them. The transformation of the West into a service economy driven by relentless greed, a process that followed Friedman’s economic precepts, is now proving to be a disaster. It means poverty and global depression. It is translated into alienation from labour and productivity.

Friedman may have been correct when he predicted that governmental intervention may lead to anti-Semitism, yet he probably failed to realise that it was largely his own intellectual heritage that would be responsible for the current financial disaster. It is, in fact, his own economic model and prophecy that could introduce Jews to far more suffering.

Chapter 15

Swindler’s List

The following verse, from
Deuteronomy
6:10-12, is a part of an oration made by Moses to his people while on their way to the ‘Promised Land’:

‘Then when the Lord your God brings you to the land he promised your ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to give you – a land with large, fine cities you did not build, houses filled with choice things you did not accumulate, hewn out cisterns you did not dig, and vineyards and olive groves you did not plant – and you eat your fill, be careful not to forget the Lord who brought you out of Egypt, that place of slavery.’

The Judaic God, as portrayed by Moses in the above passage, is an evil deity, who leads his people to plunder, robbery and theft. Yet there are many ways to deal with this negative image of the Almighty. At the literary level, one can argue that the given verses are no more than just three isolated lines in a lengthy text that is well-meaning and offers some fundamental universal thoughts. At the contextual level, it may be suggested that it wasn’t actually God speaking to the Chosen People, but Moses himself, who failed to deliver the true divine message – in other words, Moses may have got it wrong, or even made it up. There are many other ways to save the Judaic God and Judaism from being the
logos
behind contemporary Israeli plunder, but it is not so easy to save the Israelis from being presented as robbers and pillagers.

Moses, his contemporaries and their current followers were and are excited about the possibilities that awaited them in the Land of Milk and Honey. Israel, the Jewish State, has been
following Moses’ call. The ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people in 1948, and the constant and total abuse of the Palestinian people since then, makes
Deuteronomy
6:10–12 look like a prophecy fulfilled.

For more than sixty years, the Biblical call for theft has been put into legal
praxis
. The Israeli looting of Palestinian cities, homes, fields and wells has found its way into Israel’s legal system: by 1950-51, Israeli legislators had already approved the ‘Absentee Property Law’, a racially-orientated law preventing Palestinians from returning to their lands, cities and villages, and allowing the new Israelites to live in houses and cities they ‘did not build’.

The never-ending theft of Palestine in the name of the Jewish people is part of a spiritual, ideological, cultural and practical continuum between the Bible, Zionist ideology and the State of Israel (along with its overseas supporters). Israel and Zionism, both successful political systems, have instituted the plunder promised by the Hebrew God in the Judaic holy scriptures.

But this continuum goes further than just theft – in reviewing the following Biblical passages, recall the devastating images of Gazans being bombed in a UN shelter at the time of the IDF’s Operation Cast Lead (Dec-Jan 2008-2009):

‘You will chase your enemies, and they shall fall by the sword before you. Five of you shall chase a hundred, and a hundred of you shall put ten thousand to flight; your enemies shall fall by the sword before you.’
Leviticus
,
26:7–8

‘When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations … you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy.’
Deuteronomy 7:1–2

‘Do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy
them … as the Lord your God has commanded you …’
Deuteronomy 20:16

There is no doubt amongst Biblical scholars that the Hebrew Bible contains some highly-charged, unethical suggestions, some of which are no less than calls for genocide. The Catholic theologian Raymund Schwager found 600 passages of explicit violence in the Old Testament, along with 1000 descriptive verses of God’s own violent punishments and 100 passages where God expressly commands others to kill. Violence is one of the most frequently mentioned activities in the Hebrew Bible.

Secular Israelis do not follow Judaic law, yet they somehow collectively interpret their Jewish identity as a Biblical mission, which perhaps sheds some light on the IDF massacres in Gaza and Lebanon in the last few years. The IDF used lethal methods, such as cluster bombs and white phosphorus, against civilians as though its main objective was to ‘destroy’ while showing ‘no mercy’ whatsoever. It seems as though the Israeli military, in erasing northern Gaza in January 2009, were following
Deuteronomy
20:16 – they did indeed ‘not leave alive anything that breathe[d]’. Yet
why
should a secular commander follow
Deuteronomy
verses or any other Biblical text?

Though most Jews do not follow the Bible, and many are even ignorant of its content, the lethal spirit of the scriptures has infused the essence of modern Jewish political discourse. Those who disagree with such a generalisation may invoke the Bund and its ‘progressive’, secular, ‘ethical’ and cosmopolitan heritage, but a quick glance at the Bund’s heritage reveals that it is not fundamentally different from Zionism. Bundists believe that instead of robbing Palestinians, Jews should all unite and appropriate from the wealthy classes, the strong, in the name of working-class revolution. Here is the Bund’s call for action, taken from its anthem, ‘The Vow’:

We swear our stalwart hate persists,

Of those who rob and kill the poor:

The Tsar, the masters, capitalists.

Our vengeance will be swift and sure.

So swear together to live or die!

On the face of it, confiscating the homes and wealth of the rich is regarded as an ethical act, at least within Bundist discourse – possessing more is a crime.

As a young man, I myself took part in some Jewish righteous parades, ready to grab my sword and join the hunt for a Tsar, a capitalist or any other enemy who might cross my way. But then the inevitable happened: I grew up. I realised that such vengeance toward an entire class of wealthy
goyim
is no more than an extension of God’s exhortations via Moses in
Deuteronomy
.

As we can see, robbery and hatred is imbued in Jewish modern political ideology on both the left and the right. One must agree that, at least from an ethical point of view, theft cannot be the way forward, whether from Palestinians, Iraqis or even the Tsar himself
⁷²
. Theft involves a categorical dismissal of the other, even when it is based on an inherent self-righteousness.

As far as unethical practice is concerned, the difference between Judaism and contemporary Jewish nationalism can be illustrated as follows: while the Judaic Biblical context is filled with references to violent deeds, usually committed in the name of God, within the modern Jewish national and political context Jews kill and rob in their own name, in the name of self-determination, ‘working class politics’, ‘Jewish suffering’ and national aspirations. Here is the ultimate success of the Jewish national revolution: it taught the Jews to believe in themselves. ‘The Israeli’ robs in the name of ‘home-coming’, the progressive Jew in the name of ‘Marx’, and the moral interventionist murders in the name of ‘democracy’.

Historicity & Factuality vs. Fantasy & Phantasm

Chapter 16

Trauma Queen

A few years back, an American Jewish feminist academic sent me a request for an interview. I love interviews – they save me from having to go to shrinks. The professor presented herself as a ‘gender scholar’, another postmodernist discipline that fails to inspire my intellect. However, I was curious to see what a person who happens to be academically qualified in being a woman might come up with.

A few days later, a questionnaire appeared in my email inbox. The professor had loaded me with queries regarding my military experience and my ‘post-traumatic’ state. Evidently she was convinced that I was a case of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (Post-TSD). I admit this took me by surprise – I have never spoken to anyone about my ‘post-traumatic’ symptoms – for the very good reason that, until that point in time, I had never been aware of myself as suffering any traumatic disorders whatsoever.

I was intrigued by her approach. Apparently she was comparing military veterans’ Post-TSD cases with traumatised female rape victims. At the same time, I wondered how she had managed to identify me as a suitable candidate for her research. I then realised that her perception of me as traumatised was probably the outcome of her encounter with my first novel,
A Guide to the Perplexed
.

In that book, I describe the protagonist Günter Wunker’s wartime experience. In the midst of battle, Günter is shattered by fear, and finds a shelter behind a rock. Eventually he shoots his own leg in a chaotic attack. I remember being thrilled when writing those lines – it all sounded close to home. Throughout my life I have watched many war films and read many war
books. I had been close enough to a battlefield myself, and had thirstily interviewed many soldiers, but I have never been in battle. When my time came to serve my country and offer my life on the Jewish altar, I caved in; I became more and more attached to my different organs, especially to the ones that stick out.

Obviously, then, Günter’s battlefield experience was
fictional
. It had nothing to do with my own personal experience of the military. I
invented
it all. This is what fiction writers do. Yet that one specific scene must have seemed authentic to this American professor. She seemed to believe that Günter was a literary vehicle for my own story.

In confronting the question of my supposed military-induced trauma, it became clear to me that a ‘trauma’ and a
traumatic biographic event
are two distinct categories that are not necessarily associated. I found myself recollecting my army experience, along with the years that followed it, and found that there
was
one fright, which had taken me ages to overcome.

Until my early thirties, bombs would occasionally fall overhead in my dreams. While asleep I would run for my life across an endless, open field. I could clearly envisage Syrian Mig fighter jets, sometimes flying so low that the pilots’ faces were visible. The bombs were dropped in vast quantities. In my dreams I zigzagged on the ground, craning my head upward to watch for deadly iron. I would sprint, fall down, crawl, stand up, run, drop down, fall and run again. My nights saw me speeding through burning fields dodging shrapnel until, eventually, one of the bombs would plunge onto my head, and I would awaken from the blaze in one piece though covered in cold sweat. The nightmares faded soon after I left Israel; I didn’t experience another one for a very long time.

However, it is important to note that, as far as my biography is concerned, I have never
been
subject to an air raid. Not one single enemy plane has ever chased me or bombarded me. My bomb dreams were not a reaction to any real, objective event,
quite the opposite, in fact: they were probably a reaction to a
non-event
.

Unless these dreams can be interpreted as resulting from fear of impotence or some other anxiety over libidinal regression, I can guess where and how their seeds were planted. Once, during the 1982 war in Lebanon, as part of a convoy to the
Chouf
Mountains, we were ordered to jump out of the safari trucks in what was assumed to be an air raid alert. As a bunch of clueless soldiers, we knew very little about air raids; we copied the combatants around us and dug ourselves into an open field, looking for shelter and praying to God. The Syrian planes never made it to our convoy, in the end, but the unresolved terror stayed in my mind for a long time. It formulated into an imaginary discourse saturated with symbolism, traumatic implications and a sweaty outcome.

This fright perhaps found its way into my fiction. When conveying Günter’s horror I relived this fear that was self-constructed, a product of my own psyche. I merely amplified the scene.

The American scholar who mistakenly interpreted Günter’s horror as an expression of a biographical, personal trauma opened my eyes to the nature of trauma itself. I became somehow suspicious of so-called ‘traumatised people’, and even more suspicious of ‘traumatised nations’. I realised that being in a state of a trauma doesn’t necessarily imply a ‘real’ catalyst of objective biographical experience. Biography is a form of imposition, the projection of a post-dated set of ideas, feeling and thoughts. It conveys the past we
want
to posses rather than the past we lived through. (My second novel,
My One and Only Love
, was, in fact, an attempted critique of the notion of personal biography and personal narrative. The plot is structured according to three parallel narratives, all referring to the same historical events but conveying completely different biographical accounts.)

Unlike many Post-TSD experts, I tend to dismiss the magical bond between trauma and biography. Trauma doesn’t necessarily imply a verifiable traumatic event. The fact that a few scholars base their analysis of Israeli identity on some sort of collective Jewish trauma doesn’t mean that Jews are indeed traumatised by their past. It is far more likely that they are traumatised by their imaginary future.

Pre-Traumatic Gas Syndrome

One of the most terrifying moments in Steven Spielberg’s
Schindler’s List
is, doubtless, the gas chamber sequence. Earlier in the film, rumours had been circulating to the effect that Jews are being gassed to death. Now, anxious women are sent naked to the showers in Auschwitz. We follow their death march; we are familiar with the Holocaust’s symbolic order, we all know what ‘showers’ stand for. We anticipate a homicidal Nazi crime. A moment later we are relieved, as they are, when instead of Zyklon B, water pours down onto their heads. The strength of the cinematic moment is down to the gulf between the pre-traumatic imaginary narrative and the reality onscreen. In other words, the trauma predates the traumatic event; the trauma itself shapes the reality.

I was raised amongst people my age who insisted upon being traumatised: the ‘third generation’ they call themselves. People like myself, who were born in the 1960s or later, way after the liberation of Auschwitz. People who claim to have been afflicted by events that neither they nor their parents had experienced. Isn’t that strange? As I revealed here, I myself was tormented by an air raid that never occurred. The difference is that I stopped short of blaming the Syrian air force for planting these air raid images in my dreams.

Pre-Traumatic Stress Syndrome (Pre-TSS) is a fundamental tenet of Jewish and Israeli culture. Young Israelis are transported to Auschwitz by different Zionist organisations for the purpose
of maturing into traumatised Jewish adults. Those who maintain these ‘educational’ trips know that trauma is a powerful fuel with which to maintain the Zionist narrative. Unfortunately, the Israeli youngsters implement the wrong lesson once they return and join the IDF. Rather than developing some empathetic feelings towards victims of oppression, i.e. the Palestinians, the tormented Isreali youth actually seem to mimic SS brutality. ‘Never Again’ they say, and then spread misery around them.

Back in 2006 Israeli Journalist Yair Sheleg managed to sketch an exemplary case of Pre-Traumatic Stress Syndrome.

‘It is hard to believe, but only 60 years after the Holocaust the Jewish people are once again in danger of being destroyed – at least in their own state, where 40 percent of the world’s Jews are concentrated. Evidence of the severity of the danger can be found not only in the explicit threats by Iran’s president, which are backed up by an arms program that would provide the means to carry them out. It can also be found in recent articles in the European press that discuss the possibility of Israel’s ‘disappearance’ as a reasonable ‘working assumption.’ Additional evidence regarding the threat level exists in the fact that not only is Israel the only country in the world that is threatened with destruction, it is also the only state whose right to exist is the focus of international polls, with many respondents answering negatively. That is an honour that not even Iran, North Korea and apartheid-era South Africa were ever granted.’
⁷³

Though it may be that a growing number of people want to see an end to Israel, no one in political or media circles is calling for the destruction of the Jews or the Israeli people. The well-established Judeo-centric tendency to interpret almost any political and ideological criticism as a declaration of impending Judeocide is a severe form of collective Pre-TSS.

Is Pre-TSS just another name for paranoia? I would argue no. People suffering from paranoia inspire our sympathy or pity. Paranoiacs are victims of their own symptoms. Sufferers of Pre-TSS, on the other hand, actually celebrate their symptoms at others’ expense. With paranoia we can determine clearly that the sufferer is trapped in a delusional world. However, those with Pre-TSS are supposedly healthy, they are on constant alert and seem to be very focused. Often we end up believing the Pre-TSS sufferer’s claims of being victimised by an imagined future crime, thus participating in someone else’s fantasy of destruction. In the case of Pre-TSS, we are the addressees as long as we remain silent. Once we raise our voices to point out that the imaginary future crime is yet to happen and actually may never happen, we immediately become part of the crime ourselves.

The general mood in Israel is expressed eloquently by the likes of Sheleg, and reflected in the catastrophic scenarios put forward by such parties as the American Jewish Committee, about Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Israel and its lobbies have been publicly fixated on the nuclear
Shoah
to come. This pathological obsession is strange considering the fact that Hezbollah managed to defeat the mighty IDF in Lebanon (2006) with only light weaponry and smart tactics. It also managed to panic Israeli society with nothing more than short-range Katyusha rockets. In fact, Israel’s enemies do not need to nuke the country – all they need do is send a message to the Jews of the world that Israel is anything but a shelter. In fact, this is what Arab and Islamic resistance is all about: a metaphysical message rather than a call for a Judeocide.

Interestingly enough, the fear of destruction set by the condition of the Pre-TSS is just another escape route from reality. Rather than facing any imminent danger posed by Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic resistance, Israel prefers to amplify a phantasmic trauma. The Israelis have failed to read the writing on the wall. Rather than looking in the mirror and spotting their
faults (which have matured into moral bankruptcy), they prefer to submit to the fantasy of nuclear Judeocide. Rather than thinking in ethical terms, they surrender to the shallowest materialist discourse solely centred on an illusionary theme, namely, the ‘destruction of the I’.

Projection and Pre-TSS

Following the 2
^nd
Lebanon war, a commander of an IDF rocket unit in Lebanon told
Ha’aretz
newspaper, ‘What we did was insane and monstrous, we covered entire towns in cluster bombs … the IDF fired around 1,800 cluster bombs, containing over 1.2 million cluster bomblets.’
⁷⁴

As no-one is actually voicing a call to throw the Israelis into the sea or to nuke them, Israel’s inclination to blame Muslims and Arabs for holding such murderous tendencies themselves must then be understood in terms of
projection
. The people who rained Lebanon in 2006 with more than a million cluster bombs and showered Gaza with white phosphorus (2008-9) are projecting their homicidal zeal onto their victims, and even onto their future victims. This dynamic can be easily explained. The more pain we inflict on others the more we become familiar with evil, aggression and brutality. The more cruel we are towards others, the more horrified we are by the possibility that the subjects of our brutality may also be as nasty as we are. Freud calls it projection. Otto Weininger refined it, ‘we hate in others, that which we don’t like in ourselves’. The dynamic of projection is amplified once the subject of our terror is hopeless and defenceless.

Israeli treatment of the Palestinians is a devastating example of the above. The more hopeless and defenseless the Palestinians are, the more vicious the Israeli becomes. And yet, the more vicious the Israeli is, the more he or she is horrified by ‘terror’. In reality, the Israelis are actually horrified by their own cruelty. It is the terror within that horrifies the most. The recent cold-blooded murder of nine peace activists, on the high seas, by Israeli Navy Seal commandos
⁷⁵
was a shocking exposure of that lethal dynamic. This astonishing attack was fuelled by an imaginary terror threat (pre-TSS). The viciousness of the Israeli commando was amplified by the innocent transparency of the Gaza fleet.

One may wonder whether there is an escape route out of this vicious circle? Is there any means to dismantle the phantasmic fear of the other being as brutal as I happen to be? I guess that ‘turn the other cheek’ is a valid way to defy the Old Testament’s ‘eye for an eye’. Turning the other cheek is commonly realised as a means to counter an aggressor. However, it maybe the only possible measure to dismantle the ‘terror within’, that aggression that brews inside us as we become vindictive. It can also be very effective in defusing our anger at an imaginary threat. We replace it with acceptance, we disarm ourselves. We give peace a chance.