The Wandering Who: A Study of Jewish Identity Politics (9 page)

Are Bard, Rosenberg and comrades aware of what could be seen as their Zionist role? Do they consciously act on behalf of an abstract tribal network, or a ‘Jewish conspiracy’? I do not think so. As I have said earlier, I do not believe in Jewish conspiracies: everything is done in the open. I also do not believe that so-called ‘progressive’ Jews are aware of the grand tribal project in which they participate so enthusiastically. Then again, most Israelis themselves are not fully aware of the larger scope of the Zionist project they serve, including the IDF soldiers manning the roadblocks in the Occupied Territories and even the pilots who drop bombs on densely-populated Gaza neighbourhoods. It may even be possible that the likes of Wolfowitz and Sharon and Netanyahu fail to understand their roles.

Zionism is so successful because it is a global project with no head and a lot of hands. It sets out a modern framework or even template for Jewish tribalism by incorporating all elements into a dynamic power, and transforms its opposition into a productive force.

Peace,
Shalom
and the Ghetto

Ariel Sharon, a man who spent the better part of his life killing the enemies of Israel, who made warmongering into an art form, suddenly changed his spots in June 2004. During what proved to be his very last days in power, Sharon became a
shalom
-lover, a Zionist dove
–
this master of blood politics suddenly introduced an initiative known as ‘unilateral disengagement’.

Shalom
is a rather confusing word, which doesn’t necessarily translate as ‘peace’. In its contemporary Hebrew sense, it refers to the conditions required to guarantee the security of the Jewish people in Israel. When official Israeli spokesmen refer to
shalom
, they somehow always end up talking about safety of one people only, the Jews.

Sharon, the old, tired soldier, realised that the best strategy for securing the future of the Jews-only state was to withdraw the relatively few Jewish settlers from the primarily Palestinian-populated area of Gaza and the northern West Bank, and to advocate a moderate version of Jewish national expansionism. Sharon understood that, although Israel has at its disposal all kinds of weaponry – conventional and nuclear, plus other WMDs – the Palestinians have but one: the demographic bomb. Indeed, Palestinians now make up the majority population between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

As expected, Sharon’s initiative was totally rejected by the hawks of his right-wing Likud Party. He didn’t waste any time, however. He left his political home of more than three decades in 2005 and formed Kadima (‘Forward’), a new party that advocated an immediate, unilateral, partial evacuation of the Occupied Territories. Israeli voters saluted the old general at the polls in the 2006 election, in which Kadima came first. They had evidently concurred with Sharon’s ingenious political move, and the new party’s rivals disappeared, at least temporarily.

Liberal democracy fulfils its promise once the voters’ will is reflected in state affairs. The late Sharon had managed to pluck
the right strings, invoking Jewish nostalgic yearning for the ghetto. He promised to erect a monumental barrier that would keep the Palestinians out. Sharon understood Nordau’s genuine yearning for the
shtetl
better than any of his contemporaries. Zionism can be considered a rereading of the ghetto narrative in glamorous, positive terms. The ghetto, says Nordau, ‘was, for the Jew of the past, not a prison but a refuge … In the ghetto, the Jew had his own world; it was the sure refuge which had, for him, the spiritual and moral value of a parental home.’
⁴⁸

Sharon had grasped Nordau’s message of Jewish craving: Zionism is all about the abolition of the other, the re-creation of conditions in which Jews can celebrate their symptoms, in which they can love themselves for who they are – or, at least, who they
think
they are.

Sharon promised a barrier. Yet there was a serious dialectical chasm opening up. As much as Zionism promises to replace assimilation with a newly-made framework of detachment and isolation, it also promises to create an enlightened, humanist Jew who is entirely different from his Diaspora brethren. As much as Zionist Jews want to be protected by walls and by the nuclear deterrent, they also want to be ‘citizens of the world’. The Israeli, too, wants to fly cheaply with Easyjet, eat
hummus
in Edgware Road on Christmas Eve, and make it early enough to be the first at the Oxford Street sales on Boxing Day. In short, the Israeli wants the impossible. Not bad for such a young national identity!

Zionism as a movement can be described theoretically as a dialectical struggle between the tribal praxis that aims for insularity, and the universal promise of openness and tolerance. It is an ongoing debate between Jerusalem and Athens, that tries to promise both, but it is doomed to failure because tribalism and universalism are like oil and water, they don’t mix well. Jews who are subject to this schizophrenic ideology find themselves bouncing between two conflicting promises. As much as they insist on loving themselves for who they think they are, they hate
themselves for what they happen to be. Such circumstances may be seen as the ultimate tragedy, a metaphysical limbo; nevertheless, it can be a powerful position.

As it happened, Sharon didn’t make it to the polls. A stroke in 2005 left him in a permanent vegetative state, and Ehud Olmert took his place. A few weeks later, Olmert won the election, though not as easily as Sharon would have done. He formed a centrist national unity government with the Labour Party and created the necessary political atmosphere in which to implement Sharon’s unilateral agenda. But then the inevitable happened. As soon as there was a relatively minor incident involving Hizbullah on the Lebanese side of Israel’s northern border, Olmert – with the support of his
shalom
-seeking ‘centrist unity government’ – unleashed Israeli military might and flattened Lebanon’s infrastructure. It bears mentioning that Olmert’s aggression was actually the natural continuation of Sharon’s
shalom
initiative, the embodiment of the general’s ghetto philosophy. (The new Jewish ghetto, though, resembles a hostile fortress with enough nuclear firepower to turn the Middle East into dust.)

Once hostilities had commenced, the Israelis – who, just a few months earlier, were blessing Sharon for his ‘peace’ initiative – succumbed to the usual heroic spirit of flames and death. As soon as the war started, they rallied in support of their government, amongst them, of course, the intellectual left. Veteran Israeli peace activist and journalist Uri Avnery wrote: ‘When the government started this war, an impressive line-up of writers supported it. Amos Oz, A. B. Yehoshua and David Grossman, who regularly appear as a political trio, were united again in their support of the government and used all their considerable verbal talents to justify the war. They were not satisfied with that: some days after the beginning of the war, the three published a joint ad in the papers, expressing their enthusiastic backing for the operation.’
⁴⁹

The Israeli 2006 military campaign in Lebanon was not a great success – it was, in fact, a total disaster. The Israeli army failed. Hizbullah rockets rained down on northern Israel. Israeli cities north of Hadera turned into ghost towns. It didn’t take long before Oz, Yehoshua and Grossman changed their minds. Teased Avnery: ‘Some people are now pretending that this group was really against the war. To whit [
sic
]: some days before the end they published a second tripartite ad, this time calling for its termination. At the same time, Meretz and Peace Now [activist groups with which Oz is affiliated] also changed course. But not one of them apologised or showed remorse for their prior support for the killing and destruction. Their new position was: the war was indeed very good, but now the time has come to put an end to it.’
⁵⁰

Not only did the Israeli left change its mind, the entire Israeli public turned against its leadership: Olmert’s popularity dropped sharply. Labour Defence Minister Amir Peretz’s political career became a subject matter for historians only. IDF generals were mocked in the media.

Frequent changes of this sort in the mood of the Israeli public are another outcome of Zionist collective neurosis. Yet again, they love themselves for who they think they are, but nevertheless hate themselves for what they happen to be.

Chapter 9

Jewish Unconsciousness is the Discourse of the
Goyim

What Zionists think of themselves is not very interesting; far more intriguing is the duality referred to above, the chasm between who they think they are and what they actually are, between self-image and public image, consciousness and unconsciousness. Unconsciousness, says Lacan, is the ‘discourse of the other’, which is very much the male fear of impotence. Rather than the anxiety induced by the fear of being caught malfunctioning, it is the fear of being known as dysfunctional. The real terror here is the unbearable threat that the fiasco may become public knowledge.

At the time of the 2006 Lebanon war, the Israelis’ ‘discourse of the other’ encompassed CNN, Sky TV, BBC and the West in general. As the war proceeded, it began to appear as though resentment was mounting amongst those who were no longer willing to accept Israeli brutality. Indeed, this gulf between the confident Israeli self-image and the total contempt of the other is exactly where the neurosis of Yehoshua, Oz, Grossman and the majority of Israelis came into play.

Two and half years after its military flop in Lebanon, Israel found itself once again in the midst of a second disastrous war that it had launched. This was Operation Cast Lead (2008), a total war against the people of Gaza and their democratically-elected leadership, Hamas. Along the campaign, Israel attempted to implement the lesson of the 2006 war. I think, probably optimistically, that by then, somebody at the state
hasbara
bureau must have read Lacan. The Israelis would try to save themselves from fully grasping who they are and what they do by blocking out
every possible mirror. Consequently the IDF barred all foreign media from entering Gaza, in order to guarantee a propaganda success. It wasn’t just about barring
Goyim
from entering the battle zone, but about preventing Israelis and Zionist Jews around the world from seeing themselves through the gaze of the
Goyim
. It was a crude attempt to divert the discourse so that Jewish unconsciousness was kept intact.

As one might expect, this approach was completely counter-effective. While the Western media outlets were happy to obey Israel’s demand for media blackout, the Arab and Iranian news networks were committed to the principle of news coverage.

At one point during the war, Al-Jazeera and Iran’s Press TV became the only source of live feed from the battlefield. In Lacanian terms, not only had the truth of Israeli atrocities become the discourse of the
Goyim
, but it was directly fuelled and maintained by the ‘ultimate enemy’: the Israelis ended up seeing themselves through the gaze of Arabs, Iranians,
Muslims
. This must have been a painful experience.

Night after night we saw Israeli spokesmen denying the use of WMD, while behind their backs every foreign TV network projected live images of white phosphorus bursting over Gaza’s neighbourhoods. Humiliated and pulverised, Israelis saw their true nature exposed.

A Serious Man

The reading of Jewish unconsciousness as the discourse of the
Goyim
is key to understanding Jewish political activism, Jewish collectivism in general and tribal collective schizophrenia. ‘It doesn’t matter what the
goyim
say, but rather what the Jews do,’ is one of Ben-Gurion’s famous axioms; in practice, however, as far as the Jewish unconscious is concerned, what really matters is what the
Goyim
see and think, but are reluctant to say.

The Coen Brothers’ 2009 film
A Serious Man
explores this theme in a sharp, profound manner. A cinematic allegory of
Jewish cultural detachment,
A Serious Man
is a masterpiece that elaborates on the abnormalities of Jewish tribal existence. It does not explicitly touch upon issues related to Israel, Zionism, the occupation or anything directly linked to the Jewish state. Instead, it reflects on Jewish Diaspora life, Jewish segregation and the misery of operating within the Judeo-centric tribal template. It has much to say about Jewish alienation. At the same time,
A Serious Man
delivers a clear message regarding Israel and Zionism, for Israel is the Jewish state and, despite the Zionist promise to build a civilised nation, it functions as a Jewish ghetto, subject to all the symptoms of abnormality conveyed by the Coens.

Set in Minneapolis in 1967 – without a doubt a very significant year in Jewish history –
A Serious Man
tells the story of Larry, a Jewish physics professor and a family man. In just two hours, we watch as Larry’s life collapses. His disastrous existence is a glimpse into the tribally segregated society with which he is inherently associated.

Larry’s dream-life plays an important role in the film. In a dream, he meets his true nature, his fears, his desires and his unethical self. While in waking life Larry is a castrated, dysfunctional family man, in his dream he somehow overcomes his weaknesses. He makes love to his neighbour, a friendly, stoned woman; he brings his troubled brother to the river and fearlessly sends him to Canada in a canoe, giving him money (a bribe that had been given to Larry earlier) for a fresh start. Yet in the same dream, both he and his brother are punished immediately; his anti-Semitic neighbour hunts Larry with a rifle normally reserved for shooting animals. ‘Kill the Jew,’ the
Goy
orders his son. At this point, Larry wakes up.

In the dream, Larry is confronted with his guilt through his
Goy
neighbour. Rather than the fear of being unethical, it is the fear of being
caught out
as unethical that torments Larry. It is the ‘discourse of the other’ (the gun-toting neighbour) that introduces Larry unconsciously to a sense of guilt. I link this back to the case of Israel: it is not the idea of being unethical that torments Israelis and their supporters, but the idea of being ‘
caught out’
as such.

A Serious Man
opens with a quote after the medieval French rabbi and Biblical scholar Rashi: ‘Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you.’ Rashi’s eloquent words echo the
Book of Job
, which is generally considered an attempt to reconcile the existence of God with evil. Such an attempt was very common amongst Jews of all religious degrees after the Holocaust, as they repeatedly asked how, if God exists, could he permit Auschwitz to happen. To a certain extent, Larry asks his local rabbis a similar question: ‘What is
Hashem
[God] trying to tell me?’ The rabbis cannot offer any answer. Like the
Book of Job
and Rashi, they have nothing concrete to suggest other than ‘acceptance’. The rabbis are there to spin, to convey a pretence of reason. They are there to cover a black hole. They cannot reconcile God with evil in the world, nor can they explain Jewish suffering.

Interestingly, the Coens present an answer of their own, which has nothing to do with
Hashem
. For them, it is actually the abnormal culture inherent in the ‘Jewish ghetto’ mindset that is the root cause of Jewish suffering. While, in the film, it is the
Goy
neighbour who initially leads Larry to face his guilt through contempt, in reality it is the
goy
spectator who is being exposed to the secret Jewish inner life via Hollywood and the big screen. Thanks to the Coens, we are confronted with that which the Jews would prefer to disguise; to a certain extent, the filmmakers adopt the whistleblower role. They bring to light a cinematic interpretation of the Lacanian discourse of the other. The Coens’ Jewish tribal cinematic reality is the Jewish unconscious, of which Jews are far from being proud. Like Al-Jazeera and Press TV in Gaza, the Coens reveal Jewish ghetto malaise to an audience of millions. But they also tackle the notion of Jewish unconsciousness by the means of mirroring.