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This is a brief and concise exploration of a complex subject. What goes on in people’s heads to allow for this insane behavior. Are all people like Arendt’s Eichmann? Nothing in their heads? Here are some rationales that may provide insights into Israel’s insanity and its role in shifting the global order; a shift to unprecedented cruelty and danger, of planned modes of humiliation, mutilation, terror affecting the world’s people.. Here is a summary of specific history: pariah people, the nation state, the holocaust, Jewish religious texts, Israel’s foundation myths.
First I quote this long statement from Enzo Traverso’s precise work on politics and philosophy in his book on the end of Jewish Modernity. He writes about pariah people in his chapter on Arendt.
“Arendt rediscovered the ‘hidden tradition’ of pariah Judaism .”The pages she devotes to the humanity of the pariah are among the finest in 20th century literature. Lacking a personal inheritance, the pariah attributes great importance to friendship. Excluded from the public sphere and deprived of rights, he finds a ray of light in the human warmth of his neighbours. Excluded from any form of friendship, he rediscovers humanity as a universal category transcending laws and political frontiers. Love, sensitivity, generosity, the sense of fraternity and solidarity, the absence of prejudice, Arendt emphasizes, are human qualities that in these dark times find a refuge among the pariahs, the proscribed and those without rights. Such a surplus of humanity, however, is simply a reaction to the lack of rights in her essay on Kafka….. The first references go back to the early 17th century…Arendt writes that this is an eminently political category… people who lack the right to have rights….this category was far wider, denoting a figure born of the European postwar crisis, when the collapse of the old multinational empires gave birth to a mosaic of fragile national states, heterogeneous and deeply unstable, Versaille ratified the ethnic purges begun during the Great War, decided on forced transfers of populations and traced frontiers that were often artificial…There were millions who had lost their legal status and national identity in the wake of the collapse of the old European order. These pariahs, Arendt explained, were treated like outlaws not because they had transgressed but because the law did not recognise them, condemning them thus to political invisibility and worldlessness as if they were superfluous individuals.” [1]
Israel’s status as a nation in 1948 was used to justify and rationalize Israel’s right to rebuff any assaults, to defend its borders, to disregard the UN Charter specifying that the right to self-defense is subject to the permission of the UNSC, the meeting of all requirements for negotiation before any war can be launched. Israel’s right to self-defense, as on October 7, is a reversion to talion law, to an “eye for an eye justice” , revenge, the throwing out of all advances in criminal law and consideration of the background of perpetrators. There has not been investigation of the circumstances of October 7: what orders were actually given by Hamas, who perpetrated the killing and was it by order or individual reactions, how many people were actually killed by Palestinians and how many by the IDF, Many of the crimes are in dispute such as reports about rape, beheading of children. Accurate investigation is quite possible given the technical expertise of Forensic Architecture under Eyal Weizman.
What is the influence of the Holocaust? There is the ahistorical claim that the Holocaust and antisemitism is a constant in Jewish history, that the Jewish Holocaust is the only or the worst genocide in history, the omission of many periods in Jewish history of living safely and cooperatively in various societies including Arab countries.
There is idealization of Jewish humanitarian and universal values, such as by Judith Butler who in her post-modern challenge to objectivity anda facts impugns the Goldstone Report. She states that Goldstone is possibly inventing law and that Hamas plausibly may have used people as human shields. She does not report that Goldstone found that Hamas did not use people as human shields but that Israel did use people as human shields.
Precision, objectivity, and fact finding are profoundly important. Otherwise – the distortions and misrepresentations open the door to insanity.
Another important rationale is the contribution from Judaic religion. Iisrael Shahak translates Talmudic texts showing that the Jewish God specified humane treatment only between Jews, not for Jewish treatment of non-Jews. [2] The Jewish God was cruel, demanding love, obedience, devotion to the extent that he ordered Abrham to kill his own son to show his devotion to God. The Christian God did not save his own son who cried “why hast thou abandoned me?”
The Israeli foundation myths idealize the heroism of Samson and of the suicidal sacrifices of Masada. Documentary filmmaker Avi Mograbi shows how these stories are taught to all Israeli children from toddlerhood through early adulthood.
These are some of the contributions to Israeli insanity. Another factor unexplored here is the spinelessness in the universities and governments of other countries.
On the more hopeful side, there are certainly millions of people worldwide who
protest, who perceive reality, and much superb research and investigation.
NOTES
[1] Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity, Pluto Press, 2013. P 65 ff
[2] Israel Shahak. Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years (1994).
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