The following are some of my reactions to the present situation. They are not really analysis or commentary. And let me be the first say, they are not original, intelligent, or wise reflections. Nor are they even coherent. They mix attempts at thought with what are just really expressions of emotion. I apologize for this: We probably need more thinking and less feeling at the moment.
By this morning many of us have received another nightmarish push notification from the New York Times as Israel demands the evacuation of 1.1 million Palestinians from Northern Gaza. This is a cruel and impossible demand and the beginning of the worst type of calamity many feared would come from this war. There seems little possibility that international pressure will cause the Israeli Defense Forces to abandon or modify this request after the United States offered its unconditional support for Israel. One can only hope that this is a temporary measure and not the de facto implementation of the Israeli far right’s longstanding demands for “population transfers,”—essentially another round of ethnic cleansing. But even if the goal is purely military, it seems likely there will be little left to return to in Northern Gaza at the end of this war.
My interpretation remains that Hamas fully intended to provoke the most terrible possible response from Israel: their hope seems to be that Israel will commit such a massive atrocity in response that it will lose international legitimacy. All the sympathy that Jews as a people and the support Israel as a project receive as a result of the Holocaust will be erased or at least badly damaged. Every antisemite in the world will be able to say, “See, they are just as bad, stop listening to them complain, maybe they have it coming.” This would be the beginning of the end for Israel. After all, despite its military prowess, if remains a small nation, dependent on the support of bigger powers for arms and ammunition. If that goes, it is a trap, a prison, just another forsaken stretch of sand not unlike Gaza.
As a young man, I thought I was an anarchist. As you grow older, you drop such beliefs as stupid and naïve, but recently I’ve felt this naivety and stupidity is fundamentally correct: states are evil, abstractions like “nation” are not really worth dying or killing over, and that the world would be a better place if the soldiers on both sides just shot their own generals and leaders. I want to say, “To hell with the whole lot of them.”
Strategy and tactics are not what’s really at issue here. At core of the worldviews in question is a belief in sheer murderousness. What both Hamas and the far right in Israel want this is to become is a war of annihilation and extermination. This is the fundamental vision of their nationalism of despair: races and peoples pitted against each other in interminable conflicts that can only be concluded with “final solutions.” Of course, a similar vision of permanent racial war underpinned Nazism and the Holocaust. I categorically refuse to be recruited to this conception of the world. And I will not be manipulated by emotional appeals and propaganda—by one side or the other—to participate in it.
I was walking down the street and the Lubavitchers came up to me and asked me if I was Jewish. I felt an urge to do the prayers with them and to “connect with my Judaism.” But then they said point blank, “Do you want to put on tefillin for Israel?” And that was the end of it. I gave them a dirty look and walked off. I don’t want to be involved in any way. I refuse to mix the spiritual with the obscenity of this war.
I share the profound fear and heartbreak my fellow Jews experience at witnessing a massacre of Jews and then the apparent indifference and even glee this can inspire in people. But I believe adopting the attitude at the core of extreme Zionism—that Gentiles hate Jews naturally and essentially, that they will always attempt to kill Jews or justify the killing of Jews, and that as a result Jews can only really count on each other—is to embrace despair and the premise of Nazism, if only in reverse: that Jews are not really part of the larger human community, that we are in some sense its implacable foes. The division of the world into intrinsically opposed hordes and swarms attacks the very notion of shared humanity. I refuse to indulge in the despair that accepts the logic of the enemies of mankind.
I had an argument with a friend: He insisted that Jews were only really safe in Israel among fellow Jews. I pointed out the absurdity of this since Jews were quite evidently not particularly safe in Israel. Then he shifted: “Well, at least if you died there, you’d die amongst your brothers.” This is what I mean about nationalism being a doctrine of despair: ultimately, when you pull back the layers, nationalism is about desiring death, death for others and death for yourself. A warm, comfortable death for you, and a violent, cold, and terrible death for the other guy. It choses being subsumed in a mass to avoid the terrible difficulty of remaining human that rises to the fore in tragic moments like this one. When I die, I hope it will be here in New York, the promised land, surrounded by my brothers: all the different peoples of the world.
It is a deep temptation in moments like this to run and accept the embrace of nationalism. It seems to provide a sense of warmth and solidarity that compensates for the cruelty of the world on display. And it seems to offer the political means to answer that cruelty in kind and provide the appearance of safety. But it is just another trap: nationalism is the source of this all to begin with. They hug you—”Brother, you’ve finally joined us!”—and then they hand you a rifle. I believe one must resist the temptation of what Orwell identified as the core of nationalism: “[T]he habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled ‘good’ or ‘bad” and “the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests.” Above all, I refuse to become an insect or look on others as insects.