Seeing Things Clearly

How projecting past persecution onto Palestinians only perpetuates the war

Things I’ve been reading:

Rachel Shabi’s new book Off White: The Truth About Antisemitism is thoughtful, insightful and compassionate. I don’t wholly agree with all of the book, but I think it’s well worth engaging with. (Needless to say, there are many truths about antisemitism).

Lutz Fiedler’s Matzpen: A History of Israeli Dissidence is a terrific read. I can almost guarantee you will learn a lot.

Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism by Jonathan Judaken is also brilliant. It combines an introduction which reconceptualises the field, using Judeophobia as the umbrella term and anti-semitism (he makes a strong case for the hyphen) for the 1870-1945 period); chapters on each of Sartre, Arendt, Lyotard, Poliakov and more on their theories of Jews and anti-semitism; and a conclusion that considers forms of Judeophobia that have grown since 1945.

A must-read from +972 on the current situation in Northern Gaza.

I found this piece by Louis Fishman in Prospect really interesting, on the ongoing influence if Ottoman and Mandate structures in the contemporary Middle East.

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I want to address an underlying issue that I think has led many Israelis and diaspora Jews to support the war. I think it is based on a fundamental misunderstanding or misdiagnosis of the conflict, one that is rooted in historical trauma.

A primary argument frequently made by supporters of the war is that Israel has no choice, that it is faced, in Hamas and Hizbullah, with genocidal enemies who plan to kill not just every Israeli but every Jew. We, they say, are compelled to destroy them before they destroy us. We have no choice. You can see why this argument is so popular; if there if is no choice then there is no debate. If your military enemy is the epitome of evil, who aims to destroy you entirely, then there can be absolutely no compromise with them and there is no argument. To support this position Hamas has been described as genocidal, and October 7^th an attempt to simply kill as many Jews as possible. But this analysis misunderstands October 7^th and the Palestinian struggle more generally. And this misunderstanding did not begin with October 7^th – it is one that goes back decades and is probably constitutive of Israeli society.  The primary subject of the misunderstanding is Palestinian violence. Such violence may often be brutal, unethical and tactically unwise. But it is not genocidal. It does not aim to kill all Israelis, still less all Jews.

To return to the October 7^th attacks; It is clear from statements and interviews that Hamas leaders understood Al-Aqsa Flood primarily as a hostage-taking operation, and as a response to the siege of Gaza, the ongoing occupation of the West Bank and attempts to change the status quo at the Al Aqsa mosque.  Having seen the 2011 Gilad Shalit deal result in the freeing of around 1000 Palestinian prisoners, there was a belief in Hamas that if they were able to capture a much larger number of hostages, they would be able to free far more Palestinian prisoners, perhaps all of them, including high profile Fatah figures like Marwan Barghouti. It (wrongly) believed Israel would do almost anything to get its hostages back. Hamas also thought that a huge attack would be able to force an end to the long blockade of Gaza, and put Palestine back on the international agenda, after the ‘Abraham accords’ had pushed it far below the headlines. For sure, some harboured grandiose fantasies about conquest and restoring Palestine to its pre-1948 state, complete with all Palestinian refugees returning home. But most were more realistic – Hamas may be many objectionable things, but it is not irrational or blind to what it can credibly achieve.

On the day itself, Hamas’ actions were initially consistent with this aim, they used huge force to take control of the Erez border crossing, killing many soldiers in the process, and used explosives to blow up the Gazan fence in many locations. They were more successful than they had imagined, which led to many more militants, including those from other factions and unaffiliated individuals, entering Israel. This unexpected success led to a diverse set of responses. Some sought to carry out the plan, entering settlements and taking as many hostages as possible. In many such cases the attempt to take hostages en masse was carried out with extreme brutality, such as attacking or setting fire to safe rooms to force people out of them.  In other cases, militants went rogue, killing many civilians rather than trying to take them hostage. This happened in particular at the Nova festival, the site of the largest civilian death toll, and an event which Hamas leaders apparently did not expect or prepare for. Many militants there did not follow the plan of the leadership and shot large numbers of Israelis.  It is also the case that some Israelis were killed by the IDF as part of the ‘Hannibal doctrine’ – to prevent Israelis being taken hostage at all costs, even their death. This is tricky territory because it is the subject of some misinformation and conspiracy theories, and we don’t yet have a full picture, but it is clear that at least some Israelis killed on October 7^th died in this way, and more due to crossfire between militants and the IDF.

All of that is to say that October 7^th wasn’t a genocidal massacre or a pogrom. It was a cruel and brutal attack, but one that aimed to take hostages and exchange them for Palestinian prisoners. The 815 Israeli civilians killed that day were killed either during attempts to take them hostage; because of militants not following their leaders’ plan and shooting them; or due to battles between the Israeli army and the militants.  We can and should condemn Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad for their actions; killing civilians is a war crime, as is taking civilians hostage. Had they restricted their action to purely military targets and taking military hostages the situation would have been very different, and Israel would have received far less support for its subsequent war in Gaza. My point is that we can strongly condemn October 7^th without misunderstanding it. Killing civilians and taking civilians hostage was immoral and wildly irresponsible. Hamas treated Israeli and Palestinian life (and those of internationals killed on that day) as expendable, worth sacrificing in the cause of greater political goals. But it was not a massacre, or a continuation of the Holocaust. It was an act of political violence, one that its perpetrators clearly saw in anti-colonial terms, in the tradition of independence struggles from Ireland to Algeria to India. To see it as genocidal, as an attempt to simply kill as many Jews as possible, is not only wrong but also profoundly dangerous, as it paints any solution short of ‘totally destroying Hamas’ as a surrender to monsters.

We need to see what is really happening in all its precision, specificity and detail. Only then can we see what specific political responses are necessary. Instead, a substitution occurs, Nazis are substituted for Hamas, the Holocaust for acts of political violence. Israelis, alongside many of us, are looking at one thing and seeing another. In psychoanalysis this is called transference – the transfer of past feelings on to a new person or persons. Politically this is extremely dangerous and prevents the conflict from being solved or even alleviated.

None of this is new. The claim that Israel is facing enemies who are intent on genocide dates back to the 1960s, when Israel began to seriously reckon with the Holocaust. In the early period of statehood Israelis distanced themselves from Holocaust survivors (and often treated them badly), and in some radical cases from Jews in general, viewing themselves as a new and distinct Hebrew nation. This began to shift in the early 1960s following the capture of Adolf Eichmann and his subsequent trial (the process had its roots in the Kastner trial of 1954). The Holocaust started to be integrated into Israeli consciousness, and Israelis began to see themselves as Jews as much as new Hebrews. This created a new tendency to paint Arab violence in Jewish terms, as acts of antisemitism, and when the attacks (or threatened attacks) were sufficiently large, as attempted genocide. This new approach elided attempts by Palestinian refugees to return home, or to regain territory in Palestine as attempts to destroy the state of Israel and it elided attempts to destroy the state of Israel with attempts to murder all Jews. With this mindset, any Arab leader could be painted as a new Hitler, whether Gamel Abdel Nasser or Yasser Arafat.

After the 1967 war, Israeli propagandists dug up wartime statements by PLO founder and leader Ahmad Al-Shuqayri, where he was alleged to have called to ‘throw the Jews into the sea’. He hadn’t – he’d suggested that if the Palestinians were victorious Jews not born in Palestine would be ‘sent back to their countries of origin by boat’. He was pilloried for this by many Palestinian and Arab leaders, and spent years rowing back on his comments, and offering far more nuanced positions. His 1967 statement was stupid and detrimental to the Palestinian cause. But it wasn’t genocidal, he sought conquest and the restoration of pre-1948 Palestine, not the death of Jews.

Similar claims were made about the aims of Arab leaders in 1973, but by and large they sought not total conquest but instead to capture the territory laid down for a Palestinian state. In 1948 these were the areas assigned to the Palestinian Arabs in the Partition Plan, in 1973 they were territories captured by Israel in 1967. Even when, in their most maximalist fantasies, these leaders dreamed of destroying the Israeli state altogether, that was never synonymous with killing all Israelis, still less killing all Jews. The fantasy was to restore Palestine to its pre-1948 form and allow the Palestinian refugees to return. Many liberal Palestinian intellectuals clarified that Israeli Jews would be welcome to remain as citizens of such a restored Palestine with full rights, sometimes even as a national minority. (I recently saw the 1971 documentary Resistance, - Why? which depicts Palestinians in Lebanon teaching their children Hebrew in order to better interact with Israelis in a future liberated Palestine).  

The use of Nazi comparisons to (mis)understand Palestinians reached its apogee under the leadership of Menachem Begin between 1977 and 1983. Begin was the only Israeli leader to have spent part of WW2 in Europe, a prisoner in a Russian Gulag who reached Palestine in July 1942 and held a lifelong obsession with Nazis.  In justifying Israel’s bombing of a nuclear reactor in Iraq in 1981, he wrote that ‘A million and half children were poisoned by the Ziklon gas during the Holocaust. Now Israel's children were about to be poisoned by radioactivity. For two years we have lived in the shadow of the danger awaiting Israel from a nuclear reactor in Iraq. This would have been a new Holocaust.’ Before invading Lebanon in 1982 he stated that ‘the alternative to fighting is Treblinka, and we have resolved that there would be no Treblinkas’. On the bombing of Beirut in the same year Begin wrote ‘I feel as a prime minister empowered to instruct a valiant army facing “Berlin” where, amongst innocent civilians, Hitler and his henchmen hide in a bunker deep beneath the surface.’ With such comparisons frequently being made there was almost no military activities that could not be justified, and no criticism of Israel that could not be branded as appeasement or antisemitism. And diaspora Jews, being more vulnerable, and in some cases living much closer to the original sites of the Holocaust, were and are even more susceptible to this projection.

Once we appreciate the longstanding tendency to project the shadow of Nazism onto Palestinians then the underlying misunderstanding becomes clear. The Nazis were obsessed with Jews. Their antipathy to Jews was what Saul Friedlander called ‘redemptive antisemitism’; they built much of their agenda on separating Jews from society and then attempting to destroy them altogether. They devoted vast energies to killing Jews even when it went against their other goals, such as fighting the allies. In contrast, Palestinians simply do not care about Jews.  They care about Palestine, about getting it back, about gaining rights for their people who live there and the ability to return there for those who are exiled from it. They would fight for these things against whoever was occupying and subjugating them. They do not, in the main, have a special animus against Jews or a special love for them. When they engage in violence against Israelis it is in the service of specific political goals, whether or not that violence is strategic or ethical. If we paid attention to what those goals are, rather than always assuming genocidal intent, we would be several steps closer to resolving the conflict.

In 1983, just a year after Begin’s invasion of Lebanon, Dan Diner wrote an article on this subject entitled ‘Israel and the Trauma of the Mass Extermination’. I suspect that Diner, now a respected historian of modern Germany and the Holocaust, holds slightly different views today but to me it remains deeply relevant and compelling.

The fundamental pattern in the perception of the conflict by the majority of Israeli Jews includes a denial of events and of the means and measures of the colonisation process, pushed through against the Arab-Palestinian population in order to establish a Jewish-national state — ultimately the denial of the existence of Palestinians as such. This denied Palestinian reality is replaced by interpretations connected with the Jews' terrible and real experiences from persecutions in the Diaspora to the attempted total annihilation. These interpretations function with respect to the perception of reality like a seal which hardens and closes out other realities. Thus, Israeli Jews, and Jews in general, shift the conflict with the Palestinians and with the Arab environment into interpretive models based on antisemitism and the Holocaust.

Diner writes with great sympathy about the Israeli condition and the way that individuals come to identify so strongly with Israel that any suggestion that Israel might no longer exist would imply that they, or Jews in general, would cease to exist too. Diner diagnoses a deep trauma in Israeli society over the pre-state Zionist movement’s failure to prevent the Holocaust and over the fact that the Yishuv was spared the same fate as European Jewry essentially by chance – because of the British victory at El Alamein in 1942. As a result, Palestinians take on the role of the Nazis that can be defeated, thus redeeming the original failure. Crucially, Diner argues that the Nazi/Arab substitution prevents the conflict from being solved:

the Palestine conflict becomes trans-historical and therefore part of an insoluble world opposition between Jews and non-Jews. Potential solutions to the very real Palestine conflict are considered useless from the start. Moreover, the assumption of a world opposition between Jews and non-Jews turns every attempt at compromise in the Palestinian conflict into a treacherous attack upon the very existence of Israeli Jews.

This element of Diner’s analysis seems particularly relevant for today. If Hamas are the new Nazis and October 7^th was an attempt to kill as many Jews as possible then no compromise is possible – Hamas must be totally destroyed, however many thousands of Palestinian civilians are killed in the process. This is the prevailing position within Israel and amidst large sections of diaspora Jewry too. But if we recognise that October 7^th was, in the eyes of its organisers, an act of anti-colonial violence that aimed to free Palestinian prisoners and put Palestine back on the agenda then alternative responses may become possible. There might be a genuine attempt to free the remaining living hostages through a prisoner/hostage exchange, one that has been on the table since October 8th - because Hamas have rational political goals. There might be an end to the war without a ‘total victory’ - because once we discard the Nazi projection it becomes clear that a total victory over the Palestinians is impossible. There might be scope for military withdrawal from Gaza, and from the West Bank too - if it was understood that continued occupation is the cause of violence not the remedy for it. There might be acceptance of a broad-based Palestinian unity government, one that includes some representatives of Hamas - if it was acknowledged that to agree a just and sustainable peace then you must talk to the people who have carried out horrific acts of violence, just as you have inflicted horrific violence on then.

The trauma of the Nazi Holocaust is deep rooted and pervasive amongst many Jews, and it should be heard, respected and honoured. We need regular opportunities to express that trauma and to mourn the victims of the Shoah. But this projection of its perpetrators onto Palestinians does not help up. On the contrary it only perpetuates the trauma; the attempt to defeat the ‘modern-day Nazis’ leads to colossal acts of violence, like those we are seeing in Gaza today. These in turn, create the seeds of revenge amongst Palestinians, who after all have plenty of trauma of their own, from the Nakba onwards. These future Palestinian acts of violence will then be seen as further ‘proof’ of the ongoing genocidal hatred of Jews and met by ever more brutal Israeli reprisals. The cycle can never stop. And because we cannot see clearly what is happening then we are enraged by the suggestion that Israel may be carrying out genocide in Gaza. We view this word solely through the prism of the Holocaust and immediately reject the claim: if there are no Einsaztgruppen, no deportations, no Treblinkas in Gaza how can people call this genocide? They must themselves be motivated by antisemitism. No, Gaza is not the Holocaust. But not everything short of the Holocaust is just or ethical. And an honest, precise look at what Israel has done in Gaza in the last year will demonstrate a vast campaign of destruction targeting an entire society.

I’m not saying that this suggested approach, of seeing the situation clearly without transference, is an immediate and total panacea. But it is a necessary step. It’s time to look clearly at ourselves and at Israel/Palestine. Ending the projection and focusing on what Palestinians actually do and seek is surely a prerequisite for moving forward.