It was beautifully orchestrated, not that there's any beauty in it. But there was a gruesome aesthetic to this, like the one of horror and snuff films. Similar to what the Mongols did in the Middle Ages. The Mongols used to create art installations of horror. Like, pyramids of skulls, mounds of severed limbs, etc. The Cossacks did similar things to the Jews during the Khmelnytsky Uprising in the 17th century. They created spectacles of horror that seared themselves into the collective memory of the victims.
They wanted this to be an image that will be spoken about for generations, and then no one would ever dare to stand up to them. What Hamas did on October 7 was not spontaneous. It was very carefully planned. They all had body cameras, because this was meant to become an installation of sorts. It wasn’t meant to be heroic; it was meant to get under our collective skin. Heroic is when you stand face-to-face with your enemy, you confront your nemesis. There are historic models of such bravery in Arab culture, like Saladin, for example, confronting the Crusaders, army to army, sword to sword, metal to metal. The October 7 atrocities were not based on this model, not at all.
The Left immediately created a contradiction. It had spent a lot of time during the coronavirus pandemic, and the George Floyd protests here, telling everyone that speech was violence, that the way you use words can create violence. And then immediately after October 7, they said, "No, actually violence is speech, what Hamas was doing here was a protest movement. This was a protest of an unjust, illegal occupation." And so they flipped the script. And they immediately plugged Israelis and Palestinians into their racial binaries of white and Black.
That fantasy of Jews as white is so interesting to me. Like, so fascinating. I mean, go walk in the street in Israel and tell us that they're white - it’s so funny. Put aside even the Yemeni Jews, the Moroccan Jews, the Persian Jews, who never claimed to be white. The Ashkenazim, the Ashkenazi Jews in Europe, were never considered to be white, they were the untouchables, almost like the Roma. The whole project of passing as white has actually cost the Jews a dear price. It enabled them to reach certain social heights. But it is now, in my opinion, one of the worst things that happened to the Jewish collective of America, that "whiteness," because kids who were raised very liberal and then became radical go to schools where whiteness is a slur. Whiteness is a curse word. Whiteness is demonized. And now they are white, suddenly, the little Yids from the shtetl; now they are white and therefore their existence is not valid. And they cannot support their historic ancestral homeland that their grandparents pined for and used to plant trees in, because it is considered a "white country." And they are told by their professors that they need to be against white people. The absurdity of it is striking. But it' also a dangerous fantasy. It is a dangerous fantasy, this whiteness business.
The result is many Jews rejecting Zionism and the Israeli state to prove they are Good Jews, Good Whites. This self-loathing, which a lot of American Jews believe to be an authentic Jewish trait, is actually a modern European Jewish trait. It is not a true Jewish trait. The ticket to enter polite society was (a) you stop looking like a Jew and (b) you stop speaking like a Jew. And the most important thing was that they had to internalize the antisemitic gaze of their generous hosts. So they had to start loathing all things Jewish. They had to laugh at the antisemitic jokes. And this self-loathing has become like a sacrifice, like the famous pound of flesh. It’s like you cut a piece of yourself. "A pound of flesh, to be by him cut off / Nearest the merchant’s heart." You basically cut out your Jewish heart, present it to your hosts and say, "I no longer see myself as Jewish. I see myself through your eyes, as an unwelcome guest who is responsible for all the evils and wars and oppression in the world."
When I watch the scenes that come out of Gaza, I don't just see death, I see the creation of the great Jew-haters of the future. Every death is the loss of an entire world, and yet everyone who remains alive will be a Jew-hater.
Hamas always told us that they are fundamentally a terror organization that is set on destroying Israel and getting the Jews out of Islamic lands. We refused to believe them. We preferred to keep thinking about them in terms that fit our own pragmatic worldview. We need to start believing them. The projection game must come to an end.
It's difficult to understand how Israel can be, again, this all-powerful Jewish force - as all-powerful as the Jews of Europe were all-powerful - and yet not be in any way able to prevent the violence perpetrated against it. So much of the rhetoric about Hamas is colonialist in the extreme: saying that Israel "fostered" Hamas, that Israel "supported" Hamas and so on, as if Hamas itself has no agency, as if they're just wounded, misunderstood boys.
"The sights you see will drive you mad" is a verse that keeps popping into my head. I also think about sections in the Talmud that describe the destruction of the first temple, like the puddle of boiling blood on the marble floor of the holy temple. We have plenty of cultural and literary precedents to what happened. Hamas read deep into the Jewish collective unconscious and utilized the deep Jewish memory, the deep Jewish collective trauma, against Jews.
The parable of Samson, which ends with Samson’s suicide, of course, and the line "He killed more in death than he ever killed in life." One of the most striking aspects of the Samson story is that Samson seems complicit in his own destruction. Delilah asks him: What is it that makes you so strong? Three times she asks him, and three times he doesn't answer, until he finally says, you know, I'm a Nazirite; all you have to do is cut my hair. Which she does. And it turns out … he was asking for it …
I do believe Hamas should have been eliminated decades ago. I think that unfortunately they were being propagated, facilitated, and frankly enabled by an Israeli government that now recognizes it was a grave, grave mistake.
No comments:
Post a Comment