'You Made Me Do It'

In response​ to the destruction of Gaza, it seems to be becoming almost impossible to lament more than one people at a time. When I signed Artists for Palestine’s statement last month, I looked for mention of the atrocities committed by Hamas against Israeli Jews on 7 October, and then decided to settle for the unambiguous condemnation of ‘every act of violence against civilians and every infringement of international law whoever perpetrates them’. At Independent Jewish Voices, the network of UK dissident Jews, of which I was one of the founding signatories in 2007, we opened our statement on the disaster being inflicted on Gaza by specifically mentioning the assault by Hamas. But why, I find myself asking, does it seem to be so hard for those who deplore the Israeli invasion of Gaza to mention Hamas by name or show any sympathy for the anguish of its victims? Why should grief for the death of Israeli Jews be seen to undermine the argument that the longstanding and increasingly wretched oppression of the Palestinian people is the key factor behind what unfolded, so brutally and inexcusably, on that day? And why is any attempt to understand the history of Hamas as part of an insurgency and resistance movement against occupation so easily characterised as dispensing with moral judgment? When António Guterres, the UN secretary-general, suggested that the events of 7 October needed to be placed against their historical and political backdrop, he was immediately accused of fuelling antisemitism across the world. A mere whiff of understanding, and he was condemned. (...)

Who suffers most? At moments over these past weeks, the struggle for a monopoly on suffering has usurped everything else. As many commentators have pointed out, more Jews were killed in a single day on 7 October than on any day since the Holocaust. But making this link risks turning the events of 7 October into a form of repetition. By association, every assault on the Jews becomes a holocaust, and the Jews revert to their condition as a stateless people. This is not entirely without reason: 7 October destroyed the myth that the Jews would only be safe inside the walls of a Jewish state. Nonetheless, we might ask, what is gained for the Jews – many of them citizens of a powerful military nation – in seeing themselves as the eternal victims of history? This is a point that has been repeatedly made, not just by Israel’s critics, or by those who refuse to take the measure of its dark pre-history, but, for decades past, by Israelis themselves. For the Israeli writer Shulamith Hareven in her 1986 article ‘Identity: Victim’, it was disastrous. All the creative moments of Jewish history, including its commitment to human righteousness and justice, were wiped out of Jewish collective memory in favour of a belligerence that allowed the Jews to dispossess the Palestinian people by claiming: ‘I am a victim, and they are not.’ ‘If my only identity is that of the victim,’ she writes, ‘I may (or so it seems) commit any atrocity.’ Instead, I suggest, if we loosen our grip on suffering, discard any claim to own it, then perhaps we can ask a different question: how much pain can anyone hold in their mind at once? Must my pain always be greater than yours for it to count?

A partial answer to my question might be found in an unlikely place. My final invidious comparison, which follows from the first two, turns not on the quantity of violence, but its origins in the nursery or playground, in the schoolboy claim that the other side – always and unfailingly – started it (which effectively turns all wars into wars of revenge and/or self-defence). Something truly disturbing is at work here, something that was central to the work of Leslie Sohn, chief psychiatrist at Broadmoor high-security psychiatric hospital throughout the second half of the 20th century. The key to all antisocial behaviour, he suggested to me in conversation, was perfectly illustrated by a little boy he once saw on the top deck of a bus who hit his baby brother on the head, and when told to stop by his mother, retorted – with no regard for truth – that his baby brother had started it. From playground to killing fields, violence always originates from somebody or somewhere else. ‘When peace comes, we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons,’ Golda Meir said, ‘but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons.’ ‘Peace will come,’ she went on, ‘when the Arabs love their children more than they hate us.’ The casual racism – love and hatred distributed so callously between the two peoples – is one thing; but it is the shedding of all responsibility for Israeli state violence by lodging it inside the hearts and minds of the enemy (‘You made me do it’) that I find most chilling.

How, then, to make a reckoning between the people whose most traumatic moment is the industrial genocide of the Jews in Nazi Germany, and those for whom the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in 1948 in order to create the state of Israel is where the injustice begins? It is, of course, a false choice. ‘There is,’ Edward Said wrote, ‘suffering and injustice enough for everyone.’ He went on: ‘We cannot coexist as two communities of detached and uncommunicatingly separate suffering.’ He was calling for mutual recognition after Oslo, whose failure he predicted. A new form of nationalism, ‘contrapuntal’ to use Said’s musical term, would avoid the trappings of flag-waving ethnic national identity by making room for the diverse peoples of the land. Speaking about his 2009 film about the Nakba, The Time that Remains, Elia Suleiman said his most fervent political wish was to see Palestinian self-determination and the raising of the Palestinian flag. But, as soon as he achieved that objective, with the freedom and dignity it would bring, his overriding desire would be to take the flag down.

by Jacqueline Rose, London Review of Books |  Read more:

Image: Palestinian flag via