English articles and translations of my Hebrew articles
Dear Readers,
Please see a new article of mine in the Times of Israel, about the dangers of Fundamentalism politics in Iran and in Israel.
Also, this will be my last blog post here. I will posting future texts at my Substack, and I invite you to subscribe to it.
Thank you for many years of reading and responding,
Hope to see you there,
Tomer
There is a recurring scene in history: on the brink of military confrontation, the weaker side invokes arguments of justice and humanity, while the stronger side feigns deafness. The arguments for justice are sound, worthy, and at times even eloquently formulated, yet they fail – not because the reasoning is flawed, but because those who wield power have already passed beyond a reality in which arguments matter.
Thucydides presents such a moment in the famous dialogue between the Athenians and the Melians in his monumental History of the Peloponnesian War. That war was fought between a league of city-states led by Athens and another led by Sparta. The Melians were a small people of Spartan origin who chose to remain neutral. Despite this, the Athenians decided to subdue them and, in 416 BCE, laid siege to the island of Melos, where they lived.
In their encounter with the Athenian delegation, the Melians promise that they pose no threat to Athens and have no intention of joining the war. They further explain that attacking neutral peoples would undermine the moral standing of Athens’s entire enterprise and remove any incentive for other cities to remain neutral. “We stand as as righteous men against aggressors,” they declare (tr. Robin Waterfield). But the Athenians refuse to listen. “when people stop to think,” they reply, “they see that justice is a consideration only between those who have an equal ability to coerce, while the strong do what they can and the weak concede them that right.”
“The strong do what they can and the weak concede them that right” is a classic formulation of what might be called the law of the jungle – which is no law at all, but a condition in which the strong rule, the weak are devoured, and principles such as justice or integrity become objects of ridicule. This outlook was not only dominant but entirely legitimate for millennia in relations between states: the strong ruled the weak within vast frameworks called empires, wars ended in conquests deemed wholly lawful, and winners “took all”: minerals, resources, land, people.
The desire to put an end to this state of affairs arose only after the First World War and matured after the Second. The United Nations Charter, signed in 1945, sought to end wars by stripping them of the legitimacy of their spoils: territorial conquest, it declared, is illegitimate, and the strong have no right to subject the weak to their will. Even wars themselves were to be conducted according to standards of justice – both in their causes and in their conduct. The “law of the jungle” was rejected and replaced with actual law: a system of international norms to which even the most powerful states were meant to be subject.
These norms are now unraveling, and one of the most disturbing aspects of this unraveling is the delight with which we receive it. A recent and striking example is the capture of the president of Venezuela by the United States. Nicolás Maduro was a base tyrant who ruled his country without legitimacy, and Venezuela may well benefit from his removal. Yet his capture violated several international conventions and lacks any legal justification under international law. Nevertheless, the operation was greeted with applause in wide circles – certainly judging by social media. I admit it: I too felt a thrill of excitement at the surprise, the audacity, and the impressive professionalism with which it was carried out.
There is genuine reason to fear such excitement. It emerges against the backdrop of a weary disgust with the constraining normative framework of ideals and laws. In this respect it strongly resembles forces that arose in a similar political climate a century ago, when communist movements on the left and fascist movements on the right called for the existing order – liberal parliamentary politics, seen as hesitant, slow, and impotent – to be torn to shreds.
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt describes the roots of fascism in a type of person who “feels tremendously superior to these “impractical” people who are forever entangled in ‘legal niceties’ and therefore stay outside the sphere of power which to him is the source of everything.” She depicts the mass enthusiasm for the “pronounced activism of totalitarian movements,” which exalted will and action at the expense of law and reason.
Indeed, fascism above all stressed the need for a decisive act of will to replace obedience to law. What we need, it argued, is not a system of fixed norms, but a great leader who will change the world by sheer force of will. Carl Schmitt, one of the most important political theorists of the fascist movements, insisted on the necessity of an “absolute decision, created out of nothingness” (tr. George Schwab). Such a decision, taken by a singular personality – a superhuman figure occupying a historically decisive role—is equivalent to true sovereignty: the capacity to rule absolutely, not through the consent of the masses or their parliamentary representatives, but through raw will, through naked power.
One must carefully distinguish between the fascism of that era and today’s populism. Still, it is hard to deny that we are once again feeling the sly temptation of decisive leadership. Here it is before us: a great leader, commanding the most powerful army in the world, “setting things straight” by cutting through stale principles and cumbersome bureaucratic procedures. Here he is: the towering personality who reshapes the world by sheer force of will, while we stand by in admiration.
Soon enough come the explanations: “that’s just the way things are,” power has always ruled, this is “the real world,” lofty talk of values and justice is at best hypocrisy and at worst an interest-driven cover for domination and oppression. These ostensibly hard-headed but in fact lazy excuses are supplied by radicals on both the right and the left. Yes, power has always been and will always remain a central component of reality. But the essence of culture is the departure from the jungle, and the entire history of politics consists of ongoing attempts to replace power with law.
At the end of The End of History and the Last Man – one of those famous books habitually derided by those who have’nt read them – Francis Fukuyama writes about the future challenges facing liberal democracy, the form of government humanity has recognized as unsurpassed. The problem, he argues, will arise precisely from its success:
Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.
The intoxicating admiration for the use of naked power may reveal that Fukuyama was right. Among the factors driving the current crisis of the liberal order are boredom and the need for struggle, as well as protest against order, against law, against peaceful, prosperous, respectable, bourgeois stability.
The question is not whether power has political significance – it certainly does, and always will – but whether we are willing to abandon the effort to restrain it. Surrendering to enthusiasm for arbitrary decision, for bold action free of “legal niceties,” is not sober realism but cultural fatigue. It is a sign of relinquishing the greatest achievement of our civilization: the recognition that even the strong must be held accountable.
International law and liberal norms are not merely constraints on power; they are the conditions for a world in which even the weak can live without constant fear. When we applaud those who violate them in the name of “the real world,” we forfeit the greatest privilege our culture has granted us: the ability to live in a reality where force is not the sum of all things.
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Protests against Israel began on U.S. and European campuses on October 8. We are now more than two weeks into the protests in Iran, more than a week since the regime began shooting demonstrators, and the campuses are silent.
This is not merely a matter of antisemitism, that is, no Jews, no news. Of course, certain people have a particular fixation on Jews and a particular desire to deny the legitimacy of Jewish collective life (or of Jewish life altogether). But I am convinced that the majority of campus protesters throughout the war were idealistic young people who genuinely sought to protest the killing of innocent civilians.
The reason they are not mobilizing now is the cognitive dissonance they experience between, on the one hand, the killing of innocents, and on the other, the fact that the regime carrying out these killings is non-Western.
Many of these students received their idealistic education in frameworks that portray the West – primarily Europe and the United States – as fundamentally problematic. The West is colonialist, racist, capitalist, phallogocentric. In certain circles today, the label “white” alone suffices to declare something morally suspect. These frameworks entirely ignore the atrocities produced by the non-Western world. Their focus is the denunciation of the West.
There are several reasons for this. First, the West is “us,” and self-critique is always considered more noble. Second, the West is hegemonic, and criticism of those in power is deemed more important than criticism of those beneath them – let alone of those perceived as oppressed. Third, criticism of non-Western actors can be construed as racism. Fourth, this very self-critique continues the ethos of critical self-examination upon which universities are founded (an ethos that is itself very Western and that underlies, for example, the scientific method).
Beyond all this – or beneath it – there is something else at work. I want to suggest that criticism of the West also arises from a deep discomfort with modernity as such: modernity understood as the transition from dense traditional communities to a society of autonomous individuals.
In sociological terms, this is the transition from community to society, from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft. It is the transformation from organic, clan-based existence to life in an open public sphere composed of autonomous individuals; from a world saturated with myth and religion to a disenchanted universe; to a society organized around individual freedom, meritocracy, and commerce.
This transition exacts a price from the individual. Marx called it “alienation.” Durkheim called it “anomie.” Max Weber, at the end of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, wrote of “mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance.” Of course, one need not accept these diagnoses uncritically, but I believe they contain a measure of truth.
I want to suggest that this is the crisis to which hatred of the West is responding. This does not mean that the response is serious or wise. On the contrary, it is often childish and destructive. In the Iranian context, it is worth recalling Michel Foucault, who in 1979 praised the revolution, spoke of a “spiritual politics” that Shi‘ite Islam was bringing into the world, and wrote enthusiastically about “the rejection, by an entire culture and an entire people, of modernization.” Well then, modernity was rejected, and we got the ayatollahs.
Students at universities in the United States and Europe have grown accustomed to viewing the West as oppressive, and they struggle to process a reality in which the oppressive regime is not Western at all – and in which the West as a whole (at the political level) supports the opponents of a non-Western regime and hopes for its downfall, precisely in order to free its subjects from tyranny and servitude. Yet for all the West’s failures, the democratic and liberal tradition—and resistance to power in the name of truth and freedom—remain among its foundations. Universities would do well to teach that, too.
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[I now have a Substack account, in which I will be posting articles and small notes in English:
https://substack.com/@tomerp ]
My new book, In God’s Image – How Western Civilization was Shaped by a Revolutionary Idea, is out today.
The book is an expansion of the successful Hebrew version coming out at NYU Press and tracing an intellectual and cultural history of the development of individualism, liberty, conscience, equality and secularity, all hinging on the biblical idea of the creation of all humans in the Image of God.
I examine the development of Human Rights, Abolition, the separation of religion and state, freedom of conscience, Jewish Emancipation, Atheism and the Liberal order, and make the case for a cultural understanding of history, focusing on ideas as agents of change and challenging the common scholarly emphasis on material conditions.
I also try to give an answer to that fascinating and uncomfortable question: Why the West?
The book has already been positively reviewed by Publishers Weekly and Library Journal, and has endorsements by Yuval Noah Harari, Deirdre McCloskey and Rabbi David Wolpe. A few days ago I talked about it with conservative pundit Jonah Goldberg on his podcast.
I hope you’ll take a look:
The oldest known records of slavery come from Mesopotamia some five thousand years ago. Then Egypt. Then China. Then the Bible of course, and then Greece and Rome. They continue for many centuries, presenting an ongoing, ubiquitous social institution, cultivated by humans everywhere, trophied by kings, excused by philosophers, meticulously documented by diligent clerks.
Enslaving other humans has been one of the most common and universal of human activities. Indeed most people in the ancient world would have struggled to imagine a human society without slaves, and hardly regarded slavery as an institution that could be separated from society or conceivably be abolished.
It is worth noting that even the nation that founded its national and religious identity on its exodus from slavery – the ancient Israelites of course – held slaves, and did not object in principle to the institute of slavery. The Greeks as well, being the first to introduce democratic principles and institutions to political life, did not reject slavery, and indeed found ample reasons to legitimize it.
Only with the rise of Christianity do we witness the first ever principled objection to slavery. Examining this historical ethical breakthrough will allow us to begin to understand the seminal part that is played by the idea of the creation of all humans in God’s image throughout the history of the West.
Significantly, while slavery in antiquity had certain social and economic logic, any society that enslaves humans needs to legitimize the abhorrent practice ethically. Humans, it seems, have a deep psychological need to justify the injustices that they inflict on other humans.
For the Israelites, it was fairly easy to justify slavery: their laws about slavery were divinely ordained. The Bible, while beginning with the proposition that all of humanity was created in the image of God, also tell of the reasons some are enslaved (the Curse of Ham, Genesis 9), and lays out laws for the regulation of slavery. These laws, among the earliest legal codes addressing the treatment of enslaved individuals, imposed rigorous ethical obligations on slave owners, making Israelite slavery more controlled and humane than any other of the ancient Near Eastern societies.
For these, as for any society that was not based on divine law, ethnicity often provided a basis for racial justifications for slavery. Such was the case with the Spartans, who enslaved the Helots, a name they used for different ethnic groups (Messenians and Laconians) whose members they enslaved for agricultural work and other tasks they considered beneath them.
The assumption was that enslaved ethnic groups were substantively destined for slavery: that their members were not free because they were different in some essential sense and inferior to their masters. This apparently logical resolution was consistent with the teleological disposition of the ancient world: the belief that everything had a function and a purpose, which it had to fulfill. Some people were simply born to be slaves
Teleology was of course the organizing principal of Aristotle’s philosophy, an authoritative voice not only in antiquity but throughout the Middle Ages. For Aristotle, slaves were “living tools” in the hands of their masters, while slavery itself was a natural essence with which one was born: “From the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule”, he wrote in his Politics, explaining how enslaved humans’ bodies physically differed from those of the free.
Of all Hellenistic thinkers, the Stoics were the most positive in their attitude towards the enslaved, though even they did not reject the institution outright. For them the body-soul dichotomy, central to Greek thought, made slavery tolerable. Since the soul, according to the Stoics, was the locus of true personhood, and since, in their view, the soul was eternally free, there was no way to truly enslave anybody. It was not so terrible, therefore, to enslave humans, as one could subjugate only their bodies.
The fundamental change in relation to the institution of slavery began with Christianity. With its transformation into a major, widespread religion, the idea that all humans were created in the image of God gained acceptance across the Mediterranean Basin and into Europe.
Thus when Constantine began Christianizing the Roman Empire at the dawn of the fourth century, imperial law was shaped by this principle. Eager to express Christian ideals in the legal code, the emperor instituted preliminary protections for such weak sections of society as children, peasants, prisoners, and, of course, slaves. Thus, for example, an edict proclaimed in 316 made it illegal to sear a mark on the face of a convict “because man is made in God’s image.”
The Church did not abolish slavery, and in fact there were many clergymen, as late as the 19th century, who supported slave ownership and used various theological arguments in an attempt to justify their positions. Yet as early as the period of the Church Fathers, in the third and fourth centuries CE, there were pioneering voices of principled opposition to slavery, predicated on the principle of the image of God.
Among them Gregory of Nyssa was the loudest and most explicit in his rejection of slavery. For Gregory the very attempt to buy or sell a human being was inherently absurd:
God said, let us make man in our image, after our likeness. If he is in the likeness of God, and rules the whole earth, and has been granted authority over everything on earth from God, who is his buyer, tell me? Who is his seller? To God alone belongs this power… But has the scrap of paper, and the written contract, and the counting out of obols deceived you into thinking yourself the master of the image of God? What folly! …Your origin is from the same ancestors, your life is of the same kind… Are not the two [slave and master] dust after death? Is there not one judgement for them? A common Kingdom, and a common Gehenna? (Homilies IV, Eccl. 2:7)
Humankind’s creation in God’s image, according to Gregory, not only gave them supreme value but also made them, in the fullest sense of the word, subjects. In this respect, no human could ever be deprived of their personhood and considered an object that could be bought and sold. No one could therefore become the “master of the image of God.” Humans, as the image of God, were their own masters. Gregory’s words are the first principled articulation completely invalidating the institution of slavery.
Notice that when Gregory explains that all humans are judged equally by God, ascending after death to Heaven or descending to Hell, he draws on the same dualistic body-soul dichotomy we had seen above. Unlike the Stoics, however, for Christians the soul is also a locus of intersubjective relationships, as each and every soul subsists in a personal relationship with God. Thus it is not sufficient that one finds peace and freedom within while their body is enslaved. Human souls have supreme value in their own right, every soul is a unique subject, an autonomous and singular entity, by virtue of which it enjoys special worth, its status also compelling an appropriate standard of behavior from others toward it.
Gregory’s teachings demonstrate how profoundly conceptions of the individual changed with the rise of Christianity. The perception of the soul as the locus of redemption, under God’s gaze, which determined a person’s fate—in other words, the transformation of the soul into the focal point of religious life—made the individual the centerpiece of the religious drama. But this new focus on the soul, or on people’s inner lives in general, could not have instigated this revolution by itself. As we have seen, the Stoics solved the problem of slavery by focusing on the eternally-free soul. For them, the existence of the soul legitimized, rather than challenged, the prevailing state of affairs.
Unlike the Stoics, however, for Christian thinkers the soul is not a hidden refuge where one could find a modicum of freedom, but an extraordinary creation which stands in eternal relationship with the divine, it’s only true master, and to whom its whole existence must be dedicated. For them the person, in his or her distinct entirety, must be free, because the human person was the image of God, and thus a complete subject worthy of reverence.
According to Aristotle, the slave is “a living tool”, and according to Varro, a Roman educator from the first century BCE, slaves were “articulate instruments.” Jews and Christians could not have accepted such definitions, because these definitions deprived slaves of their humanity. They found it inconceivable that slaves be analogized to instruments, because to do so denied their existence as creations in God’s image.
Thus the ancient Hebrew laws mandating the treatment of the enslaved as human beings. Thus, when Christianity transforms the idea of freedom and privatizes it, the voices calling for complete rejection of slavery. Thus, issuing the universal Catechism of the Catholic Church, Pope John Paul II affirms that “Being in the image of God the human individual possesses the dignity of a person, who is not just something, but someone.” The individual was a subject and could not be turned into an object.
This guiding logic would accompany Western civilization all the way to the total abolition of slavery. In the late eighteenth century, the famous abolitionist William Wilberforce would still cry that all humans were created in God’s image and that slavery was therefore utterly illegitimate. The original French version of the popular Christmas carol O Holy Night, written in French by Placide Cappeau as Minuit, Crétiens in 1847, proclaims that Jesus “has broken all the shackles / The earth is free and heaven open / He sees a brother where there was once but a slave.”
Less than a decade later, writing in dissent of the majority verdict in the infamous case of Dred Scott v. Sanford (1856), Justice John McLean insisted in defiance of his colleagues on the United States Supreme Court that “A slave is not a mere chattel. He bears the impress of his Maker”.
The abolition of slavery is centered on the radical transformation in the understanding of the human person introduced by the idea that all people are created in the image of God. Over the centuries, this idea reshaped moral and legal frameworks, laying the groundwork for the eventual rejection of slavery as an institution, fueling abolitionist movements and embedding itself in the foundations of modern human rights discourse.
It is hard, indeed terrifying, to contemplate the possibility that lacking the idea of the creation in image of God the institution of slavery would have endured to this day. We must believe another moral or philosophical principle would have emerged to challenge it. Yet as much as we would like to think of our rights as self-evident and unalienable, a close examination of the history of the West reveals just how much we owe to that one clear and distinct idea, the idea that all human being were created in God’s image.
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My new book, In God’s Image: How Western Civilization Was Shaped by a Revolutionary Idea, is out for pre-order. Click here for the Amazon page and here for the NYU Press page.
Israel’s current social and political crisis has been brewing for decades. It’s not divorced from the global crisis of the liberal order, but Israel’s democracy being on shaky ground as it is, and Judaism having a religious dimension in addition to a national one, make it distinct, and more perilous.
Over the last 30 years a broad realignment has been taking place in the Israeli public sphere, a transformation from a republican political arena to a fractured society of tribes, with a constant tug-of-war between divergent groups. At the same time, Israel’s leadership for the last two decades, mostly personified by Benjamin Netanyahu, rules less by setting a political agenda and more by coalescing a varied alliance of forces, based on partisan interests and needs, and guided not by agreed-upon norms and customs but by ad hoc deals, power plays, and loyalty to the chief.
This process, a reversal and unraveling of the nation-building project of the secular Socialist Zionists who had established the state, has carried Israeli society back from the ‘melting pot’ experiment and, after passing through a short-lived era of multiculturalism in the 1990s, toward a more contested, bare-knuckles, less liberally-inclined political arena. A reversion, as it were, from republic to the pre-modern Jewish shtetl. The shtetlization of Israel.
The attempt, over the last two years and even in the midst of war, to restructure the balance of power between the branches of the state, is the dramatic climax of this process. This shtetelization, the transformation of the very meaning of “Israeliness”, should not be understood as the miserable accomplishment of a certain politician or even a whole political camp. It aligns with much broader, global trends, and needs be seen as a backlash to the integration of the Israeli economy into the global market, and the extensive adoption of liberal ethics and ideals – arguably the most significant social process Israel went through since its founding.
As is well documented, since the 1980’s, and increasingly in the 1990’s, Israel witnessed pervasive economic liberalization, bringing it relatively rapidly into a globalized, post-industrial market headed by a vibrant Information Technology sector. The scope of privatization was not limited to the economy, but inspired and changed the Israeli society at large, including its political culture, judiciary, and civic sphere. The reaction to this, also aligned with other states that went through such liberalization, was a traditionalist and populist backlash, witnessed since the beginning of the millennium.
From a political standpoint, the Right has claimed complete control of the executive branch since the untimely end of the Barak government in 2001. From a cultural standpoint, Israel has seen a so called “renaissance” of Jewish expression and engagement, offering types of privatized Judaism as well as a religious revival through an increasing accentuation of traditional(ized) Judaism. From the standpoint of Jewish identity, Israel experienced a rise of ethno-national Judaism, grounded in a sense of tribal belonging and devoted to a purported mission of preserving the security and prosperity of the Jewish people and their heritage. Lastly, socially and civically Israel has been divided between those who wish to continue pursuing the ideas and ideals of western liberalism and those who prefer to reject them as false, dangerous or “un-Jewish”, while aiming to reinforce and empower traditionalized Judaism.
That’s why in Israel the global crisis of liberalism and the rise of populist politics has an added menace in the form of fundamentalist religion. Our fundamentalists, not very popular among the general public, piggyback, as it were, on the much more widely supported populists, and are given immense power. They use this power to change the face of Israel, and indeed of Judaism itself.
More than the Ultra-Orthodox, Haredi public, that have long labored to disengage from the general Israeli society and seclude themselves in a life according to their own beliefs and preferences, the most troubling extreme of this phenomenon are the fundamentalist fringe of the Religious Zionist public. Here we have groups such as the so called Hilltop Youth, the Kahanist circles, the Temple Mount activists, and the general Hardal (i.e. Haredi Nationalist) public, all of which display a deep seated rejection of democratic, liberal and indeed humanist values. This is the fundamentalist part of Religious Zionism, comprising about 15% of it, which is about 2% of the Jewish Israeli public.
To give a small example, the Hilltop Youth, extremist settlers mostly under thirty, have over the last decade grown more brazen and chaotic, making clear that they do not see themselves under the jurisdiction or the state. For example, following the death of a member of this circle in a car crash after a police chase in December 2020, hundreds of them went on a rampage stretching across three months, attacking not only damaging property and wounding Palestinian villagers in nightly raids, but also smashing Palestinian cars in makeshift roadblocks, stoning members of the Israeli police and army, wounding several, and in general engaging in more than forty acts of arson, vandalism and violent attacks across Samaria. With the rise of the current government these attacks became more bold and unabashed, as Israel has witnessed, over the year before the Gaza war, arsonist pogroms at the villages of Hawara, Turmus Ayya, Luban Sharqiya, Um Safa and other Palestinian communities, altogether hundreds of attacks with dead, wounded and much property destroyed as a result. The war has only given pretext and cover for more such acts.
There has always been a violent fringe to the Settler Movement, and it has long benefited from lax enforcement on the side of Israeli authorities. What is exceptional with this continuing series of events is that it enjoys an increasing support among Israeli leadership, exemplified most blatantly by Israel’s current finance minister Bezalel Smotrich. Smotrich’s statement that the village of Huwara should be "wiped out" is just an illustration of the fact that there is almost no daylight between him and the young hooligans. Indeed, he takes care to shield them from the law and support their illegal (even under Israeli law) outposts.
With Smotrich as finance minister, and with the minister of police, Itamar Ben-Gvir, being an avowed Kahanist and convicted in the past in two different cases of “support of a terrorist organization”, it’s easy to understand why the extremist part of the settler public feel that they have a free rein, and why they enjoy a disturbingly low level of motivation from the IDF and the Israeli police in stopping their violence, even relative to the permissive past. Under the impression of the current war the Religious Zionist fundamentalists blatantly asserted what in the past was only implied: that they simply disregard universal humanism, liberal values, and at time even Israeli law; that theirs is a Judaism that disavows core Jewish values and ideals such as the fundamental quality between all human beings and the struggle for justice; that they adhere to a limited, diminished and immoral version of Judaism.
We cannot stay silent in the face of such a threat to Israeli democracy and to our collective identity. We must unequivocally condemn such fundamentalists, reject their warped understanding of both the Jewish tradition and Zionism, and refuse to legitimize their champions, people such as Smotrich, Ben Gvir, and their political parties. In this the Jews of the diaspora must join hands with us Israelis. It’s pertinent to understand that this is not only an inner political struggle in Israel, nor even a heated debate about Israel’s security.
We are in a struggle for the essence and soul of our tradition. Even today Smotrich and his circles deface Judaism and present it to the world as a fanatical, violent and racist tradition. If they are able to remake Israeli Judaism in their image and likeness, diaspora Judaism will not remain intact. The face of Judaism will be deformed forever, Jews everywhere will be ashamed of their heritage, and younger generations will distance themselves from it. We must – together – assert our values and embrace Judaism’s and Zionism’s humanistic and liberal heritage. Please, help us at this time, and let’s make clear what we stand for.
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Published in issue 34 of The Peoplehood Papers
Beyond the misery, the sadness, the mourning over what could have been and will now not be, abides the helplessness: the appalling feeling that we are being taken willy-nilly to a place where we don’t want to be. As if in a bad dream, we are in the passenger seat of a bus whose brakes have failed, and the borders of the country are our closed windows.
“Proceedings have been instituted against you, and you will be informed of everything in due course,” says one of the strangers who have come to arrest K. in Franz Kafka’s novel “The Trial,” giving precise expression to the helplessness of the citizen in the face of the machinery of the state. “We’ve been abducted,” shout the demonstrators in Tel Aviv and across from the Prime Minister’s Residence in Jerusalem, giving vent to the same kind of angst.
The helplessness that underlies our present situation places us opposite the vast power of the state. We encounter that power when we are inducted or are informed about a tax audit, but at present the lines are sharpened and the danger of losing all we hold dear looms clear and immediate. As though we’ve been transformed from citizens into subjects, we stand wide-eyed in the face of the decisions made by the government. Like the faithful in the hands of an angry God, we are unable to wield influence and have no knowledge of what to expect.
In his 1829 essay “Reflections on Tragedy,” Benjamin Constant pointed out the profound transformation that occurred in the human consciousness upon the entry into the modern age. Constant explains that it no longer makes sense to write tragedies that pit the individual against the forces of fate or the gods – they are no longer on our mind, and in any event are not the entities that are threatening us. They have been supplanted by other forces, far more concrete and no less appalling:
The social order, the action of society on the individual, in diverse phases and in diverse epochs, this network of institutions and conventions which envelops us from our birth and is not broken until our death, these are the tragic motivations which one needs to know how to manipulate. They are entirely equal to the fatality of the ancients; their weight composes all that was invincible and oppressive in that fatality… Our public will be more moved by this combat of the individual against the social order that robs or pinions him than by Oedipus pursued by destiny or by Orestes pursued by the Furies.
Constant (1767-1830), a Swiss-French political thinker and one of the first to characterize himself as a “liberal,” grasped that something fundamental had changed in human consciousness. The transition to modernity and the process of secularization separated us from the worldview holding that every grain of sand and every leaf of grass are part of a comprehensive divine plan, that all of us, like them, are entwined in a complete and holistic order and answer to forces larger than us. At the same time, the rise of the bureaucratic nation-state posited other institutions, no less large and, to whose authority we are subordinate.
What frightened the authors of the Greek tragedies was the hand of fate, of the Moirai, the goddesses that determined each person’s course of life and the moment of their death. The Romans were fearful of Fortuna, the goddess of fortune, and the ancient Hebrews were of course daunted by The Almighty. What frightens us are the state’s enforcement and bureaucratic mechanisms. It’s between the teeth of their cogwheels, not those of the goddesses of fate, that we are liable to be caught and ground.
Indeed, the creation of great dramas at this time rests not on the wrath of the gods but on the tension between the individual and the government. From Kleist’s “Michael Kohlhaas” through Kafka’s “The Trial” to Brecht’s “Caucasian Chalk Circle,” we are witness to the inevitable friction between the individual and the political-social system, without there being a need for higher forces. Not theology, but politics. Not fate, but government. What drives us is not the connection with the divine being, but the connection with the ruling powers, and we’re more apprehensive of an arbitrary arrest than of God’s judgment on Yom Kippur.
In the face of the gods’ power, religion offered us mechanisms of protection: formulations of prayer, means of purification, rituals of atonement. One of the great innovations of monotheism vis-à-vis the pagan religions was the possibility of forging an covenant with the divine, which forms an alliance that operates not only for the benefit of the King of All Kings but also for the benefit of the human individual. God promised order and security, not only exploitation or capricious displays of power.
In like fashion, in the face of the immense power of the state, various political conceptions arose that sought to protect the citizen. Liberal thought (Constant was one of its leading exponents) also called for striking an agreement – a social contract – with the authorities, which would limit their power. A liberal regime is barred from encroaching on a number of important facets of our life: property, expression, movement, conscience, etc. In a liberal state, human and civil rights are preserved, and we are protected, at least in regard to them, from the strong hand and outstretched arm of the government.
The democratic idea aimed to go even further and to reverse the order of things: to vest citizens with power over the government; if they wish, they can topple and replace it. Now it’s the regime that needs to fear the judgment of the citizens, in a manner that Kleist and Kafka – not to mention the Patriarch Abraham – could barely have imagined. True, we still would not want to encounter the income tax authorities, but life in a liberal democracy is like life under a merciful and compassionate God: We are protected as long as we do the necessary minimum.
What we have undergone in the past two years is a gradual shattering of all these basic assumptions and mechanisms. First the government set out to infringe on the liberal space and to emasculate the sole protection that Israel’s citizens have in the face of their government: the Supreme Court. After the outbreak of the war – as a result of a colossal blunder by that same government – the regime focused primarily on its own self-preservation. Subsequently the regime cultivated its base at the expense of the commonalty, and sent our sons and daughters to the front amid a protracted refusal to present a clear strategy or to make clear its intentions. Now we are being subjected to rockets and missiles and being led by a government in which a delinquent like Itamar Ben-Gvir is termed the minister of national security.
Moreover, surveys conducted since the start of the war show that this government rests on the support of a minority of the country’s citizens and that its leaders suffer from basic lack of trust among the public. A government for which support is partial and declining can only intensify its citizens’ feeling of having been taken hostage. Add to this the government’s denial of its responsibility for the crisis, disdain for professionalism and expertise, and lack of readiness to correct its path, and you get a population that feels it is held captive by an erratic and unpredictable demon.
The Israelis who are now fleeing abroad are impelled by a sense of helplessness. In a properly run political system, a regime that acts against our personal worldview can be suffered based on confidence that it is serving all the citizens, and that in any case it can be replaced. In an average country, there are no bloodthirsty enemies across the border that will exploit the weakness of a corrupt and incompetent government in order to kill its citizens. Israel’s broken politics manifests the complete opposite: We are subject to a government that promotes blatantly sectarian politics, that is responding to the biggest crisis in our history without a strategy and that is putting our lives at risk by having failed, for more than a year, to restore security to our cities.
We find ourselves in a modern tragedy, albeit not an uncommon one. The citizens of Russia, Venezuela and poor neighbor Syria know this story from up-close. Now we are extras in the same play, in which an egocentric regime carries a population toward destruction. A “mortal god” was Hobbes’ term for the state. Here, that same god is violating the basic covenant between himself and the citizens, and in his blindness believes not only that they need to maintain silence and go on placing trust in him, but also to continue offering sacrifices at his altar.
From monotheism we have shifted to paganism, and there’s no knowing what the Moloch will decide tomorrow. A rebellion against such an abusive state-god is called revolution. The secularization process of such theological-politics is called emigration.
Oedipus’ subjects endured a plague because they lived under a sinning monarch. Only his abdication saved them, and fortunately for them he was capable of taking responsibility and departing when he saw what he had brought about. Israel’s citizens are suffering from an irresponsible government which knows very well what it has inflicted on them but is only tightening its hold on power. If that looks like a struggle against an angry giant, it’s not by chance. This is what the plotline of the calamity of fate looks like in our age.
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Published in Haaretz Magazine
The ongoing military operation in the northern Gaza Strip, which includes the third Israel Defense Forces invasion of the Jabalya refugee camp in the course of the war, purports to deal with Hamas terrorists who have regrouped in the area, and it must be noted that the orders received by the IDF reflect this goal. But the campaign also seems to conceal a grave scenario: the expulsion of the residents of the northern Strip in order to prepare the ground for future settlements of Israeli Jews.
On October 21, as senior cabinet ministers and coalition lawmakers addressed a conference titled Preparing to Settle Gaza, journalist Amit Segal stated:
What is happening in northern Gaza is different from everything that we have seen before today. You can deny until tomorrow that the story is not the implementation of the ‘generals’ plan’ – emptying the [northern] Strip, starving the terrorists, eliminating and capturing them – that’s what I think is happening there, and in my opinion this is only the pilot or trailer.
Segal, who is known to be close to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is referring to the plan proposed by Maj. Gen. (ret.) Giora Eiland, which calls for ordering the remaining Palestinians in the northern Strip to move to the south and placing anyone who remains under siege, including starving and killing them, on the assumption that they are Hamas terrorists. When the plan was published, 27 Knesset members and cabinet ministers signed a letter urging its adoption and Netanyahu said he would consider it. Now it seems that he has. It appears that the plan is being implemented and that what is currently happening is, according to Segal, only a "pilot or trailer" for things to come.
Yaniv Kubovich also reported that field commanders told him,
the recent decision to launch operations in northern Gaza was taken without any in-depth discussion. They said it appeared that the operations were aimed principally at pressuring local residents, who were again told to evacuate the area for the coast as winter is approaching. It is possible that the operation is laying the groundwork for a decision by the government to put into effect [Eiland’s] so-called surrender or starve plan.
Haaretz defense analyst Amos Harel noted: "To what the army portrays as an effort to cut out the Hamas infrastructure that has regrown in the camp, the far-right aims to add a darker side – driving the civil population out of it."
Furthermore, in a conversation with a former senior defense official, who is in contact with senior field commanders, it was made clear to me that what is happening in northern Gaza is an ethnic cleansing attempt.
Testimonies from the northern Strip support this concern: The operation is focused not only on finding and killing terrorists, but rather on the systematic destruction of buildings, including even hospitals (on October 18, the IDF bombed the Indonesian Hospital in Beit Lahia and the Al Awda hospital in Jabalya), thereby forcing area residents to evacuate or die. In the process, the army distributes leaflets demanding the residents of a few neighborhoods to leave and even publishes video and photos of fleeing Palestinians.
Add to this the emerging discourse among politicians, and the conference where the finance and the national security minister, among others, spoke explicitly about settlement in the Strip, add the fact that the event and its message were not met with opposition from the prime minister, add in the composition of the inner cabinet, consider the proximity to the U.S. election and you will reach the conclusion that there is a reasonable suspicion that Israel is seeking to expel the Palestinians from the northern Gaza Strip to carry out a population transfer in order to settle Jews there.
It must be made clear to the soldiers participating in the operation in the northern Strip: You may be complicit in an attempted mass expulsion of Palestinians not for defense purposes, but rather for ethnic cleansing. This means that you may be complicit in a war crime. The individual soldier at the bottom of the chain of command is not exposed to the overall context of the operation, but every soldier in the field has a duty to determine whether an attempt is being made to permanently expel the Palestinian residents from the northern Strip to the south.
In 1989, Amos Oz stated that if the idea of "expulsion and exile of the Arabs" is ever raised, principled Israelis must make it clear that they will not permit this: "We will not let you expel the Arabs even if we have to divide the state and the army, even if we have to lie under the wheels of the trucks." One year later, Yair Tzaban and Yossi Sarid wrote in Yedioth Ahronoth that "the day the transfer order, which is patently illegal, is given shall also be the day of refusal to obey an order."
IDF soldiers must know whether this day has arrived. The government and the heads of the military must say, publicly and unequivocally, that there is no plan to expel the residents of northern Gaza, and they must provide minimal conditions to the area’s residents so that they can continue living there now as well. It is forbidden under any circumstances to be complicit in war crimes and ethnic cleansing.
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Published in Haaretz
As a moment in time, the Oct. 7 massacre was, paradoxically, an event both anomalous and familiar, at once exceptional and routine. It was horrifying and shocking to the extreme, yet, given the historical memories that we, as Jews, carry with us, it was typical — even expected, almost preordained. Strictly speaking, the calamity we suffered on Simchat Torah 5784 was a very Jewish calamity.
The murder, burnings, rape and torture — as well as the fact that there was no help, that hours passed before the army finally showed up — shaped the terrible disaster that we suffered into an event that differed from anything we had experienced, making the unfamiliar, and that which we had assumed would never become familiar, a part of our lives. We experienced things we had only heard about and learned about, a reality we had faced momentarily during memorial days. The massacre brought Jewish history back into our lives, while also making us a part of Jewish history. It infused the hardships of the Jewish people into us, welding us with hellfire in the historical continuum of Jewish suffering.
The massacre brought us back to Jewish history.
Two thousand years of suffering
Returning to history was Zionism’s ancient desire, but for the Zionist movement, this meant returning to the history of mankind while departing from the history of the Jews. This aspiration stemmed from a negative perception of the Diaspora, which included a rejection of the passive stance and victimhood that traditional Judaism had taken upon itself, contented with eternal wanderings. The Zionists wished to put an end to these wanderings, and thus also to the victimhood. Agency would replace passivity, sovereignty would replace being subject to the will of others, and self-determination and control of our own fate would replace helplessness. The Jew would once again take part in the history of mankind.
A return to Jewish history moves in the opposite direction. Oct. 7 — during the interminable hours of Saturday and Sunday we listened to the voices of our brothers and sisters pleading for the help that didn’t come, we slowly realized, and were astounded, and astounded again, and again, by the unbelievable scope of the disaster — threw us back into passivity, into victimization, into the miserable existence of the pre-1948 Jew.
We had known about pogroms, some of us being third-generation, or even second-generation relatives of Holocaust survivors. We are all familiar with Jewish history. But that is exactly the point: We had assumed it was history. We thought we were past it, disconnected from it, that we now live in different times, in a new era. We thought we had become part of modern world history, a part of universal, normal, banal reality. That we live in a time when Jews are completely accepted and receive equal rights in the Diaspora, and alternatively enjoy solid protection in their own sovereign state. That what had been will no longer be. We thought, Never Again.
The massacre executed in the kibbutzim and towns surrounding the Gaza Strip, and the cruel sadism and unspeakable barbarity with which it was carried out, connected us instantly and viscerally as yet another link in the long Jewish chain that goes back to the First Temple period — and even beyond. Human history took a sharp turn, flinging us back into Jewish history — from independence to exile, from security to pogroms, from revival back to the Holocaust — while every dream that we had of the end of our suffering, the end of history, of better and different times — dissipated in one cruel awakening.
To the crisis caused by the pogroms on the Gaza border we can add the blunt antisemitic sentiments now flooding the global scene, from the United States to China, like ancient demons released from the depths. Who would have believed that in 2023 so many people would be attracted to the hatred of Jews? Only a few months ago, most of us were sure that the Jewish people had finally found its place in the world, both in its independent State and in its complete integration within liberal societies in Europe and the United States. If we thought that we were living in a new era, and that after 2,000 years of exile we had finally escaped the eternal curse of the wandering Jew — that very stable and comforting proverbial rug had been suddenly pulled from under our collective feet. We have returned to Jewish history, or to be more precise, we have discovered that we had never really left it. We have never been disconnected from the same fate, from the same decree, from the same distress, from the same two-thousand-year-old suffering.
In 1934, the Jewish Romanian playwright and author Mihail Sebastian published his novel “For Two Thousand Years.” Sebastian was one of the outstanding names in Romanian culture at the time. He viewed himself nationally as a Romanian, while personally and publicly fighting against the escalating antisemitism that surrounded him.
The hero of his novel, with overt autobiographical characteristics, tries to find his bearing in life. He is attracted to the Zionist movement on the one hand, and to the hope of integrating into Romanian society on the other. He meets an old Jewish merchant, a Mr. Sulitzer, who tries to get him to sober up and abandon both these hopes. He invites him to take pleasure in the “mysticism of the synagogue” and the “folklore of the Jewish neighborhood in the ghetto.” When the hero rejects these as irrelevant anachronisms, the old man angrily replies:
Have you forgotten that, luckily, there are still antisemites? And, thank God, that there are still pogroms from time to time? However much you’re assimilated in a hundred years, you’ll be set back ten times as much by a single day’s pogrom. And then the poor ghetto will be ready to take you back in.
Indeed, a single day’s pogrom set us back. Back to the ghetto. Returning to Jewish history means that we all — against our will! — are now more connected to our Jewish identity than we were before October 2023. We are now connected not only horizontally to all those surrounding us, in the cruel bonding of the destiny forced upon us, but also vertically, to the Jewish story of the past and of the future.
In practice, we are of course not in the ghetto, or even in the Diaspora. The State of Israel exists, and it is strong. But the singular dimension of victimhood that reappeared in our lives will not disappear over the coming decades. We are different Jews now, we are Jews of old. “Two thousand years through flames, through disasters, through wandering come to us through the history of the ghetto,” Sulitzer concludes in Sebastian’s book. “It’s a history lived under lamplight. ‘We want sunshine,’ [the Zionists] shout. Good luck to them — and let them become footballers. They’ll get plenty of sunshine then. But this lamp by which I’ve read so many hundreds of years, this lamp is Judaism – not their sunlight.
‘You’re old, Mr. Sulitzer. That’s why you talk like that.’
‘I’m not old! I’m a Jew – that’s what I am.’
Our new Jewish identity collapses into the historical, ancient (and perhaps — eternal) Jewish identity. Modern Jewish identity crumbles, and its crumbs are molded by the horrors of Oct. 7, into a pre-modern Jewish identity. We are now more Jewish, in the deep-rooted sense, but also in the victimized sense. Sunlight is now a bit less inviting, a bit less familiar. We once again read by the lamp.
Where will Jewish history take us?
What could this shift in our self-perception lead to? I believe that several trajectories are possible.
In 1978, as the protests against Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi were picking up volume and speed, Michel Foucault visited Tehran. He wrote several articles for the French and Italian press on the revolutionary proceedings and sat down for a conversation with the writer Baqir Parham to discuss world events.
Turning first to the West, Foucault noted that the desire to establish a “non-alienated, clear, lucid, and balanced society” had begotten, over the preceding two-hundred years, Western industrial capitalism, which, he postulated, is “the harshest, most savage, most selfish, most dishonest, oppressive society one could possibly imagine”.
The West, it appears, was pure evil. But new hope rose from the East, specifically from Iran, where young and old alike were casting off the yoke of tyranny. Foucault told Parham he agreed with those in Iran who said that Marx was right about religion being the opiate of the masses—except when it comes to Shi’ite Islam. Shi’ism is different, surmised Foucault, because of “the role of Shi’ism in a political awakening”.
Foucault cheered the crowds and wrote enthusiastically about the movement to oust the Shah (no doubt a corrupt dictator). Reading his words, one gets the impression that even more than wishing freedom for the Iranian people, Foucault seems to be excited about what he perceived as the Iranian rejection of modernity.
“Recent events”, he wrote just one month after his conversation with Parham,
did not signify a shrinking back in the face of modernization by extremely retrograde elements, but the rejection, by a whole culture and a whole people, of a modernization that is itself an archaism.
It wasn’t the Khomeinist movement that was retrograde, but modernity itself. As an archaic framework, it had to be removed, and Foucault celebrated what he perceived as Iran’s rejection of it. “Modernization as a political project and as a principle of social transformation is a thing of the past in Iran”.
As part of the French philosophical tradition (modern itself, alas), Foucault identified revolution with the Iranian people’s volonté générale. Accordingly, he hoped (in strange contradiction to much of his published thought), that while modernity has made Iranians alienated from themselves, the adoption of fundamentalist Islam would return them to their true identity and allow them to express true freedom.
Foucault envisioned the Islamist revolutionary movement ending not in a ruthless theocracy but in an ideal “political spirituality”, ushering in a new form of non-alienated politics not only to the Middle East but to the whole world. His moral and political failure would haunt him for the few remaining years of his life.
Revisiting Foucault’s romance with the Iranian revolution has nothing nostalgic today, when only two months ago an heir of Foucault as prominent as Judith Butler insisted that the Hamas attack on Israeli civilians on 7th October 2023, which included mass murder, systematic rape, kidnapping of whole families and an attempted ethnic cleansing of more than twenty villages and three cities, was “armed resistance” and “not a terrorist attack”.
The infatuation of thinkers in the Western radical left with Islamist terrorism has been more or less a constant, going back to the Soviet Union’s support of the PLO after 1967’s 6-day war, when the Soviets saw a chance to put a proverbial spanner in the works, so as to undermine US control of the region. But even without going into the historical-geopolitical reasons for this alliance, its symptoms have been constant—flaring up especially after 9/11. In its aftermath, one could read French postmodernist theorist Jean Baudrillard claiming that
The system forced the Other [= Al Qaeda] to change the rules of the game. […] Terrorism is the act that restores an irreducible singularity to the heart of a generalized system of exchange.
Again we encounter Capitalism as the Infernal Fiend against which the terrorists rebel, and again the hope for authentic existence (“irreducible singularity”) born through the painful, though “unavoidable”, labor of mass murder.
Islamist fundamentalism is an old favorite with these thinkers, and no doubt its sharp otherness from the secular West adds to its “authentic” charm. But there is nothing special about Islamist fundamentalism within this genre of thought, as can be witnessed, for example, as early as in Sartre’s infamous Preface to Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961). Sartre conjures similar standards when he states that, in the rebellion of the colonized,
to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time: there remain a dead man, and a free man; the survivor, for the first time, feels national soil under his foot.
We find here the blueprint for the quest for authentic being through the aggrandizement of violence, though here relating to a more general indigenous nationalist, not specifically the Islamic fundamentalist. But there is something else that is common to all these arguments, which is the target of this kind of “authentic” violence. It is always the West.
More than a romantic infatuation with the not-so-noble savage, what we have here is a rejection of the West, condemning it and its offspring, modernity, as inherently violent, oppressive, imperialist, patriarchal, or just plain evil. This genre of thinking has a history, as Avishai Margalit and Ian Buruma display in their book Occidentalism (a play, of course, on Edward Said’s Orientalism). From the 18th century onward, “the West” has always been denigrated by its eastern neighbors, though how the West was defined had changed over time. France maligned the English, Germany thought that “Paris, Europe, the West”, as Richard Wagner once wrote, were corrupt with “freedom and also alienation”, Russian thinkers like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky thought similarly about Germany as well, and Indian, Chinese and Japanese intellectuals viewed the whole of Europe as degenerate and depraved.
Several strands of thought coalesce to produce this hatred. Romanticism of course, which considers rationalism and intellectualism as spurious artificialities detached from life; the pre-modern aristocratic view of commerce as debased and demeaning; the traditional devotion to hierarchy and authority, and the condemnation of a culture that sheds these off; the religious objection to secularization; and perhaps above all the dread and the feeling of loss that comes with a community’s transition into a society.
This transformation of Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft, perhaps the cardinal question on which the field of sociology was established, should be viewed as the sum of all fears for any traditional civilization. The passage from the organic extended family or village to autonomous individuality, from a world suffused with myth and religiosity to a disenchanted universe engaged in meritocracy and trade, is what Durkheim warned against as “anomie”, or what Max Weber, at the end of his masterly The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism calls “mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance”. This is the crisis Occidentalism spurns, what, at heart, Foucault, Baudrillard, Sartre and Butler revolt against.
Fascism of course also rebelled against the “decadence” of liberal society and promised a fierce and faithful Volksgemeinschaft. And were not dominant parts of the Marxist tradition, opposing liberalism as well, and promising a new society free from alienation, actually seeking a return to pre-modern tribal brotherhood? “The protest against the abstractions of modernity”, writes sociologist Peter L. Berger, “is at the heart of the socialist ideal.”
Tomer Persico - English 