AN IMAGINED PHONE CALL

Truth Has the Structure of Fiction

Comrades,

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Recall Robert Harris’s The Ghost (filmed by Polanski) in which a ghostwriter for Adam Lang, the U.K. former Prime Minister modeled on Tony Blair, discovers that Lang was planted into the Labor Party and manipulated all along by the CIA to become a UK prime minister servile to the US interests. The New York Observer commented that the book’s “shock-horror revelation” was “so shocking it simply can’t be true, though if it were it would certainly explain pretty much everything about the recent history of Great Britain.”

Can we imagine a similar event that would also explain “pretty much everything” about the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas? It is easy to do it – let’s for a moment engage in a conspiracy theory and concoct a phone call between Hamas (H) and Israeli hardliners (IH) at some point before the war broke out:

IH: “Hi, do you remember we discreetly supported you against PLO? Now you owe us a favour: why don’t you attack and slaughter some Jews close to Gaza, they are in any case Arab friends, peaceniks, we don’t need them. We have here two problems: civil protests against us, and the all too slow ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. The world will be shocked at your brutality, and we will be able to play a victim again, get national unity and escalate ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.“

H: “OK, but we need a counter-favour. In revenge for our slaughter, promise that you will bomb civilians in Gaza, killing thousands, especially children – this will give a boost to anti-Semitism all around the world, which is our true goal!”

IH: “No problem, we – Israel - also need more anti-Semitism in the world to be able to continue to play the role of a victim, a role which legitimises us to do what we want!”

H: “So let’s hope this is the beginning of a beautiful hatred!”

In his short essay from 1919 “A Child is Being Beaten,” Freud analyses a child’s fantasy of witnessing another child being severely beaten; he locates this fantasy as the last one in a chain of three, the previous two being; “I see my father beating a child” and “My father is beating me.” The child was never conscious of this last scene, so it has to be reconstructed to provide the missing link between the first and the last scenes – and can we not claim the same about our obscene fantasy of a phone call? It is the unconscious, purely virtual, middle term between the two extremes, “Palestinian children are killed in Gaza” and “Hamas slaughtered Jewish children in a kibbutz near Gaza.”

Such an obscene phone call is of course just imagined, but – in the same way as The Ghost - it brings out the objective logic of the perverse deadly dance going on between Hamas and the Israeli hardliners.[1] Since victims are in principle allowed to strike back, the war gives Israel a chance of ethnically cleansed Great Israel, maybe even including Gaza. Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, said the “voluntary migration” of Palestinians in Gaza is the “right humanitarian solution” for the besieged enclave and for the region, a stance Palestinian officials correctly likened to support of “ethnic cleansing”. We now see why Israel is so allergic to the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free” – as it is becoming more and more clear, it should really be “From the river to the sea, Israel shall be free (of Palestinians).” The really difficult question to be raised here is: what if persons like Ben Gvir and Smotrich are not just marginal fanatics, what if they just openly state the actual politics of the State of Israel covered up by the more “liberal” mainstream?

And let’s go to the end in this direction: what if Hamas cannot be destroyed, as Israel wishes? Decades of ontological limbo, as well as the inefficiency and corruption of the PLO, created the conditions for a desperately violent resistance, in which (some) Palestinians fell into. Even if Israel kills all its leaders and most of its soldiers, the minority will begin to grow again, fed by the very violence of Israel’s destruction of Gaza. The only way to prevent the resurrection of Hamas is to give Palestinians a palpable hope of a free and decent life. This is why Israeli propaganda is making a big mistake in demonising Yahya Sinwar as a small Hitler, evil embodied: in this way, they are just strengthening the myth of an authentically evil and cruel but charismatic leader, making sure that, if they succeed in killing him, he will survive as a martyr-hero.

After 7 days of the ceasefire, Israel resumed the bombing of Gaza, adding to it a »humanitarian« note which makes things just worse: »Israel’s military said it was dividing the entirety of Gaza into dozens of numbered blocks as a prelude to demanding targeted local evacuations in the crowded south of the strip before attacking a highlighted area. It dropped leaflets on to Gaza with a QR code to a website with a map of all the areas and geolocating people within them. IDF map of the Gaza Strip split into 620 small numbered zones, which it will use to order forced evacuations.”[2] Does this humanitarian advice which obviously cannot be followed in reality not add a cruel joke to the brutality of bombing? On the top of running from bombs, Palestinians in Gaza now have to play a “macabre game of Battleships” to have a chance to survive… No wonder that a Palestinian who left Gaza City for the South and is now asked to move again, said: “What we wish now is to be killed, to avoid going through all this feeling of threat all the time and being in that distress.”[3]

Am I really presenting the two sides as mirror-reflections of each other, both co-responsible for the events, along the lines of “it takes two to tango“? Yes, but the two caught in a tango embrace are not Israel and Palestine but the two ultimate enemies bent on each other’s annihilation, the present government of Israel and Hamas. They are not the same, they are just in a tango embrace. Hamas and Israeli messianic hardliners are thus the two sides of the same coin: the true choice is not between them but between hardline fundamentalists who are not interested in serious peace negotiations and those open to co-existence on both sides. So I don't think that the Hamas attack was a big rupture – all of it together, the attack and the Gaza bombings, stands for a tragic deadlock which confronts Israel with an impossible choice: the desired total destruction of Hamas cannot be achieved and will just strengthen anti-Semitism, and Israel also cannot do the opposite, i.e., just accept that the Hamas attack was a moment in anti-colonial warfare.[4] The only way out of this desperate situation was depicted by Efraim Halevy, ex-chief of Mossad, in an interview with Tim Robbins:

»Q: In some way do you think we're maybe reaching rock bottom? And from this there could be an opportunity that emerges to reframe the conflict, to move towards something more peaceful?

A: Yes, but this would need, I think, a more comprehensive approach to the Palestinian cause at large.

Comment: An approach, Halevy said, that would benefit from a new leadership in both Israel and the Palestinian authority.

A: And once that happens, we can begin a different approach to what is on the chessboard and see how you can move the various players in a manner which would brings us to the right direction.

Q: Is it naive to still talk about peace and a peace plan? Do you think it could still be attainable or not?

A: We don't have the luxury to wait. We have to have a viable policy which would deal with the presence in this area of the Jews and the Palestinians. And we are doomed to live together. I don't want to say we are doomed to die together. And if our approach is that we are doomed to live together, we can't simply live together with one part of the equation having the upper part and ignoring the aspirations of the other side. There has to be the beginning of a meeting of minds. It will not be easy. There'll be lot of opposition. It will not be simple. You need a lot of creativity. That's what we are here for.«[5]

The last lines recall how Brecht, in his short poem In Praise of Communism, quite appropriately referred to Communism as the simplest thing that it is so difficult to achieve[6] – the formula proposed by Halevy sounds simple, self-evident for common sense, but it needs a lot of political creativity to be actualised. What is to be achieved is the Hegelian reconciliation of the two opposite: each pole should perceive in its opposite the truth of its own predicament. Does the Palestinian terror not echo the Jewish terror in the years before 1948? Does the homelessness of each pole not echo the other’s homelessness?

         What I am trying to do is thus not to adopt an (obviously faked) non-engaged neutral position from which I could safely criticise both “extremes” (Israel and Hamas). I see the Gaza war as the culmination of an authentic tragedy in which one cannot simply choose one side – one should gather the courage to see the deadlock or antagonism in which both sides are caught. And this two sides are Jews in Israel and Palestinians, NOT the messianic Jewish fundamentalists and Hamas. Not only do I reject Hamas, I also find it very sad that (as far as I know) no Palestinian and Arab state or political organisation clearly condemned Hamas attack. Such a condemnation would not function as a sign of weakness, it would give new strength to the Palestinian movement.

This may sound strange, but in our crazy time, secret services can also play a positive role: in contrast to politicians and ideologists, they are fully aware of what really goes on.

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[1] Although mysteries came out again and again: now we learned that Israeli secret services were fully aware of how Hamas is preparing the attack, their warnings were just not taken seriously by the politicians. See New York Times: Israel knew Hamas's attack plan more than 1 year ago - YouTube.

[2] Israel launches strikes on Gaza as fighting resumes after truce expires | Israel-Hamas war | The Guardian.

[3] ‘We now just wish to be killed’: the Palestinians under fire in southern Gaza | Israel-Hamas war | The Guardian.

[4] In its war against Hamas, Israel faces a tragic choice between two different routes to disaster | Jonathan Freedland | The Guardian.

[5] Exclusive Insights From Former Head of Mossad - YouTube.

[6] Paraphrased from Brecht’s Poem In Praise of Communism | MLToday.