EYELESS IN GAZA
Comrades,
Welcome to the desert of the real.
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The title of Aldous Huxley’s outstanding novel Eyeless in Gaza is taken from a phrase in John Milton's Samson Agonistes: in the Old Testament, Samson was expected to deliver Israel from Philistian yoke, but “ask for this great deliverer now, and find him / Eyeless in Gaza at the Mill with slaves.” Samson was captured by the Philistines, his eyes were burned out and he was taken to Gaza, where he was forced to work at grinding grain in a mill. Who is today, in the war between Israel and Hamas, “eyeless in Gaza,” Hamas or the Israeli racist fundamentalists? In some sense both are blinded by their acts: Hamas expected to deliver Palestinians from the Israeli yoke, but now it serves Israel to further enslave or expel Palestinians; Israeli fundamentalists expected to create a safe Great Israel from the river to the sea, but now they are reinforcing anti-Semitism all around the world. And although the conflict is between Hamas and Israeli hardline Zionists, we should abandon all illusions that there is a clear line to separate “extremists” from the majority of the population. According to the latest opinion polls, around 90% of Israeli Jews are opposed to the two-state solution.
So how are we to define clear-sightedness, the opposite of eyelessness, in the ongoing Middle East war? A couple of examples from recent history can be of some help here. Although, as to their positive content, the Communist regimes were a failure, they at the same time opened up a certain space, the space of utopian expectations which, among other things, enabled us to measure the failure of the really existing Socialism itself. When dissidents like Vaclav Havel denounced the existing Communist regime on behalf of authentic human solidarity, they (unknowingly, for the most part of it) spoke from the place opened up by Communist itself - which is why they tend to be so disappointed when the "really existing capitalism" does not meet the high expectations of their anti-Communist struggle. At a reception in Poland a decade or so ago, a nouveau riche capitalist congratulated Adam Michnik for being a doubly successful capitalist (he helped destroy socialism, plus he heads the highly profitable publishing empire); deeply embarrassed, Michnik replied: “I am not a capitalist; I am a socialist who is unable to forgive socialism that it did not work.”[1]
In the Communist Left, this line begins with Victor Kravchenko, the Soviet diplomat who, in 1944, while in New York, defected and then wrote his famous bestselling memoir I Chose Freedom.[2] His book is the first substantial first-person report on the horrors of Stalinism, beginning with the detailed account of the forced collectivization and mass hunger in Ukraine, where Kravchenko himself, in the early 1930s still a true believer in the system, participated in enforcing collectivization. The publicly-known story about him ends in 1949 when he triumphantly won the big trial against his Soviet accusers in Paris who brought to the court even his ex-wife to testify to his corruption, alcoholism, and family violence.
What is much lesser known is that, immediately after this victory, when Kravchenko was hailed all around the world as a Cold War hero, he got deeply worried about the McCarthy anti-Communist witch hunt in the US, and issued warnings that such a way to fight Stalinism courts the danger of starting to resemble its opponent. He also become more and more aware of the injustices of the Western world, and developed almost an obsession to critically change also the Western democratic societies. So, after writing a much less known sequel to his I Chose Freedom, significantly entitled I Chose Justice, he engaged in a crusade to find a new, les exploitative, mode of the organization of production. This led him to Bolivia, where he put (and lost) his money into organizing poor farmers into new collectives. Crushed by the failure of his endeavours, he withdrew into private life and shot himself at his home in New York; his suicide was due to his despair, not to some dark KGB blackmail – a proof that Kravchenko’s denunciation of the Soviet Union was a genuine act of protest against injustice.
And is today’s Kravchenko not the famous Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei who, in a recent interview for Fox News, said that “today in the West we are doing exactly the same things and sometimes even more ridiculous then [what the Chinese were doing in] the Cultural Revolution”[3]? Weiwei thus placed himself into a long line of authentic dissidents to whose ranks one has to include thousands of Jews critical of today’s Israeli politics. When Jonathan Glazer, the director of The Zone of Interest, took the stage to accept the international film award at the Oscar ceremony on March 10 2024, he said:
“Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether the victims of October 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization — how do we resist?”
He was immediately and ferociously attacked by the usual gang of Right-wingers and Zionists, with many of them taking his words out of their full context, as if Glazer was refuting his Jewishness itself – for example, John Podhoretz wrote: “By saying he refutes his Jewishness on the biggest stage in the world five months after the attack on Israel, Jonathan Glazer has instantly made himself into one of Judaism’s historical villains.”[4] Glazer claims the exact opposite: what Israel does in Gaza makes the Israeli government itself “one of Judaism’s historical villains” since by way of treating the memory of Holocaust as a means to legitimize the slaughter in Gaza they enact an utter disrespect for the millions of killed Jews… Here we are today, with both the new Right and the woke Left display brutally violating the elementary rules of reading a text - such fully conscious and intended stupidity is possible only in our time in which ideological fanaticism mixes with outright cynicism.
To achieve some kind of clear-sightedness, one thus has to perform an additional reflexive turn and question the very position from which we confront what we first perceived as our enemy. Kravchenko, the same as Ai Weiwei, rejected the very ”free world” which he embraced to escape the Stalinist terror. For a Zionist, this means that a legitimate fidelity to the Jewish legacy and identity must include a critical view of the abuses of this identity – as Yuval Harari pointed out, in Israel a struggle is now going on between the “two souls of the Jews,” and no compromise is possible here.
Is such a view utopian, in discord with the brutal reality of the Middle East tensions? On the contrary: the only realist solution of the crisis is not a mystery, it is clear to participants on both sides of the struggle. Who could be more realist than a person like Ami Ayalon, a former leader of Shin Bet? On January 14 2023 he said: “We Israelis will have security only when they, Palestinians, will have hope. This is the equation.” Israel will not have security until Palestinians have their own state, and Israeli authorities should release Marwan Barghouti, jailed leader of the second intifada, to direct negotiations to create one: “Look into the Palestinian polls. He is the only leader who can lead Palestinians to a state alongside Israel. First of all because he believes in the concept of two states, and secondly because he won his legitimacy by sitting in our jails.”[5] Barghouti is effectively perceived by millions there as the Palestinian Mandela (he is imprisoned for over 20 years). The only problem with such retired-truth-sayers is that they say this AFTER they retired: they are free to say it because their words just cause a small bubble without serious impact. I was told by an Israeli friend that there was a case of some who told the bitter truth after his retirement, but then he was called back to serve and was again doing exactly the same thing he criticized in his retirement… It’s not enough to tell the truth – the truth has to be told at a right moment, when it will produce the effect of truth.
[1] I owe this anecdote to Adam Chmielewski, who was present when it occurred.
[2] See Mark Jonathan Harris’s outstanding documentary on Kravchenko The Defector (2008).
[3] Exiled Chinese artist Ai Weiwei: 'Censorship in West exactly the same as Mao's China' (youtube.com).
[4] Jonathan Glazer’s Oscar speech sparks fierce reactions - Los Angeles Times (latimes.com).
[5] Ex-Shin Bet head says Israel should negotiate with jailed intifada leader | Israel | The Guardian.
What follows is openly UTOPIAN. The proposals put forward here have, under contemporary historical conditions, ZERO prospects of ever occurring. They are impossible proposals but not, strictly speaking, inconceivable.
Unconstrained by being a member of the diplomatic corps, which is also to say free of the vested interests and Realpolitik chess games of hegemonic power-positioning that poison all International Relations, ordinary people such as myself possess, as an essential aspect of their insectoid insignificance, a type of imaginative and conceptual Freedom that can also at times be untrammeled.
Employing this Freedom, I would like to put forward a model for a One-State *solution* to the One-State *reality* that is currently Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories of the West Bank and Gaza. The new state of United Palestine-Israel.
However science fictional the proposals outlined below will seem, they may at least serve as a *negative* illustration. The New State of United Palestine-Israel as conceived of here may serve as an antithetical picture, possibly even an utopian negation, of the military-colonial, mass-murderous horrors that are the Hell on Earth that Tel Aviv has constructed in its monumental contribution to the History of Criminal-against-Humanity Evil.
Under present-day conditions, acquiescing to the ethnic cleansing logic of American and Israeli Zionism is the only viable path that remains for those that wish to save the Palestinian lives that are still left. When the situation is viewed through this bloody glass darkly (free from the lotus-eating “solutions” that have failed so bloodily in the past) the only real world “solution” is the same as the Absolute Evil that the nuclear-armed military machines of Washington and Tel Aviv have teleologically positioned as the deathly end point of the decades-long Palestinian Genocide.
This is a Zero-state solution. A theocratic, ethno-nationalist State of Israel characterized by uniform religious affiliation and universal military conscription. The Palestinians will go the way of the Herero. No Palestinian territory. No Palestinian state. A terrestrial Palestinian population of near-Zero that consists entirely of a people in permanent exile. A perpetual Diaspora with tragically ironic parallels to the history of the Jews.
Wholly dependent as they are upon the good graces of their iron-fisted military colonizers, the only good option for the Palestinians is to flee en masse. Trump, Kushner and now Biden and Blinken may have been tight-fisted when it came to squeezing UNRWA and the UNHCR, but they can doubtless be relied upon to foot the bill for Palestinian mass expulsion.
To see the iron necessity of this inexorable Historical logic of the Palestinian Genocide, consider by way of contrast the impossible tasks that are those that need to be done if instead we want a One –State *solution* to the One-State *reality* that is currently Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories of the West Bank and Gaza.
For the newly minted state of United Palestine-Israel to be a viable, stable, happy and prosperous entity there must be:
1/A multi-paradigmatic transformation of historical consciousness.
A new name for the new state: United Palestine-Israel. Or better yet, the literati from both sides can invent a new name, invent a new tradition (Eric Hobsbawm) and imagine a new community (Benedict Anderson).
A new flag. A new anthem. The publication of new linguistic dictionaries to lay the groundwork of the new national language that will develop in the future that will be the syncretization of modern Hebrew and modern Arabic.
A voluntary cross-adoption program in which Israeli families adopt Palestinian infants and raise them as Muslims or as Christians. Palestinian families adopt Israeli infants and raise them as Jews or as secular atheists.
Choose a World Cup year for the start-date of this newly birthed state. If FIFA can drop all pretense of apoliticality and ban Russia from the World Cup, FIFA can do something in a positive direction and reserve a place for United Palestine-Israel. FIFA already reserves a place for the host nation.
2/A Truth, Reconciliation and Reparation Commission and Fund. The UK, the USA, Israel and certain powerful sections of the Jewish diaspora owe the Palestinian people untold trillions for their infliction of multi-generational military mass killing, internal and external displacement, arrested development and democidal injury and trauma. As a negative example, Tel Aviv *deliberately* withheld the provision of Covid vaccines to the Palestinians in a timely manner. The Absolutely Evil weaponization of Famine and communicable Disease as instruments of Genocide that we are currently all damned to witness are all Crimes against Humanity that scream to the Heavens for repentance, remorse, reparation and recompense.
https://sites.google.com/site/palestiniangenocide/
Pay this multi-trillion dollar bill in full and into the future.
3/United Palestine-Israel will sign the NPT and agree to regular IAEA inspections. United Palestine-Israel will sign all relevant treaties that commit to arms limitations and disarmament.
The Reparations Fund will pay the multi-billion dollar bill that Tel Aviv and Washington owe to the ordinary people of Iran who have suffered greatly under a regime of sanctions that were specifically designed to maintain Israeli rogue- nuclear hegemony in the region.
4/It is *imperative* that these processes must be completed within 12-24 months.
The *real* start-date for the Dawn of the New reality will be the day after. On that day every single nationalistic thought and sentiment is halted and expunged utterly and forever more. All of the foul ethno- and religious nationalism without which most of the mindsets of modern-day belligerence would not exist will cease immediately and forever in United Palestine-Israel.
Let United Palestine-Israel be the guiding Light and inaugural Event for the final and terminal death of the historical Age of Nationalism. Let the next, New Age be one of Universal Humanism.
Tragically it is necessary for us to plummet from the Celestial plane of pure conceptualization to the nauseating reality of Hell on Earth. This is a suitably Miltonic plummet to infernal Hell as we Fall from the Divine Light of God’s grace and glory in keeping with Zizek’s thematic poetic allusion above.
Of necessity, we must reflect on the Global, world-historical macro-situation in which the ongoing Israeli military colonization of Palestine is but one part of the overall picture of profound Civilizational systemic crisis, self-destruction, terminal collapse and death.
We are past the tipping-point of the Seneca Cliff. There are at present a number of viciously morbid systemic and structural asymptotic fault lines and processes - climate change; oligarchical capitalist class warfare; the continuing historical phenomena of military conflict without any corresponding pacifist and peacemaking historical processes to act as a counterpoint - that are ineluctably leading the human species to an extended period of great suffering in hell on earth.
Under such historical conditions, Tel Aviv will not sate its military-colonial bloodthirst until there is not a single Palestinian - the people that Golda Meir infamously called “an invented people” in her act of genocide by conceptual means - left anywhere on the face of the Earth. A Zero-State solution non plus ultra.
Do you remember which polls cited that around 90% of Israeli Jews are opposed to the two-state solution? I haven't seen numbers that high, and I'm curious.