EYELESS IN GAZA

A Palestinian girl sits on the remains of a destroyed house, next to graffiti of a missile by Hussein Abu Sadeq. Photograph: Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters

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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.

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[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.