THE GERMAN FAKE

More on Gaza and Israel.

Israeli troops walk past destroyed buildings on the outskirts of Gaza City © Mahmud Hams/AFP/Getty Images

Comrades,

For the time being, my writing on here will be entirely free. If you have the means, and believe in paying for good writing, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

I also ask that in conjunction with my text, you read this extraordinary piece by Tamar Nafar:

If Our Eyes Can See the Huge Scope of Atrocity, Can Our Hearts Contain Two Pains at Once? - Opinion - Haaretz.com

When the German government solemnly proclaims the safety and existence of Israel is Germany’s Staatsräson, they mean more than raison d’etat – they mean it is the reason for the German state to exist - as Christian Dürr put it, "geopolitically we do everything so that Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, will be in future politically successful.”[i] This commitment to Israel “is not inscribed in law, but it's kind of paralegal in the sense that this is our self-understanding as a nation,” said Sina Arnold; or, to quote Ben Gidley, it’s a way Germany “as a national culture has dealt with its Holocaust guilt": "in order to pay back for the Holocaust, we need to stand by Israel whenever.” As three Jewish writers said recently: “Germany’s reckoning with its history of atrocities began as an undertaking by left-leaning German civil society. Today it has become a highly bureaucratised lever of the state that increasingly serves a reactionary agenda.” The last step in this bureaucratization is that the Bundestag is now “mulling a draft law to require people seeking citizenship through naturalisation or seeking to obtain asylum and residency in Germany to pledge a commitment to Israel’s right to exist.”[ii]

This weird demand of a political stance towards another country as a condition of citizenship is quite logical: if Israel is Germany’s Staatsräson, then you cannot be a German citizen without commitment to Israel… my advice to Jews is here: be afraid when the very perpetrators of the Holocaust offer themselves to you. It is easy to smell something rotten in such a full commitment based on the axiom that, in spite of all possible excesses, Israel stands for the values of Western civilization against the Muslim world which is much more constrained - OK, in principle this may be true, but let’s then apply these same values or standards to Israel itself, to what it does in Gaza or on the West Bank! Here is the latest measure announced by the US, Israel’s staunch ally: 

“The U.S. Department of State is set to implement travel bans on any Israeli settlers who are implicated in attacks on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. The move was announced by Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Tuesday, as part of efforts to establish stability in the Palestinian territory where extremist settler violence is rampant, and has worsened as a consequence of the Israel-Hamas conflict.”[iii]

To make such a statement – to demand the cancelling of visas for settlers – today in Germany would trigger immediate accusations of anti-Semitism: Israelis as the ultimate victims are untouchable in the public discourse. This brings me to Illouz’s latest text in which she is critical of me[iv]: she assumes the position of victim despite being published in the big European media channels, from Sueddeutsche Zeitung to Guardian, while I am more and more censored. When I was recently invited to give a talk in Germany, I was explicitly prohibited to mention the ongoing Middle East war: “We cannot present a speech by you on the subject of the war in the Middle East or to be more specific, the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel. Not now in Germany, and not by a Slovenian philosopher.” (“Now” used here means two months after the Hamas attack, when many other things had proceeded it). I am not just censored but also attacked with breathtaking brutality. Claudius Seidl recently published in Frankfurter Allgemeine “Ist das Žižeks Ernst?”[v] with the explanation of its topic: “How a thinker disqualifies himself: Slavoj Žižek seriously fails apropos the situation in Israel, mocks Zionism and suggests that Hamas and Israel are quits.” (Wie sich ein Denker disqualifiziert: Slavoj Žižek scheitert am Ernst der Lage in Israel, verhöhnt den Zionismus und suggeriert, die Hamas und Israel wären quitt.) The first sentence of the article tells it all: “Slavoj Žižek didn’t become crazy, on the opposite: this is what is so disgusting. Slavoj Žižek was crazy for decades.” (Slavoj Žižek ist nicht verrückt geworden, im Gegenteil: Das ist ja das Entsetzliche. Slavoj Žižek war jahrzehntelang verrückt.”)

Just imagine the reaction if I were to write like this in a public polemic! I don’t want to lose words on such trash – what I want to note is that the reproaches addressed at me by Illouz, although their tone is much more civilized, ultimately amount to the same: I speak from a cold cynical distance unable to emotionally identify with what goes on; I treat Israel and Hamas as two partners in a self-destructive dance where they are both equally guilty… Is this so? Illouz claims that my argumentation circles around two core claims. The first one:

“I, Zizek, was expected to show massive support for Israel but I did not to do it because I am moderate and hold a middle position. I recognise the evil character of Hamas’s actions, but as an intellectual, I argue we should investigate its causes which are to be found in the Occupation.”

The pompous style of this formulation is totally foreign to me – this is not me speaking, this is Illouz projecting onto me the figure of a pompous “Leftist” intellectual. No, I was not expected to show massive support for Israel – “Leftists” expected from me an “understanding” for Hamas and were appalled when I agreed that Hamas has to be destroyed. Plus I definitely do not hold a moderate-middle position – or, to quote what Illouz describes as my second core claim:

“Whatever horror the Hamas declared or committed, the Israelis also declared and committed quite similar. The State of Israel can no longer pretend to be the only democracy in the Middle East and has now de facto morphed into a theocratic state equivalent to Shari’a law. It is therefore futile to look for right and wrong, heroes and villains. The only thing that remains is to hold a mirror to both groups and show them they are in fact quite similar to each other, which, I, Zizek, have the courage to say.”

Simply false, again. I totally agree with Illouz when she writes: “As Max Weber famously said, being in the middle is not a better guarantee of truth than being on a clear side.” I am not in the middle in this sense of comfortable neutrality, I only insist that the situation is inherently tragic, which is why one cannot choose one side against the other. Hamas is terrifying, and Israel is not innocent – to quote Illouz herself: “Israel bears a moral and political responsibility to help resolve the statelessness of Palestinians. This responsibility is all the more acute that Israel illegitimately and even criminally occupies the territories it conquered in 1967.” (Incidentally, this is why I also don‘t view Oct. 7th as a variation on the Occupation” – I use the term “occupation” only when it applies to the post-67 expansion of Israel, i.e., in the sense in which Illouz herself says that Israel “criminally occupies” the territories it conquered in 1967.) Consequently, Illouz totally misses my stance when she writes:

“I would like to ask you, Slavoj Zizek, you and your armchair leftist comrades: Why wasn’t there a place for such tact of the heart? Why didn’t you express compassion for the unfathomable shock and pain Jews have experienced? Why couldn’t the Left grieve with us in silence for just one short week before resorting to its pontificating analyses? Why do you and so many others seem to take antisemitism so lightly, as if the hatred of Jews was the natural default position of the world? We could have grieved for three people together, the murdered Israelis, the Jews threatened by antisemitism all over the world, and the innocent Palestinians ravaged by Israeli bombs.”

The last sentence also describes my position – with an addition. Palestinians suffer not just from bombing in Gaza: the violence on the West Bank is also exploding, and there are clear signs that Israel is moving towards a full evacuation of Palestinians from Gaza. But to claim that I am taking anti-Semitism lightly is too much: I wrote pages and pages on it for decades, clearly defining it as the basic form of ideology. As for grieving, I must admit I have a problem with displays of public grief – they all too often turns into a spectacle, especially now in Germany where grief is bureaucratized. The style of Illouz’s paragraph quoted above is for me already false, a fake. “Why couldn’t the Left grieve with us in silence for just one short week before resorting to its pontificating analyses?” Because the choice between grieving in silence and pontificating analyses is a false one: in that “short week” after October 7, massive things were already taking place, the bombing of Gaza began, so analysis was crucial to draw attention to the catastrophe that lie ahead for both Palestinians and for the Jews.

I am as far away as possible from pontificating for a simple reason: there is no safe external place from which to do it. My pain is much worse and more intense: in the ongoing horrors on both sides, it is obscene to choose a side. I am disgusted when the Hamas attack is singled out as a unique “crime against humanity,” while the devastation of Gaza and violence on the West Bank are treated as secondary excesses for which ultimately Palestinians themselves are responsible. One should reject such simple solutions and persist in the tragic hopelessness of the situation. Tamer Nafar, a Palestinian rapper and Israeli citizen, wrote in a letter published by Haaretz: “If our small eyes can see the huge scope of atrocity, can our big hearts contain two pains at once?” To contain two pains at once, THIS is my stance, and this is why I fully understand Tamer when he goes on:

“When I face Israeli or Western media, it always feels more like an interrogation than an interview. ‘Do you condemn Hamas?’ I’m asked. Right now, in front of you, there is an entire generation of bleeding children in Gaza; what is your message to them, beyond telling them to ‘condemn Hamas?’ or asking “why did the preceding generation vote for Hamas?’ or ‘you’re being used as human shields.’”[vi]

Nafar is right to insist that the question;“do you support Hamas?”, is the wrong one to be asked if you are a victim in Gaza – the right answer of a victim is: “I try to resist the temptation to support Hamas, although you are doing all you can to push me in that direction!” The latest revelations on what Hamas did to Jewish women on October 7, the brutality of rapes, bears witness to something worse than terror: terror was 9/11, a bomb or plane explodes killing many, while what Hamas did on October 7 was plain perverted morbidity which, on top of this, was commanded, and so was not simply an outburst of spontaneous depravity. So no mercy for Hamas – as I wrote, “Hamas soll vernichtet sein” (and I never said the same for Israel). The only shadow of a doubt that remains is that, while I fully accept the fact of the horrors committed by Hamas, I cannot help but remember that Israel had to withdraw two similar accusations (there are no photos of beheaded children; the burned corpses were not corpses of Jews but the corpses of Hamas fighters burned by IDF in its counterattack).

Plus one should ask the inevitable question: why we were bombed by these disclosures now? This NOW is no longer the now of pure grief and horror, the moment of “compassion for the unfathomable shock and pain Jews have experienced”: it comes in the midst of what Israel is doing in Gaza, so volens nolens it functions as a justification for what Israel is doing now. To put it brutally, it is Israel which manipulates the victims of Hamas here, so that unfortunately grief and horror are somewhat overshadowed by the question: what does Israel want to do now?

Niall Ferguson claims that Hamas intends “nothing less than a second Holocaust’[vii]; however, in the case of Israel, we are not dealing with mere intentions: what is actually happening is the less and less hidden creation of Great Israel from the river to the sea. To put it in other words, the image of the eternal victim is used by Israel to justify its strongest expansion ever. A true “desert of the real” that we see in the drone shots of ruined Gaza cities makes any choice between the two horrors (which one is “less horrible,” Hamas attack, Israeli bombing) obscene. 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.”[viii]

Does this humanitarian advice which obviously cannot be followed in reality not add a cruel joke to the brutality of the bombing? On the top of running from bombs, Palestinians in Gaza now have to play what was called 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.”[ix] Can one imagine the explosion of anti-Semitism to which such scenes that circulate all around the world will give birth?

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. I don’t equalize them, but the Israeli messianic hardliners present a danger of Israel becoming a fundamentalist state (a danger recognized by many Jews, from Yuval Harari to Efraim Halevy).

This is why, from a global geopolitical perspective, the greatest victim of the Gaza war will be Europe (or, rather, more precisely, the EU) which missed the opportunity to let its distinctive voice be heard, subordinating (with minor reservations) to the US unconditional support of Israel. To return to my starting point, the German unconditional support of Israel amounts to the support of the present Israeli government against the liberal opposition to it which advocates an understanding for the plea of Palestinians – the German full support of Israel thus de facto contributes to the growth of anti-Semitism. The German support of Israel thus becomes visible in its obscene truth: Germany is ready to pay for its past sins not by insisting on justice but by covering up the sins of its principal ex-victim. Today, a true friendship with Israel must include a severe critique of the present Israeli government. Yes, it is difficult to be a true friend.

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[i] Israel: Die deutsche Schwierigkeit mit der Staatsräson - ZDFheute.

[ii] In Germany, debate rages over a state policy to support Israel, no matter what | Courthouse News Service.

[iii] U.S. Imposes Visa Bans For Extremist Israeli Settlers | TIME.

[iv] Eva Illouz: Am 7. Oktober hörte das Herz der Linken auf, zu schlagen — der Freitag.

[v] Slavoj Žižek und der Antisemitismus (faz.net).

[vi] If Our Eyes Can See the Huge Scope of Atrocity, Can Our Hearts Contain Two Pains at Once? - Opinion - Haare Eva Illouz: Am 7. Oktober hörte das Herz der Linken auf, zu schlagen — der Freitagtz.com.

[vii]Hamas ‘intending nothing less than a second Holocaust’: Niall Ferguson - YouTube

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

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