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The Jewish-Israeli navel-gazers

The latest outrage, a video recording of an Israeli army medic (!) casually executing a Palestinian man, has been seized upon by people who are sympathetic to Israel. They quickly began to write things like: What have we become? What about our values? This fight is about the battle over the soul of the “Jewish state.” And remarkably: Thanks to the dead Palestinian for forcing us to face what we’ve become.

As usual, the real victims – like the man whose brain is exploded in the video, or the young girl in the other video, or the black guy in the lynch video – get lost in the solipsistic mix. It’s as if the Jewish-Israeli navel has projected itself four feet outwards before flexing back, splitting in two, and glomming onto Jewish-Israeli eyeballs.

Small wonder they can only see one small piece of what they actually are. Of what the whole picture is.

It’s normal for members of a community – imagined or not – to attend to the facts and stories of their daily lives and the lives of people who are like them. The broadening and fragmentation of the media landscape enables and encourages the phenomenon. Sites like this one even help drive the development of new communities.

Yet, one consistent and durable criticism of the Jewish-Israeli left goes to its bewilderingly myopic perspective. It’s not so much an inability to see other people. Rather, it’s the tendency to see others as objects (or rarely, agents), situated within a narrative of self. A preening egoism adorns every “humane” pronouncement about the need to end the occupation. Don’t you see? Apartheid undermines the very essence of our whatever and etc…

Fine, one group of people is painfully self-involved and grandiose. Why is that important?

In other circumstances it wouldn’t matter: like a whole culture dedicated to bathroom selfies. But in the apartheid context it matters a lot. The dehumanization of other people occurs through the extraordinary status we afford ourselves or through the denigration of others. For the Jewish-Israeli left it’s the former, for the right it’s both.

The truth of course, is that there’s nothing exceptional about Jewish-Israelis, or Palestinians for that matter. God didn’t choose anyone, and Palestine/Israel is one more ugly mess in a world that’s seen thousands of them at least. Ethnic conflict is ordinary and the Banality of Evil is as persistent a truism as any other. Even, apartheid, the chosen government of the Jewish-Israeli people, isn’t very exceptional. It’s only very offensive.

The whole claim of religious or secular exceptionalism (so many Nobel prizes, after all) informs apartheid and justifies it. Even a high-minded theory of exceptionalism will always lead to a striking lack of self-awareness and sense of superiority in the best of cases. In Palestine, it’s the source of our daily calamity.

My unsolicited (and likely unheeded) advice to “liberal” Jewish-Israelis is to forget about being exceptional, either as people or as a people. Approach your role in apartheid from the perspective of someone who believes in true equality. When a Palestinian is executed by a racist – a true exceptionalist – in your midst, don’t worry about how it’ll make you look. Don’t ask what the murder means for “Jewish morality.” Instead ask things like, What was the dead guy’s favorite football team? Did he play a musical instrument? What was his favorite memory?

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“Small wonder they can only see one small piece of what they actually are. Of what the whole picture is.”

There is a story I recall (can’t remember if I read it or heard about it) some decades ago about two Israeli soldiers during the ’48 war. They take an Arab fighter prisoner and while on their way to their base argue about his fate. One soldier wants to execute him outright while the other says that would be wrong. The whole story then becomes a foray into how these two men explore their, and the Jewish people’s, humanity or lack thereof. Meanwhile during all this discussion the Arab guy says not a word. It’s as if he is only there to provide a catalyst for the soldiers, an excuse to talk about everything else except where he fits into these two men’s universes. In the end his fate is not really THAT important.

Thanks to both abc
and Ahmed Moor .

Brilliant insight , and a lesson to all peoples !

Ahmed Moor is so right.

Has there ever been a more self absorbed community than Zionist Jews?

“Likely unheeded”

. as if Palestinians would ever take advice from these supposedly
‘unaware’ minions of “liberal” (not centrist mind you) zionists about what to do, think or negotiate from 67 on. I think your problem is not what you wrote above which makes sense if what you believe in your mind about liberal zionists is something you can’t let go of. the problem is you have such misguided, warped and convoluted knowledge about what a liberal and/or left wing zionist is versus a true zionist-hater/israel hater that you confuse the two. you do realize that the gideon levys’s of israel represent less then a 10th of a% of the population. that the organized resistance against Israel has been trying for a long time without serious results to separate Zionists into the ‘evil’ center to right while implying there may still be some kind of ‘redemption’ for the confused and gut-wrenched left–but only if they see the light of anti-zionism and all that implies.

Also, your fixation with what you think is exceptionalism is your problem, not Israel’s. It isn’t as if all the major Judaic born faiths don’t all feel they are the most superior extension of the religion. Any two-bit religious scholar can tell you that the so called covenant the Jews took on had little to do with being superior too shoddy and being the ones who chose would bring much hardship and suffering. There were rules and rules broken but what religion doesn’t have them. You possess the most narrow minded and typical bigoted understanding of what the phrase “chosen people” means.

Anyway, as long as Palestinian supporters(from u’s. Campus to Gaza , and yesterday Abbas said it in a speech,) continue to say that “all of palestine is “occupied”. And by all they mean the catchy little chant – from the river to sea…. So, what does it matter what some left-wing Zionist thinks and what’s left to negotiate

The banality of evil, indeed, but it is important for those outside this banality to call attention to it — and to call it by its name, “evil”. If some of the perps are, like all perps, I suppose, too self-involved to see it, the worse for them.

Yesterday I spent several hours walking through a mostly-Hispanic neighborhood in Brooklyn, canvassing Democratic voters about their likelihood of voting for Sanders (or, of course, for Clinton). And often I thought about all the people who probably thought about the Democratic Party as a party “of the people” and hadn’t noticed what it had become under Bill Clinton and Obama and others, people who dimly recalled FDR and felt comfortable “being” Democrats (perhaps as Israeli-Jews feel comfortable “being Jews”) without noticing that what they were busy “being” was a far cry from what Democrats were in the 1940s, 1950s. Or maybe mine is a false nostalgia or resulting from listening too exclusively to what my parents told me. Maybe nothing has changed. For Democrats. And maybe Jews were ever thus.