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Slavoj Zizek

By Slavoj Zizek, Global Eminent Scholar at Kyung Hee University

I am sometimes ashamed of being a citizen of Slovenia. One such moment came in May, when the Slovene government, in act of solidarity with Israel, decided to put up Israeli flags on government buildings, along with the national and EU flags.

The Slovene government said Israel is under rocket attack from Gaza and has to defend itself, putting all the blame on Palestinians.

The ongoing crisis between Israelis and Palestinians, however, did not begin with rockets from Gaza. It started in East Jerusalem, where Israel is again trying to evict Palestinian families. For half a century since the 1967 Six-Day War, Palestinians have been stuck in the West Bank in a kind of limbo as refugees in their own land.

This protraction is in Israel's interest: they want the West Bank, but they don't want to annex it because they don't want to grant Israeli citizenship to West Bank Palestinians. So the situation drags on and is occasionally interrupted by negotiations which a Palestinian participant perfectly described. Both sides sit at the opposite ends of a table with a pie of pizza in the middle, and while negotiating over how to split the pie, one side constantly eats "its" parts.

When, as a sign of solidarity with protesting Palestinians in the West Bank, Hamas began to launch rockets against Israel, this act — which should be condemned — gave Netanyahu his moment to shine, as he framed a genuine West Bank protest against Israel's ethnic cleansing of Palestinians as yet another Hamas-Israel conflict.

One of the focal points of the protests is the Israeli city of Lod, with a strong Palestinian presence. Lod's mayor has described events as a "civil war." Gangs from both sides are terrorizing individuals, families and stores.

The Guardian reported on May 15: "Far-right Jewish Israelis, often armed with pistols and operating in full view of police, have moved into mixed areas this week. In messages shared by one online Jewish supremacist group, Jews were called to flood into Lod. 'Don't come without any instrument for personal protection,' one message read."

The most dangerous aspect of the situation is that the Israeli police don't even try to look neutral as an agent of the law and public safety. Some even say they were applauding the Jewish mob terrorizing Palestinians.

The rule of law is disintegrating in Israel. Its Palestinian citizens are left to themselves and cannot appeal to any higher agency that would intervene when they are attacked. This scandalous situation is just a consequence of something that has been going on in Israel in recent years: the openly racist extreme right is more and more recognized as legitimate and becoming part of the public political discourse. They want to restore Israel's "full sovereignty" over the West Bank and treat Palestinians living there as intruders.

This racist stance has always been the de facto foundation of the Israeli politics, but never publicly acknowledged. It was just the secret — although known to everyone — motivation of the Israeli politics whose public official position was always the two-state solution and respect of international laws and obligations.

With this façade of respect for the law torn down, we now see the truth behind the appearance all along. Appearances are essential. They oblige us to act in a certain way, so without appearance, the way we act changes.

The distance between the fabricated appearance and the dark reality behind it enabled Israel to present itself as a modern state of law in contrast to the Arab religious fundamentalism, but with this public acceptance of the religious fundamentalist racism, Palestinians are now a force of secular neutrality while the Israelis act like religious fundamentalists.

The wider context of this escalation of events in Israel makes the entire picture even darker. First in France, then in the US, a considerable number of retired military officers published letters warning against the threat to the national identity and the country's way of life.

In France, the letter attacked the tolerance of the state against Islamization, and in the US, they warned about the "socialist" and "Marxist" politics of the Biden administration. The myth of the depoliticized character of the armed forces is dispelled as a considerable part of the military supports the nationalist agenda. In short, what happens now in Israel is part of a global trend.

But what does this mean for the Jewish identity?

As one of the holocaust survivors said, "In the past, an anti-Semite was a person who dislikes Jews; now, an anti-Semite is a person whom Jews dislike."

The title of a recent dialogue on anti-Semitism and the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement in Der Spiegel was: "Wer Antisemit ist, bestimmt der Jude und nicht der potenzielle Antisemit" ("The Jew determines who is anti-Semite, not the potential anti-Semite"). OK, sounds logical; the victim should decide their victim status. But there are two problems here. First, shouldn't the same hold for Palestinians in the West Bank, who should determine who is stealing their land and depriving them of their fundamental rights? Second, who is "the Jew" who determines who is anti-Semitic?

What about the numerous Jews who support the BDS or who, at least, have doubts about the State of Israel politics in the West Bank? Is it not the implication of the quoted stance that Jews who oppose the Israeli state are in some deeper sense not Jews?

Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg said that a shame for one's country, not love, may be the true mark of belonging. A supreme example of such shame occurred back in 2014 when hundreds of Holocaust survivors and descendants of survivors bought an ad in Saturday's New York Times condemning what they referred to as "the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza and the ongoing occupation and colonization of historic Palestine."

Maybe some Israelis today will muster the courage to feel shame apropos of what the Israelis are doing in the West Bank and in Israel itself — not, of course, in the sense of shame of being Jewish, but, on the contrary, of feeling shame for what the Israeli politics in the West Bank is doing to the most precious legacy of Judaism itself.

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