Elements of Anti-Semitism
The limits of Zionism
Jake Romm
Zionism is an antisemitism. What do we mean by this? The Zionist has no particular disposition towards Jews qua Jews—if they are nationalists, they are embraced; if they are not, they are despised. Or further: if a Jew declares “I am not a Zionist,” the Zionist retorts, “then you are not a Jew.” Zionists demand absolute devotion to the national project, and, like the Christian supersessionists before them, attempt to replace Judaism as a religion, degrading it into yet another vulgar nationalism premised on a constructed racial identity. But even on these terms, “racial belonging” is not sufficient for the Zionist to consider someone a Jew. It is clear that the Zionist considers anti-Zionist Jews to be their enemy—over and above all others except the Palestinian, the former representing a fifth column in the war of extermination against the latter. Anti-Zionist Jews are regularly subjected to Zionist vitriol, which targets them specifically as Jews—“Kapo,” “self-hating Jew,” “Nazi,” “race traitor,” etc…[1]
But Zionism shares more with antisemitism than a hatred of certain Jews, because antisemitism is more than simply the hatred of Jews. It is a personal and social pathology, a manner of thinking, a form of reactionary modernity—one distinct from other forms of racism or xenophobia, though they share a family likeness. Zionism is an antisemitism, first and foremost, because it internalizes and recapitulates the very same European antisemitism that sought the extermination of the Jews in the Shoah. It is not only the pathology transposed into a new context, but the continuation of its tactics as well.
Because antisemitism is a mode of thought, however, it does not necessarily have a fixed target. The group which occupies the hated position is mutable. As Adorno and Horkheimer write, “depending on the constellation, the victims are interchangeable . . . so each of them can replace the murderer, in the same blind lust for killing, as soon as he feels the power of representing the norm.” Since the Nakba, it is the Zionist who represents the norm; the Palestinian has now taken their place as victim—the constellation has changed. If we are to understand Zionism, we must understand its relation to antisemitism, and not just to fascism—though, as George Habash told the Associated Press in 1984, “Zionism is fascism, exactly.” Further, considering the murder that always follows when antisemitism permeates the organs of state, and considering the genocidal slaughter which Zionism has wrought, we must say, to update a phrase from Moishe Postone: no analysis of Zionism that cannot account for the extermination of the Palestinians is fully adequate.
“No analysis of Zionism that cannot account for the extermination of the Palestinians is fully adequate.”
Two notes seem in order. First, if the language used here seems sterile (“The Palestinian,” “The Zionist”) it is because I am writing about types: the Palestinian type from the perspective of the Zionist type. Where some Zionists may not see themselves in some of these notes, they may in others, and where they see themselves in none, then they are either not Zionists or they have simply failed to consciously acknowledge what such a position entails. Second, the choice to turn largely, but not exclusively, towards the literature of antisemitism in post-war critical theory is intended not only to apply our understanding of that particular psychic formation to Zionism, but also to demonstrate the continuity between Zionism and the exterminationist and colonial regimes of 20th century Europe. Both during and after the calamity of the Second World War and the Shoah, thinkers like Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Jean Améry, Franz Neumann, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Siegfried Kracauer undertook studies of Nazi society and the social psychology of antisemitism—work later picked up and expanded upon by Werner Bonefeld, Moishe Postone, Enzo Traverso, Zygmunt Bauman, and Jean-François Lyotard, among others. These thinkers generally refused the comforting lie of Nazi singularity, instead keeping open the possibility of another Shoah under a different “constellation,” placing the Shoah in the context of capitalist modernity itself. They sought to answer more generalizable questions: why did the Shoah happen to this group in this place at this time, what kind of subjects undertake such a project, and what kind of society produces them? Rather than attempt to grasp Zionist antisemitism as a totality, what follows is a series of sketches in that tradition which, I think and hope, speak directly to the current situation.
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Prior to October 7th, between 170-200,000 Palestinians worked in Israel (roughly 75% with work permits—with around 90% of these permits going to Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank). After October 7th, nearly all Palestinian workers were fired, their work permits revoked, and their range of movement, already limited, restricted even further. The economic damage has been immense particularly in construction and agriculture, where the majority of Palestinians had been employed (it is an aspect of Zionist cruelty that Palestinians—a highly educated people—should be confined to low-wage manual labor employment in two of the primary economic sectors which have been used to advance their dispossession). To provide the starkest example: the construction industry, which accounts for 6-7% of Israeli GDP was, as of December 2023, operating at only 30% of its pre-October capacity, and fully half of all building projects were on hold.
Although business interests were able to pressure the government to allow a paltry 8–10,000 Palestinians back to work in December, the short- and long-term solutions to the problem of Israeli dependence on Palestinian labor (and, indeed, for the Zionist it has always been a problem) appears to be the increasing importation of foreign workers from Asia and Eastern Europe, particularly Thailand and India. It should be noted that Israel has used debt—the result of exorbitant “placement fees” charged by recruiters in workers’ home countries—to trap many foreign workers in hyper-exploitative working conditions enforced by geographic isolation. This is the paradigmatic form of modern slavery. Even if cheap imported labor were to get the construction industry back on track, the war has also resulted in the downgrading of Israel’s credit rating, a sharp decline in imports and exports, the almost complete pause of its tourism industry, a snowballing cancelation of arms deals the world over and, in the case of Turkey, trade relations as well, yielding an almost 20% contraction of its annualized GDP.
With these numbers, it could be said that Israel’s present genocide against the Palestinians harms both its short-term and long-term economic interests, sacrificed for the drive to extermination. But the enforced economic obsolescence of the Palestinians must be understood as integral to the drive for their extermination. Employing the brute force of siege, Israel has succeeded in cutting many Palestinians off from much of the global economy—now, entirely in the case of Gaza, and increasingly so in the case of the West Bank. Even those who are able to run businesses with international clientele face delays or de facto bans from cash-transfer sites like PayPal, and imports, exports, and access to certain goods are all controlled and restricted by Israel. These restrictions limit access to raw materials, affecting the types of industry Palestine is capable of sustaining, and limiting prospects for economic development.
Palestinians' limited access to the global economy in turn nurtures a dependency on Israeli goods and employment. But this dependency cuts both ways—Israel has grown dependent on Palestinian labor, which renders Palestinians necessary to the functioning of the Israeli economy and also creates barriers against their total social exclusion (not only in the sense that this labor requires social interaction with the Israeli populace). As Bataille writes in The Psychological Structure of Fascism, “money serves to measure all work and makes man a function of measurable products. According to the judgment of homogenous society, each man is worth what he produces.” In capitalist society, productivity becomes the prerequisite to admittance to social life. To totalize race-based social exclusion, then, the target population must be rendered economically obsolete. “As early as 1895,” Fayez Sayegh notes, “Herzl was busy devising a plan to ‘spirit the penniless population across the frontier by denying it employment.’”
Nazi Germany understood this as well: the 1938 “Regulation for the Elimination of the Jews from the Economic Life of Germany” completed the work begun three years prior by the Nuremberg Laws, which stripped Jews and other groups of their citizenship and enshrined racial classification and separation into law. “The Jewish middleman,” Adorno and Horkheimer write, “fully becomes the image of the devil only when economically he has ceased to exist.” In apartheid society, in which the target population is seen as subhuman, or at least undeserving of rights or consideration, the wage remains one of the last means of verifying their humanity: beasts may be productive, but they do not earn a wage. The attempted elimination of Palestinian labor from the Israeli economy marks one of the final steps on the way to their full dehumanization in the Zionists’ eyes, one that prepared the way for the present mass extermination.
Zionism is not, then, a race-based system of economic exploitation at its core, though it does benefit from such exploitation: it is, first and foremost, a program of land acquisition. We can see the dual attack on Palestinian economic self-determination and land ownership in Israel’s routine destruction of Palestinian olive groves. Settlers, often armed or otherwise protected by armed agents of the state, uproot, burn, or cut down olive trees, with increasing frequency since 2019. The aim is to drive Palestinians from their land by destroying the subsistence produced by the land itself and nurtured over centuries by Palestinian farmers, in an effort to “Judaize” the area. As Palestinians flee from unchecked violence, forced from their land at the barrel of a gun, Jewish settlements appear in their wake, strictly illegal but in practice facilitated by the state until they are eventually recognized and assimilated into the legally regulated regime of property. (The whole cycle of legalizing illegal settlements, in any event, is something of a formality as their existence and proliferation is the entire raison d’être of the Zionist project.) When Palestinians refuse to leave and cannot be forced, they are murdered.
While this pattern of violence and dispossession impacts shepherds as well as other farmers, the destruction of olive groves, in particular, holds a special symbolic significance and must be understood as a part of the colonialists’ project to remake the land in their own image. This first requires a clearing of the ground. Zionism has spread the myth that, prior to Jewish development of the land, Palestine was “empty,” that their presence “made the desert bloom.” This is a recapitulation of the European myth-cum-legal concept of terra nullius or “nobody’s land,” invoked to justify the colonization of the Americas and the extermination of the native population. But there is a sense in which Palestine was empty, or rather, not quite full: it was empty of the European colonial and thus it had to be filled with its new project. Every trace of a “before”—and this includes indigenous foodways and, especially, the olive groves that in many cases predate Zionism as a movement itself—is a reminder of the native’s existence, and crucial to settler colonialism is the idea that the colonists are the only rightful, inhabitants of the land, indeed that they always have been. The olive groves symbolize for the Zionist not only Palestinian cultivation of the land (and, in a more biblical register, peace), but also a presence that predates their rule and contests their entire historicity.
“The Palestinian, according to the Zionist, is simply a very bad capitalist.”
The Palestinian, according to the Zionist, is simply a very bad capitalist. The Palestinian failed to turn Gaza into a Westernized tourist destination akin to Abu Dhabi, a recent Israeli advertisement on American streaming services stated (“failed entrepreneur” being a charge specifically designed to penetrate the American psyche). And because of this political-economic failure, they can be, according to market logic, eliminated. Unable to claim that Palestinian land is literally unowned or unoccupied (because ownership and occupation are the issues at stake), the Zionist reverts to a quasi-Lockean theory of property: the Palestinian has not sufficiently mixed their labor with the land, and so the land can, even must, be seized.
The reality that Palestinians have, of course, mixed their labor with the land is beside the point. The Zionist recognizes only a particular type of labor, from which endeavors like agriculture and even light industry seem to be excluded. Locke and the concept of terra nullius have been updated for neoliberal times: instead of the discovery of a no-one’s land, decades of Israeli siege, blockade, and extraction have denied the Palestinians the means to “sufficiently” mix their labor with the global economy. Significant heavy industrial or technological exports and sizable international financial institutions are nowhere to be found: through its own economic denial and strangulation, the Zionist fashions the Palestinian into the image of the anachronistic un-modern that they always imagined them to be. The logic follows an almost total inversion of the valences of classical 20th century antisemitism. Jews, confined to the money trades, became identified with usury and with capital itself, and in turn, with abstraction: against “homeland,” against “community values.” Now, in keeping with the current of the times, the Zionist says the Palestinians have no aptitude for exchanging money, no capacity for the abstractions of capital, they are too tied to the land—they are, always have been, and always will be peasants, lashing out against development, capable only of subsistence. Proposals to develop the Gaza seaside into resorts for the murderers are in development: the jackals are already licking their chops.
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The violence of Zionism is not a response to the ideological dehumanization of the Palestinians but simultaneous to it: murder is the way in which the Palestinian human being is first reduced to a “thing” and then rendered incapable of disputing the ideological lie of dehumanization, the disputation of which requires nothing more than their gaze. Murder quiets the guilt of Zionism’s untrue thought that this human they see is not a human at all, and the Zionist must constantly enact new and ever greater violence to stave off the ultimate and inevitable realization. The injunction against murder is total, but for the killer convinced of their own morality (“the most moral army in the world”), it is through murder itself that the victim becomes less than human.
The phrase “human animals,” uttered by Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant in the early stages of the present genocide, is instructive. “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly,” he said. What does acting accordingly mean? The human must be reduced to its animal essence, to “bare life” in Agamben’s terms. Israel’s complete siege of Gaza includes the denial of adequate food, the near-total destruction of every urban center and the subsequent bombardment of the resultant tent cities, and the wreckage of the Strip’s energy infrastructure, causing the failure of the entire area’s already severely limited access to clean water. Sewage runs through the streets, clean water is almost nowhere to be found, people are dying of starvation or otherwise resorting to eating animal feed. A struggle for survival, for food, for shelter, for water. And crucially, so the Zionist would like, only that. The struggle for political independence or the recognition of rights may be waged on behalf of animals, but not by animals themselves, who lack the capacity for this high-level thought but retain the capacity for violence.
Even prior to October 7th, during the Israeli blockade of Gaza between 2007-2010, Israel denied the entry of adequate food into Gaza, studying the minimum calorie count the Strip could sustain without malnutrition or rapid mass death (Israeli manufactured food insecurity has remained a significant problem in Gaza since that period as well). Israel refers to its strategy of intermittently bombing the Gaza Strip as “mowing the grass.” Calorie counts, mowing the grass, human animals: this confluence of phrases reveals the Zionist dehumanization of the Palestinian. The language is agricultural. “Like sheep to the slaughter”—the concentration camp is the cousin of the factory farm. The Israeli military’s artificial intelligence systems publicized as Gospel and Lavender (the former by Israel itself, the latter only named through reporting by +972 Magazine), which accelerate the target-generation process to inhuman speeds, further develop the exterminatory logic of the camps in the age of automation.[2] Human soldiers are intended to be distanced from the physical act of killing, which is achieved primarily through bombing. Israel has even recently been testing artificial intelligence-powered guns—which use AI powered image processing to assess and lock on to targets, leaving only the decision to push the ‘fire’ button up to a living soldier— at checkpoints (these guns fire so-called “less than lethal” munitions but, as people in both Israel and the United States know, the munitions still have a knack for being lethal). With the Gospel, Lavender, and AI-gun systems (and others—for example, drones equipped with rifles), Israeli soldiers are largely insulated from the act of targeting as well as killing (a human actor may still ultimately make the decision to pull the trigger, as it were, but this decision is mediated by increasingly large and complex layers of technology as well as physical distance). The delegation of murder to machines can only be adopted once the necessity of murder has been agreed upon in advance. Once the moral and political question is resolved decisively in favor of death, the only questions remaining are those of cost and logistics: a vision of the 21st century as abattoir.
“So what do you do with a rabid dog,” a recent blog post on the Times of Israel asked, “who, through no fault of his own, is deathly sick, enraged, and goes to attack humans due to his illness. Please don’t misunderstand me: I am not comparing them to animals. That would be an insult to the animals.” Since the near-removal of the Palestinian from Israel’s economic life after October 7th, the Zionist has rendered them human animals: not beasts of burden, but predators or pests. Once any injunction against killing animals is lifted (be it for consumption, self-protection, or otherwise), predators or pests must be eliminated following simple economic logic because the predator or pest is not useful like the beast of burden: it is actively harmful or, in any event, a stumbling stone. Some propaganda images that emerged shortly after October 7th showed Israeli soldiers finding dogs and cats deemed “too clean” for Gaza, and advertising them as lost Israeli pets—both a dehumanization of Palestinians as “lower than domestic animals” and an only slightly veiled invocation of the rhetoric of racial cleanliness. Returning to Adorno and Horkheimer: “The precondition of the fascists’ pious love of animals, nature, and children is the lust of the hunter. The idle stroking of children’s hair and animal pelts signifies: this hand can destroy.” That these animals could belong to Gazans does not cross the Zionists’ minds: animals do not keep other animals as pets, people do—and in any event, they are too clean to belong to the filthy Palestinian. Indeed, the Zionist has, at all turns, sought to force uncleanliness upon the Palestinian in order to turn them into the image of the human-animal who lives outside and bathes in dirty water, a reality which has been fabricated through the denial of water, the strangulation of municipal services and fuel for sewage pumping and sanitation, and ultimately the ongoing destruction of all human dwellings in the Gaza Strip.
“Once the moral and political question is resolved decisively in favor of death, the only questions remaining are those of cost and logistics: a vision of the 21st century as abattoir.”
In contrast to the images of “rescued” domestic pets, Hasbaraists have, since October 7th, frequently used images of rats or cockroaches in anti-Palestinian propaganda, particularly in reference to fighters operating within Hamas’s tunnel network. Israel’s air superiority has driven the Palestinian resistance underground, and now the Hasbaraists use their tactical adaptation to confirm what they have always believed: the Palestinian is an animal that must be rooted from the earth, and then buried underground again: now in mass graves. Images of murdered Palestinians are interpolated into images by Zionist propagandists. In the wake of the first “flour massacre”—in which Israeli forces opened fire on Palestinians clamoring for aid, killing at least 118—drone videos emerged, published by the Israeli military, in which the black and white infrared footage figurally dehumanizes the victims, reducing them to blazing black shapes—the visual language of the hunt, so many dots on the screen erased in an instant.
Zionism as a settler-colonial endeavor was always destined to regard its victims as animals. Not simply because to be an animal is to be killable, but because settler colonialism is premised upon the domination of nature: it refashions the native soil into the image of the colonist. Israeli Zionists claim to have “made the desert bloom,” and in a sense they did by destroying Palestinian farmland, sequestering the majority of the region's water resources, and then diverting those resources to the cultivation of water-intensive foreign crops. Organizations like the Jewish National Fund, along with the Israeli government, engage in afforestation programs in the Negev Desert in an effort to displace Bedouin populations with an eco-friendly cover. Such afforestation also destroys desert ecosystems and further diverts water resources from Palestinians. Making the desert bloom, in this sense, should be understood as referring to the ongoing destruction of indigenous foodways and ecosystems. Adorno and Horkheimer again: “When domination of nature is the true goal, biological inferiority remains the ultimate stigma, the weakness imprinted by nature, the mark which invites violence.” Palestinians are conceived as human animals in order to inscribe them as and within Nature, and to reinforce the Zionists’ sense of racial superiority in exaggerated fashion. At one with the land, the Palestinian is material to be used or excised. As humans, at once determined by nature and determining it, they resist the charge. The Zionist answers by returning them to the land as corpses.
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Twentieth century antisemitism proceeds first by the racialization of Jews as alien, and subsequently transposes that imputed racial difference into national difference. In order for the Jew to be rootless—a fifth column against the nation wherever they live, regardless of their historical ties and roots in a given land—they must first be regarded as racially distinct from the national polity now defined as race (i.e. the nation-state). Zionist antisemitism recapitulates the process, but with a distinct inversion. Confronted with a land inhabited prior to their arrival, the Zionist as colonialist was required to invent roots in the land (or establish their claim based on ancient history) in order to displace the existing Palestinian (which, then, included native Jews as well) ones. The protest against the charge of rootlessness—in its way, an endorsement of the necessity or desirability of blood-and-soil nationalism—found its voice by agreeing the Jews of Europe had no roots there, and subsequently creating them elsewhere.
The racialization and de-nationalization of European Jews depended in part upon the construction of Jews worldwide as a “Semitic” race, exiled from their proper geography. No similar claim can plausibly be made against the Palestinians, however, and so in order to de-nationalize them two steps are required: the transformation of Palestine into the Jewish State, and the deracination of the native Palestinians.
In order to create the Jewish State, the Zionist appropriated and continued the construction of a Jewish racial identity first begun by the Jews’ tormentors. In Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, Fayez Sayegh succinctly diagnoses the problem: “Racism is not an acquired trait of the Zionist settler-state. Nor is it an accidental, passing feature of the Israeli scene. It is congenital, essential and permanent. For it is inherent in the very ideology of Zionism.” This stems from the Zionists’ acceptance and celebration of European antisemitism by “uncompromisingly repudiat[ing] the assimilation of Jews into non-Jewish societies” and embracing a “fundamental . . . principle of racial self-segregation [which also] demand[ed] racial purity and racial exclusiveness in the land in which Jewish self-segregation is to be attained.” This strain of thinking, which persists to this day in the speeches of myriad Israeli officials,[3] finds roots in the work of Martin Buber, an early Zionist and prominent Jewish theologian and philosopher. In his 1911 “Judaism and the Jews,” Buber argued that the essence of Judaism lay in “a community of blood . . . its perseverance in the infinite past. . . . that the deepest layers of our being are determined by blood; that our innermost thinking and our will are colored by it.” The continuity and nurturing force of “Jewish blood” could, for Buber, only be fully realized in Palestine. He wrote that “the full expression to the immortal Jewish unitary drive—this will come into being only after the continuity of life in Palestine, where the great concepts of this unitary drive once originated, has been re-established.” Blood mixed with soil, then.
Buber’s thinking was not the dominant strain of Zionist thought at the time he was writing, or even in the immediate period of the Nakba but history, it seems, has caught up. Since the emergence of genetic studies, the racist concept of blood has been replaced by the allegedly more empirical concept of DNA in the Zionist imaginary. This took on an increased importance in the wake of the Nakba and the founding of Israel, when, as Nadia Abu El-Haj argues in The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology, “faced with communities of immigrants who from the perspective of the state’s Ashkenazi political and scientific elite seemed so radically different, that question took on urgency in the early state period.” We can see how genetic testing was also motivated by intra-Jewish racism, which persists both politically and economically—consider the divergent economic fates of Mizrahi and Ashkenazi Jews in Israel, or the police brutality directed against the country’s Jewish-Ethiopian population. Perhaps even more important than cultural difference, El-Haj argues, was phenotypic difference: race, commonly understood to correspond to phenotypic markers, needed blood, or DNA, to fill the gap left by visual difference. The early genetic studies of the Israeli state, then, were a “biopolitical project of relevance to—even if not seamlessly directed by—the interests of a newly founded state and the struggle of its various elites (political, military, scientific) to produce a Jewish nation that it presumed already to exist.”
The labor has paid ideological dividends. A 2010 study in the American Journal of Human Genetics that purported to have found “distinctive Jewish population clusters, each with shared Middle Eastern ancestry, proximity to contemporary Middle Eastern populations, and variable degrees of European and North African admixture” was quickly seized upon after its publication by Hasbaraists and remains a frequently posted link by online Israeli and Zionist bot-farms to assert Jewish indigeneity in Palestine. That the authors of the study were clear to write that “the issue of how to characterize Jewish people as mere coreligionists or as genetic isolates that may be closely or loosely related remains unresolved” gave no pause to Zionists who seized the opportunity to further assert the biological existence of a Jewish race. They nevertheless conflated a political claim to autochthony for a geographical one (i.e. Israeli nativism vs. long-standing Jewish existence in the present-day Middle East), assumed only one group may be indigenous to a location, and that this indigeneity justifies ethnoracial supremacy within that geography. A recent Hasbara video speaks of a “4,000 year old” Jewish civilization (the idea of a unitary civilization would have certainly been news to the first Ashkenazim to encounter Yemeni Jews in Palestine), and of Israel as “the place that birthed our people.” As the theorist Werner Bonefeld writes in “Notes on Anti-Semitism,”
“Anti-Semitism urges a different sort of equality. Anti-Semite equality appears, at first sight, to be the complete opposite to the form of equality proposed by the project of the Enlightenment. Equality is derived from membership in a volkisch community. This equality is one of “property,” the property of land and soil defined by the bond of blood. Blood and soil are configured as the bond of community, of Volk. The notion of the original possession of land and the purity of blood amount to a mythical conception of community insofar as possession is construed as a blood-tied property.”
The centrality of race and origin in Zionist thinking mirrors, in uncanny resonance, the centrality of race and volk in antisemitic thought. As in Buber’s writings, blood justifies ownership of the soil from which it sprang, and the unity of the soil justifies the unity of the blood permitted to reside upon it. But the fiction of the national soil must respond to the blood, and be refashioned in its unitary image. As Sayegh argues, “Zionism is the belief in the national oneness of all Jews—who are identified as such in terms of their supposed common ancestry. Neither religion nor language comprises the alleged ‘national bond’ of Jews, according to the Zionist creed.” This
“racial identification produces three corollaries: racial self-segregation, racial exclusiveness, and racial supremacy.” Assimilation of the Jews into Europe was emphatically rejected by the Zionists, and thus assimilation into the pre-existing Palestinian population was rejected as well. This principle of racial self-segregation away from the people of Europe required, in turn, the racial self-segregation within Palestine, but this time from a position of power over the State apparatus. Instead of emigration, expulsion.
“The centrality of race and origin in Zionist thinking mirrors, in uncanny resonance, the centrality of race and volk in antisemitic thought.”
A central Zionist claim is that while there are many Arab or Muslim (Zionists will often use these terms interchangeably) states, there is only one Jewish state: that is, the Palestinians have many lands to which they can go, whereas the Jews have only one. The centrality of this claim to Zionist ideology reveals that the racialization of the Jews was necessary but not sufficient for the Zionist to cement the blood and soil conception of Judaism; the Palestinian must also be deracinated, and in a similar fashion that the Jews were deracinated before becoming racially Jewish, their diasporic and local cultural specificities subsumed within and destroyed by the new Zionist identity.[4] Stripped, in the Zionist imagination, of their ethnic specificity, the Palestinian is refashioned into an Arab or simply as a Muslim (the Zionist, in international communications at least, largely elides the Palestinian Christian population in an effort to more closely align the war against the Palestinians with the U.S.-led so-called Global War on Terror, and also to avoid angering its lucrative and politically powerful right-wing Christian connections). But the Palestinian is manifestly in exile in Jordan or Lebanon or Egypt: manifestly, because they can still see the very houses and villages from which they were driven. And so the Zionist, like the European antisemites before them, ideologically fashions the Palestinians into a rootless population at the same time as the Zionist war machine expels them from their land. The destruction of Palestinian grave sites and archeological sites must be seen in this light: as a material destruction of evidence of rootedness in the land.
Not even Jews are safe from Zionist blood and soil ideology. With the cementing of the authority of the Israeli state and its cohesion of the Jewish race, the internal racial dynamics of Zionism can be disregarded at will in favor of the nationalist ones. The soil, which was always the prize, takes precedence over the blood. The novelist Joshua Cohen recently told the New Republic that “most anti-Zionists are not going to be Jews in a generation . . . The vast majority of these Jews don’t speak any of the Jewish languages. They don’t know the Jewish texts or live in Israel. And if they’re going to have children, there’s nearly a fifty percent chance they’re not … going to raise them as Jews. For these Jews to oppose Zionism, for these Jews to have reserved for themselves as the final expression of their Jewishness the condemnation of Israel—I have to salute them, I might even bow down to them. That’s ultimate chutzpah.” In Cohen’s all-too-typical Zionist conception, blood continues to bind all Jews to the Zionist project, but it is only the soil which gives blood meaning in the first place. A rejection of Zionism amounts to a rejection of Buber’s idea of the “immortal Jewish unitary drive”: a repudiation of one’s own genetics, which act upon the person to determine their fate.
Cohen’s screed does, however, contain an element of truth: Jewish history tends towards secularization, towards cultural and legal community. Think only of the revulsion many Jews, particularly Israelis, have towards the ultra-orthodox. There is something dogmatic about the ultra-orthodox, a variation on the form of Zionist dogmatism applied to a different content (and it is possibly this family resemblance, along with the former’s refusal to participate in the military, which amplifies the hostility between these two groups of Israelis), that Judaism as law—law which is, in the last analysis, according to the Midrash (Bava Metzia 59b:1-5), not in heaven, but the province of humanity—immanently views with suspicion, particularly from the viewpoint of redemption (which appears secularly as the self-abolition of particularism). Nationalism is the kernel of enlightenment within the Jewish Midrashic tradition reverting to myth—society reverting to community, law reverting to power. Zionism, with all the zealotry of a recent convert still unsure of its acceptance into the fold, insists upon the nation über alles, including Judaism itself.
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“Violence, on which civilization is based, means the persecution of all by all, and the persecution-maniac puts himself at a disadvantage only by blaming on his neighbor what is perpetrated by the whole, in a helpless attempt to make the incommensurable commensurable. “—Adorno, Minima Moralia
It is a common mistake to see Zionism purely as a form of persecution mania: its defenders who cannot stomach a conscious alignment with settler colonialism, extermination, and racism insist that Zionism is the exaggerated but understandable reaction to the real persecution of the Jews in Europe, elevated to a mania by rogue elements within Israel, resulting in violent symptoms. But these more outwardly odious aspect of Zionism are, however, just barely repressed, and it only takes an event like October 7th to bring them to the fore even among those who insist on their membership in the “Israeli left.” There is certainly some historical truth to the claim that Zionism was bolstered by the Shoah and European antisemitism, but Zionism was not merely a reaction against antisemitism as even a cursory reading of Herzl’s statements on colonialism will confirm.
That being said, persecution mania plays an important role in the contemporary Zionist psyche, as it does in all antisemitic or fascist ideologies. And it is, indeed, a mania: a hermetically sealed system of interpretation in which every stimulus is interpreted through the lens of defense against imagined enemies. Even the most innocuous of stimuli can become, in the paranoiac’s mania, a threat to life itself. Subjectivity, unable to return to the world anything other than its own image, ossifies: the world becomes a world of phantoms contained within the subject’s mind and is robbed of its richness, of its own qualities (the relation to instrumental reason, whereby people become things and inputs, should not be missed). There is a sense as well in which persecution mania does take in the violence and domination which sustains the current intolerable social order and displaces it onto the specific group marked for enmity. It is, in a sense, a narcissistic lie that the subject tells itself to cope with the truth of universal persecution, a persecution in which they play a constituent part as actor rather than mere victim. The lie, however, refashions the victim-perpetrator into a pure victim, with all the moral weight such a designation carries. The other side of this refashioning is that the victims of any violence carried out by the persecution maniac become instead a perpetrator—from the viewpoint of the closed system of paranoia, the victim is instead a pursuer and omnipresent threat of violence.
Zionism’s relation to the Palestinians was an antagonism and hostility based on a material reality: the desire for the land from which the Palestinians refused to be expelled. But since the Nakba and the near-total Zionist conquest of Palestine, the real objective enmity of the Zionist and the Palestinian has become a persecution mania as well. The Zionist is at once victorious and simultaneously incapable of letting go of their victimhood: the more land they take, the more they see themselves as under assault. Indeed, the “lachrymose theory of Jewish history”—a phrase coined by historian Salo Wittmayer Baron to refer to the outsized emphasis on suffering in accounts of Jewish history—has a particular sway over the Zionist, who seems to form their identity in a purely negative fashion. Psychic identification with the Nazis or European colonialists is socially unacceptable, and so such identification takes place via a negative formation: we are not the “Jew with trembling knees” exterminated in the Shoah, we are not the “backwards” Jew of the shtetl or the naively idealistic Jew of the Bund, we are not the “backwards” colonized Palestinian or Arab living under foreign rule. Identity so constituted tends towards a repressed identification with those who turned these negative others into victims in the first place. At the same time, the image of the victim against whom the Zionist constitutes themselves lurks like a threatening phantom at every turn. By constantly outrunning their historical victimhood with ever greater violence, the Zionist is incapable of leaving it behind. Even as victors—both nationally and internationally—they cling to the lachrymose history: no longer facing structural oppression in Palestine or in the vast majority of the world, the Zionist’s worldview remains nonetheless stable. They remain unable to assimilate the fact that structural oppression has given way to individual bigotry and so the latter is refashioned into the threat of the former (consider Zionists’ outsized reactions to even the slightest or sham use of “antisemitic tropes” by U.S. politicians). To acknowledge this change in the status of world Jewry, for whom the Zionist claims to speak, would do irreparable damage to the Zionist self-conception: having finally outrun their victimhood, the Zionist would be forced to finally face the repressed identification, indeed admiration for, their former persecutors.
In order to sustain the persecution mania in the face of the objective lack of persecution, the Zionist resorts to the fabrication of ever greater threats. The logic of escalation trends towards the introduction a Manichean strain into Zionist thought, as so many speeches since October 7th have made clear: “we are sons of light, they are sons of darkness” (Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu), “this is a war between light and darkness” (Yoav Gallant), “[this] is a war that is intended … to save Western civilization . . . We are attacked by Jihadist network, an empire of evil” (Isaac Herzog). This Manicheanism is enhanced by the loss of actual victimhood, which leads to an ever more vociferous lashing out against those who, by their very existence as the type of oppressed collective subject the Zionists imagine themselves to be, give lie to the entire self-conception as victim. When there are no more Palestinians left to kill, perhaps the Zionist will realize what they have become. More likely, though, the negative image which could, in a moment of reflection, reveal the truth, will simply cease to exist: with this, peace of mind can follow. Having succeeded in turning the world into the hell they always imagined it to be, the Zionists’ last remaining task is to silence the wail of the victim in order to forget about hell entirely.
The wailing of the victim, in the meanwhile, is taken always as a threat. “Antisemitism,” Adorno and Horkheimer write, “is based on false projection . . if mimesis makes itself resemble its surroundings, false projection makes its surroundings resemble itself. . . . impulses which are not acknowledged by the subject and yet are his, are attributed to the object: the prospective victim.” While defending Israel’s escalating violence in Gaza in late October 2023, Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Gilad Erdan wore a yellow Star of David patch, meant to recall the patches Jews were forced to wear by the Nazi regime. He promised to wear the patch until the UN condemns the “atrocities of Hamas and demand[s] the immediate release of our hostages.” In every Palestinian, a Hitler: everything, then, is permitted. Finally, the Zionist has the atrocity they have always longed for, one which would give concrete form to their persecution fantasies and let loose their desire for murder: an annihilatory response masquerading as self-defense as genocidal violence often is. The impulse to genocide which cannot be acknowledged by the Zionist is attributed to the victim. The star is not just a symptom of persecution mania, it is a threat.
“In every Palestinian, a Hitler: everything, then, is permitted.”
Widening inequality also breeds paranoia: the economic element figures lightly, but it cannot be discounted. Israeli society is marked by high income inequality, both in absolute measure and in relation to other OECD countries; conjoined cost of living and housing crises are endured in a massively militarized society[5] in which every Jewish youth (the Israeli Supreme Court recently ended the Haredi exemption to conscriptions, though it remains to be seen how faithfully this decision will be implemented) is run through the psychic meat grinder of military discipline and conformity. An incredible amount of energy and resentment is pent up and then released upon the Palestinian in rituals of violence and humiliation, in part, as consequence and redirection of the deepening class antagonisms within Israel. Economic degradation meets a society that valorizes combat heroism but in general finds little outlet for its exercise. The soldier-citizens are dedicated to the maintenance of checkpoints: to the random brutalization of the unarmed. When faced with armed opposition, Israeli soldiers have a record of personal cowardice (as so memorably stated by a child in the documentary Jenin, Jenin)[6]. So much the worse for their opposition, however, who are in turn pummeled with even greater zeal by drones and fighter jets—the Zionist’s ego is saved by their technological superiority, which is also a sign of their economic superiority, reorienting internal economic antagonisms into national and martial pride.
This ability to reroute antagonisms into the persecutory complex provides a stability for Zionist persecution mania. There is a sense in which the dual and contradictory character of 20th century antisemitism—which saw the Jew as both impossibly strong and pathetically weak, as both avatar for capitalism and for bolshevism—persists. Here, instead of the capitalist and the communist, the Zionist mobilizes the figures of the savage “Islamo-fascist” and the left-wing intellectual. On the one hand, the figure of the Islamo-fascist is weak and pitiable—they are technologically and economically primitive, poor and dirty—but they also represent a potent genocidal threat in their willingness to both die and to kill which, when the figure is imagined to control the entire Muslim world, gains incredible strength in numbers. The left-wing intellectual, also a favored target of 20th century antisemites, is physically weak, effete, and intellectually hypocritical, casting their lot in with the figure of the Islamo-fascist, upon whom the Zionist casts their most lurid rape and murder fantasies against the intellectual (invariably, the taunting Zionist response to queers or feminist Palestine solidarity groups is to invite them to visit Gaza, where, the Zionist asserts, every manner of atrocity will be visited upon them). But the left-wing intellectual is also a global threat—engineering worldwide anti-Zionist bias through their manipulation of international institutions as well as various national media and academic institutions. Both figures aim at the destruction of Zionism (and, so the Zionist claims, of world Jewry as well) but from opposite angles. The Islamo-fascist targets Israel physically but also in its capacity as its self-appointed status of avatar for democratic egalitarian values and western civilization writ large. The left-wing intellectual, on the other hand, targets the Zionist as a nationalist, as an embodiment of a national community—they attack the Zionist, that is, in their rootedness. This ideological pincer movement allows the Zionist to deflect and reroute antagonistic energies based on demographic group or the latest outrage. Persecution mania assimilates both figures into the same system of interpretation, and the Zionist has learned how to make such persecution mania nimble, to guard against reason.
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The Jewish question is, in miniature, a question of utopia. It asks whether humanity is capable of collectively achieving emancipation as the “realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences.”[7] Zionism answers in the negative, and Palestinians bear the brunt of this negation. With each new murder, each new expulsion, Zionists further cast their ballot on the side of the antisemites: they reaffirm particularity against the universal, they transform the world into, per Adorno and Horkheimer again, “the hell they have always taken it to be.” This negation voids Judaism’s historical content—the construction of the law against power, homeland without nation, messianism which reconciles past wrongs. To assert particularity against the universal is to assert power against the law. Might makes right—the Zionist enmity to international law and international courts is not merely prudential, it is also ideological. The idea that there can be an external constraint on Israel’s action is, for the Zionist, redolent of the constraints placed upon pre-Zionist Jews. To live, on the periphery or otherwise, in a country not your own means to live by strangers’ rules. To the Zionist, whose persecution mania has fashioned every stranger into a threat, the aspirational universalism of international law looks only like subjugation. Thus, in every sense, the Zionist rejects a fundamental biblical maxim: ““When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt.” The maxim contains within it not just a religious requirement, but also Adorno’s vision of human emancipation from civilization premised on domination. Judaism says: all for all, and only then, to each their own. The Zionist does not recognize the first clause.
Judaism was made keenly aware of the consequences of this thinking: civilization as “persecution of all by all.” The historical persecution of the Jews, Europe’s refusal to allow them to enter into the universal, gave Judaism’s content an immediate and vital importance. The violence Zionism has turned on Palestine acquires greater force from this prior, now repressed awareness. In this sense, it is not the Palestinian, but the Shoah survivor who constitutes the primary negative image of the Other against which Zionism constitutes itself: the Jews who thought themselves safe in homeland without national belonging, the Jews who are the (false) image of weakness without resistance, a weakness which Zionism, as a form of fascism, cannot tolerate, and which inspires violence. It is Zionism, in its real abuse of living Shoah survivors (many of whom lived, and live, in poverty, shamed for their weakness in contrast with the new Israeli übermensch), and in its continued abuse of their memory to perpetuate another genocide who give living form to Benjamin's dictum: “only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.”
Menachem Begin, the sixth Prime Minister of Israel, who presided over the 1980’s massacres in Lebanon reportedly stated: "I am not a Jew with trembling knees. I am a proud Jew with 3,700 years of civilized history.” David Ben-Gurion before him, the father of the nation, said: “Call me an antisemite, but I have to say it …We are choked with shame from what is going on in Germany, Poland, and America, that Jews do not dare fight back. Can we not be brave anywhere in the world?…We do not belong to that Jewish people. We do not want to be that sort of Jew.”
The Jew with “trembling knees” is excluded from the new Jewish history, from the new Jewish race. Ben-Gurion chokes with shame in 1939—two years later ,the Jews of Europe choke in the gas chambers. There is an identification here, not with the Jews, but with the Nazis who kill them. This identification rebounds towards the Palestinians, who, through a deliberate transference, become contemptuously identified with the Nazis’ passive victims. Or so the Zionist hopes: the identification is refuted by the Palestinians at every turn. Armed resistance marks the Palestinians’ refusal to acquiesce to their own murder in the way that Zionists falsely and disgustingly attribute to the Jews (while the Zionist celebrates the Warsaw Ghetto uprising as an illustration of Jewish resilience and resistance, which was itself a suicidal act on behalf of human dignity, it is considered to be a singular moment, and model—like the mass suicide on Masada before it—in what is otherwise viewed as a modern Jewish history of pure victimhood). This refusal to bear the mark of weakness, also used to incite violence, inspires an even greater rage: a shame that the Zionists’ victims have in some sense bested them on a historical scale.
“The lesson the Zionists learned from the Shoah was that civilization is coextensive with the nation-state, which confers the right to exclude, by murder if necessary.”
The lesson the Zionists learned from the Shoah was that civilization is coextensive with the nation-state, which confers the right to exclude, by murder if necessary. The nation-state is a machine for producing particularity. It was, the Zionist asserts, the lack of nation-state that made the Shoah possible—ignoring, or celebrating rather, that it was in the nation-state’s name that the Shoah was carried out. Thus, the Zionist conception of history has the nation-state as its telos: progress is the slow march towards the ever greater particularity of nation-states, “to each their own.” One single catastrophe.
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Hasbara is the Hebrew term for the information warfare of the Zionist regime and its supporters, roughly translating to “explanation.” Since October 7th, Hasbaraists—both the overt propagandists and their subtler, but no less vicious stenographers in mass media—have seemingly lost the plot, turning to increasingly outrageous and nakedly false histrionics in order to shore up waning support for the Zionist project in the West (and indeed, Hasbara is primarily targeted towards a Western audience, as it is the governments of the United States and Western Europe, particularly Germany, which provide both ideological and material support to Israel). In the early stages of the present war, Hasbaraists promoted fake phone calls attributed to members of Hamas claiming responsibility, in broken Arabic, for Zionist atrocities. In a cartoonish example which has since been repeated by Hasbaraists, Anat Berko, a Likud Party member of the Knesset, asserted that Palestinian must be a fake national identity because the Arabic alphabet has no letter P, ignoring both the fact that “Palestine” is an anglicization of the Arabic falastin and, ironically, that Hebrew has no letter J (what would this mean for Judaism as a national identity?).
“The Palestinian becomes the barbarian at the gates.”
People wonder: was the propaganda always this bad? But this is the wrong question. Hasbara, like all fascist propaganda, derives its efficacy not in its rational content, not in its ability to convince, but precisely in the opposite. As Adorno writes, the apparent falsity and absurdity of fascist propaganda is itself “relished cynically and sadistically as an index for the fact that power alone decided one's fate in the Third Reich, that is, power unhampered by rational objectivity.” Hasbara does not utilize argumentation so much as the rote repetition of slogans: “am yisrael chai,” “we are the most moral army in the world,” “there would be a ceasefire tomorrow if Hamas would release the hostages,” “liberate Gaza from Hamas,” and so on, ad nauseum. The repeated and almost exclusive use of slogans and cliches serves to fashion out of the Zionist polity and its supporters a stereopathic type: rational argumentation requires the engagement of an individual subjectivity, reciting slogans only memorization. On a societal level, a type of equality emerges: we share a nation, a destiny, because we share these thoughts, and vice versa. Through repetition, people congeal into a mass and adopt an obedient group psychology.
In a similar vein, that Hasbara has become more untethered from rational argumentation since this intensification of the genocide of the Palestinians reveals Hasbara’s libidinal core: blind domination, even on the field of reason. As the physical domination of the Palestinians reverts once again to the murderous blindness of its origin, so too does the propaganda which justifies it. The façade of lies and innuendos which the Zionist has constructed—Israel as a liberal-democratic nation, as a bastion of tolerance in a sea of hatred, as the most “moral army” in the world, Palestine as backwards, fundamentalist, incapable of peace—collapses under the weight of its actually existing actions. The performance of a false unity and its derivative power must be emphasized all the more.
The Hasbaraist lie that behind every Palestinian lurks another Shoah functions as constitutive national myth (as well as a powerful false projection), and has, since October 7th, been utilized to great effect. President Biden insists that Jews everywhere would be unsafe without Israel amplifying the Hasbaraists’ basic premise with the reach of the Oval Office. Adorno points out that “it is probably the suspicion of [the] fictitiousness of their own ‘group psychology’ which makes fascist crowds so merciless and unapproachable.” In order to silence what rational capacity remains in the Zionist polity and its supporters, the Hasbaraist must continually up the ante, lest “the whole performance…go to pieces.” Likewise, the Israeli state must continually and intermittently activate the entirely militarized society’s capacity for violence. To quiet the bombs for too long would allow the voice of conscience, that is, the voice of the Palestinian, to pass through the din. This in turn requires not only the mass death of the Palestinians, but also the death of Jews both within Israel and outside. Both are equally necessary to the Hasbaraist, and in the wake of October 7th, which has shattered the myth of the possibility of apartheid without consequence, both must be increased. The show must go on.
There are prudential reasons for the Hasbaraists outrageousness as well, which serves two functions: first, to incite, but second, to cloud the field with falsehood. Once the lies are found out (and they are always found out), the damage on the first front has been done but the damage on the second is only beginning. The incredible violence actually inflicted upon the Palestinians takes on the color of atrocity propaganda, the foreign audience already primed to skepticism. The accusations become a tit for tat, the truth of the one lost in the formal equality of the Hasbaraists’ game.
After graduation, a high school classmate of mine joined the Israeli military. She served as a checkpoint guard. Upon returning to the United States, I heard that she would remark, “Arabs always lie; it is their culture.” The figure of the barbarian—the one who cannot speak the correct language—is resurrected in this statement. “Pallywood” is the term Zionists use to refer to the allegedly staged propaganda videos made by Palestinians depicting Israeli atrocities. The slander reveals the way these videos of real violence are received—first as “fakes,” and then, when inevitably proven real, as entertainment. For the Israeli who cannot make it to the Gaza border to watch the bombing in real time, this cinema of suffering will have to do.
Pallywood: do not believe the Palestinians when they speak of their own suffering, it’s all a spectacle for someone else’s consumption (to brainwash the gullible westerner, to incite the Arab to violence against Israel, to entertain and enflame the Zionist against weakness and “lies”). Chief among the marks of inferiority stamped upon the Palestinian by the Zionist is the canard: they lie. They cannot belong to the community of rights because this community is constituted through the intercourse of language. Rights and law are a discourse dependent upon expectations of truth and communicability. Palestinians can speak, and the world can hear and understand them, thus unintelligibility must be constructed after the fact. This form of dehumanization is more advanced than singling out any other particular quality, which to be sure the Zionist also does for good measure. This form ensures that any quality whatsoever can be cast on the Palestinian, and that any atrocity can be denied. “I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed,” Joe Biden said in late October, despite the consistent, documented reliability of the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza. Even the dead will not be safe: mass graves are simply, for the Zionist, more antisemitic slander.
Every attack on the Palestinians, seen as ex-ante false, inverts the dynamic of the victim and perpetrator. The Palestinian victim becomes the perpetrator of an incitement against the Israeli—who is in turn victimized by the exposure of their own purportedly fake violence. Every attack then, reinforces the necessity of future attacks—every Palestinian death reinforces itself as just deserts. Suffering, rendered unintelligible, presents itself to the Zionist as a blind rage. The Palestinian becomes the barbarian at the gates. Where the Palestinian says “I am being driven from my home, my brother has been murdered,” the Zionist hears only “bar bar bar.”
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Since the invasion of Gaza, Israeli soldiers have documented themselves—with bizarre frequency—looting lingerie and underwear and bras from Palestinian stores and homes. They wear them, they strap them to their Humvees, they hold them up for the camera—in every case they are displayed as trophies. It is a means of feminizing the enemy in toto—of using the visual language of misogyny to say “these fighters are merely women, and look, we have won,” of asserting dominance through a symbolic rape, as the garments without wearers are standing in for the act of forcible removal (which is elsewhere literally carried out in the prisons). It is also a means, ironically, to “westernize” Palestinians, who, like most Muslims in the Zionist imagination, are considered to be sexually repressive and culturally “backwards.” “Look,” the soldiers seem to say, “deep down we know you want to be like us, deep down you like it.” The private erotic lives of Palestinians are imagined to be driven by distinctly Western feelings, as opposed to human ones. The animal-enemy merely breeds; in the lingerie, the Zionist sees the humor of a pig in lipstick, which explains their laughter. The invasion of privacy into the intimate carries the message that nowhere is safe.
The forced stripping of Palestinian men, which Israeli soldiers also delight in filming, serves a similar purpose. As Sophia Gaulkin writes regarding the use of sexual violence in the U.S. torture program, “rape is always sexual, not because it must involve sexual impulses or desire (which are not required), but because of its underlying social sexing.” Though Gaulkin’s account focuses on rape, the tactic of “forced nudity,” she argues, is similarly “intended to illustrate and widen the power differential between detainees and interrogators, undermine the victim’s autonomy, masculinity, and overall sense of self, and convey that the interrogators have absolute control over the detainees’ bodies and can do as they please.” Whereas Israeli soldiers’ theft of women’s underwear is a symbolic rape—and also a callback to a time when women were regarded as the spoils of war, as property—the forced stripping of Palestinian men springs from a similar impulse. Palestinian men are subject to sexualized violence at the hands of the soldiers (again, rape, assault, and sexual humiliation also abound in Israeli prisons), in order to feminize them, to subordinate them as “social women,” and reinforce the dynamic of colonizer–colonized. The Zionist insistence on numerous unproven claims of mass rape on October 7th can be seen as another false projection of barely repressed desire.
Likewise, the insistence demonstrates the deep psychic wound that feminization has for a hyper-militarized and machismo society. As sociologist Uta Klein notes, “strength and readiness to defend honor by means of fighting were the desired characteristics of the [image of the] ‘new Jew’” as constructed by the early Zionists, traits that were even further emphasized and exaggerated in the wake of the Shoah, which was conceived, on these Zionist-masculinist terms, as a feminizing defeat (indeed, in May, Israeli newspaper Haaretz published an interview with an Israeli filmmaker titled “We're Dealing With a Sexual Shoah as It's Happening.” In January, the “Nonviolent Opposition Against Hate,” a Canadian organization founded by two Israeli expats, staged a public performance in which “A man dressed as a Hamas militant marched a woman in a white top and grey sweatpants down the street—her hands tied together, her crotch blood-stained…[trailed by] a placard [reading]: 'This is what free Palestine looks like.’” Bloody sweatpants have been adopted by Zionists as the visual symbol of the rape allegations for the Western public. In contemporary Israel, where the draft is compulsory, Klein writes that “military service is an inherent part of maturation, a rite of passage to male adulthood”—and it can be seen, according to demilitarization and anti-occupation activist Rela Mazali, as a “pseudo-biological phase of male maturation.” To face defeat in battle or to fail to serve is then a failure to attain puberty—the defeated Israeli male is in a certain sense, not quite a man, having suffered a disruption in the normal maturation process.
“The unproven claims of mass rape by Hamas can be understood, then, as a synecdoche for military defeat.”
While the magnitude and vitriol of Zionist violence cannot be fully explained through gendered factors alone, the perception of October 7th as a mass feminizing event serves as a partial explanation. The unproven claims of mass rape by Hamas can be understood, then, as a synecdoche for military defeat. The male soldier confirms his masculinity by physically meting out the psychic wound. Elsewhere, the civilian Zionist has experienced the psychic wound without the opportunity for redemption through violence. The violence of the Zionist project thus takes on a global dimension: the Zionist outside of Israel must either, or in some combination, turn to violence themselves (as we have seen with the chemical and vehicular attacks on student protestors in the United States), find release in the spectacle and support of localized but related manifestations of state violence (police repression of Palestinians and anti-Zionist protestors), or in an all encompassing identification with the Zionist war machine through symbolic and material gestures (protests, the flying and wearing of Israeli flags, fundraising for “charities” like Friends of the IDF, or the vociferous vocal support for the worst Israeli atrocities, real or yet to come). In both the case of male solider and the civilian Zionist, the redemptive quality of violence—which the globalized 24-hour spectacle reduces, for the observers but never the victims, to a constant visual thrum—acts as a masculine bonding rite: first, the authorizing comfort of victimhood; then murder.
[1] We know as well from Faris Yahya Glubb’s Zionist Relations with Nazi Germany that some leaders of the Zionist movement were “indeed single-minded…[about] securing their goal of a state in Palestine” even against the interests of world Jewry during the Shoah. “Yitzhak Greenbaum,” for example, “who was appointed Chairman of a committee that the Zionists set up supposedly for the rescue of European Jewry, stated that nothing, not even the rescue of European Jewry, should be allowed to obscure that goal. In his words, ‘when they come to us with two plans — the rescue of the masses of Jews in Europe or the redemption of the land — I vote, without a second thought, for the redemption of the land.’” In a similar vein, the Stern faction of the Irgun, also known as the National Military Organization (one of the most prominent pre-1948 Zionist paramilitary groups), promulgated an internal document, written in 1941, which proposed military collaboration with Nazi Germany against the Allied Force in return for Nazi assistance in “[t]he establishment of the historical Jewish state on a national and totalitarian basis [to be] bound by a treaty with the German Reich.”
[2] Prior to October 7th, it would have been more precise to call the Gaza Strip a Ghetto, a particular type of carceral structure based upon racial or ethnic sequestration while preserving nominal internal autonomy for the victims, who can also be utilized as labor outside the Ghetto so long as they are ultimately returned. But since October 7th, with the initiation of the ‘fast’ phase of Israel’s decades long slow-genocide of the Palestinians, the Ghetto has transformed into a camp—which operates on a logic of pure domination and reduction of humans to their animal-being—in which the murder that lies latent in the Ghetto is activated. The camp is the promise of the Ghetto walls: wherever a population can be separated, made to sleep ‘outside’ the polis, it can be severed entirely as well.
[3] In 2015, for instance, Netanyahu gave a televised speech after the antisemitic murders of five Jews in France in which he encouraged emigration from Europe, stating: “To all the Jews of France, all the Jews of Europe, I would like to say that Israel is not just the place in whose direction you pray, the state of Israel is your home.”
[4] The primary critics of Zionist racecraft have long been Palestinians, who, at every turn, have rejected the false identity of Zionist and Jew. Instead, Palestinian political and resistance leaders have repeatedly stressed the former peaceful coexistence of Jews and other groups in historical Palestine and have asserted their vision for a multi-ethnic, multi-faith democratic society as against the Zionist dream of racial purity.
[5] Israel spent $2,535 per capita on its military between 2018-2022, making it second only to Qatar as the largest military spender per capita. In 2022, Israeli military spending accounted for 14.6% of all government expenditures and between 2022 and 2023, military spending as percentage of GDP increased from 4.5% to 5.3%, the 9th most in the world. In addition to military spending, military exports are a significant part of the Israeli economy. In 2022, Israel reached a record high $12.5 billion in weapons exports, up 50% from 2019.
[6] “I’m not afraid of these cowards.They're like mice. Despite their great weapons, they still hide behind their tanks, afraid of civilians like us. Their cowardice is legendary.”
[7] Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia (Verso 2005), pg. 103