Persecution Terminable and Interminable
Zionism’s circuit of retributory violence
David Markus
This essay is part of our rolling online issue about Palestine, born out of both the unfolding genocide in Gaza, in the aftermath of October 7th, and ongoing contentions with international emanations of the so-called “Palestine Question.” Essays will engage the colonial politics of Zionism, Palestinian resistance, perennial questions about loss and diaspora, identitarian entanglements with Islamophobia and antisemitism, and more. As contemporary interlocutors of psychoanalytic traditions, we are inheritors of the field’s ambivalence toward Israel and the politics of Zionism, inaugurated by Freud himself. But as a magazine preoccupied with the unruly mesh of psychoanalytic, psychosocial, and historical-material analysis, we are decidedly unambivalent about our steadfast solidarity with Palestine and the diasporic geographies of Palestinians beyond Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. This series shares a name with the Palestinian chorus calling for freedom: “From the River to the Sea.”—The Editors
The setting is postwar Amsterdam, an empty field on the outskirts of Rivierenbuurt, the once largely Jewish neighborhood where Anne Frank and her family lived before going into hiding. There, my father Yehudi and his best friend Kees, both Jewish child survivors of the Nazi occupation, would often play soccer with non-Jewish boys. At one time or another a dispute would arise over the game: “it was a goal!” “It wasn’t a goal!” “It was!” Inevitably, a member of the opposing team would hurl the offending words: “dirty Jew.” In response, Kees, who “wasn’t that tall but…had big hands,” would confront the boy. In my father’s account, it’s always “the tallest boy, the biggest boy, with the most muscle, and the most shoulder, and the biggest head” that Kees singles out. Peering upward in defiance, and speaking with a stutter, Kees insists that the slur be repeated. “Dirty Jew,” the bigger boy responds. “Do I h-h-hear that right?” Kees asks, curling one hand into a fist. “Dirty Jew,” the remark comes again; upon which my father’s friend punches the boy square in the nose, drawing a spurt of blood. He picks up the soccer ball and places it under one arm, triumphantly, “like a Maccabee, like a hero,” as my father tells it. “Come Yehudi,” says Kees, “we’re going home.”
When my father died in the summer of 2022, I found myself rewatching his video testimony for the Shoah Foundation, the audio-visual history project founded by Steven Spielberg in the 1990s. Over the course of four and a half hours, my father recounts his experiences as a child during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. He describes being separated from his parents during the war and hidden in the northern farmlands of Friesland, far from the streets of his earliest childhood days. No less importantly for my own understanding of his past, he reflects on his postwar years in Amsterdam, a period when antisemitism was still virulent on the continent and many Jewish survivors felt a deep sense of shame about their identities.
Like most testimonies of survival, my father’s story is a harrowing one. But it is also happier than most. During the war, between the ages of 4 and 7, he was shuttled between more than a dozen homes, usually on the back of a bicycle under the cover of night. He suffered physical abuse from some of those who hid him, and only narrowly escaped discovery and almost certain death more than once. My grandfather died in hiding working for the Dutch resistance, and most relatives from both sides of the family were exterminated in death camps at Auschwitz and Sobibor. My grandmother survived, however, passing as a gentile in the east of Holland, and my father spent the final months of the Nazi occupation in the hands of caring Catholic farmers. Mother and son were able to reunite and establish a life in the wake of the catastrophe.
There are moments in my father’s testimony that affect me deeply, as when he reflects on the fear and shame that overtook him when he was forced to bathe naked with other children from the farm on which he was hiding, conscious, even as a young boy, that being circumcised put him at terrible risk. Or when he talks about being interrogated by an SS Trooper whose snarling face would haunt him for years after, becoming, in his adolescence, the subject of a drawing that I still have today. Yet if there is one episode that has stayed with me more than any other it is the postwar story of Kees’s heroism on the soccer field. This may be because it's one of the few stories from my father’s youth that I heard him recount multiple times in person. There’s also a written account that he published in an anthology some decades ago. It’s particularly illuminating, however, to see him tell the story on video, and to be able to analyze the subtleties of his speech, along with the movements and emotions that texture his narrative.
I’m drawn, first of all, to his hand gestures, which I know so well, and sometimes catch myself unconsciously emulating. There’s the surprisingly animated, almost comical, way in which he acts out the exchanges between his friend Kees and the bigger boy on the soccer field. And then there’s the teary-eyed, overwhelming relief that comes over him at the moment he describes his friend vanquishing their mutual foe. What I find myself fixating on, however, perhaps with some of the same obsessiveness with which my father told his story, is the swell of satisfaction that I see in him as he relates what is unavoidably, and disconcertingly, a story of violent retribution. To this entanglement of vindication and gratitude, this snarl of what Nadia Bou Ali might call “ugly enjoyment,” I will return in a moment. Because there is a second part to the story my father tells in his testimony.
“And then, as it were, to pay him back, but not deliberately,” my father says of his courageous friend, “I took him to…Habonim,” the Labor Zionist youth group that had just opened a chapter in Amsterdam. At weekly meetings, “way out. . . on the edge of town,” away from what were often broken homes, my father and a generation of child survivors of the Shoah learned “a different view of Jewish history” from “the Nazi view” which, my father confesses, he had “in one form or another internalized.” There’s a shadow that falls over his face as he makes this last remark that chills me; it vanishes in an instant as he picks up the thread of his narrative. Although many Habonim leaders were steeped in leftist thought, what my father and his friends gained above all from their experiences was a prideful sense of Jewish identity. Jews, throughout history, it turned out, were good, brave, defiant—they stood up for themselves, they were not always the victim. From one day to the next, the child survivors of the Shoah were transformed, spiritually and politically. They had become fervent Zionists. “And no word was ever mentioned,” the story concludes, “not about the war, not about being in hiding, nothing about our history. But we sang songs about how we would go up to Israel, and how a new life would start, and how we would leave the old ways behind.”
“From one day to the next, the child survivors of the Shoah were transformed, spiritually and politically. They had become fervent Zionists.”
Placing these two episodes of my father’s youth side by side, I’m struck by the way in which the first episode, his experience with Kees on the soccer field, seems filtered through the second, the inculcation of Zionism into the fabric of his developing subjectivity. For starters, Kees, as my father describes him, embodies not simply the masculine ideal of “muscular Judaism” or “Muskeljudentum” promoted by nineteenth century Zionists like Max Nordau but, more compellingly, the very process whereby the stereotypically nebbish diaspora Jew is negated and replaced by an image of strapping heroism. Philip Hollander writes of the prevailing pre-state Zionist notion that “for the New Jewish Man (ha-yehudi he-hadash) to arise in Palestine. . . elements of diasporic Jewish masculinity, especially those evoked by the Yiddish term schlemiel, an awkward, clumsy person, a blunderer. . . needed to be eradicated.” It was only out of this negation that “the New Jewish Man[,] rugged and rooted in the land like the sabra cactus,” could arise. In my father’s story, during a brief playground incident or, as he implies, over a series of incidents combined into a single narrative, Kees is transformed from a diminutive stutterer into the very picture of “rugged” manliness.
It is noteworthy that a supposedly “new”-Jewish identity resurrects longstanding myths of Jewish heroism. I don’t know to what extent my father had consciously reflected on—as opposed to having merely internalized—discourses around Zionist masculinity. But as a literary scholar, no less than as a practicing Jew, he had to have realized the extent to which his story resonates with biblical lore. When he describes his vertically challenged friend using his “big hands” to slay the tall, muscular, broad-shouldered, big-headed boy towering above him, how could he not have had the image of “l’il David. . . small, but oh my” (as in the Gershwin song), and famously depicted by Michelangelo with outsized hands somewhere in his thoughts?
The story of David and Goliath is, of course, the founding underdog story of so-called Judeo-Christian culture. In the Old Testament, Goliath is a warrior in the army of the Philistines who occupy the area south-east of the Kingdom of Israel, including present-day Gaza. David’s courage and poise in battle ensure the future and wellbeing of the Jewish people, much as the military superiority of the Israeli state is claimed by Zionists today to ensure the security of the Jewish people in the face of a hostile world bent on their destruction. For my father, at the time newly steeped in images of Jewish bravery, the soccer ball under his friend’s arm as the two boys marched off triumphantly across the makeshift pitch may as well have been the severed head of Goliath. What he actually says, that Kees places the ball under his arm “like a Maccabee,” is telling in itself. The Maccabees were Jewish warriors who not only retook Judea in the first century BC after it had fallen under Hellenic rule—but expanded the kingdom by way of conquest.
*
When I was a teenager and young adult, my father repeatedly encouraged me to take a Birthright trip to Israel. I know he would have liked me to have had exposure in my formative years to some of the same perspectives that he had been immersed in as a young Zionist. Growing up in Canada and the United States during the 1990s, amid what historian Quinn Slobodian recently described as the “wave of Holocaust memory” that coincided with the release of Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, and with a father who was deeply connected to Israel and had dedicated the second half of his life to documenting the Shoah, going on Birthright was an ordinary, almost expected, ritual. But for reasons that only became fully apparent to me later in life, I was never attracted to the idea.
Friends who did end up going on Birthright trips often returned transformed. They would talk about how Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance center in Jerusalem, had helped them realize the true meaning of the phrase “never again.” Or how a trip to the Golan Heights (Syrian land that has been more permanently occupied by Israel since at least 1973) had helped them understand the territory’s geostrategic importance, and thus the absurdity of calling for a return to 1967 borders. Almost without fail, they would speak of Masada, the once-fortified plateau overlooking the Dead Sea where a band of Jewish rebels held out for months against a Roman siege, supposedly opting for mass suicide as an alternative to capture.
I’m grateful that by the time I visited these places in my mid-twenties I had already adopted a critical perspective on the history and contemporary consequences of Zionism. Looking back, it’s clear to me that my skepticism had been primed first by a strain of left internationalism within my stepfather’s family—Jews who had initially arrived in Canada during the turn of the nineteenth century—and second by the experience of coming fully into my political consciousness in the wake of 9/11, when a majority of the American public revealed its alarming susceptibility to racist clash-of-civilizations narratives along with a sickening appetite for blindly vengeful, and woefully misdirected, military destruction. The devastation wrought upon Lebanon during Israel’s 2006 military campaign against Hezbollah buried whatever remaining sympathies I might have felt toward my father’s Zionism under piles of blasted concrete and the massacred remains of innocent civilians. In any case, whereas my peers who had gone on Birthright trips experienced Israel filtered through the perspectives of young Israeli Defense Force soldiers eager to justify their militancy, I was able to see the contradictions of the state with my own gradually opening eyes. I saw how my father’s enthusiasm for Israel’s economic, technological, and agricultural achievements—not to mention its concert halls, its museums, and buzzing nightlife—obstructed his ability to see the ongoing brutality and oppression upon which the state is built.
But then it wasn’t just the vibrancy of Israeli society that clouded my father’s vision. The fact that he’d grown up under Nazi terror and had been, in his own words, “so humiliated for so many years” meant that any glimmer of Jewish flourishing, wherever it occurred in the world, filled him with pride. More than this, it meant that whatever violence had founded and sustained the project of a Jewish state was, at worst, a necessary evil. Just as his psychic economy dictated that he “pay. . . back” his friend Kees for his heroics by drawing him into the Zionist fold, so would he remain permanently indebted to the state of Israel for the uncompromising way it defended the lives of almost half the population of world Jewry.
History, as written and wielded by the oppressor, is a cunning tool. The colonial imagination has perennially sought to invert the power relations between settler and native, effacing the initial land grab, and transforming subsequent acts of colonial aggression into self-defense against incursions waged by the dispossessed. As I argue in my book Notes on Trumpspace, drawing on work by Nicholas Mirzoeff and by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, this paradigm is reflected within the supremacist ideology of the Trump movement, which imagines itself as a colony besieged by internal and external threats that can only be held at bay by erecting bigger and better security barriers. It is for this reason, among others, that there is such an easy congeniality between members of the extreme right in American politics and broad portions of Israeli society.
“The colonial imagination has perennially sought to invert the power relations between settler and native, effacing the initial land grab, and transforming subsequent acts of colonial aggression into self-defense against incursions waged by the dispossessed.”
Rest assured, the inverted narrative of persecuted persecutor only grows in power and persuasion when it is underwritten, as it is for Israel, by claims of ancestral inhabitation and the living memory of an extermination campaign so existentially threatening as to have inscribed the fear of persecution, seemingly once and for all, into the marrow of an already historically persecuted group. “A land without a people for a people without a land” always depended upon an egregious falsification of historical reality. But as an idea, it proved beautiful enough for Jews still reeling from the Holocaust—and convenient enough for a European continent still simmering with antisemitism—to rationalize the permanent displacement of three-quarters of a million people, and the large-scale destruction of pre-1948 Palestinian society.
After slavery, exodus, Babylonian exile, the Romans, the Inquisition, the pogroms in Eastern Europe, and, finally, the Holocaust, it is understandable—not to say excusable—that a generation of young Jews, my father among them, could misrecognize a colonial enterprise founded upon ethnic cleansing and subjugation as a project of redemption. At the very least, I can understand the sense of proud bellicosity inspired in my father by his friend’s violent refusal to countenance hate speech; I can grasp that the “new Jewish” masculinity embodied by Kees became, as he says, “an easy role to get into”; and I can then chart his gravitation toward Zionism on the basis of the more general overcoming of his humiliation that the movement seemed to provide. Still, something inside of me snags every time I recollect that episode on the soccer field.
Watching the Shoah Foundation video again, my attention turns to the strange prematurity of the satisfaction that my father exudes as he begins to tell the story. This sense of satisfaction will eventually culminate in the closest thing to joy in an otherwise somber testimony. It’s already expressing itself in the mysterious grin that appears on his lips, alongside the more familiar twinkle in his eye, at the moment he imitates the bigger boy, the one who hurled the antisemitic insult. He seems to take perverse pleasure in saying the words aloud (“dirty Jew”), perhaps even in briefly identifying with the perpetrator. Given what he will momentarily assert about his internalization of the “Nazi view” it is reasonable to speculate that there is, for him, at least some self-persecutory gratification involved in telling—and retelling—the story. But this initial enjoyment blends seamlessly into the more expected sense of joy and relief that wells up in him a moment later as he describes—and reenacts, with an awkward uppercut—his friend’s act of violence against their harasser.
Granted, it may be that the premature satisfaction I’m detecting is purely anticipatory. Knowing how the story ends, and having told it many times before, after having apparently witnessed the events in question play out repeatedly during his childhood, he may simply be radiating excitement at the conclusion that lies ahead. Yet the very sense of repetition that clings to this story—a repetition present within the narrative itself in Kees’s insistence that the phrase “dirty Jew” be repeated not once, but twice—leads me to suspect that its importance lies less in its triumphant resolution than in a profound lack of resolution, of which the need to retell the tale is symptomatic. Indeed, the more I’ve wrestled with it, the more I’ve come to believe that what matters above all when it comes to this story is my father’s repetitious return to a cycle of persecution and retaliation that is without end; or that, rather, constitutes a gratifying end in itself.
This is already suggested by the way in which the narrative is structured. As I began to relate earlier, the story’s two seemingly separate “parts” are in actuality inextricable from one another. The scene on the soccer field is colored in advance by the experiences at Habonim to which they lead. The psychological structure mapped out by the story, in other words, which is something like the terrain my father spent much of his life traversing, is akin to a Möbius strip, a never-ending story. This is evident even, or especially, when he insists on a sense of finality.
“There was always blood, and it was always the end. . . you know, game over,” he says of Kees’s actions. At this moment in his testimony, my father’s emotional release is at its most profound. His eyes are glazed with tears. His voice hovers on the verge of a tremble to which it never quite succumbs. “And then he’d say to me—it was like a code—he’d say, ‘come, Yehudi, we’re going home.’” But already in the mention of home, that most conclusive of notions or codes, there is something else encoded. There is the greater homecoming that will follow, the necessity of the “return” to Zion, which will be reinforced during the weekly meetings of Habonim, gatherings that will take place, in fact, quite far from home: “way out. . . on the edge of town,” my father says, and, importantly, away from their parents—“those of us who had parents,” he adds.
At the culmination of this “second part” of the story, right after noting that among the child survivors who participated in weekly meetings at Habonim, “no word was ever mentioned” of their war experiences, my father makes one additional remark that I have yet to mention. He says that “a renewal and a. . . transformation was beginning to work inside of us that would have a very permanent effect.”
*
Those whose studies or practice are informed by psychoanalytic thought will already have perceived a problem: any “transformation” founded upon the silencing of speech and the repression of the past risks only ever amounting to an interminable replay of an earlier scene, albeit on a different stage. Already in the sequence “renewal. . . transformation” there is a hint of contradiction. Essential to the postwar Zionist project is an effort to “leave the old ways behind”—words my father punctuates, in his testimony, with a wave of one hand over the shoulder, as if to say so long to that dark history. But it is also necessary to replace those old ways with an image at once revived, or renewed, from the more distant past and projected into the near future: the image of Jewish heroism.
To recall Hollander, the Zionist project and the institution of a “rugged,” supposedly “new” version of Jewish identity “required shlilat ha-golah, or negation of the Diaspora”; that is, a negation of the condition of exile and dispersion that many Jews then and now take as foundational to their identities, but a negation which Zionism, as a radically ethnonationalist political project, ideologically disparages. In the case of child survivors like my father, however, diasporic existence, what is sometimes also called galut, was fundamentally interwoven with a lived experience of genocidal persecution that, as history has dramatically shown, cannot simply be waved away. At the same time, and no doubt in part as a result, the muscular image of “new Jewish” identity—already questionable enough in its hypermasculine and ablest underpinnings—was suffused with pathological impulses: the ugly enjoyment of retaliatory violence that I perceive in my father’s repetitious return to the story of Kees on the soccer field. In this context, “renewal” and “transformation” might be more accurately described as the imperfect crystallization of identitarian fantasies, and the soldering into place of a closed circuit of persecution and retribution over the festering wound of childhood fears and humiliation.
Needless to say, the process of socialization in question here can only spell trouble. The “new Jew,” disciplined or subjectivized into existence by Zionism, cannot help but remain haunted by their repressed remainder. That piece of the psychosocial puzzle about which “not a word was spoken” will, because of its very silencing, be prone to violent reassertion. If my observations of my father over the course of his adult life are anything to judge by, the repression of fear and shame among the persecuted may even lead those who quietly harbor these hidden aspects of their identity to seek out, obsessively, instances of potential persecution, in order to affirm themselves more completely. It is not simply that the experience of victimhood in this case will give license to the aggressive assertion of ethnoreligious identity, though this is a troubling enough thought on its own. It is that victimhood itself comes to carry with it a powerful sense of identitarian affirmation. Under such conditions, the world at large can easily be perceived as a hostile entity, and fantasies of retribution flourish at the expense of reconciliation.
This confluence of unresolved traumatic experience and repetitive retributory violence is crucial, in my view, for understanding not only my father’s formative years but postwar Zionist identity more generally: the broader Zionist movement as it came to be reshaped in the wake of World War Two and that in many ways constitutes the basis for the state of Israel today was itself nothing if not a false resolution opening onto tireless repetition—now carried out at the collective level—of identity-affirming violence underwritten by victimhood. The Six-Day War is paradigmatic in this regard. In his book The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, Rashid Khalidi observes that, as Washington well knew and Israeli generals later admitted, Israel held an overwhelming military advantage against the Arab armies they preemptively struck and devastated during the summer of 1967. Yet the myth born out of that war, of “a tiny vulnerable country” facing “constant, existential peril,” continues to be used “to justify blanket support of Israeli policies, no matter how extreme.”
If there is an image that consolidates this logic in the context of our present moment, it can be found in the curious sartorial accessory adopted by the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, in the aftermath of the October 7th attacks by Hamas in southern Israel. As the IDF set out on a massive campaign of destruction in Gaza, the ambassador began showing up at the UN headquarters with a Star of David patch pinned to his shirt, in an act of political theater that was deemed dishonorable by no less than the head of the Yad Vashem. In the center of this Star of David, which recalls the patches Nazis used to identify Jews during the Holocaust, the familiar words “never again” were inscribed. It goes without saying that “never again,” here, decidedly does not mean no genocide ever again against any people on earth. When I recently implied on social media that this should, in fact, be the true meaning of the phrase, I was rebuked by a Zionist acquaintance: “It means the Jews will not be sent to concentration camps again. It has nothing to do with anything else.” But I think even this startlingly callous admission of ethnonationalist allegiance presents too kind a definition for the phrase as it is used in the context above.
In the two months following October 7th, Israel dropped 29,000 bombs, shells, and munitions—almost half of them untargeted “dumb bombs”—on an area roughly the size of Detroit but with a much higher population density. As The Wall Street Journal reported, this is more than eight times the munitions dropped by the US on Iraq between 2004 and 2010. Civilian deaths, the majority of which are among women and children, now number in the tens of thousands. Hospitals, schools, and places of worship have been turned to rubble. Babies have been left to die on powerless incubators, while doctors, deprived of medical supplies under the Israeli siege, have been forced to perform amputations without anesthetic. Seventy percent of dwellings have been destroyed or damaged in an act of “domicide” that many legal scholars consider a crime against humanity. Nearly two million people have been displaced. Water levels have dropped to less than one tenth of the recommended per person per day allotment. Human Rights Watch has determined that Israel is committing the war crime of using starvation as a weapon against Gazan civilians. In a matter of months, more journalists have been killed in Gaza than in any conflict around the world for the past thirty years. Anyone still in denial about whether Israel was engaged from the start in a campaign of indiscriminate slaughter and destruction need look no further than the three Israeli hostages who were shot dead by IDF soldiers after they emerged from a building shirtless, waving a white flag, and in the case of one of them, screaming for help in Hebrew.
Four months into the campaign in Gaza, the ratio of Palestinian to Israeli deaths was approaching thirty to one. And yet, the Israeli government, its Western allies, and its surrogates in the media have continued to position the state as engaged in a self-defensive precision operation. In this context, the shameless instrumentalization of the Holocaust exemplified by the Israeli UN ambassador’s Star of David, and deployed daily to aid in the perpetuation of mass atrocity, is best explained by way of Israeli journalist Gideon Levy’s self-critical assessment of his country of birth: “as the victim, and the only victim in history,” Levy asserts, Israel grants itself the “rights to do whatever we want”—apparently up to and including the ethnic cleansing of an entire region and people, and the bloody sacrifice of Israeli citizens themselves in the name of what the IDF has fittingly called “maximum damage.”
When I think of how my father might have reacted to the UN ambassador’s stunt, I imagine him making a gesture he sometimes made. I see him placing his fingers to his forehead, shaking his head, and then gazing upward in disbelief. I am almost certain that his first reaction would have been incredulity. Much as I wish it were otherwise, however, a small part of me questions this conviction. If I close my eyes and let go of my idealizations, I can also see him turning to me with a familiar twinkle in his eye, maybe giving a little shrug: “Chutzpah.” And then: that mysterious grin.
If I’m able to envision this, it is because there is more than a passing resemblance between the ugly enjoyment I have tried to pinpoint in my father’s Shoah Foundation testimony and the self-satisfaction of the UN Ambassador. Here, then, is what I finally find so troubling about the look on my father’s face as he sits before the camera reflecting on his youth from the position—it must now be emphasized—of a middle-aged professor, secure in the geopolitical alignments that took shape in the postwar period and in the psychological fortress he built around his suffering. It is not simply his palpable sense of attachment to his status as the central figure of victimhood in twentieth-century Western history, with all the reinforcement that has been given to that designation by academic discourse, popular cinema, and liberal identity politics; it is his satisfaction at simultaneously knowing that, thanks to historical circumstances, any threat to his identity or being will be dealt with swiftly, violently, and, most importantly, in a manner that preserves his sense of impunity.
Whether my father is conscious of it or not at the moment he relates his story, behind the blow that he recalls Kees delivering to the boy on the soccer field is the specter of American-backed military superiority that has upheld Israel’s ethnonationalist prerogatives for decades, in conformity with the perverse geopolitical principle that might makes right. But there is something still more unsettling at play here. With the Holocaust effectively singularized and sacralized into an event of near eschatological proportions, incomparable to any crime in history, there is the collective fantasy of a retribution that would be commensurate with the suffering endured by the Jewish people. This is at least partly what is behind Benjamin Netanyahu’s promise of “mighty vengeance,” his invocations of Amalek and the biblical call to “kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings.” It is reflected in Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s assertions that Gazans are “human animals” and that the IDF will “eliminate everything” in the region. It is the same reservoir of boundless punishment from which Israeli Channel 14 news anchor Shay Golden was supping when, vowing mass destruction, he asserted not only that Israel was “coming to Gaza. . . to Lebanon. . . to Iran” but that they were “ready to fight with the United States” and “the entire world.”
A corollary to this fantasy of sublime retribution is the sense of supplementary or excess injuriousness that would seem to accompany every act of violence against the state of Israel. Sarah Schulman has written of “the dehumanization involved in overstatement of harm as a justification of cruelty.” Nowhere has this been more glaringly on display than in the need to outrageously embellish what might have already seemed terrifying enough in Hamas’s deadly October 7th attack. The false accounts, repeated in the media and in the halls of power, of babies beheaded, burned in ovens, or hung on clotheslines, and fetuses ripped from their mothers’ wombs, testify not only to a veiled contempt for those murdered, a reduction of loss and suffering to pornographic spectacle; they reflect the extreme dehumanization of the Palestinian population that has been part and parcel of the necessary psychological groundwork for the horrors we are now seeing in Gaza.
Schulman observes that at the base of pathologically rigid systems of control is “the belief in one's self as human, and of the other as not-human: a specter or monster.” As the IDF has been busy killing one child every ten minutes in Gaza, online content creators in Israel have reveled in racist stereotypes, dressing themselves in Keffiyehs, painting their teeth black, and smearing fake blood on their faces in open mockery of Palestinian suffering. Ha’aretz reports that the IDF’s “psychological warfare” unit has operated a Telegram channel known as “72 Virgins—Uncensored,” illegally and clandestinely targeting local Israeli audiences with graphic images of slain Gazans. The captions on the posted content confirm the extent to which dehumanization of the other begets inhumanity in oneself. One post reads: “Burning their mother. . . You won’t believe the video we got! You can hear the crunch of their bones. We’ll upload it right away, get ready.” Another reads: “Exterminating the roaches. . . Share this beauty.” On the ground, online, and in the imaginations of a society founded upon and sustained by supremacist fantasies, the circuit of persecutory violence remains unbroken.
“On the ground, online, and in the imaginations of a society founded upon and sustained by supremacist fantasies, the circuit of persecutory violence remains unbroken.”
In reckoning with how my father—a caring and learned individual, beloved by his family and community, and, let it be said, dearly missed by his only child—could have spent so much of his life caught up in a cycle of persecutory gratification, to the extent that there was hardly any lengthy conversation between us that didn’t in some way intersect with Jewish grievance, I’m led back to one of his concluding remarks about his early days in the Zionist movement: “And no word was ever mentioned, not about the war, not about being in hiding, nothing about our history.”
*
For Freud, the “compulsion to repeat” (to use the Freudian term for the repetitive behavior I have been describing) would become a central preoccupation of the second half of his work, eventually leading to Beyond the Pleasure Principle in 1920. It is in this work that the famous “death drive” is introduced, not incidentally in the context of contemplating the intractable resistances built up in the psyches of those traumatized by the First World War. Freud’s inaugural reference to the compulsion to repeat, however, occurs in his 1914 essay, “Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through”; and it is in this brief reflection on the clinical setting that he presents us with an insight that may be useful for understanding the material at hand. What first leads Freud to the formulation is his perplexity with the way in which the patient in treatment, rather than bringing a repressed traumatic experience to consciousness, as psychoanalytic technique would dictate, “acts it out” in the course of the transference. That is, the patient “reproduces [the experience] not as a memory but as an action; he repeats it, without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it.”
Freud offers some examples of the above. He first points to the patient who defies his parents’ authority as a child and subsequently reproduces that defiance with the analyst. He then offers the example of the patient whose “helpless and hopeless deadlock in his infantile sexual researches” is reproduced as a sense of helplessness in daily undertakings. Finally, there is the patient whose sense of shame about sexual activities and fear of their being found out reemerges as shame and secretiveness about being in treatment. Multiple prongs of compulsion, then: defiance, helplessness, shame, fear. Doubtless there are many others. But it is hard to ignore how easily Freud’s exemplary forms of acting out can be made to align with the life histories of child survivors like my father. These were individuals whose very identities had to be concealed for the sake of survival; whose senses of themselves were permeated with shame thereafter; and whose “helplessness and hopelessness” at a profoundly impressionable moment in their development could only have been accompanied by feelings of defiance in the face of an indomitable authority.
My father was resolute about the therapeutic role the Zionist movement played in the lives of child survivors. But the therapy in question here must be understood as antithetical to everything that psychoanalysis intends by the phrase “treatment.” In the context of Habonim, my father and his peers were not only given license to repress the past but were encouraged to reproduce it, in Freud’s terms, “not as a memory but as an action.” Their reeducation involved not only a negation of their diasporic identities but an active renewal of a deeper history of Jewish heroism overlaid with nineteenth and twentieth-century heteromasculine idealizations and consolidated into the figure of the so-called “new Jew.” At the same time, the collective implementation of political Zionism in which the war generation participated would come to manifest as a simultaneous acting out of unconscious entanglements of fear, shame, and helplessness, which is to say, victimhood, on the one hand, and absolute defiance on the other. Ethnonationalism as self-exonerating violence: a doubly brutal apparatus in that its outward oppression depends upon inward subjugation. As Jacqueline Rose has written: “Because of the opposition from the indigenous people which it was bound to encounter (as [Ze'ev] Jabotinsky acknowledged), but also because it enlists and requires such passionate identification, Zionism cannot help, although it will go to great lengths to this day to repress this internal knowledge, but be a violent—that is, internally, as well as externally, violent—affair.”
Gazing upon a photograph of my father taken at a Habonim summer camp sometime in the 1950s, when he had gone on to become one of the leaders of the Amsterdam chapter of the group, I sense something of the internal violence required to maintain his allegiance to the radical project he had embraced. In the image, he stands between two rows of kids much younger than himself. Alongside him, dressed in fatigues, are a pair of fellow camp leaders, a man and a woman. These two individuals stand upright with their hands behind their backs. They look casually self-assured; and although their duties probably differed little from those of ordinary summer camp counselors, they could easily pass as militants. My father, however, stands with his long arms dangling at his sides. His shirt has a pattern on it that distinguishes him from his fellow camp leaders. He’s wearing glasses, and—in a characteristically eccentric fashion choice—he has a scarf wrapped around his neck. My father was no schlemiel, but neither was he a sabra. He was bookish, sensitive, charming, endearingly awkward, and, at times, somewhat less endearingly neurotic; good looking, a bit of a nerd. Standing there in the photograph, with his hands at his thighs and his feet splayed outward, he looks to me like he’s playing a part. Even if the rugged, pugilistic “new Jewish” identity was, as he says in his testimony, “an easy role to get into,” it was one for which he was never quite cut out.
That there is a profound ambivalence at the heart of postwar Zionism can be gleaned from the way in which the Israeli state memorializes the history of Jews in the Second World War. The day on which the Holocaust is commemorated is known as the “Day of Destruction and Heroism.” Rose observes that the date of observance was placed “as close to the date of the Warsaw Uprising as religious laws relating to Passover would permit.” The subsequent enactment of the “Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Law” and the decision to commemorate the slain but not the survivors would subsequently confirm that “remembrance was conditional—Warsaw first, the survivors last, and least.” For Israel, Rose concludes, “trauma enters the national psyche in the form of resistance to its own pain.” At the individual level, as my father’s experiences attest, what the national and political project of Zionism provided was an alternative to a more difficult task—perhaps, as Freud saw it, the most difficult task: that of working through their pain.
Regarding the difficulties of “working-through,” Freud makes two remarks that are particularly striking in the present context. First, he describes the analyst’s efforts at helping the patient to “unearth his memories” and eventually arrive at a “reconciliation with the repressed material” as a process of disarmament. Compelled into acting out through the very process of confronting repressed memories, “the patient,” Freud writes, “brings out of the armoury of the past the weapons with which he defends himself against the progress of the treatment—weapons which we must wrest from him one by one.” Second, he describes the project of working through one’s own resistance to reconciliation and recovery as itself dependent upon a form of defiance; in this case, a defiance that would not translate trauma into violent self-assertiveness but would patiently and persistently refuse to yield to such an impulse. “One must allow the patient time to become more conversant with this resistance,” he writes, “to work through it, to overcome it, by continuing, in defiance of it, the analytic work.” While it may be that some survivors of Nazi persecution were able to confront their pain after the war, perhaps even in the clinical setting, no such time for working-through, no such cultivation of the more difficult form of defiance identified by Freud, was afforded to my father and his peers. On the contrary, what they found in the Zionist youth movement was an expedient means of strengthening, in the name of ethnonationalist militancy, the psychological weaponry with which they defended themselves against their troubled minds.
“What they found in the Zionist youth movement was an expedient means of strengthening, in the name of ethnonationalist militancy, the psychological weaponry with which they defended themselves against their troubled minds.”
This past summer I visited the Netherlands for the first time since my father passed away. At the research center of Kamp Westerbork, the site from which 102,000 Jews were deported to their deaths, I interviewed Bert Jan Flim, an expert in child survivors of the Holocaust whose dissertation my father advised decades ago. A common experience among child survivors, Flim said, is that they were told that they “did not deserve any special attention.” Even though most if not all had lost family members and undergone years of terror and devastation, they were considered the “lucky” ones, and therefore they were “told to shut up,” to “leave the past behind and get on with their lives.” Flim is not to my knowledge a Freudian, but his perceptions of the psychological toll this took on the later lives of child survivors point to a classic case of the return of the repressed. “If you only look forward, and you don’t confront some of what happened,” he told me, “if you never face that, it can maybe sit inside of you, and [cause] problems in your life.”
For my father, it was not until the 1980s, when he attended the first conference specifically dedicated to child survivors of the Holocaust, that he seriously began to engage with what he had experienced as a child. In the interim between his Habonim years and his first significant reckoning with himself as a “child survivor” his allegiance to Israel only strengthened. In 1967, when the Six-Day War broke out, he was a PhD student at Harvard. Within twenty-four hours he was on a plane to Israel, where he volunteered in hospitals and subsequently helped with postwar efforts. His closest surviving cousins were kibbutzniks and he visited them frequently in the north of the country. His partner during the most formative years of my childhood was an Israeli woman. Throughout my life, I knew him as a fairly typical liberal Zionist; that is to say, a person capable of holding myriad contradictory beliefs. He believed in a two-state solution, but only on terms that would deny key aspects of Palestinian sovereignty. He believed that the peace process had broken down because of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s intransigence on issues such as right of return, and not because of the fundamentally inequitable terms of the negotiations. He held onto the notion that had Yitzhak Rabin not been assassinated, peace might have one day been possible, but he shied away—at least until very near the end of his life—from calling out Israel’s extreme right and the settler movement who were responsible for Rabin’s murder. He believed that the security barrier was an unfortunate but necessary instrument for maintaining Israeli safety. He could express genuine concern for the suffering of Palestinians, especially Palestinian children. But he was fundamentally incapable of acknowledging Israeli culpability and could easily grow indignant at suggestions of the state’s misdeeds. At Sabra and Shatila in 1982, it was those Lebanese Phalangist butchers who were responsible for the wanton slaughter of Palestinian refugees; the 1996 Qana massacre, in which the IDF destroyed a UN compound where hundreds of civilians had sought shelter, was a miscalculation of war; the destruction of Jenin in 2002 was an understandable response to the ongoing intifada; and so forth.
Of more recent events in Gaza and the West Bank he would often comment on how terrible and heartbreaking it all was before swiftly changing the subject. He knew that for many years the discourse had been changing. What had been far left positions were becoming increasingly mainstream. Even within the chavurah group that he helped found in Montreal, his staunchly pro-Israel position had begun to seem unfashionable. Toward the end of his life, the conversations between us about the Middle East, which varied between lively debates and heated arguments, gradually fell silent. Now and then he would send me an article from Ha’aretz, when he was in a genial mood, or from The Jerusalem Post, when he was feeling provocative. I tried my best to remain even-keeled and to avoid taking the bait when it was offered. I think we both knew this was one of many strands of our relationship that would have to be left unresolved.
For most of his life my father entertained the notion that he would one day make Aliyah—that is, move to Israel. At the very least, he mused, he might purchase a small vacation apartment on the Mediterranean, somewhere north of Haifa. Just before he died, he spent a month in Israel, bouncing between city and desert, rejoicing with loved ones, and probably placing considerable strain on the 84-year-old body that would fail him, suddenly, not long after his return home. In the image printed in his obituary, he is standing against the backdrop of the Negev Desert. He looks tan, handsome, much younger than his age.
After he died, I spent months organizing and rummaging through the archives he kept in his small cottage in the Quebec countryside. Among the unfinished academic manuscripts, magazine clippings, photos, and piles of journals, I came across a legal pad dating from sometime in the mid-1980s, with what appeared to be the start of a memoir. “It’s finally settled,” he’d written. “I’m ready to begin my life in Israel.” Ultimately, my father’s fantasies about making a life for himself in the Jewish ancestral homeland remained just that. Another unresolved narrative. A story without an ending.
I was staying at his old cottage in Quebec on October 7th, 2023, a date that happened to coincide with Canadian Thanksgiving weekend. Alone in the woods, with nothing but my phone and my father’s ghost to keep me company, I spent hours scrolling through the footage streaming out of southern Israel. There’s no sense in downplaying the retraumatizing impact that Hamas’s attack has had on much of the global Jewish community. Holocaust historian Omer Bartov, who remains deeply critical of the Israeli state, has spoken about how October 7th triggered painful recollections for him of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. For my father it would probably have brought him back to 1967. My stepmother put it in characteristically stark terms: “If he were alive, this would have killed him.”
For my part, I was aware from the first posts I saw on social media that the images of that day would haunt me for the foreseeable future. But like many of my closest friends and family members, I could not look upon these images of death and not think of other images: of the thousands of buildings and bodies mercilessly destroyed by the Israeli state throughout its violent history; and, more troublingly still, of the violence that now unquestionably was to come. Israel’s assault on Gaza has been predictably disproportionate. But very few, even among those of us who have closely followed the ascent of proudly homicidal former terrorist leaders and self-proclaimed fascists into the highest ranks of the Knesset, could have predicted the extent of the horror that Israel has unleashed on the Palestinian people.
More than one commentator in the mainstream media has asserted that Israel never took the necessary time to grieve before launching into violent retaliation. “Intense emotions often make it difficult to think carefully about the implications of one’s actions,” Fareed Zakaria stated in a television segment questioning Netanyahu’s call for “mighty vengeance” against the perpetrators of the October 7th attack. Such remarks among apparently well-meaning liberal media pundits problematically presume an identity between the apparatus of the Israeli state and the population at large. No doubt, the Israeli government and media have instrumentalized the grief and trauma of many Israelis. But to suggest that the state apparatus itself is somehow acting emotionally or compulsively is simultaneously to underestimate and risk exonerating its malevolence. Netanyahu’s government, as has been made clearer with each passing day, is concerned neither with providing comfort to the bereaved nor with simply carrying out blind retribution on behalf of an inflamed public. The former presupposes a humanity it plainly lacks, the latter presupposes an animality that is still proper to the human. But the Israeli state and its military, as it has operated under Netanyahu’s cabinet, is neither human nor composed of “human animals,” to recall the words of Defense Minister Gallant. The Israeli state is a coldly calculating death machine that converts the unprocessed trauma I have been describing throughout this essay into further destruction. This much has been driven home by the chilling reports that have emerged of the IDF’s use of “a secretive, AI-facilitated military intelligence unit” to carry out its ongoing massacre of Gazans.
Those likening Israel’s crusade to hasty and irrational actions like those supposedly undertaken by the United States post-9/11 again misrepresent the malevolence of the actors involved in state decision making—in this case the neoconservatives who had long been waiting in the wings for an opportunity to implement their disastrous geopolitical agenda. Netanyahu’s war on Gaza is, indeed, very much like the Bush administration’s crusade against “Terror” and exploits in Afghanistan and Iraq—and it is using horror as a pretext for capitalizing on longstanding ideological commitments, in this case the intention, unequivocally voiced for years among extreme factions of the Israeli government, to kill or expel from its controlled territories those who refuse to submit to “Jewish rule.” But with respect to the painfully evident reality that there is no military solution to the misery that has persisted for decades in Palestine, Netanyahu’s government has responded with what Jacqueline Rose might call its “last resistance”: the implementation of a scorched earth enterprise that the International Court of Justice has determined to be plausibly genocidal. This, finally, is the work that the phrase “never again” has been perverted into carrying out in our time. I can think of no greater dishonor to the legacy of my hundred-plus murdered Dutch ancestors, or to the millions more whose bodies were incinerated in Nazi crematoria. Israel’s brutal military campaign must be opposed by people of conscience everywhere.
*
That some part of my father would have believed this, however clouded his views might have been by reactionary influences, is suggested by another segment of his Shoah Foundation testimony. Reflecting on the working-through that he had belatedly—perhaps too belatedly—set out on in the second half of his life, he observes how important it is “to pass through what till very recently we used to look at. . . as a very dark place that we do not want to visit. Because at the other side of the dark place there is something very positive as well.” Here, finally, the redemption in question is decidedly not the Zionist project, nor even a flourishing global Jewish population. “I’m certainly not just talking to Jews,” he says. “I’m talking to all people of all colors and all races and all ethnic identities, because there is something that we need to learn.” First, regarding the dark tides of genocidal destruction: “how fast it can happen,” and “how vulnerable we all may be.” But also, importantly, that some degree of faith in “humanity and the world” can be found in the story of survival itself, particularly in the actions of the innumerable individuals—most of them total strangers—who acted on behalf of the imperiled. “For my single survival, forty, sixty, eighty people contributed somehow, in some kind of essential way,” my father declares before the camera, his voice now trembling with a more tender form of gratitude. In other words, if there is a lesson to be learned from the Holocaust it must be a universal one; and if there is any hope to be placed in humanity, it comes from our ability to act on behalf of others. Never again, if it is to be anything more than a hollow sentiment, must mean never again for anyone.
“If there is a lesson to be learned from the Holocaust it must be a universal one; and if there is any hope to be placed in humanity, it comes from our ability to act on behalf of others.”
The latter phrase has been one of the rallying cries among the largely youth-led Jewish organizations that have emerged on the international stage as a crucial supplement to the global movement for Palestinian emancipation. Alongside the phrase above there has appeared an accompanying slogan: “not in our name.” These words have often been expressed in the form of song, as groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, If Not Now, and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice have gathered in acts of nonviolent protest and mass civil disobedience; that is, in contexts in which the words take on something of the power of performative utterance. If the first phrase, “never again for anyone,” affirms a relation between self and other (or “I and Thou,” to use the familiar terms of Martin Buber, himself a deeply ambivalent Zionist), then the second phrase, “not in our name,” insists that there is no one Jewish identity, that the “I” is always riven by otherness.
As rebukes to the assertion of ethnonationalist identity, with all the potential violence the latter entails, both statements can be thought of in terms of what Edward Said called “a politics of diaspora life.” In the context of rejuvenated understandings of Jewish practice and principle, one might discover an antecedent for such a politics in the Book of Exodus: “you shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the feelings of the stranger, since you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” For Said, however, this politics is indebted in part to none other than Freud, whose insistence on the Egyptian origins of Moses would seem to go a step further, destabilizing Jewish ethnonationalism at its very foundation, and opening the door—if only by a hairsbreadth—to the possibility for a new history of collective, multiethnic (in Said’s words, “binational”) flourishing. Said writes of “Freud’s profound exemplification of the insight that even for the most definable, the most identifiable, the most stubborn communal identity—for him this was Jewish identity—there are inherent limits that prevent it from being fully incorporated into one, and only one, Identity.”
This limit has been powerfully reaffirmed by the growing numbers of Jews, who, in the face of cynical media personas, craven institutional directors, publishers, and university administrators, and—above all—a US congress beholden to the financial and political priorities of Empire, have opted to stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people, and to refuse the insidious, ahistorical, and manifestly erroneous equation of Zionism and Judaism. As the catastrophe in Gaza continues to unfold, the Palestinian justice movement has once again become a central arena within which the greatest global struggles of our time—between humanity and capital, no less than between freedom and tyranny—are now being waged. In joining with the millions of pro-Palestinian activists that have taken to the streets in recent months, Jewish activist groups have helped to revive what Jacqueline Rose, describing Freud’s epistolary exchanges on Zionism with the writer Arnold Zweig, calls “a critique of national self-enchantment, of identities that harden like iron in response to the ills of the world.” Over and against the “last resistance” that has flared up in the wake of October 7th, one that is fueling the collective punishment of more than two million lives, the voices now clamoring for peace insist on a more difficult defiance—a different aim and end to a story that has been repeating itself for far too long.