In anticipation of Purim, which is this year March 24 on the Gregorian calendar, I spoke with Yakov Rabkin, a world-renowned theologian of Judaism and Professor Emeritus at the University of Montreal. I encourage people to get his influential classic, What is Modern Israel?, from our dear friends at Pluto Press. Reflecting on the content and wishing also to express the mourning in which we are all now engaged, I have written the article below by way of context.
Words fail. Hopefully, as Rabkin concludes, changes for the better will soon start to gain pace. The audio of our discussion, at any rate, is available in full here.
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Ever since the defeat by Palestinians of Israeli technologies of confinement in the Gaza operation of October 7, 2024, I have had little to add to the words of Chicago’s Ali Abunimah, when on Day 7 of this genocide he lost his composure. He was speaking with Gaza City’s Refaat Alareer, this century’s treasure in the English world of letters. Abunimah said:
“What is this? What is this hell we’re living in? People come to us for analysis – I don’t know how to analyze this! I don’t know what to say to people. Our hearts are in pain, our hearts are broken. . . . I don’t know what to say to you, Refaat, I don’t know; as Khalil said he doesn’t know how to face his children, I don’t know how to face you, and to face people in Gaza. And I don’t know how to say to you that I’m sorry we failed.”
We flatter ourselves to associate in any way with Abunimah’s words. But the prosodic inflection of each word resonates. As does the voice of Alareer himself – his strength, his humanity, his warmth. “These are tears of humanity,” we can all hear Alareer read. “Not tears of defeat, or fear, or cowardice.” Those words command respect. Still, there is every reason to mourn.
This is no case for despondency. The liberal West and its Israeli protégés are piling up intergenerational defeats for themselves one after the next. I have been researching these monsters for two decades. My focus in recent years has for this reason been drawn by South African analysis into a close reading of German National Socialism – if only to understand the so-called “psychologische Überlegenheit des Engländers” (“psychological superiority of the English”) on which Nazism was modelled.1 I rely on the standard American wartime translation: Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf: Complete and Unabridged (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1941), 200. See also for context Gerwin Strobl, This Germanic Isle: Nazi Perceptions of Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). And the big picture is full of hope. We live in an increasingly multipolar world; world white or “Western” predominance is ending. New forms of human solidarity and creative strength are everywhere gaining momentum against the schöne Schein, or “beautiful lies,” of the liberal West’s Überlegene machinery of death.2See Elizabeth M. Wilkinson, “Schiller’s Concept of Schein in the Light of Recent Aesthetics,” The German Quarterly 28, no. 4 (1955): 219–227. The concept is everywhere in the literature of and against Nazism.
But the losses in Gaza are staggering. If German Jewish memory counts for anything, this is what Erich Fromm always described as the “paradoxical” truth.3Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (London: Thorsons, 1995), 57. From 1933–1941, just before the most notorious genocide of the twentieth century, German National Socialism seemed (scheint) to be moving from strength to strength. Then came the June 1941 triumphs of the resistance, and National Socialism’s schöne Schein started to evaporate. The detailed, authoritative literature on the Holocaust shows that the gaining of the initiative by the anti-Fascist resistance was inseparable from Nazism’s progression from its “expulsion” policies of 1933–1941 to its “annihilation” policies of 1941–1945.4Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). Unsustainable, explosive cruelty marked the system’s decline.
That tension is once again gut-wrenching. On the one hand, a bare-minimum deference is owed by every thinking, feeling human being to the reshaping of world consciousness and West Asian geopolitics by the peoples of Palestine and Yemen. As has been beautifully lyricized by Saïdou, respect for this resilience or sumud must be “unequivocal.” On the other hand, the burden that humanity has placed on these peoples to liberate the rest of us could four decades ago already be flagged as a hateful injustice.5“In the absence of viable partners in the Arab world, the PLO has been saddlied with a heavier burden than any other liberation movement in contemporary history except one: following the Korean war, US policy placed the Vietnamese in a similar predicament.” Eqbal Ahmad, “‘Pioneering’ in the Nuclear Age: An Essay on Israel and the Palestinians.” Race & Class 25, no. 1 (1984): 5. “It frustrates me,” Ghada Abed wrote from Gaza, “how often people perceive us as strong or resilient – superheroes. We are ordinary individuals with a limited capacity for endurance.” Words fail to capture the horror of where things now stand.
So spring holidays this year cannot really be celebrated, Jewish or otherwise. This is true even at a safe distance from the mass killings at points of food access, and the livestreamed famine that those massacres are designed to enforce. I write with what humility I have, distant, too, from the worst of the mourning. But if words are worth anything, the main solace I know of is some version of what Simone Weil wrote in 1940. Just before the worst of it, Weil stared down a National Socialist Germany that to all outward appearances still seemed strong. But hubris has its patterns. So she had (as we all have) good reason to look ahead to the enemy’s defeat, and she did so with a beautiful reading of Homer’s Iliad:
“The strong are, as a matter of fact, never absolutely strong, nor are the weak absolutely weak, but neither is aware of this. They have in common a refusal to believe that they both belong to the same species . . . . Thus it happens that those who have force on loan from fate count on it too much and are destroyed. . . . Since other people do not impose on their movements that halt, that interval of hesitation, wherein lies all our consideration for our brothers in humanity, they conclude that destiny has given complete license to them . . . . [A]t this point they exceed the measure of the force that is actually at their disposal. . . . And now we see them committed irretrievably to chance; suddenly things cease to obey them. . . . This retribution, which has a geometrical rigor, which operates automatically to penalize the abuse of force, was the main subject of Greek thought. It is the soul of the epic.”6Simone Weil, The Iliad or The Poem of Force (Wallingford: Pendle Hill, 1991), 14.
Weil did not live to see the victory, passing away in 1943 for spiritual rather than strictly physical reasons. But today, as Israel turns from its 1948–2023 expulsion policy to more harrowing forms of annihilation, maybe we too can look ahead to brighter West Asian futures after this hell.
On Purim and the political theology of genocide
Today, anyway, is Purim. And in an Israel made, not in God’s image, but in the image of empire, what passes for Purim this year features a harrowing celebration of genocide.
Like nearly everything that Israel and the liberal West do these days, the use of Purim to celebrate genocide orders is just wildly, psychedelically deceptive. But this has always been the nature of genocide’s schöne Schein (German for “beautiful lies”).7I appreciate that I am not treating this important concept with much nuance here. In its usage, however, by the social groups discussed in this piece, “beautiful lies” will do. It often takes the shape of religion, but under the surface is what the German jurist Carl Schmitt coldly called “political theology.”
Sometimes the blasphemy just strikes us over the head. In National Socialist Germany, for instance, a close associate of Hermann Göring declared outright that “Hitler is a new, a greater, a mightier Christ.”8Magnus Hirschfeld, translated by Eden and Cedar Paul, Racism (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1948), 278. But this marked an exaggeration of established practices rather than the creation of new ones. Harvard, too, preached that new Western faiths would need to supersede the “Hebrew and Greek Scriptures” (the Old and New Testament) and to place all holy mandates at the service of propertied classes and the state.9Ralph Waldo Emerson, “An Address” (The Harvard Divinity Address), in Essays and English Traits: Harvard Classics Vol. 5 (New York: The Collier Press, 1909), 42. The Harvard dream was that ruling groups could seize all claims to divine power and in this way form an “Imperial Guard of Virtue,” swooping down, as from heaven, to “treat [us] as gods would, [and] walk as gods in the earth.”10Emerson, “An Address,” 41; and “The Over-Soul,” 150, also in Essays and English Traits.
Here the United States, like Germany, looked to England for inspiration. Oxford University was proud to record that by breaking away from the Catholic church, King Henry VIII had set a new Western standard and transformed himself into “the Pope, the whole Pope, and something more than the Pope.”11The phrase is from William Stubbs, an Anglican bishop and Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford. As quoted in Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (London: Chatto & Windus, 1947), 182. English rulers were thereafter constantly raised by court thinkers to some official status as “Gods on earth” (in the words of William Perkins).12A quoted in George L. Moss, The Holy Pretence: A Study in Christianity and Reason of State from William Perkins to John Winthrop (New York: Howard Fertig, 1968), 83. Modern Germany developed in thrall to this example; the Hitler-as-Christ madness did not emerge overnight. Nowhere were the tricks more thoroughly outlined than in F.W. Schelling’s Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology. This how-to guide to dehumanization argues that a ruling group can always experience its momentary material predominance as deepfaked divine right. Schelling urged ruling groups to claim for themselves both the Prometheus of the Greeks and Ha Adam of the Hebrews. His science held that power’s only “true God” is the imagination of “the divine race” that feels Him.13F.W. Schelling, translated by S. Jankélévitch, Introduction à la philosophie de la mythologie Tome II (Paris: Aubier, 1946), 287 and 291. See also reference to it in Léon Poliakov, The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nationalist Ideas in Europe (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 239. Schelling was particularly excited to emphasize that it is when oppressors feel “divine” that they can best make the oppressed seem (scheint) less than human.14Poliakov, The Aryan Myth, 239; Schelling, Introduction à la philosophie de la mythologie, 279.
Better, as Haidar Eid said, to read German National Socialism directly than to hear its echoes from the Israelis. And holocausts sometimes make for grim, gallows humour. As concerns the Third Reich, one of the most revered Jewish critics observed that all the highfalutin political theology had done no better than to reduce the “Himmelreich” (“Kingdom of Heaven”) of the Lutheran Bible to a Himmlersches Reich – a dark reference to Heinrich Himmler, the principal architect of the 1941–1945 annihilation machinery.15Victor Klemperer, translated by Martin Brady, The Language of the Third Reich (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 119. Beneath the wordplay, the machinery turned. As Schmitt taught, will-to-power political theology cares nothing for logic, focusing instead on the instinctivist development of some “means of physically killing human beings.”16Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, translated by George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 33.
Nevertheless, the verbal details of annihilation orders sometimes do matter. So we need to take note of how Israel announced its progression from its expulsion policies of 1948–2023 to its annihilation policies of the present. These are all in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) records now, thanks to the South African representatives who recorded them:
“Prime Minister Netanyahu, in his address to the Israeli forces on 28 October 2023 . . . [,] urged the soldiers to “remember what Amalek has done to you.” This refers to the biblical command by God for Saul for the retaliatory destruction of an entire group of people known as the Amalekites. “Put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.” The genocidal invocation of Amalek was anything but idle. It was repeated by Mr. Netanyahu in a letter to the Israeli armed forces on 3 November. . . . On 7 December 2023, Israeli soldiers proved that they understood the Prime Minister’s message to “remember what Amalek has done to you” as genocidal. They were recorded by journalists dancing and singing: “We know our motto: there are no uninvolved . . .”; that they obey one commandment, “to wipe out the seed of Amalek.” . . . Journalists and commentators have announced that “the woman is an enemy, the baby is an enemy . . . the pregnant woman is an enemy” . . . . We remind the Court of the identity and authority of the genocide inciters: the Prime Minister; the President; the Minister of Defence; the Minister of National Security; the Minister of Energy and Infrastructure; members of the Knesset; senior army officials; and food soldiers. Genocidal utterances are therefore not out on the fringes; they are embodied in State policy.”
These – this week once more shows – are at the surface Purim-themed orders for genocide. But that only goes so far in sketching the contours of Israel as a political-theological threat.
I approach the wordplay with caution. More than half a century ago, Jewish thinkers like Ania Francos were already treating it as given that peoples colonized by Israel have every right to supplement “the armoury of criticism with the criticism of arms.”17The phrase itself, tweaked from Marx, belongs to Anouar Abdel-Malek, translated by Michael Pallis, “Introduction,” Contemporary Arab Political Thought (London: Zed Books, 1983), 19. The case for endorsing it in friendship is the overall argument of Ania Francos, Les Palestiniens (Paris: Julliard, 1970). Now the Chinese representative to the United Nations, Zhang Zu, affirms world majority opinion that Palestinians have the natural and legal right to resist the hatreds cited above by “all available means, including armed struggle.”18“China tells ICJ: Palestinians have the right to use ‘armed force’ against Israel,” Middle East Eye (February 22, 2024), https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/palestinians-have-right-use-armed-force-against-israel-says-china-icj Liberal schöne Schein to the contrary has reduced the West to a global disgrace. Those of us distant from the explosions and famine oppose this in our own contexts with humility as well as rage.
So before proceeding to the Purim-themed interview with renowned Jewish theologian of conscience Yakov Rabkin, I will briefly add this. During the March to Washington in 1963, Rabbi Joachim Prinz, who had weathered Hitlerian rule as the chief rabbi of the Jewish community in Berlin, reminded those assembled that the real moral question is never moderation versus extremism. During genocide, he recalled, “the most urgent and most disgraceful” problem is not “bigotry and hatred” but “silence.”19As quoted in James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2011), 55. Assuming the podium at the Oxford Union the next year, Malcolm X had not needed the cue. Never forget, he taught, that “when one is moderate in pursuit of justice for human beings, I say he’s a sinner.”
Having sinned in moderation, I confess to feeling my whole society wrapped in old holocaust phrasing; as was once said from the reluctant edges of the Nazi cultural machinery, “Innocence is spreading like the plague.”20The quote is from a certain Erich Kästner, as quoted in Andreas Höfele, German Shakespeare from Nietzsche to Carl Schmitt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 237. But maybe a few comments, just the same, on the struggles ahead.
The shift in the balance of social forces in Israel is less staggering than the tangible details of the holocaust in Gaza, but it also demands world attention. It was just this last spring that Shir Hever, the military embargo coordinator for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) National Committee, guided us through the civic protest wave in Israel. Hever reminded us of what split the “first” from the “second” armies of Israel. The “first army,” as Hever explained, was better-off and more involved in the high-tech branches of the Israeli armed forces. The “second” was more heavily involved in on-the-ground violence against Palestinians and so more swept up in the visceral organicist racism that this work requires and generates.21Shir Hever, “Israeli protests expose divisions on the military,” Electronic Intifada (May 26, 2023), https://electronicintifada.net/content/israeli-protests-expose-divisions-military/37831 Remember those days? There were wild liberal fantasies about principled Jewish protests of the “first army” sort. That is all over now. We today face in Israel a qualitatively deepened and widened organicist racism, which deepfaked war propaganda since October 7 has forged into a war-fever consensus. The Israeli threat to the peoples of the region is nuclear-armed Spartan madness.
Given my loyalties, my occasional levity in a calm pre-Purim discussion of theology needed, I felt, to be joined with some of the above texture. That said, I immensely respect Yakov Rabkin’s work and want now to turn to his classically Jewish integrity. It will be wonderful when such principled Judaism can recover a peaceful place in Palestine in a country recovered, filled with that full Palestinian return and restitution that can start to make things right. But with this Israeli population? How to get from here to there is for the moment a painful challenge. As dear Ghada Karmi has often said, I really do wish we were starting from someplace else.
The audio interview with Yakov Rabkin is available here.