Moshe Dayan and Girard

This is an extraordinary document. I am reminded of René Girard’s argument that culture is founded on a denial of mimetic, fratricidal violence that perpetuates the violence. The opening words are important. Moshe Dayan says: “Let us not hurl blame at the murderers. Why should we complain of their hatred for us? Eight years have they sat in the refugee camps of Gaza, and seen, with their own eyes, how we have made a homeland of the soil and the villages where they and their forebears once dwelt”. That was written in 1956. Since then, not eight, but 76 years have passed. Dayan’s acknowledgment that the Palestinians are right to hate seems as true today as it was then. 

But then, the speech goes on to argue that precisely for that reason – precisely for the reason that the Palestinians are so justified to hate – Israel must never ever be lulled into thinking that peace is possible with them. The surging sea of hatred behind the walls, he writes, means that “without the steel helmet and the maw of the cannon we shall not plant a tree, nor build a house.” The speech turns into a grim paean for “the barbed wire fence and the machine gun”, and the ones to blame, he suggests, are not the Palestinians so much as “the ambassadors of conspiring hypocrisy, who call for us to lay down our arms”. 

Why is this document so extraordinary? Not just because it is a “defining speech of Zionism”, as the commentator points out, but because it is so totally bereft of any moral justification of the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians. The reference to “millions of Jews, murdered without a land” certainly justifies Jewish hatred of Germans and Europeans, but hardly of Arabs. And the reference to “children” who “shall not have lives to live if we do not dig shelters” of course immediately invites the objection: how about Palestinian children? 

So what the speech amounts to is an asounding self-acknowledged barbarism: a grim affirmation of unceasing, ruthless struggle, despite the knowledge that the victims are in the right. It does away with denial, but not with violence. What Israel must do, it suggests, is to face the violence on which the state is founded and affirm it, despite its horror and its immorality. I can’t help thinking, while reading it, that Dayan must have realized how repulsive his own stance was, as well as the stance of Israel.

The antinomy of hope

Just some thoughts here about Rebecca Solnit's article. It made me think of Kant, in whose writings the disconnect between freedom and the empirical world is mirrored in a similar disconnect between hope and the empirical world. To both him and Solnit, hope is obligatory in whatever circumstances: it is never too late.

The paradox is that, to inspire hope, we must always think that it is not too late to act. But empirically, it is self-evident that things can be lost that one had hoped to keep and preserve. And not only material things, but also living beings, relations, and ways of life. So situations where it is “too late” can certainly exist.

Against Benjamin’s idea that redemption must include the dead, Horkheimer replied that the dead are dead.

The disconnect is stubborn: it is true that it is never too late – in whatever circumstances, there will always be meaningful things to do, small actions that can make a difference, if not saving the world then at least make things a little less bad. But it is equally true that we often experience that it is too late. The disconnect has emotional consequences: shock, grief, traumatization, depression.

Even when the earth turns into a wasteland – Beckett’s rubbish heap – it will not be too late. This is the vindication of the Panglossian hope ridiculed by Voltaire. Even if we do not claim that the world is the best of all possible ones despite all catastrophes, we are obliged to think that things can always improve, regardless of how bad they are. We end up in Solnit’s: “I respect despair as an emotion, but not as an analysis”.

But at the same time, such an attitude is both cruel and cynical, especially in view of those who mourn what has been lost. Those insisting on hope – like Kant or Solnit – can easily appear unfeeling.

Can the paradox be overcome? No side is right: we are confronted with an incompatibility, or antinomy.

To hope is fine, but this must be a hope that proceeds through despair and through a loss of hope, a “hope beyond hope”. A hope that can bud even in the rubbish heap.

The problem with Kant and Solnit is that they never allow for giving up hope. For hope to be meaningful, it must be disappointable, as Bloch writes. Only a hope that can be lost is respectful of what people hold dear.