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.