Israel’s madness loses its luster

If I were an Israeli politician, my first and foremost decision would be to prioritize a prisoner exchange deal, releasing all Israeli hostages. Only then would I turn my gaze to Gaza to strike it, flip it upside down and inside out.

This was possible, but it did not happen. As the Palestinian blow landed, it not only shattered the gears of Israel’s strategic thinking but its art of deception and embellishment as well. Israel chose to hastily flaunt its might over releasing its citizens, flexing its muscles to the point where Israeli Heritage Minister Amihai Eliyahu even alluded to obliterating Gaza with a nuclear bomb. When pressed about the fate of Israeli prisoners held there, his response was callous: every war yields casualties.

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We say that this house, or this woman, is older than Israel. Israel, in turn, perceives this as a testament to its youthful state. Zionist settlements were indeed borne on the shoulders of young, ideological immigrants. Zionism demanded that the nascent Israelis become zealous, youthful warriors, setting themselves apart from the submissive Jews of Europe. This narrative conveniently paved the way for Israel to cast its conflicts with the Arab nations as a modern-day tale of David versus Goliath, where the cunning young boy outwits the mighty giant.

This new Israeli, the soldier, son of the kibbutz, was portrayed as a rebellious, untamed youth, impudent — chutzpan in Hebrew — speaking their mind without regard for anyone. This chutzpan persona became a defining, even admired, feature of the Israeli character, so much so that even historian Norman Finkelstein borrowed the term as the title of his book Beyond Chutzpah (Beyond Audacity).

However, it is the Israeli playwright, Hanoch Levin — one of the most enigmatic and, in my opinion, ingenious writers to ever emerge from Israel — who was truly able to critique Israel from this angle. Levin appeared to lean toward the Jewish coldness of Europe rather than the radiant Israeli vitality. Following the 1967 war, he wrote a comedic scene wherein a young soldier enters his grandparents' house, greets them and walks to a chair in the living room to flip it over. Why, his grandfather asks, and he innocently answers: Because I'm mischievous.

Grandfather: Huh?

Tsevi: (raising his voice), I said, because all my Israeli magic stems from these playful pranks, done in a completely spontaneous manner.

How do I explain to you, he continues, that my pranks flow freely and naturally like an innocent child? They are the spices that infuse with my personal Israeli magic. This was how I was taught, and I cannot help it. (Meanwhile, he playfully circles around his grandfather and lightly kicks him in the behind, laughing, and his grandfather starts to cry.)

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In her book The Question of Zion, Jacqueline Rose contemplates Zionist madness, employing psychoanalysis to tie it to the notion of salvation — where horror blends with the euphoria of triumph: the horror of the Holocaust and the euphoria of Israeli military triumph.

What has become increasingly evident to me is that Israel has developed a fondness for its own madness. Unlike wisdom, fitting for the elderly, this madness grants Israel the freedom to do anything and be unpredictable. In 1914, Chaim Weizmann, Israel's first president, wrote that it is fortunate for Zionists to be perceived as mad, "for if we were in our right mind, we would never have thought of going to Palestine." I am reminded of an Israeli journalist who, during the 2006 war, wrote that it is advantageous for Israel to occasionally display signs of madness.

To be fair, he did not say Israel, but rather "the neighborhood thug," and we all know how we feel about the thug in our neighborhood when they go on a rampage — some eye them with anger, but the majority look upon them with fear, and perhaps even admiration.

In an attempt to embellish madness, the Israeli military has been described as the "most moral army in the world," with soldiers who "shoot and cry." In Yoram Kaniuk’s book Adam Ben Kelev (Adam Resurrected), a novel on madness within a psychiatric asylum for Holocaust survivors in Israel, it is said that the intelligent Jews perished or went to Europe, while only the strong and foolish ended up here. In daytime, they engage in displays of brawn with the military, and at night, they cry.

Night weeping aside, the combination of strength and foolishness may be an apt description of the madness that Israel likes to portray about itself.

A strong and foolish state — this duality may be the root cause for its admiration.

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Israel has been loved in our Arab region by those who have a lust for power and authority, particularly among secularists, right-wing currents and authoritarian systems, as well as certain segments of the people. I recall a surprising incident with a child from our relatives, extremely quiet and gentle, to the point where I suspected he might be autistic. One day, he lay on the couch, crossed one leg over the other, and proclaimed his love for Israel. Why? Because it is a strong state.

It is no secret that without the military, there would be no state — one of the strongest armies in the world, where reserve duty can extend up to the age of 40, and sometimes even 45 or 49. Despite the overall arduousness and rigor of military service, there is an alluring quality to it — an opportunity for career advancement, laudatory nicknames and romanticized representations in literature and cinema. It is no wonder, as the military is also the crucible that molds the primitive Arab Jew into a progressive Zionist Israeli.

David, known for his cunning intellect rather than physical strength, wielded nothing more than a simple sling — a novel and striking contraption that allowed him to defeat his brawny adversary. On what grounds, then, did Israel imagine itself as David?

Similar to a young man who adopts a veneer of modernity owing to his father's wealth, so too does the progressive Tel Avivian youth live — hip, know all about the US and Europe and speak many languages. But deep down, they know that all of this, even their very existence on this land, owes itself to their military.

This sentiment is not solely restricted to Tel Avivian youth, but also extends to settlers in the West Bank — to the religious Jews for whom Zionism came to sanctify. Their appearance may still resemble their predecessors in Europe, with distinctive braids and yarmulkes, however, they now bear AK-47s on their shoulders. The religious Jew has acquired a weapon, and with it, the Chutzpah of Zionism has taken root.

On his Facebook page, playwright Lior Waterman ponders the transformation of the payot. The side curls that once symbolized the Jewish vulnerability in Europe have become, since the turn of the millennium, a symbol of brutality. He says this while contemplating the countenance of Zvi Sukott, a young member of the Knesset born in 1990, from the most extremist factions among the settlers, who was accused of leading a cell to set fire to a mosque in 2009.

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Two fixed elements draw my attention in Zionism. The first is blindness, which I claim to be a phenomenon deeply ingrained within the movement since the inception of the equation "a land without a people for a people without a land." The early Zionists arrived in Palestine and encountered its inhabitants, yet, for the sake of the seamless progression of their project, they chose to turn a blind eye to them. They engaged in negotiations with the British, the Turks and even the Egyptians, yet they deliberately blinded themselves to the true owners of the land. And when they finally saw them, they expelled them.

A systematic apparatus of forced ignorance, operating in a neurotic manner, allows the Israeli youth to know much more about Europeans than they do about Arabs and even more so about Arabs than they do about Palestinians.

The second element is rigidity. Not only does Israel set itself apart as a Jewish state surrounded by an Arab milieu, but it also clings to its guns, firing indiscriminately out of fear of assimilation.

It is true that, for the sake of appearances, Israel loves to present itself as a democratic state. Much ink has been spilled in defining how it can simultaneously be both "Jewish and democratic," but it is well aware that this is nothing more than a linguistic trick. Israel knows that it cannot be itself without its Jewishness, but it could exist without its democracy.

In The Living Wall by Israeli writer Dorit Rabinyan, a love affair unfolds between an Israeli woman and a Palestinian man in New York. At first, their romance flourishes, until political debates erupt between them. He, a dreamer and artist, believes in a single state for Jews and Palestinians, and she, irritated by his dream, mocks his ideals, comparing him to John Lennon. In another instance, she confesses to the readers that she, who regularly derides Jewish extremism in her Tel Aviv home, would return to her true self during her discussions with him: a bourgeois conservative Zionist.

"Conservative Zionist." I read it and gasped, and then read it again. It was the first time I had seen these two words together, intertwined. I was very grateful to the writer.

Afterward, I understood more about the state of Israel. It is not solid but rather rigid, a tense state — highly neurotic.

***

"The main enemy of the warden is habit. Many days pass without anything happening, and his senses grow numb," says a senior Israeli military officer in a video about the escape of six Palestinian prisoners from Gilboa Prison in 2021.

Over the decades, Israel has changed its familiar appearance. Jews begin to arrive from Arab countries, and the dark-skinned Jewish citizen stands side by side with their blond kin. It abandons the working-class imaginary that it had long claimed for itself, allowing for more extremist Christian currents to grow, non-cool currents, but if one is to be honest,— and this is the claim of the settlers themselves –- they follow in the footsteps of the original cool Zionism. Protests against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who increasingly appears to be a traditional Arab dictator, have emerged. Something disintegrates under the guise of "the strongest army in the Middle East." The state has settled into routine and its senses grew numb and its joints stiff.

Meanwhile, the Palestinians are living in a new era. Perhaps they were inspired by the Arab Spring uprisings, which in turn were inspired by the struggle for Palestine — I don't know, but what I do know is that in 2021, the Palestinians presented their own revolution. It began with protesting the eviction of Sheikh Jarrah’s residents. The protest evolved into a sit-in, snowballing and gaining sympathizers from around the world with each passing day. It evoked memories of the 1936 intifada, a great moment of birth. The 1948 occupied territories and the West Bank rose together in massive peaceful marches. The Palestinians addressed the world in fluent English and children raised balloons in the colors of the Palestinian flag, only to be arrested by heavily armed soldiers.

No sooner had the echoes of the intifada subsided than six Palestinian prisoners escaped from Gilboa Prison, digging a tunnel in the ground using spoons and hangers. True, they would be eventually apprehended, but the fact that they were able to transform fiction into reality settled in our minds — a true Shawshank Redemption moment.

And now, on October 7, Palestinian parachuters broke through the borders of Gaza, descending on its outside. Fate had it that I was in Lebanon at that time, accompanied by Gazan journalist Omar Moussa, who told me that Israel had been preoccupied with underground tunnels, only for the Palestinians to descend upon them from the sky.

It was a magical moment that no one expected. Hamas seized Israeli hostages and demanded the release of Palestinian prisoners in exchange for their freedom. Israel revealed its mad, brawny, foolish, blind and rigid face, but it was also the face that was anticipated. From the very first day, we knew it would bomb without limits. We knew it was going to be all brawn and no brains, without imagination. We knew that their imagination had deserted them and now stood by our side — that we were now David. From the outset, a meme circulated with this sentiment.

This was the "how" strike — a qualitative shift, a new set of rules. What would follow from the Israeli side would be a quantitative strike, a difference in extent and a new level of brutality that we have not known before.

As of writing these lines, the Palestinians have suffered casualties ten times greater than those on the Israeli side. There is no explanation for our sense of victory and their feeling of defeat, except that, for the first time, we have seen Israel as an elderly state to such an extent, and ourselves as youthful with the same intensity. Our fighters rise from the rubble of Gaza to destroy tanks with their small lighters, then bid farewell to their Israeli captives with youthful, cheerful spirits and plenty of high fives and goodbyes.