My Anti-Semitism Problem
For one minute, he stopped thinking like an officer educated at Saint-Cyr, like a captain relentlessly pursuing the pacification of Morocco, and for a brief moment he saw that all his usual rhetoric – honor, country – was a trap.
From An Honorable Exit by Eric Vuillar, an elegy of fools’ errands in Indochina from 1923 to 1975
There’s no escape from The Beast, my friend, because our moral certainty is The Beast.
Sigmund Freud speaking to C.S. Lewis in 1939 in the film Freud’s Last Session
Anti-semitism is the riddle that gets more and more confusing as the state of Israel gets more and more complicit in the crime of ethnic cleansing. With iPhone realities, truth is becoming so atomized into finer-and-finer human silos of opposing righteousness that the term anti-semitism no longer makes much sense.
My dictionary tells me the abstract noun anti-semitism is defined as “hostility to or prejudice against Jewish people.” OK. That’s how it’s used. No argument. But, then, you look up the pfoper noun Semite and you get this: “a member of any of the peoples who speak or spoke a Semitic language, including in particular the Jews and Arabs.” An etymological note in the citation gives this background for the noun Semite: “It comes from modern Latin Semita, via late Latin, from Greek Sem, Shem, son of Noah in the Bible, from whom their people were traditionally supposed to be descended.”
Now I’m even more confused. The idea of “traditionally supposed” covers a lot of ground; sort of like the term “whatever.” The point is most Palestinians, at least according to someone’s definition, would seem to also be Semites.
Both Jews and Arabs, we’re told, are Biblically connected to the prophet Abraham. I guess this means Semites can be anti-semites. It reminds me of all the leftist menschen I’ve known who joked about being a “self-hating Jew.”
During the 1980s I spent time in El Salvador wandering around as a photographer sympathetic with the peasantry fighting off death squad violence and other means of oppression from the wealthy right. Like the Likud Party in Israel, the rightwing Arena Party in El Salvador pursued a brutal war against the poor. In one case, I witnessed forensic anthropologists digging through thousands pf human bones as they uncovered a famous civilian massacre in the town of El Mozote.
I was an angry man and wrote very negative things in righteous tones about the death squads and the Arena government. In my mind, they were murderers. At no point did anyone suggest I was “anti-Hispanic.” There was no history to back up that kind of anti- identity found in the term antisemitism. Hispanic is a term like Semite, and in the case of El Salvador, it applied to both oppressor and victim.
Being systematically abused throughout history, especially during WWII, one understands how Jews began to feel the need to become tough, ruthless and even, at times, cruel. Meyer Lansky must have believed that. The point is Israelis, Jews and the United States government cannot be absolved of the crime of ethnic cleansing because Jews have been abused in history. The history of Israel since 1948 seem a pretty clear case of powerful, righteous people punching down against a weaker people. And once this fact of punching down becomes obnoxiously clear – as it is now! -- determination to continue punching down until so-and-so is no longer a problem begins to raise that other very controversial term, genocide.
Recently, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez used the term in a speech. Naturally, she was raked over the coals. I see the term a bit more nuanced – if nuance can be a factor in something like the mechanized killing of 32,000 people, mass infrastructure destruction and enforced starvation. In my mind, Israelis are not guilty of genocide, a noun that represents a completed fact. I’d argue the Israeli Likud onslaught against Gaza is genocidal, an adjective that suggests evolution toward the final accomplished state of genocide. But this may be mincing words.
A cease fire is critical in the short term, but it won’t do much about the traditional asymmetrical struggle between the haves and the have-nots. Israel’s new oily, golden friend, the Saudis, had been punching down vigorously with US aid to eliminate the dirt-poor Houthis in Yemen. But the Saudis have now cried “uncle” in their war against the Houthis; they want to concentrate more on golf tournaments and international financial issues. The Houthis are, thus, in a very cocky mood attacking international shipping and expressing enthusiasm to take on the US.
In response, the United States Navy has beefed up its operations in the Gulf of Oman and the Strait of Hormuz. With their sophisticated, up-to-the-minute intel eyes and ears on the unfolding twists and turns of the plot, the US military’s campaign is, tellingly, being called Operation Prosperity Guardian. We must secure the capitalist venture wherever it goes.
What might this mean on the ground in the future? Will Operation Prosperity Guardian involve -- let’s make this like a sexy thriller – guarding, say, the sumptuous, gold-embossed, white-robed media circus of a Saudi golf tournament where a re-elected President Donald Trump is in attendance waving a sabre to hand out the trophy? Even more to the point: Might the US someday need to guard against an attack along the beautiful Gaza coast against a prosperous resort called Jared’s Golden Nugget?
When the current fiction film The Zone of Interest came up in conversation with a Jewish friend of mine (she’s a family therapist) I asked her if she was planning to watch the film. I had not seen it.
“Don’t you know that I’m Jewish!?” she asked, a bit astonished I’d even suggested she might watch it.
“Of course, I know you’re Jewish,” I responded.
In her profession, I’m sure she listens to lots of tragic stories, and I’m sure she listens honestly. I’ve, now, seen the film twice. I love smart, honest, depressing films like this one. Full disclosure: As a WASP, I know it was my European ancestors who colonized the world, killed the Indians and built the railroads. We were good at exploiting people. Hitler even respected some of my ancestor’s work. In fact, my people even did their best to keep post-WWII Jews from emigrating to the United States.
So, in my friend’s case, she knew it would be her people shown in the film going up in acrid, black smoke while the murderer’s family basked in suburban luxury next to the Auschwitz death camp. What a disturbing feeling it must be to even consider watching a drama of your people reduced to such humiliating passivity.
The commandant in the film, down to his bizarre “punk” haircut, is based on the real commandant of Auschwitz, who was hung at the end of the war. I’d call The Zone of Interest an “art film.” It juxtaposes the Auschwitz camp commandant’s domestic family situation (wife, five kids and a dog in a lovely home next to the camp) to his job gassing human beings and working on the R&D to design more and more efficient crematoriums to turn those gassed into easily removable ash. It’s the cinematic manifestation of Hannah Arendt’s idea of ”the banality of evil.” The film’s horror is in watching the sense of normality and domestic bliss the Hoss family succeeds in establishing in a garden compound next to the death camp. A one point, an innocent Hoss child in his bed at night playfully catches floating pieces of ash in the light of a flashlight.
Efficient fascism depends on the promotion of such ambitious, efficient and sociopathic people to positions of leadership. Fear guarantees loyalty. It’s here the film’s flat, “objective” quality really works as fodder for metaphor. Along with two of his co-producers, Jonathon Glaser, the Jewish director of the film, had this to say as he accepted the 2023 Oscar for best international film:
“Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people.” He did not flinch or prevaricate.
My favorite scene is towards the end of the film. Hoss is so good at his Auschwitz job that he’s rewarded with a promotion as second in command under Adolf Eichmann, overseeing dozens of lethal concentration camps. He’s at a sumptuous party in an obscenely rococo palace that reeks of craven fear and loyalty. He wanders up to an upper balcony overlooking all the Nazi party goers, below; he seems to glory in the view. Later, relaxed on the phone with his wife (she enjoys accumulating fur coats, jewelry and chocolate from murdered Jews), she asks him how it went at the party. In the familiar tones of a loving husband/wife chat, he tells her all he could think about as he overlooked the party below was the challenge of how to gas all the party-goers given the incredible high ceilings of the room.
Late in his life, as WWII loomed, a frustrated Sigmund Freud had an ongoing conversation with Albert Einstein on human violence. He had written of the idea that human beings contain powerful inner psychological mechanisms that he labeled the Life Instinct and the Death Instinct. Freud’s writing on this is evidence of a deep moral concern rather than a precise analysis. I see Commandant Hoss as a poster boy for this inchoate idea of a death instinct.
The only glimmer in The Zone of Interest that there is any kind of doubt going on inside our commandant’s mind is at the end when he’s descending an ornate tiled stairwell following a meeting. Down one flight, he stops and begins to dry heave a couple times. He shakes it off and continues to descend the stairwell. He stops again very briefly; no heaving. As he continues down floor-by-floor it gets darker and darker, until he disappears into blackness.
The film seems to say the Holocaust cannot be considered so far out there in the realm of evil that, as some have suggested, it’s beyond representation. That may be literally true; but since art is based on metaphor and other poetic tools, it can’t be a rule. We might say the Hoss family is living in something of a “silo,” a term of art used in our time to describe how politically sympathetic people can cluster together and convince themselves the most dishonest and diabolical behaviors are, in fact, noble and worthy of respect. To me, this is the working metaphor of this movie: The little secure, comfortable places we create for ourselves so we don’t have to suffer the agonies of others, some of those agonies caused by the sustenance of our own comforts.
In the agitprop classic Triumph of the Will, we get to see how Hitler saw himself and Germany as a victim, justifying the darkness Nazis descended to in the real world -- not the artistic world of metaphoric staircases. While Israelis are certainly not Nazis and have committed nothing of the order and scale undertaken by Nazis and the protagonist of The Zone of Interest, the image of the bloody Israeli onslaught of Gaza as Israel defending itself after October 7th becomes perverse public relations.
In an essay in the London Review of Books titled “The Shoah After Gaza,” Pankaj Mishra lists some of the greatest modern Jewish thinkers and writers and how they were critical of Israeli leaders exploiting the Holocaust as justification for ethnic cleansing.
Here’s diplomat Abba Eban, born in South Africa, fluent in Hebrew and Arabic -- a very smart, eloquent Israeli foreign minister: “It is about time that we stand on our own feet and not on those of the six million dead.”
Mishra points out that Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion characterized Holocaust survivors as “human debris” who survived only because they were ”bad, harsh, egotistic. ... Everything they had endured purged their souls of all good.” Might this suggest in those early, “frontier” days after WWII that stressing the past horrors and one’s victimhood was seen as crippling -- that it was only later, in the logic of post-traumatic stress, that the Holocaust became a third-rail of power.
Mishra tells us that it was the demagogic Menachem Begin “who turned the murder of six million Jews into an intense national preoccupation, and a new basis for Israel’s identity.” The Italian Holocaust writer Primo Levy “was especially incensed by Begin’s exploitation of the Shoah.”
Mishra is Indian and sees similarities between Netanyahu’s Zionism and the current Hindu Nationalism. “The envy is now out of the closet: Hindu trolls constitute Benjamin Netanyahu’s largest fan club in the world.” Zionism and Hindu Nationalism, Mishra writes, “emerged in the 19th century out of an experience of humiliation ... to overcome what they perceived as a shameful lack of manhood among Jews and Hindus.” This could explain the focus on toughness, even ruthlessness, of modern Israelis.
Writer Jean Amery survived the Holocaust and was critical of Israel. According to Mishra, “he pleaded with Israeli’s leaders to acknowledge that your freedom can be achieved only with your Palestinian cousin, not against him.’” In 1977, he killed himself.
Mishra refers to “the American cult of Elie Wiesel, who went around asserting that the Shoah was incomprehensible, incomparable and unrepresentable.” Primo Levy was “profoundly disturbed by the culture of conspicuous Holocaust consumption around Wiesel,” Mishra writes. Wiesel told people he knew Levy in Auschwitz, but Levy could not recall him. The rightwing magazine Commentary published “venomous attacks on Levi.” Here’s a particularly smarmy bit of venom:
“As a writer, Primo Levi represents a relatively unfamiliar combination in the literature of the Nazi concentration camps. He is a survivor without Jewish—or, more specifically, without East European—inflections, a memoirist endowed with all the fruits of a classical Mediterranean education, an aesthete, a skeptic, a mild, equable, and eminently civilized man who is more at home in Dante and Homer than in the Bible.”
Levi is now considered one of the 20th Century’s greatest writers. He eventually committed suicide. “Misgivings of the kind expressed by Amery and Levi,” Mishra writes, “are condemned as grossly antisemitic today.”
Mishra ends his rich essay on a pessimistic note:
“Perhaps Israel, with its survivalist psychosis ... is the portend of the future of a bankrupt and exhausted world. ... It is possible that Israel will succeed in ethnically cleansing Gaza, and even the West Bank as well. There is too much evidence that the arc of the moral universe does not bend towards justice.”
Mishra is Asian and respected for important intellectual histories and other writings focused on the legacy of Western Colonialism vis-a-vis the former Third World. He’s quite lucid and does not pull punches. Here’s a sentence toward the end of his essay that really shook my western optimism and comfort zone:
“It hardly seems believable, but the evidence has become overwhelming: we are witnessing some kind of a collapse in the free world.”
The exasperating situation in Israel/Palestine does now seem to suggest such a view. The mutual hatred is so daunting and so seemingly insurmountable that, as vague and half-baked as Freud’s Death Instinct may be, it now seems to rule.
I’ve wondered aloud more than once whether the October 7th Hamas attack and the Israeli mass killing response are analogous to the assassination of the Archduke in Sarajevo in 1914, an event that triggered a world conflagration in which lethal technology overwhelmed the weaker, nurturing Life Instinct. There’s ample evidence that Israeli rightwing politicians for years have had zero tolerance for peaceful protest and non-violent civil-disobedience -- while in a back-handed way they supported entities like Hamas because they justified the heavy hand of Israeli militarism.
With the world’s sovereign nation states challenged like never before by more and more non-state power centers and a world population dazzled and atomized by iPhone and cyber technology, Freud’s Death Instinct may be waking up to rampage again. For one minute, he stopped thinking like an officer educated at Saint-Cyr, like a captain relentlessly pursuing the pacification of Morocco, and for a brief moment he saw that all his usual rhetoric – honor, country – was a trap.
From An Honorable Exit by Eric Vuillar, an elegy of fools’ errands in Indochina from 1923 to 1975
There’s no escape from The Beast, my friend, because our moral certainty is The Beast.
Sigmund Freud speaking to C.S. Lewis in 1939 in the film Freud’s Last Session
Anti-semitism is the riddle that gets more and more confusing as the state of Israel gets more and more complicit in the crime of ethnic cleansing. With iPhone realities, truth is becoming so atomized into finer-and-finer human silos of opposing righteousness that the term anti-semitism no longer makes much sense.
My dictionary tells me the abstract noun anti-semitism is defined as “hostility to or prejudice against Jewish people.” OK. That’s how it’s used. No argument. But, then, you look up the pfoper noun Semite and you get this: “a member of any of the peoples who speak or spoke a Semitic language, including in particular the Jews and Arabs.” An etymological note in the citation gives this background for the noun Semite: “It comes from modern Latin Semita, via late Latin, from Greek Sem, Shem, son of Noah in the Bible, from whom their people were traditionally supposed to be descended.”
Now I’m even more confused. The idea of “traditionally supposed” covers a lot of ground; sort of like the term “whatever.” The point is most Palestinians, at least according to someone’s definition, would seem to also be Semites.
Both Jews and Arabs, we’re told, are Biblically connected to the prophet Abraham. I guess this means Semites can be anti-semites. It reminds me of all the leftist menschen I’ve known who joked about being a “self-hating Jew.”
During the 1980s I spent time in El Salvador wandering around as a photographer sympathetic with the peasantry fighting off death squad violence and other means of oppression from the wealthy right. Like the Likud Party in Israel, the rightwing Arena Party in El Salvador pursued a brutal war against the poor. In one case, I witnessed forensic anthropologists digging through thousands pf human bones as they uncovered a famous civilian massacre in the town of El Mozote.
I was an angry man and wrote very negative things in righteous tones about the death squads and the Arena government. In my mind, they were murderers. At no point did anyone suggest I was “anti-Hispanic.” There was no history to back up that kind of anti- identity found in the term antisemitism. Hispanic is a term like Semite, and in the case of El Salvador, it applied to both oppressor and victim.
Being systematically abused throughout history, especially during WWII, one understands how Jews began to feel the need to become tough, ruthless and even, at times, cruel. Meyer Lansky must have believed that. The point is Israelis, Jews and the United States government cannot be absolved of the crime of ethnic cleansing because Jews have been abused in history. The history of Israel since 1948 seem a pretty clear case of powerful, righteous people punching down against a weaker people. And once this fact of punching down becomes obnoxiously clear – as it is now! -- determination to continue punching down until so-and-so is no longer a problem begins to raise that other very controversial term, genocide.
Recently, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez used the term in a speech. Naturally, she was raked over the coals. I see the term a bit more nuanced – if nuance can be a factor in something like the mechanized killing of 32,000 people, mass infrastructure destruction and enforced starvation. In my mind, Israelis are not guilty of genocide, a noun that represents a completed fact. I’d argue the Israeli Likud onslaught against Gaza is genocidal, an adjective that suggests evolution toward the final accomplished state of genocide. But this may be mincing words.
A cease fire is critical in the short term, but it won’t do much about the traditional asymmetrical struggle between the haves and the have-nots. Israel’s new oily, golden friend, the Saudis, had been punching down vigorously with US aid to eliminate the dirt-poor Houthis in Yemen. But the Saudis have now cried “uncle” in their war against the Houthis; they want to concentrate more on golf tournaments and international financial issues. The Houthis are, thus, in a very cocky mood attacking international shipping and expressing enthusiasm to take on the US.
In response, the United States Navy has beefed up its operations in the Gulf of Oman and the Strait of Hormuz. With their sophisticated, up-to-the-minute intel eyes and ears on the unfolding twists and turns of the plot, the US military’s campaign is, tellingly, being called Operation Prosperity Guardian. We must secure the capitalist venture wherever it goes.
What might this mean on the ground in the future? Will Operation Prosperity Guardian involve -- let’s make this like a sexy thriller – guarding, say, the sumptuous, gold-embossed, white-robed media circus of a Saudi golf tournament where a re-elected President Donald Trump is in attendance waving a sabre to hand out the trophy? Even more to the point: Might the US someday need to guard against an attack along the beautiful Gaza coast against a prosperous resort called Jared’s Golden Nugget?
When the current fiction film The Zone of Interest came up in conversation with a Jewish friend of mine (she’s a family therapist) I asked her if she was planning to watch the film. I had not seen it.
“Don’t you know that I’m Jewish!?” she asked, a bit astonished I’d even suggested she might watch it.
“Of course, I know you’re Jewish,” I responded.
In her profession, I’m sure she listens to lots of tragic stories, and I’m sure she listens honestly. I’ve, now, seen the film twice. I love smart, honest, depressing films like this one. Full disclosure: As a WASP, I know it was my European ancestors who colonized the world, killed the Indians and built the railroads. We were good at exploiting people. Hitler even respected some of my ancestor’s work. In fact, my people even did their best to keep post-WWII Jews from emigrating to the United States.
So, in my friend’s case, she knew it would be her people shown in the film going up in acrid, black smoke while the murderer’s family basked in suburban luxury next to the Auschwitz death camp. What a disturbing feeling it must be to even consider watching a drama of your people reduced to such humiliating passivity.
The commandant in the film, down to his bizarre “punk” haircut, is based on the real commandant of Auschwitz, who was hung at the end of the war. I’d call The Zone of Interest an “art film.” It juxtaposes the Auschwitz camp commandant’s domestic family situation (wife, five kids and a dog in a lovely home next to the camp) to his job gassing human beings and working on the R&D to design more and more efficient crematoriums to turn those gassed into easily removable ash. It’s the cinematic manifestation of Hannah Arendt’s idea of ”the banality of evil.” The film’s horror is in watching the sense of normality and domestic bliss the Hoss family succeeds in establishing in a garden compound next to the death camp. A one point, an innocent Hoss child in his bed at night playfully catches floating pieces of ash in the light of a flashlight.
Efficient fascism depends on the promotion of such ambitious, efficient and sociopathic people to positions of leadership. Fear guarantees loyalty. It’s here the film’s flat, “objective” quality really works as fodder for metaphor. Along with two of his co-producers, Jonathon Glaser, the Jewish director of the film, had this to say as he accepted the 2023 Oscar for best international film:
“Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people.” He did not flinch or prevaricate.
My favorite scene is towards the end of the film. Hoss is so good at his Auschwitz job that he’s rewarded with a promotion as second in command under Adolf Eichmann, overseeing dozens of lethal concentration camps. He’s at a sumptuous party in an obscenely rococo palace that reeks of craven fear and loyalty. He wanders up to an upper balcony overlooking all the Nazi party goers, below; he seems to glory in the view. Later, relaxed on the phone with his wife (she enjoys accumulating fur coats, jewelry and chocolate from murdered Jews), she asks him how it went at the party. In the familiar tones of a loving husband/wife chat, he tells her all he could think about as he overlooked the party below was the challenge of how to gas all the party-goers given the incredible high ceilings of the room.
Late in his life, as WWII loomed, a frustrated Sigmund Freud had an ongoing conversation with Albert Einstein on human violence. He had written of the idea that human beings contain powerful inner psychological mechanisms that he labeled the Life Instinct and the Death Instinct. Freud’s writing on this is evidence of a deep moral concern rather than a precise analysis. I see Commandant Hoss as a poster boy for this inchoate idea of a death instinct.
The only glimmer in The Zone of Interest that there is any kind of doubt going on inside our commandant’s mind is at the end when he’s descending an ornate tiled stairwell following a meeting. Down one flight, he stops and begins to dry heave a couple times. He shakes it off and continues to descend the stairwell. He stops again very briefly; no heaving. As he continues down floor-by-floor it gets darker and darker, until he disappears into blackness.
The film seems to say the Holocaust cannot be considered so far out there in the realm of evil that, as some have suggested, it’s beyond representation. That may be literally true; but since art is based on metaphor and other poetic tools, it can’t be a rule. We might say the Hoss family is living in something of a “silo,” a term of art used in our time to describe how politically sympathetic people can cluster together and convince themselves the most dishonest and diabolical behaviors are, in fact, noble and worthy of respect. To me, this is the working metaphor of this movie: The little secure, comfortable places we create for ourselves so we don’t have to suffer the agonies of others, some of those agonies caused by the sustenance of our own comforts.
In the agitprop classic Triumph of the Will, we get to see how Hitler saw himself and Germany as a victim, justifying the darkness Nazis descended to in the real world -- not the artistic world of metaphoric staircases. While Israelis are certainly not Nazis and have committed nothing of the order and scale undertaken by Nazis and the protagonist of The Zone of Interest, the image of the bloody Israeli onslaught of Gaza as Israel defending itself after October 7th becomes perverse public relations.
In an essay in the London Review of Books titled “The Shoah After Gaza,” Pankaj Mishra lists some of the greatest modern Jewish thinkers and writers and how they were critical of Israeli leaders exploiting the Holocaust as justification for ethnic cleansing.
Here’s diplomat Abba Eban, born in South Africa, fluent in Hebrew and Arabic -- a very smart, eloquent Israeli foreign minister: “It is about time that we stand on our own feet and not on those of the six million dead.”
Mishra points out that Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion characterized Holocaust survivors as “human debris” who survived only because they were ”bad, harsh, egotistic. ... Everything they had endured purged their souls of all good.” Might this suggest in those early, “frontier” days after WWII that stressing the past horrors and one’s victimhood was seen as crippling -- that it was only later, in the logic of post-traumatic stress, that the Holocaust became a third-rail of power.
Mishra tells us that it was the demagogic Menachem Begin “who turned the murder of six million Jews into an intense national preoccupation, and a new basis for Israel’s identity.” The Italian Holocaust writer Primo Levy “was especially incensed by Begin’s exploitation of the Shoah.”
Mishra is Indian and sees similarities between Netanyahu’s Zionism and the current Hindu Nationalism. “The envy is now out of the closet: Hindu trolls constitute Benjamin Netanyahu’s largest fan club in the world.” Zionism and Hindu Nationalism, Mishra writes, “emerged in the 19th century out of an experience of humiliation ... to overcome what they perceived as a shameful lack of manhood among Jews and Hindus.” This could explain the focus on toughness, even ruthlessness, of modern Israelis.
Writer Jean Amery survived the Holocaust and was critical of Israel. According to Mishra, “he pleaded with Israeli’s leaders to acknowledge that your freedom can be achieved only with your Palestinian cousin, not against him.’” In 1977, he killed himself.
Mishra refers to “the American cult of Elie Wiesel, who went around asserting that the Shoah was incomprehensible, incomparable and unrepresentable.” Primo Levy was “profoundly disturbed by the culture of conspicuous Holocaust consumption around Wiesel,” Mishra writes. Wiesel told people he knew Levy in Auschwitz, but Levy could not recall him. The rightwing magazine Commentary published “venomous attacks on Levi.” Here’s a particularly smarmy bit of venom:
“As a writer, Primo Levi represents a relatively unfamiliar combination in the literature of the Nazi concentration camps. He is a survivor without Jewish—or, more specifically, without East European—inflections, a memoirist endowed with all the fruits of a classical Mediterranean education, an aesthete, a skeptic, a mild, equable, and eminently civilized man who is more at home in Dante and Homer than in the Bible.”
Levi is now considered one of the 20th Century’s greatest writers. He eventually committed suicide. “Misgivings of the kind expressed by Amery and Levi,” Mishra writes, “are condemned as grossly antisemitic today.”
Mishra ends his rich essay on a pessimistic note:
“Perhaps Israel, with its survivalist psychosis ... is the portend of the future of a bankrupt and exhausted world. ... It is possible that Israel will succeed in ethnically cleansing Gaza, and even the West Bank as well. There is too much evidence that the arc of the moral universe does not bend towards justice.”
Mishra is Asian and respected for important intellectual histories and other writings focused on the legacy of Western Colonialism vis-a-vis the former Third World. He’s quite lucid and does not pull punches. Here’s a sentence toward the end of his essay that really shook my western optimism and comfort zone:
“It hardly seems believable, but the evidence has become overwhelming: we are witnessing some kind of a collapse in the free world.”
The exasperating situation in Israel/Palestine does now seem to suggest such a view. The mutual hatred is so daunting and so seemingly insurmountable that, as vague and half-baked as Freud’s Death Instinct may be, it now seems to rule.
I’ve wondered aloud more than once whether the October 7th Hamas attack and the Israeli mass killing response are analogous to the assassination of the Archduke in Sarajevo in 1914, an event that triggered a world conflagration in which lethal technology overwhelmed the weaker, nurturing Life Instinct. There’s ample evidence that Israeli rightwing politicians for years have had zero tolerance for peaceful protest and non-violent civil-disobedience -- while in a back-handed way they supported entities like Hamas because they justified the heavy hand of Israeli militarism.
With the world’s sovereign nation states challenged like never before by more and more non-state power centers and a world population dazzled and atomized by iPhone and cyber technology, Freud’s Death Instinct may be waking up to rampage again. For one minute, he stopped thinking like an officer educated at Saint-Cyr, like a captain relentlessly pursuing the pacification of Morocco, and for a brief moment he saw that all his usual rhetoric – honor, country – was a trap.
From An Honorable Exit by Eric Vuillar, an elegy of fools’ errands in Indochina from 1923 to 1975
There’s no escape from The Beast, my friend, because our moral certainty is The Beast.
Sigmund Freud speaking to C.S. Lewis in 1939 in the film Freud’s Last Session
Anti-semitism is the riddle that gets more and more confusing as the state of Israel gets more and more complicit in the crime of ethnic cleansing. With iPhone realities, truth is becoming so atomized into finer-and-finer human silos of opposing righteousness that the term anti-semitism no longer makes much sense.
My dictionary tells me the abstract noun anti-semitism is defined as “hostility to or prejudice against Jewish people.” OK. That’s how it’s used. No argument. But, then, you look up the pfoper noun Semite and you get this: “a member of any of the peoples who speak or spoke a Semitic language, including in particular the Jews and Arabs.” An etymological note in the citation gives this background for the noun Semite: “It comes from modern Latin Semita, via late Latin, from Greek Sem, Shem, son of Noah in the Bible, from whom their people were traditionally supposed to be descended.”
Now I’m even more confused. The idea of “traditionally supposed” covers a lot of ground; sort of like the term “whatever.” The point is most Palestinians, at least according to someone’s definition, would seem to also be Semites.
Both Jews and Arabs, we’re told, are Biblically connected to the prophet Abraham. I guess this means Semites can be anti-semites. It reminds me of all the leftist menschen I’ve known who joked about being a “self-hating Jew.”
During the 1980s I spent time in El Salvador wandering around as a photographer sympathetic with the peasantry fighting off death squad violence and other means of oppression from the wealthy right. Like the Likud Party in Israel, the rightwing Arena Party in El Salvador pursued a brutal war against the poor. In one case, I witnessed forensic anthropologists digging through thousands pf human bones as they uncovered a famous civilian massacre in the town of El Mozote.
I was an angry man and wrote very negative things in righteous tones about the death squads and the Arena government. In my mind, they were murderers. At no point did anyone suggest I was “anti-Hispanic.” There was no history to back up that kind of anti- identity found in the term antisemitism. Hispanic is a term like Semite, and in the case of El Salvador, it applied to both oppressor and victim.
Being systematically abused throughout history, especially during WWII, one understands how Jews began to feel the need to become tough, ruthless and even, at times, cruel. Meyer Lansky must have believed that. The point is Israelis, Jews and the United States government cannot be absolved of the crime of ethnic cleansing because Jews have been abused in history. The history of Israel since 1948 seem a pretty clear case of powerful, righteous people punching down against a weaker people. And once this fact of punching down becomes obnoxiously clear – as it is now! -- determination to continue punching down until so-and-so is no longer a problem begins to raise that other very controversial term, genocide.
Recently, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez used the term in a speech. Naturally, she was raked over the coals. I see the term a bit more nuanced – if nuance can be a factor in something like the mechanized killing of 32,000 people, mass infrastructure destruction and enforced starvation. In my mind, Israelis are not guilty of genocide, a noun that represents a completed fact. I’d argue the Israeli Likud onslaught against Gaza is genocidal, an adjective that suggests evolution toward the final accomplished state of genocide. But this may be mincing words.
A cease fire is critical in the short term, but it won’t do much about the traditional asymmetrical struggle between the haves and the have-nots. Israel’s new oily, golden friend, the Saudis, had been punching down vigorously with US aid to eliminate the dirt-poor Houthis in Yemen. But the Saudis have now cried “uncle” in their war against the Houthis; they want to concentrate more on golf tournaments and international financial issues. The Houthis are, thus, in a very cocky mood attacking international shipping and expressing enthusiasm to take on the US.
In response, the United States Navy has beefed up its operations in the Gulf of Oman and the Strait of Hormuz. With their sophisticated, up-to-the-minute intel eyes and ears on the unfolding twists and turns of the plot, the US military’s campaign is, tellingly, being called Operation Prosperity Guardian. We must secure the capitalist venture wherever it goes.
What might this mean on the ground in the future? Will Operation Prosperity Guardian involve -- let’s make this like a sexy thriller – guarding, say, the sumptuous, gold-embossed, white-robed media circus of a Saudi golf tournament where a re-elected President Donald Trump is in attendance waving a sabre to hand out the trophy? Even more to the point: Might the US someday need to guard against an attack along the beautiful Gaza coast against a prosperous resort called Jared’s Golden Nugget?
When the current fiction film The Zone of Interest came up in conversation with a Jewish friend of mine (she’s a family therapist) I asked her if she was planning to watch the film. I had not seen it.
“Don’t you know that I’m Jewish!?” she asked, a bit astonished I’d even suggested she might watch it.
“Of course, I know you’re Jewish,” I responded.
In her profession, I’m sure she listens to lots of tragic stories, and I’m sure she listens honestly. I’ve, now, seen the film twice. I love smart, honest, depressing films like this one. Full disclosure: As a WASP, I know it was my European ancestors who colonized the world, killed the Indians and built the railroads. We were good at exploiting people. Hitler even respected some of my ancestor’s work. In fact, my people even did their best to keep post-WWII Jews from emigrating to the United States.
So, in my friend’s case, she knew it would be her people shown in the film going up in acrid, black smoke while the murderer’s family basked in suburban luxury next to the Auschwitz death camp. What a disturbing feeling it must be to even consider watching a drama of your people reduced to such humiliating passivity.
The commandant in the film, down to his bizarre “punk” haircut, is based on the real commandant of Auschwitz, who was hung at the end of the war. I’d call The Zone of Interest an “art film.” It juxtaposes the Auschwitz camp commandant’s domestic family situation (wife, five kids and a dog in a lovely home next to the camp) to his job gassing human beings and working on the R&D to design more and more efficient crematoriums to turn those gassed into easily removable ash. It’s the cinematic manifestation of Hannah Arendt’s idea of ”the banality of evil.” The film’s horror is in watching the sense of normality and domestic bliss the Hoss family succeeds in establishing in a garden compound next to the death camp. A one point, an innocent Hoss child in his bed at night playfully catches floating pieces of ash in the light of a flashlight.
Efficient fascism depends on the promotion of such ambitious, efficient and sociopathic people to positions of leadership. Fear guarantees loyalty. It’s here the film’s flat, “objective” quality really works as fodder for metaphor. Along with two of his co-producers, Jonathon Glaser, the Jewish director of the film, had this to say as he accepted the 2023 Oscar for best international film:
“Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people.” He did not flinch or prevaricate.
My favorite scene is towards the end of the film. Hoss is so good at his Auschwitz job that he’s rewarded with a promotion as second in command under Adolf Eichmann, overseeing dozens of lethal concentration camps. He’s at a sumptuous party in an obscenely rococo palace that reeks of craven fear and loyalty. He wanders up to an upper balcony overlooking all the Nazi party goers, below; he seems to glory in the view. Later, relaxed on the phone with his wife (she enjoys accumulating fur coats, jewelry and chocolate from murdered Jews), she asks him how it went at the party. In the familiar tones of a loving husband/wife chat, he tells her all he could think about as he overlooked the party below was the challenge of how to gas all the party-goers given the incredible high ceilings of the room.
Late in his life, as WWII loomed, a frustrated Sigmund Freud had an ongoing conversation with Albert Einstein on human violence. He had written of the idea that human beings contain powerful inner psychological mechanisms that he labeled the Life Instinct and the Death Instinct. Freud’s writing on this is evidence of a deep moral concern rather than a precise analysis. I see Commandant Hoss as a poster boy for this inchoate idea of a death instinct.
The only glimmer in The Zone of Interest that there is any kind of doubt going on inside our commandant’s mind is at the end when he’s descending an ornate tiled stairwell following a meeting. Down one flight, he stops and begins to dry heave a couple times. He shakes it off and continues to descend the stairwell. He stops again very briefly; no heaving. As he continues down floor-by-floor it gets darker and darker, until he disappears into blackness.
The film seems to say the Holocaust cannot be considered so far out there in the realm of evil that, as some have suggested, it’s beyond representation. That may be literally true; but since art is based on metaphor and other poetic tools, it can’t be a rule. We might say the Hoss family is living in something of a “silo,” a term of art used in our time to describe how politically sympathetic people can cluster together and convince themselves the most dishonest and diabolical behaviors are, in fact, noble and worthy of respect. To me, this is the working metaphor of this movie: The little secure, comfortable places we create for ourselves so we don’t have to suffer the agonies of others, some of those agonies caused by the sustenance of our own comforts.
In the agitprop classic Triumph of the Will, we get to see how Hitler saw himself and Germany as a victim, justifying the darkness Nazis descended to in the real world -- not the artistic world of metaphoric staircases. While Israelis are certainly not Nazis and have committed nothing of the order and scale undertaken by Nazis and the protagonist of The Zone of Interest, the image of the bloody Israeli onslaught of Gaza as Israel defending itself after October 7th becomes perverse public relations.
In an essay in the London Review of Books titled “The Shoah After Gaza,” Pankaj Mishra lists some of the greatest modern Jewish thinkers and writers and how they were critical of Israeli leaders exploiting the Holocaust as justification for ethnic cleansing.
Here’s diplomat Abba Eban, born in South Africa, fluent in Hebrew and Arabic -- a very smart, eloquent Israeli foreign minister: “It is about time that we stand on our own feet and not on those of the six million dead.”
Mishra points out that Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion characterized Holocaust survivors as “human debris” who survived only because they were ”bad, harsh, egotistic. ... Everything they had endured purged their souls of all good.” Might this suggest in those early, “frontier” days after WWII that stressing the past horrors and one’s victimhood was seen as crippling -- that it was only later, in the logic of post-traumatic stress, that the Holocaust became a third-rail of power.
Mishra tells us that it was the demagogic Menachem Begin “who turned the murder of six million Jews into an intense national preoccupation, and a new basis for Israel’s identity.” The Italian Holocaust writer Primo Levy “was especially incensed by Begin’s exploitation of the Shoah.”
Mishra is Indian and sees similarities between Netanyahu’s Zionism and the current Hindu Nationalism. “The envy is now out of the closet: Hindu trolls constitute Benjamin Netanyahu’s largest fan club in the world.” Zionism and Hindu Nationalism, Mishra writes, “emerged in the 19th century out of an experience of humiliation ... to overcome what they perceived as a shameful lack of manhood among Jews and Hindus.” This could explain the focus on toughness, even ruthlessness, of modern Israelis.
Writer Jean Amery survived the Holocaust and was critical of Israel. According to Mishra, “he pleaded with Israeli’s leaders to acknowledge that your freedom can be achieved only with your Palestinian cousin, not against him.’” In 1977, he killed himself.
Mishra refers to “the American cult of Elie Wiesel, who went around asserting that the Shoah was incomprehensible, incomparable and unrepresentable.” Primo Levy was “profoundly disturbed by the culture of conspicuous Holocaust consumption around Wiesel,” Mishra writes. Wiesel told people he knew Levy in Auschwitz, but Levy could not recall him. The rightwing magazine Commentary published “venomous attacks on Levi.” Here’s a particularly smarmy bit of venom:
“As a writer, Primo Levi represents a relatively unfamiliar combination in the literature of the Nazi concentration camps. He is a survivor without Jewish—or, more specifically, without East European—inflections, a memoirist endowed with all the fruits of a classical Mediterranean education, an aesthete, a skeptic, a mild, equable, and eminently civilized man who is more at home in Dante and Homer than in the Bible.”
Levi is now considered one of the 20th Century’s greatest writers. He eventually committed suicide. “Misgivings of the kind expressed by Amery and Levi,” Mishra writes, “are condemned as grossly antisemitic today.”
Mishra ends his rich essay on a pessimistic note:
“Perhaps Israel, with its survivalist psychosis ... is the portend of the future of a bankrupt and exhausted world. ... It is possible that Israel will succeed in ethnically cleansing Gaza, and even the West Bank as well. There is too much evidence that the arc of the moral universe does not bend towards justice.”
Mishra is Asian and respected for important intellectual histories and other writings focused on the legacy of Western Colonialism vis-a-vis the former Third World. He’s quite lucid and does not pull punches. Here’s a sentence toward the end of his essay that really shook my western optimism and comfort zone:
“It hardly seems believable, but the evidence has become overwhelming: we are witnessing some kind of a collapse in the free world.”
The exasperating situation in Israel/Palestine does now seem to suggest such a view. The mutual hatred is so daunting and so seemingly insurmountable that, as vague and half-baked as Freud’s Death Instinct may be, it now seems to rule.
I’ve wondered aloud more than once whether the October 7th Hamas attack and the Israeli mass killing response are analogous to the assassination of the Archduke in Sarajevo in 1914, an event that triggered a world conflagration in which lethal technology overwhelmed the weaker, nurturing Life Instinct. There’s ample evidence that Israeli rightwing politicians for years have had zero tolerance for peaceful protest and non-violent civil-disobedience -- while in a back-handed way they supported entities like Hamas because they justified the heavy hand of Israeli militarism.
With the world’s sovereign nation states challenged like never before by more and more non-state power centers and a world population dazzled and atomized by iPhone and cyber technology, Freud’s Death Instinct may be waking up to rampage again.