We Really Have To Talk About Lunacy
You’re looking at a very old photo of Gaza’s Khan al-Zait (source MOG). Those born in the 1960s would not know it.
It is a mad moment. The lunatics, therefore, would have to own it.
But do they?
The label is obviously despairing: a pronouncement of incomprehension when the actions are unfathomable, the crimes are unspeakable, and the spectator is speechless. And aren’t we all about so much that is happening in this world, from the truly bizarre to the frighteningly grotesque? About Gaza? About the West Bank?
It feels as if we, the appalled, keep repeating it––majaneen, they’re crazy––in lieu of history’s verdict, soon to come, we all hope, to settle for us the nature of the horrors we are suffering or witnessing. It also feels as if we are making the mistake of believing that this mad moment is truly different from the many mad ones that came before it, when it’s yet one more in a human chronicle teeming with them.
In the end, the question remains: is a war crime ever an expression of insanity?
I choose here sections of Israel-Palestine to the exclusion of other tormented locales like, say, Syria and Sudan, for a number of reasons. Who doesn’t dare call Sudan’s ghoul, General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, aka Hemedti, all sorts of grisly names, among them criminally insane? When Isis and her sisters first rose in Iraq and Syria, deranged very quickly became their nickname. Gautam Malkani, in the Financial Times, gave voice in 2014 to the emerging consensus:
…we do need to talk about lunatics. Even though the Islamic State has displayed formidable organisational skills, resourcefulness and social media savvy, that does not detract from the fact that many of its members are clearly deranged.
I notice no such public chorus among Western elites about Israel’s war criminals. There isn’t even a hint of a suggestion that Israeli politicians, officers, and soldiers have lost their mind; that the Israelis cheering them on have taken leave of their senses. Not surprising, since they still claim that war crimes are not being committed. When the charge of insanity is actually mentioned, it is more in vexation that, unlike other war criminals who busy themselves in disguising their depravity, Israel seems to be hell bent on fully documenting its own.
Experts on Sudan describe marauding gangs in the bloodletting but not the collective hysteria that has gripped the Israelis, an overwhelming majority of them either stone-faced towards or openly reveling in the decimation of Gaza, in the murder of its children, in the starvation of its babies. Not in three blinks of rage, but over the course of 21 months.
There is no communal fratricide in Israel-Palestine. There is a genocide being committed by a mighty usurper against a long disinherited, besieged people. And this attack on the very pulse of Gazan life––on its past, present, and future, on its ability to revive itself into a semblance of normalcy––has been playing out with unusual candor and gusto by its Israeli perpetrators.
Insanity, then, as an explainer? In lamenting Zionism’s endgame, Frédéric Lordon, the French philosopher and economist, recently posited that:
This is where we are, seventy-seven years later. The genocide is not some unfortunate turn of events, still less the act of a monstrous leader who need only be removed. For the truth is that a terrifying proportion of Israeli society has quite literally become insane… Since 2005, Gaza has been an open-air prison; today it is an open-air concentration camp, while swathes of Israeli (and diasporic) society resemble an open-air psychiatric ward… To be sure, there are the others: soldiers in moral devastation, reservists who refuse to ‘go back’, longstanding opponents of a colonial consensus that has become a consensus in favour of annihilation. Eyal Sivan reminds us of their numbers: negligible.
I understand Lordon’s impulse to hang the label of insanity on this sustained, willful, self-conscious, boastful human cruelty. His urge is similar to mine. But upon further thought, it recalls Luke 23:34 as the ticket out, doesn’t it? “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Insanity acquits even as it damns.
But Israelis know exactly what they have been doing. They have always known. Most think it is their right, their duty, even. A necessary act of survival, of self-defense. The state’s very raison d’être, as Rise And Kill First, Ronen Bergman’s audacious book title brashly implies. Per Jaqueline Rose, Zionism’s eternal plea for dispossessing Palestinians, for oppressing them, for killing them: “you made me do it.”
Call it ideology as destiny. A Jewish state on “terra nullius,” as Lordon argues, could have worked; a Jewish state on Palestinian land could never work. Either the ideology would have to adapt to the hard reality on the ground, or the reality on the ground would have to bow to the ideology. Political Zionism wouldn’t adapt and reality wouldn’t bow.
A queue of dominos on a fault line!
There is nothing insane about Zionism. The Israelis are not well––at all!––but they are not lunatics. When genocide, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid are the tripod on which a people’s supposed yearning for security and safety rest, what is at work is disturbingly more malevolent than sheer madness.
When the time of reckoning comes, and it will, Zionism itself will be in the dock. Israelis’ best hope is for them to be the first ones to put it there.
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On Another Note