Gaza drowned in silence, despair and anguish

by Raha

Gaza appears to have drowned in silence for now. It has all but vanished from the headlines. Not even Obama's speech in Cairo made mention of it. Amid the devastation and mass graves, with orphans roaming the streets for food, the Palestinians, in shock and disbelief, continue to ask: "Why?" and "How can we explain this to children?" This, they cry, was "a war of extermination."[1]

The gruesome scenes and the heinous crimes of Israeli Defense Force (IDF) soldiers have begun to generate outrage within Israel. Testimonies, partially revealed and printed in Haaretz, confirm the accounts given by Palestinians. Not only the bulldozing of homes with live civilians inside waving white flags, but certain unspeakable and obscene acts committed by IDF troops, point to an ominous development. Here is how a Guardian reporter described it:

"But most disturbing of all was the graffiti they daubed on the walls… 'Arabs need 2 die,' 'Die you all,'…'1 is down, 999,999 to go,' and scrawled on an image of a gravestone the words: 'Arabs 1948-2009.'"[2] Haaretz also reports an IDF commander confessing, "The lives of Palestinians, let's say, is something very, very less important than the lives of our soldiers."[3]

'AT THE MIND'S LIMIT'

In Gaza the drive toward the total domination of Palestinians reached its apogee. That the "Operation Cast Lead" was militarily planned for months in advance is not a secret. What is not as well known, however, is that conceptually this was no mere military adventure but an attempt at a whole new experiment. In fact, as far back as March 2008, the Deputy Defense Minister, Matan Vilani, had warned that "The more Qassam fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they will bring upon themselves a bigger holocaust [Shoah]..."[4]

Even Shimon Peres of the Labor Party, who, in 2002, opposed the ultra-right Avigdor Lieberman for advocating collective punishment, came out in support of the assault in order "to provide a strong blow to the people of Gaza so that they would lose their appetite for shooting at Israel."[5] It appears that a new consensus has been reached among all the ruling factions in Israel that, in the words of IDF chief of staff, Moshe Ya'alom, "The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people."

Will Jews, inside and outside of Israel, permit their leaders to imitate their former tormentors? Do these rulers wish to drive down the Palestinians to the state of bare existential survival and submerged endurance? Did the "1000-year Reich" succeed at "de-subjectifying" the Jewish masses by destroying their capacity for resistance, their will to freedom? Despair and anguish appear simultaneously as different forms of the same consciousness under domination and captivity. No people know this better than the historical Jews, whether under the Romans or the Nazis.

No one has illuminated this state of despair better than Hegel. Referring to the Jews under the Roman and the Syrian Kings, he points to "despair at reality" as what brings one in touch with "a universal dimension of human existence, which they could not deny, but which nonetheless is a completely spiritless universality."[6] Despair, therefore, signifies the active presence of a cleavage within the subject. When the subject becomes aware of this contradiction, she undergoes anguish. Anguish is present where "there is opposition to what ought to be. Anguish is precisely the element of negativity in the affirmative, meaning that within itself the affirmative is self-contradictory and wounded." (pp. 305-306) "Mind and its world are thus both alike lost and plunged in the infinite grief of that fate for which a people, the Jewish people, was held in readiness. Mind is here pressed back upon itself in the extreme of its absolute negativity."[7] This is a demand for reconciliation, which can be "only reconciliation with the truth."[8] Truth here means that what is taken as objective is not something alien. "Reconciliation consequently is freedom and it is not something quiescent, rather it is activity, the movement that makes the estrangement disappear." (p. 172)

In this regard, Palestinians too have proven that they are resilient people. Their intense yearning for self-determination, even under decades of occupation, has not diminished. In this, they resemble their Jewish "brethren." However, if there was one thing that they should learn from the Jews, even if negatively, it would be: What happens after you gain a mind of your own and become independent? This is a turning point in the movement of freedom. Because getting a mind of your own is not yet the mastery over the estranged world, you will either go further, suffering new negations, or retrogress. Herein lies the greater tragedy of what has happened to Israel of "Exodus" from the death camps of Auschwitz, the Israel of ferocious and successful anti-British struggles to the Israel of today as an imperialist Goliath!

"After Gaza," there is a whole new sense of reality among the growing opposition in Israel--from all the outpouring of massive demonstrations against the war to all the Jewish human rights groups, from the Rabbis who prayed for the Palestinian children to the joint Jewish-Palestinian groups, especially the women.[9] They dared express solidarity with Palestinians and refused to regard them as "the enemy." And they did so under the most suffocating conditions.

CONTRADICTIONS AT ISRAEL'S BIRTH

We begin directly from the period 1945-47, from the liberation of the concentration camps and the creation of masses of Jewish refugees when no country, including the U.S. and Britain, would take them in. No sooner did the refugees reach Palestine, than they had to plunge into a new struggle, this time primarily against the British imperial power, now, however, with the consciousness of self as independent. No one could deprive them of this newfound sense of liberation. The Concentration Camp, after all, was the birthplace of the idea of freedom. It was through the Ghetto uprisings, the gas chambers, a veritable life and death struggle, that the Jew as Subject was born.

This is a critical period when we see a great diversity of tendencies, both international and indigenous, whose ideas had grown roots among the masses, rise to prominence--from Socialists to agrarian Narodniki, to "proletarian" Zionists, all aspiring for a new society. Without a doubt, the idea of a non-capitalist road to socialism, whether through urban cooperatives or the village communes, kibbutzim, was the most prevalent.

Martin Buber, the great Jewish philosopher and proponent of "Hebrew Humanism," records in his Paths to Utopia a most serious dialogue among the advocates of agrarian communes. Buber makes reference to the fact that they were debating Marx's response to Russian revolutionary Vera Zasulich, to whom Marx wrote that the archaic Russian village communes could serve as ground for a socialist development. They had then traced Marx's view of the cooperatives from the 1840s to the Paris Commune of 1871. When dealing with Marx's Critique of the Gotha Program, they took "sides" with Marx against Ferdinand Lassalle's appeal for government aid in setting up and sustaining the cooperatives.

But they wanted to set up these communes, apparently without a revolutionary transformation of the society at large. The core of their effort was devoted to preserving the communes, creating a federation of the communes, and minimizing external influences. Marx, however, held that the Russian communes' development could not be separated from the world context or from Russian society as a whole.[10] While the agrarian Israeli communalists were hard at work trying to realize their ideas, the larger context, the urban development, the political revolution taking place all around them, very nearly escaped them.

What prevailed in Palestine as a whole was not Marx but Lassalle's "practical" idea of setting up urban cooperatives and preserving them with the help of the state. It was Lassalle's views that were being serialized and published in Socialist papers. This was the beginning of the end of kibbutzim as a socialist experiment. The diaspora's elite interjected themselves directly into the internal dynamics of Palestine. Congregated in Europe, under the umbrella of the Jewish Agency, composed, mainly, of religious, nationalist and Labor Socialists, they overtook the indigenous movement, even as they were recognized as the legitimate authority for bargaining by the big powers.

Here is how Raya Dunayevskaya, the founder of Marxist-Humanism, summed up the situation: "Methodologically as well as practically, the point here is that we could--and did--express the contradictions at its birth. We refused to be silent even when we most enthusiastically supported the establishment of 'a homeland for the Jews,' by pointing sharply to the fact that the land contained the presence--as a minority, it is true, but a presence, nevertheless--of the reactionary Irgun, whose leader was the terrorist, [Menachem] Begin."[11]

Raya Dunayevskaya recalls that back in 1947, when she was in Paris and London, she met "quite a few German Jews who had escaped the Holocaust, were happy to reach Palestine, only to find conditions there--both the hostility of Arabs and of religious Zionists--unbearable. The stories they told were not only about the bombing of the King David Hotel, but Irgun terrorist acts against individual Jews who were struggling to found a socialist republic, as well as pressures exerted also against moderate Zionists--and the young left Polazionists--for attempting to work also with Arabs."[12]

THE 1948 DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

UN Resolution 181 called for the partition of Palestine, with provisions to link the two entities economically and politically. This created a tremendous backlash among all Arab states and set the stage for a civil war. No Palestinian declaration of independence ever came about. Instead Arab leaders called for the disastrous mass exodus of Arabs from the mixed areas.

The text of Israel's Declaration drafted by Ben-Gurion was a grand bargain with religious Zionists that laid the foundation for a theocratic state. The duality in the document was between full citizenship for all the inhabitants of the new state and the creation of a Hebrew Nation. More importantly, the Declaration called for the formation of a "constituent assembly" to draft a constitution. Neither the assembly nor the constitution ever came to be. It was left to the political elites whether or not to follow through on all other provisions of Resolution 181.

Nevertheless, the Labor Party remained in power for nearly three decades, until the rise of the Irgun leader, Begin, in 1977. This was a turning point in the transformation of Israel. Now Begin could rewrite the history, calling his terrorist beginnings "anti-colonial." What was a fanatical and marginal tendency was now in power, transforming their reactionary ideology into official state policy. They have pushed Israel further and further toward religious fundamentalism.

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

What began as a political revolution against imperialism and contained a multifaceted social content, changed the face of the Middle East. Even Egypt's Nasser, when he was concerned with revolution against colonialism and feudal monarchy, was inspired by it. The founding of Israel ushered in the birth of a new consciousness, that of Palestinians for self-determination. What ensued was the ever deepening tension between two contending national identities.

The near total rejection by the Arab states of Jews' rights for self-determination, and the subsequent wars unleashed against Israel, not only undermined the character of the Palestinian national liberation movement, but constantly reminded the Jews that their very survival as a people was at stake. Having nearly perished under the Nazi Holocaust, they were not about to take this existential threat lightly. The preservation of the state of Israel became the unifying force that truncated the self-development of society, including the powerful trade unions and the communal settlements. On the other hand, once terrorism emerged within the Palestinian movement as an acceptable form of "resistance," it helped pave the way for the most degenerate elements within both societies to come to dominance.

For the Palestinian movement to regain its status as a truly liberatory movement, it must renounce terrorism unequivocally, and focus on what it is for, especially the day after it achieves independence. For Israel to begin regenerating itself on the path of social renewal, it must completely renounce occupation and military domination of the Palestinians. The burden on Israel is much greater, for they did come oh so close to social revolution and yet allowed themselves to degenerate into a state-capitalist country whose mode of operation is the exploitation of alienated labor, whether Jewish or Arab. They must regain their footing by recollecting the high points of their revolutionary movement for a new social revolution.

NOTES:

1. "The Palestinians say: 'This is a war of extermination,'" Guardian, 1/17/2009.

2. "Amid dust and death, a family's story speaks for the terror of war," Guardian, 1/19/2009.

3. "'Shooting and crying,'" Haaretz, 4/28/09.

4. "Israel threatens to unleash 'holocaust' in Gaza," Times Online, 3/1/08.

5. "Israel wanted a humanitarian crisis," Times Online, 1/20/09.

6. Hegel, Lectures on Philosophy of Religion, Vol. III, p. 117.

7. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, p. 222.

8. Hegel, Lectures on Philosophy of Religion, Vol. III, p. 296.

9. See "Leading drive for peace in Middle East," News & Letters, Feb.-March. 2009.

10. For an extensive and in-depth discussion of this topic, see Raya Dunayevskaya, Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution, Chapter XII, pp. 180-188.

11. Marxist-Humanist Writings on the Middle East, "Down with the perpetrators of the Palestinian slaughter," 9/19/1982, p. 26.

12. The Political-Philosophic Letters of Raya Dunayevskaya, 1/5/82.

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