“The Jews . . . and the bicyclists”
On October 24, 2024, an item appeared whose title is both unsurprising and outrageous: https://worldisraelnews.com/professor-of-international-law-calls-sinwars-killing-murder-demands-war-crimes-probe/
The idea of accusing Israel of a “war crime” for “murdering” the mastermind of last year’s massacre, who (after being cured of a brain tumor in an Israeli hospital) had served as the commander of Hamas’ terrorist troops is not simply “absurd”: it provides a simple measure—or what the French would call démesure—of what antisemitism really is. The same phenomenon occurs when our “progressive” students accuse Israel of “genocide” for responding to the 10/7 pogrom, and mainstream political figures like Kamala Harris go out of their way to affirm that these accusers “have a point.”
The world is full of injustices and political murders, but we all know without thinking about it that Israel, the Jews, are the only people who could conceivably be accused in the world media of “murder” in such cases. No Western law professors accused the US of murder for killing Bin Laden, although he was presumably not given a chance to surrender peacefully.
We are so habituated to this phenomenon that we no longer find it in any way anomalous. This Canadian professor, Heidi Matthews, a Harvard graduate who considers Hamas’ Simchat Torah pogrom a legitimate act of “resistance,” may not be representative of the Canadian population as a whole, but she is certainly a respectable member of the academic community, and is most unlikely to suffer in any way from this statement.
Yet its enormity is indisputable. Is it not understandable that Jews explain antisemitism as a mental disease? Except that it is not a disease of an individual’s mental faculties; it is a social phenomenon. The fact that only the Jews are accused in the public media of such “crimes” is a simple demonstration of the extraordinary anomaly of Jew-hatred—as are the numerous condemnations of Israel by the UN, and its frequent denunciations by heads of state around the world.
The following is a more nuanced, and perhaps more telling example. In an October 22 article on the JNS (Jewish News Syndicate) website (https://www.jns.org/ex-french-fm-natural-to-be-antisemitic-after-the-damage-by-the-idf/), Bernard Kouchner, a former French Foreign Minister, whose paternal grandparents “were Russian-born Jews who immigrated to France and died later at Auschwitz,” is quoted in an interview as saying “How can you not be antisemitic when you see the damage done by the Israeli army? Look at Gaza, it’s a field of murder and disaster.” In a later passage, he adds, “Of course, there were Hamas attacks on Oct. 7. And God knows that revolted me. But to take revenge with 40,000 dead [a figure supplied by Hamas], if the figure is true…”
“God knows that revolted me” is an interesting way of claiming to be “revolted” when in reality all the “revolt” we hear in this interview is aroused by the undoubtedly spurious figure of “40,000 dead,” described not as the unfortunate result of military action, but as “revenge.” The “Hamas attacks” (no need to mention the 1200 or so Israeli deaths) are merely the preface to “But,” presumably viewed as understandable revenge for years of mistreatment—although there had been no Israelis stationed in Gaza since 2005, despite Hamas’ constant missile launches at civilian targets (which provoked the limited incursions called “mowing the grass”)—whereas the deaths attributable to Israeli military action are called “murder and disaster.” And this from a man who lost both paternal grandparents at Auschwitz.
Kouchner, co-founder of the humanitarian Doctors Without Borders, concludes the quoted conversation on a sickeningly sanctimonious note:
A lot of people have been massacred. It’s a murderous reaction. I’m not satisfied with that. . . . I’ve spent my life caring for people.
Note the reprise of “murderous” along with “massacred,” as though the IDF weren’t soldiers fighting a war but, like the Hamas-led mob on 10/7—with whom Kouchner associates no word of violence beyond “attacks”—were a “murderous” mob “massacring” unarmed civilians.
We are so used to this kind of thing that it seems useless to feel shocked and disgusted by it. No doubt we should feel shocked and disgusted; but that is not enough. We must understand that this is antisemitism, a euphemistic term for a phenomenon that is better described as Jew-hatred, Judenhass, a phenomenon that, as the Kouchner example shows, has a great deal of mimetic power not merely over “antisemites,” but over a certain type of Jew or near-Jew who fears that his sensitivity to Jewish evil might be questioned.
The point that we miss because it is so obvious is that we need to explain why there is in the world no other comparable hatred, the archetype of what we may call ontological resentment—resentment of a people that can be imagined to consider itself as closer to the sacred than any other, whether or not it speaks of itself as “[God’s] chosen people.”
If white Woke self-hatred is a caricature, it is of this. Our land acknowledgements and Columbus-denunciations seek to disculpate ourselves of the sins of long-dead ancestors who thought themselves entitled to the lands of the New World, but the “ancestors” that we moderns are really able to hate are made all the more hateful by the fact that their descendants are not only still living among us, but have dared to attempt to restore their original community in the era of the nation-state.
The phenomenon is familiar, but even those who have studied its historical manifestations have shied away from seeking to explain its anomalous nature. Everyone has “prejudices,” but this is no simple “prejudice.” It participates in a quasi-universal conspiracy—one once limited to the West, but now world-wide—to take the side of even the most monstrous enemies of Israel. What Israel has done for the Jews is immense, as has been its contribution to contemporary science and industry; but as the nation-state of Israel, the Jewish people can be hated in a far more public and supposedly neutral way than as “the Jews.”
Prof. Matthews’ and M. Kouchner’s accusations provide us with the occasion for a “learning experience.” These demonstrations of sympathy for the perpetrators of the most deadly massacre of Jews since the Holocaust reveal how central Jew-hatred remains, both to Western civilization and to its extensions to the rest of the largely anti-Western world—a hatred all too visible in the United Nations.
The Deferral of Mimetic Desire: Jews, Christians . . . and Muslims
Anyone familiar with René Girard’s writings on mimetic desire will see the connection between two contrasting effects of our increased mimetic capacity: on the one hand, the origin of the human scene of language and religion; antisemitism on the other. On the one hand, the need to restrain our mimetic facility provided the impetus to deferral, Derrida’s différance, which is to say, to the scenic space, Sartre’s néant, of freedom, conscience, morality, language and religion, sanctifying the symmetry of the human community through the mediation of signs. On the other, it gave an impetus to mimetic violence, the multiplication of intraspecific aggression by the same means that provided for its prevention, that is, the deferral of instinctive action in the free space of the scene, on which we communicate through signs about the objects of our common desires, whether for cooperation or for mayhem.
Yet whereas Girard tried, I believe unsuccessfully, to trace the origin of the human community to what he conceived as the primordial form of the scapegoat phenomenon, GA’s originary hypothesis begins with the discovery of the deferral of instinctive action and the conversion of its gesture into a sign. The origin of language is understood as the inaugural effect of a sacred self-restraint that allowed for the first equal distribution of food and/or other possible objects of common desire in what should consequently be called the originary human community.
For Girard, the human begins with the “emissary murder” of some marginal member(s) of the proto-human group in an attempt to turn away a collective disaster such as a plague (recall the plague among the Greeks on the first page of the Iliad) by sacrificing a marginal figure who, in the image of the Old-Testament scapegoat, would be indifferently blamed for the disaster and burdened with the community’s collective sinfulness that may have brought it about. But this can only be a later development reflecting the institution of social hierarchy; the hunter-gatherer societies encountered by anthropologists seem inevitably to practice a rigorously egalitarian distribution of, e.g., the meat from large animals scavenged or brought down by hunters in order to prevent any possibility of differential resentment.
As a first approximation, we can say that Judaism understands the central defense against the sinful effects of mimetic desire as the respect for God’s commandments. I can still recall, at lunchtime during a conference, Girard reading through the Ten Commandments as if for the first time, pointing out the obvious insistence on the mimetic in, e.g., “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife…”
In contrast, for Christianity the Crucifixion demonstrates that acceptance of the authority of God the Father standing above and outside the human world is insufficient to sustain human obedience; the sinfulness that led to the expulsion from Eden would eventually lead to the universal rejection of God’s representative on Earth, and thereby of God himself. But through this very rejection, through the universally shared experience of killing the Son, the human embodiment of the sacred will, we discover its permanence: not as a failed divinity but as one whose love for humanity has made necessary the Father’s embodiment in human form and subsequent sacrifice and resurrection.
The original Christians were Jews, and like the Jews of today, they saw HaShem as ontologically incompatible with mortal humanity. The prophets were revered in memory, but in no sense “persons” of God. In that context, Saul’s conversion on the road to Damascus must be seen as a revelatory act that modified (our understanding of) the ontology of the sacred itself. From merely expressing Saul’s sense of guilt for persecuting the Christians it becomes the revelation that the sacrificed Son whom they continue to worship was no mere temporal victim, but an intrinsic element, a person, of God the Father, one whose function is to offer salvation to his human persecutors by demonstrating our inability to destroy, even through physical death, the transcendental providence that allows the preservation of our species.
Although there is no doubt that the historical Jesus was crucified by the Romans, not the Jews, it is difficult to contest the fundamental New Testament theme that, assuming that the Crucifixion indeed took place, it was performed at the behest of the Jewish authorities, or at the very least, in accordance with their wishes. What might be called the originary trope of antisemitism, calling the Jews “Christ-killers,” cannot be dismissed as a mere fiction. And it is consequently easy to understand that the persistence of the Jews within Christian societies over the centuries would be seen as evidence of their continued spiritual blindness, their inability, after taking the sacred beyond its primitive stage to the notion of the One God, to accept the necessity of this new revelation that reflected God’s decision that the Son, who had presumably existed from the beginning, had to be sent into the world at this moment, killed, and subsequently resurrected in order to perpetuate the promise of salvation in societies more complex than those of the Old Testament.
What is more difficult to understand is that the decline of the power and influence of the Christian churches in today’s postmodern era would be accompanied, on the one hand by the disappearance of the Church’s hostility to the Jews, as reflected in John Paul II’s designation of them as “elder brothers,” but on the other, by the amplification of this hostility as a rallying point of political ideologies. Whence the conundrum posed by the persistence of this founding element of the Abrahamic posterity, not merely in the realm of Jihadist Islam, whose founder can be said to himself provide the model, but in the secularized West, where it is obvious that the choice of the Jews as objects of hatred is independent of any grounding in even the most remote historical experience. Whence our intellectual elite’s near-universal identification, as the victims (and certainly not the aggressors!) of the Gaza war, with the Palestinians—this “new” nation whose very definition is that of being persecuted by the Jews, whence the UNRWA’s unique perpetuation of their status as “refugees” unto the nth generation.
Clearly the catalyst of the reemergence of antisemitism in the West after WWII was simply the creation of Israel itself. A major reason why Israel has continued to have difficulties with neighboring Muslim nations has been the more or less severe antisemitic reaction to Israel among the various Western nations, which in the case of Ireland and Norway, and to a lesser extent, Spain, England, and France (and even the US), had been visible well before 10/7. The fact that the egregiousness of the Hamas pogrom gave rise to only the most ephemeral surge of indignation among “respectable” non-Jews in the West and was almost immediately replaced by horrified reactions to the Israeli response—including the readiness with which Israel was falsely accused of bombing a Gaza hospital—demonstrated the persistence of a latent hostility that could be said to have been awaiting a triggering event, a fact surely grasped by the planners of the pogrom.
It is the very idea of a “Jewish state” in the modern world that arouses suspicion and predisposes to hostility. The idea that the unique landless status of the Jews could be normalized by creating a Jewish nation-state comes up against the paradox that, having been unique among all peoples in their persistence without a territory of their own, as a state they would only become all the more so, not to mention the fact that, starting from the Balfour Declaration, Israel was created at the very end of the colonial era from what can only be described as colonized territory.
No doubt had the Arabs accepted the originally envisioned idea of a symmetrical Arab/Muslim state, this problem would presumably not have arisen. But given the fact that the Mufti of Jerusalem spent the war years in Berlin urging Hitler to exterminate the Jews of the Middle East, it was surely utopian to think that a territorial division, including a shared Jerusalem, would be accepted by the Muslims, who have had no compunction in denying the Jews’ historical roots in the city, and consider “Al-Aqsa” as sacred Waqf territory. Islam may have given up on reclaiming Spain, but, after having looked forward to the Jews’ complete eradication, to find a Jewish state in their very midst was a step too far.
Yet Muslim hostility alone does not explain the willingness of European countries to support their cause. What does in part is the fact that Hitler’s final solution itself reflected a reality of the end of the colonial era: the impracticability of his original idea of deporting the Jews to Madagascar or some other extra-European location. As a consequence, at just the moment when European colonies were being granted independence, the survivors of the Holocaust were placed in a role that could be interpreted not only as usurpation of territory belonging to the Muslim Waqf, but as an offense to the new post-colonial mentality. For whereas our “land acknowledgements” are virtually entirely symbolic affairs, the local Arabs’ claim of prior residence in the territory of Israel, whether or not founded on long-term habitation, gave the newly baptized Palestinians the victimary credibility that assured the failure of the Oslo process, inspiring them to reject the generous “two-state solutions” proposed by Israel and to form militant terrorist movements—all of which has not prevented the rest of the world from continuing to insist on such a solution, as though it were Israel that had rejected it.
The most significant question from the perspective of what we might call the historical dialectic seems to me to be what we must learn from the quasi-paradox that, in an era when victimary minorities are accorded a moral recompense that conflicts with egalitarian norms, the one minority group that has been, both traditionally and presently, the most frequent victim of assaults and insults is consistently counted on the side of the oppressors. No doubt most Jews encountered in the West are “white,” but their Jewishness, rather than granting them minority status in the same sense as, for example, white homosexuals, is viewed rather as an aggravating factor. From an intellectual if not from a moral standpoint, the beauty of this designation is that it restores the Jews in the West to their medieval role as the scapegoat people, reviving the old blood libels in a new form—and thereby confirming once more the “firstness” of the Jews in the Abrahamic world, which is to say, in Western civilization.
However unfortunate it may have been for the militantly secular Moshe Dayan, following Israel’s victory in the 1967 “Six-Day War,” to blithely place the Temple Mount under the control of the Waqf, he was unknowingly and paradoxically confirming the transhistorical scapegoat role of the Jews. Mahmoud Abbas’ disgust at the idea of the Jews’ “filthy feet” desecrating what had been the original locus of their own temple centuries before the appearance of Islam exemplifies in its very paradoxicality the essence of antisemitism.
No series can exist without a first element; but unlike Christianity, which seeks dialectically to transcend and include its “elder brother,” Islam, the final stage of the Abrahamic dialectic, seeks to usurp the place of the first through its simple denial. The principle is that the denial of the other’s priority will by its very “absurdity” demonstrate the faith that will insure one’s triumph. As with the “absurd” Resurrection of Jesus as Christ, but in a far cruder fashion, the firstness of the Hebrew Temple will be not transcended but simply negated by that of the Islamic mosque.
Whence the scandal for the decreasingly Christian West of the perpetuation of the Jewish claim to Jerusalem and its surroundings. But is today the radical Muslims who alone of all non-Jewish religious groups have the courage to seek martyrdom—to “love death”—in order to reject this claim, with the confidence that they will be compensated by an eternity of bliss far exceeding the pale joys of Dante’s Paradiso.
If Israel continues to take a strong stand, even without the active support of its “allies,” this faith, like so many others, may not endure beyond another generation. But at present, what is yet more significant than the faith of the Islamists is the evident need of the West’s “respectable” Left to protect it from destruction. I need merely remind the reader that Taylor Swift, today’s embodiment of youthful respectability, has endorsed Kamala Harris in the coming election.