‘At the Mind’s Limit’: Gaza in Despair and Anguish!

“Those who invented neither gunpowder nor the compass
Those who never learned steam and electricity
Those who never explored the seas or the skies
But they knew the farthest corners of the land of anguish”
Aime Cesaire, Notebook of a Return to My Native Land

Gaza in Despair and Anguish!

Gaza appears to have drowned in silence for now. It has all but vanished from the headlines. The dead are accounted for, and the corpses recovered from under the rubble. Amid the devastation and mass graves, with orphans still 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 IDF soldiers have begun to generate outrage even within Israel. Testimonies, partially revealed and printed in Haarats, 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 the Guardian reporter in Zeitoun, Roy McCarthy described it:


“But the most disturbing of all was the graffiti they daubed on the walls… ‘Arabs need 2 die,’ ‘Die you all,’ ‘1 down, 999,999 to go,’ and scrawled on an image of a grave stone the words: ‘Arabs 1948-2009.’”2 Haarats also reports an IDF squad leader, confessing that “The lives of Palestinians, let’s say, is something very, very less important than the lives of our soldiers.” 3

But atrocity, as manifest ‘evil,’ 4 especially when perpetrated against children, invites speculation and promotes fermentation and social movement.


‘At the Mind’s Limit’ 5

This ought to compel us to ask: Has the Palestinian, even when she is not a ‘combatant’ touched bottom in the minds of Israelis? Have the current rulers of Israel succeeded in turning the Palestinian into an undifferentiated entity, an object of collective hate, and hence, deserving of collective punishment? Let’s not rush to quick judgment, not just yet. Instead, let’s stay sober and focus on what the rulers had in mind as they launched the assault on the hapless Gaza, and what they did or did not accomplish.

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 so well known, however, is that conceptually this was no mere military adventure but an attempt, perhaps a ‘final’ attempt, at a whole new social experiment. Indeed, as far back as March 2008, the Deputy Defense Minister, Matan Vilani, had warned that “The more Qassam fires intensifies and rockets reach a longer range, they will bring upon themselves a bigger holocaust [shoah] because we will use all our might to defend ourselves.” 6

Even Shimon Peres of Labor, who, in 2002, did oppose the ultra right Avigdar Lieberman for advocating collective punishment by bombing the civilian targets, came out strongly in support of ‘shock and awe’ in order “to provide a strong blow to the people of Gaza so they would loose their appetite for shooting at Israel.” 7
Shockingly, it is not too far fetched to now conclude that a new consensus has been reached among all the ruling elites 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.” (ibid)

Let’s not resist questioning this barbarism: Will the 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 status of ‘die Muselmanner’?,8 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 manifest 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 illuminated this state of despair better than Hegel. Referring to the Jews under the Roman and the Syrian Kings, “who were done with the world and with whom the world was done,” 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.” 9 Despair, therefore, signifies the active presence of a cleavage within the subject. But 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.”(ibid, p.305-306) This is a demand for reconciliation, which can be “only reconciliation with the truth.” (ibid, p.296) Truth here is taken to mean that in what is objective we are not relating to something alien. “Reconciliation consequently is freedom and it is not something quiescent, rather it is activity, the movement that makes the estrangement disappear.” (ibid, p.172)

In this regard, Palestinians too have proven that they are resilient people. Their intense yearning for self-determination, even under nearly a half century of occupation, has not diminished. In this, they resemble their Jewish ‘brethrens.’ However, if there was one thing that they should learn from the Jews, even if negatively, it would be this: 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, overcome new barriers and, thus, suffer negations or retrogress. Herein lies the greater tragedy of what has happened to Israel of ‘Exodus’ from the death camps of Auschwitz, when no country but Palestine would take them in, the Israel of ferocious and successful anti-British struggles to the Israel of today as an Imperialist Goliath!

As we now turn to that history, let’s keep in mind that ‘After Gaza,’ there is a whole new sense of reality among the growing opposition in Israel. From all the Jewish human rights groups to those who took to the streets and suffered jail, from the Rabbis who prayed for the Palestinian children to the joint Jewish-Palestinian groups, especially the women. 10 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

“All emancipation is the restoration of human world and the relationship of men themselves.”
Marx, “On the Jewish Question”

We begin directly from the period 1945-47, from the liberation of the concentration camps and the creation of massive Jewish refugees when no country, including US 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 new found sense of liberation. Concentration Camp, after all, was the birth place of the idea of freedom. It was through the Ghetto uprisings, the burning of the gas chambers, a veritable life and death struggle, that the Jew as Subject was born. What was also learned during captivity was a new sense of ‘collectivity’. In a perverse way, the camp had also turned everyone into a ‘class-less’ man!

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 and Socialist-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, himself an advocate of the communal settlements, makes reference to the fact that they were debating Marx’s response to Vera Sazulitch, whom Buber calls ‘the women of the moment.’ Sazulitch had asked Marx if the archaic Russian village communes should undergo dissolution or if they could serve as ground for a socialist development. They had then traced Marx’s view of the cooperatives from the 1840’s 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 their flaw was that they wanted to setup these communes in the womb of the old society, apparently without a need for the 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. 11 Marx , however, while asserting that the ‘East’ may avoid going through the ‘vicissitudes’ of the capitalist development in the ‘West,’ held that its development could not be separated from the world context. Furthermore, the Russian communes could not be isolated from Russian society as a whole, otherwise the presence of the ‘duality’ within the village communes would allow for an alternate development. The point is that while the agrarian 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.

However, what prevailed in Palestine as a whole was not the prevalence of Marx but Lassalle’s ‘practical’ idea of setting up urban cooperatives and preserving them with the help of a State power. It was his views that were being serialized and published in Socialist papers. Herein is contained the beginning of the end of kibbutzim as a socialist experiment. When State power becomes a substitute for founding a society on new human foundations, you have already set foot on a retrogressive path. Subsuming everything under a Political State was exactly the kind of opening needed for Diaspora’s elites to interject 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 Begin.” 12

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 the 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 – the young left Polazionists – for attempting to work also with Arabs, pressures which were unbelievable. It isn’t that the Arabs accepted those Jews who were trying to establish a secular state for Jews and Arabs, or that the religious Jews accepted them. Walking around with a Bible in their hands, the religious Zionists were speaking of ‘Eretz Israel,’ not as the reality showed Palestine to be, a land where Arabs lived. Instead, they spoke of it as if it was ‘assigned to Jews by God.’ Since the comrades found it impossible to work for a socialist republic, or even for a secular state, they were driven to become exiles again, this time from Israel.” 13

The 1948 Declaration of Independence

“This new humanity cannot do otherwise than define itself
as a new humanism both for itself and for others…
National consciousness, which is not nationalism,
is the only thing that will give us an international dimension.”
Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth

Having once toyed with the idea of a bi-national state, with the British Mandate about to expire, the UN passed Resolution 181, with UK abstaining. It 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 the Arab leaders of Palestine led by the pro-Axis Mufti of Jerusalem, and, therefore, set the stage for a civil war. The resolution had called for a declaration of independence from both parties within 2 months. No Palestinian declaration of independence ever came about. Instead they 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 existence. Given the presence of all the diverse tendencies, the creation of a constituent assembly and the subsequent public discourse for a genuine constitution would have certainly generated a huge storm. It was, therefore, left to the political elites not only to leave undefined the precise borders of the new state, but whether or not to follow through on all other provisions of Resolution 181, including the status of the Jerusalem. Above all, the new constitution would have had to define the form and content of the new state, and not leave it at the caprice of political deal makers. To date, Israel has no formal constitution!

Still, for what it’s worth, the Labor Party remained in power for nearly three decades, until its demise with the rise to power of the Irgun leader, Begin, in 1977. This was a turning point in the transformation of Israel. Now Begin could rewrite the history by displaying his terrorist beginnings as ‘anti-colonial’ acts. Irgun, as we mentioned, was instrumental in causing a reign of terror in areas where Jews and Arabs lived and worked together, such as Haifa and Jaffa. They were especially notorious among the refinery and duct workers where they had created the strongest mixed unions. In 1946 they had initiated a long, united, mass general strike of Jewish/Arab labor against the British. They were the targets of Irgun Terrorism. Irgun was also instrumental at expropriating the Palestinian fellah from the land. And yet they were allowed to join forces with partisans of Haganah in fighting the British and the ensuing war against the Arab states.

Thus what was a fanatical and marginal tendency was now in power and was bent on transforming their reactionary ideology into official state policy of Israel. Viewing it with the eyes of today, they have not only succeeded to stay in power and spread their ideology, but have pushed Israel further and further backward toward religious fanaticism. The ‘Eretz Israel’ of early religious Zionists has been amended with the words ‘uber alles.’ When Duayevskaya was warring against the presence of a reactionary minority faction at Israel’s birth, theoretically, the focal point in the transformation into opposite was the movement from quality to quantity, to measure. In other words, it is what a tendency stands for in the historic context, rather than how many it ‘represents’ at a given moment. One can argue the same point about the Palestinian Intafada. This began as a new movement independent of the old parties, in fact telling them that “you cannot decide our fate. You can make all the political decisions you want, but that is not going to change our lives.” 13 Has not the fundamentalist Hamas very nearly succeeded in derailing and co-opting the Intifada?

Where do we go from here?

“…the impasse on revolutions in the Middle East, Arab and Jewish alike,
can under no circumstances be resolved, except when theory and practice
unite for total freedom..”
Raya Dunayevskaya, “The Arab – Israeli Collision…” June 8. 1967

More than 60 years has passed since the founding of Israel. What had begun as a political revolution against imperialism and contained a multifaceted social content changed the face of the Arab Middle East from a region dominated with politics of oil. Even Egypt’s Naser, when he was concerned with revolution against colonialism and feudal monarchy, was inspired by it. The founding of Israel, at the same time, 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 of the rights of Jews for self-determination on the part of the entire Arab states, and the subsequent wars unleashed against Israel, not only undermined the character of the Palestinian national liberation movement, but was a constant reminder to the Jews that what’s at stake is their very survival as people. Having nearly perished under the Nazi Holocaust, they were not about to take this existential threat lightly. Of necessity, the preservation of the state of Israel became the dominant 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 Palestinian movement to regain its status as a truly libratory 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, like all other capitalist societies, is the exploitation of alienated labor, whether Jewish or Arab. They must regain their footing by recollecting the high points of their revolutionary movement, and embarking on a new social revolution.

Raha,
3/22/2009

1 - Guardian, 01/17/2009
2 - Guardian, 01/19/2009
3 - http://www.allheadlinesnews.com/articles/7014477609
4 –”Evil is nothing but the incompatibility between what is and what ought to be.” Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, Par. 472
5 - Allusion to the title of a book by the Auschwitz survivor Jean Amery
6 - http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/worl/middle_east/article/3459144
7 - http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/20/gaza-israelpalestinians/
8 - “Their life is short but their numbers are endless; they, the Muselmanner, the drowned… an anonymous mass, continuously renewed and always identical. One hesitates to call their death, death.” Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, p.82
9 - Hegel, Lectures on Philosophy of Religion, Vol. III, p. 117
10 - See ‘Women as Reason,’ News & Letters, Jan-Feb 2009
11 - For an extensive and in depth discussion of this topic, see Raya Dunyaveskaya, Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution, Chapter XII, pp. 180-188
12 - Marxist-Humanist Writings on the Middle East, p.26
13 - The Political-Philosophic Letters of Raya Dunayevskaya, 01/05/1982
14 - See Olga Domanski, in Marxist-Humanist Writings on the Middle East, p.48