From Exclusion to Erasure

I am writing this on Israel’s seventy-fifth anniversary, its democratic future shrouded in fog. Sections of society that failed to gain recognition, excluded for years from the main public discourse and centers of power, are now seeking to dismantle it from within. They are enraged: they seek to use their power, this time not just to exclude others (as they themselves were excluded) but to wreak destruction and erase everything they perceived as other than them. A striving for solidarity, which was characteristic of Israel for generations, is now crumbling. 

Some of that withering rage I know through personal experience. My mother’s parents participated in Israel’s pre-state revisionist underground and were excluded from the mainstream social, political, and professional discourse for many years.[1] To avoid being persecuted for his past, my grandfather changed his name. He and my grandmother felt their all-out effort during the foundation of the state went unacknowledged and that they and their friends were not granted the place they deserved in the new society. They were often treated with contempt, and this had repercussions, economic as well as psychological. 

Two generations after that, I found myself living in a town where most of the population was Mizrahi and right-wing, unlike myself (having an Ashkenazi background). I often felt excluded and alienated there.[2] Later, I also grew aware of how outraged my Mizrahi friends felt because of the discrimination and lack of due recognition they and their parents frequently had to face.   

This sentiment has been fermenting over the years, quietly murmuring below the surface. I see it unfolding on two parallel planes: social and intrapsychic. On the first, social level, rage is associated with social injustice. It is triggered whenever people do not get the recognition they expect and feel they deserve. Revisionists, Mizrahis, Ethiopian Jews,[3]  women, citizens living on the periphery of Israel, Arab citizens of Israel, and, of course, Palestinians, who are deprived of human rights—all these groups and others have gone unrecognized, with the subjective experience this entails, together with a sense of not being seen. The ideas of the revisionists have been close to power for many years in Israel, but the other groups still feel they are being ignored. The experience of being ignored threatens a loss of personality, and if it goes on for too long, it is felt as contempt for the person’s very existence. Axel Honneth, writing about acknowledgment, explains how in situations like this, shame and bitterness are eventually followed by rage: “The social protests of the lower classes are not motivated by positively formulated moral principles but by the experience of having their intuitive notions of justice violated. The normative core of such notions of justice is always constituted by expectations of respect for one’s own dignity, honor, or integrity.” [4]

Recognition, on the face of it, might be an appropriate response to this rage. But while contributing to the creation of a positive self-image, such recognition can also be leveraged as a political tool and subject individuals as well as groups to existing structures of control and power. The “obedient” slave, the “good” homemaker, the “brave” soldier, the “loyal” Mizrahi—all of these illustrate what happens when recognition seemingly elevates self-images but in fact resubjects them to power structures. For recognition to be truly ethical rather than merely ideological, it should be translated into action. What must change is the legal definitions relevant to minority groups that have gone unrecognized hitherto, different types of political representation have to be generated, and resources must be redistributed. 

A new political order came into existence in Israel in the 1970s, offering what seemed to be then an acknowledgment of the rage festering among Mizrahi and revisionist citizens. As for the revisionist ideas—these are now well represented in official government policies. But while giving hope to many, this so-called political turnover did not bring about real change for other groups, because in the forty-six years of almost continuous right-wing rule since, recognition for weaker social groups (including the Mizrahis) was mainly ideological. Over the years, this kind of fake recognition only deepened the sense of disadvantage by symbolically acknowledging exclusion while not offering any material, social, or political solution. 

A few corrupt Israeli politicians were, and continue to be, in charge of this process—but they are not alone. They were joined by two groups,  a messianic population that seeks to further absolute Jewish supremacy, leading, to all intents and purposes, to an apartheid regime, first and foremost in the occupied territories, but beyond that, throughout Israel; and an ultra-Orthodox section (including only a small proportion of the country’s ultra-Orthodox [Haredi] citizens and mainly consisting of its political leadership), which acts to maintain itself—its children deprived of a modern education and its women going without representation in their communities—sealed off from the rest of Israeli society. [5] Having entered a destructive pact, these politicians, aided by these two extremely ideological groups, are now acting like a parasitic element, threatening to crush Israel’s social contract and solidarity. This pact perversely leads from exclusion to erasure in a process I believe Donald Meltzer[6], the psychoanalyst, has well described. His psychoanalytic explanation describes the perverse person’s tendency to give up on truth in order to maintain control and power by means of the other’s erasure. 

From an intrapsychic perspective, perversion emerges from the personality’s evil, infantile part, when it experiences envious rivalry toward idealized objects. It fans omnipotent situations, which it then grounds in the real world by means of confusing inner and outer reality. In its social version, one part of society takes a parasitic position in relation to the others. The corrupt politicians and the leaders of the other two groups I described use mental tools grounded in splitting, projection, and incitement to take destructive action. The attendant effect is fundamentally manic, feeding upon a sense of power: I can do whatever I like, and more specifically: I can do whatever I like to the other. The underlying method is to single out the other and then unleash aggression upon them, to sow confusion and weaken the truth so as to set the scene for casting this other as the source of evil. Fake news, therefore, is currently in massive circulation in Israel, as well as a groundswell of populism and attacks on the basic distinction between good and evil. That’s the world of Orwell’s 1984, in which it is all but impossible to tell truth from lie, good from bad. That’s the world whose picture the prophet Isaiah sketches: “[…] those that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness” (Isaiah 5:20). In a world like this, in Israel today, the problem is not the many lies we are being fed. It is obvious that our politicians are telling lies. The problem is that from the sheer amount of lies, it has become hard to make out the truth even when it is staring us right in the eye. The resulting distress, anxiety, and frustration cause many to look for a source of comfort and security—which they find among exactly the same politicians who knowingly deceive them. 

What can be said about this destructive pact that is currently leading Israel into disaster is that in the long run, a complex and integrated view of the truth cannot be maintained while simultaneously excluding entire swaths of the population from ethical (not just ideological) recognition. The corrupt politicians and the leaders of the two extremist groups fear that when their lies falter, they will lose their ability to control, so they know the only way to continue victimizing their followers is by deepening the lies they are telling them. The corrupt leadership knows this about the Mizrahis’—and other social groups’—sense of disadvantage. The leaders of the messianic Israelis know this about the Palestinians, who are bereft of basic human rights. The Haredi leadership knows this about its offspring: not all of them think the same, and many would like to get an education, serve in the army, and become part of Zionist society. In order to preserve their pact, the leaders of these groups and our corrupt politicians believe they have no choice but to turn exclusion into erasure, which comes at the price of truth. In other words: they choose the way of perversion. 

Many of us, appalled at the terrible truth, cannot believe it. Such destruction has been wreaked here in the past few months in the name of preserving their destructive pact, and at what speed has it been achieved! Soldiers who have fought for their country have been called “anarchists,” and a government minister has told them to “go to hell”; leaders who dedicated their whole life to their homeland have been called “traitors.” A government minister has called “to wipe out” a Palestinian village while the prime minister does not denounce severe social violence, not even when it occurs in cemeteries, during Israel’s annual commemoration for Israel’s fallen soldiers. 

For the sake of the future, will we manage to stop these powers? As we are now facing apparent madness in Israel, will we find a leader who can take us back on the path of sanity and truth? Are there brave leaders among us who can guide us back from the path of perversion in order to choose, instead, solidarity, help us restore our democratic future, and save our children from perdition? 

Special thank you to Mirjam Meerschwam Hadar for help with the translation.

[1] The revisionists were a part of the Zionist movement. Their leader was Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who wanted to establish a Jewish state in the historical land of Israel (which includes Mandatory Palestine and the nowadays state of Jordan). He was the chief competitor to David Ben-Gurion’s “practical Zionism” and called to fight the British Mandate in Palestine. Revisionist Zionism strongly influenced modern right-wing Israeli parties, first Herut (led by Menachem Begin) and then its successor, Likud (led today by Benjamin Netanyahu). They were in the opposition until 1977, and from then on (except for a few years) from the coalition in Israel’s government (Knesset).

[2] Mizrahi Jews are a group of Jewish communities composed of those who existed in the diaspora around the Middle East and North Africa (and also those who remained in the Land of Israel). Most of these Jews came to the State of Israel in the 1950s. They were maltreated in many ways, and many of them felt disrespected by the other Jewish groups in Israel, especially the Ashkenazi (those who immigrated from Europe during the first half of the 20th century, took part in the establishment of the State of Israel, and many of them were holding key positions in the government and in other social institutes). Menachem Begin, as head of the opposition for many years, called for inclusion of the Mizrahi in the formal and informal institutions in Israel. 

[3] Ethiopian Jews are a Jewish community that lived for centuries in Ethiopia. Most of them immigrated to Israel in the 1990s. Different in skin color and in culture, they are often misunderstood, suffer from discrimination in many areas, and are maltreated in many ways.

[4] Axel Honneth, Disrespect: The Normative Foundations of Critical Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 71.

[5] The ultra-Orthodox Jews and the Messianic groups are both very religious groups, but they differ in their nationalistic orientation. The Messianic group consists mainly of Jews living in the occupied territories and having an ideology of nationalism and Jewish supremacy. The ultra-Orthodox live in closed communities everywhere in Israel, and their leaders practice politics mainly in order to preserve (by way of receiving governmental money and by legislating laws) their very extreme way of life (not studying mathematics or English in their schools, their women having no representational rights, their men studying the Jewish holy scripts for most of their life and not working, and so on).

[6] Donald Meltzer, Sexual States of Mind (Clunie Press, Perthshire, 1973).