Holy War revisited — ‘You want it darker, we kill the flame’

By Kevin Bloom

8 May 2024

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Since its founding, the State of Israel has presented an obvious problem to the great writers, thinkers and artists of the Jewish diaspora — how would the story of Jewish suffering play out when the culture had its own army and flag? For voices like Saul Bellow, Naomi Klein and Leonard Cohen, events such as the banning of Al Jazeera and the invasion of Rafah were almost inevitable. Unless a new story could be told, they suspected, history’s victims would become its perpetrators.

The words of the master

'They’re afraid that if they stop suffering, they’ll have nothing.”

If ever there was a sentence that unlocked the secrets of the Jewish genetic code, it occurred to me, this was the one.

Set to paper by Saul Bellow, the great American-Jewish Nobel literature laureate of the late 20th century, the sentence appeared to hold the key to the enigma of my people. Also, there was the timing — while I had once been a fan of Bellow, I hadn’t visited his work in more than a decade. Now, in mid-April of 2024, the words of the master had returned to my field (via a poignant late-night YouTube session) like the lifting of a veil.

Just as my people were beginning to properly suffer again, just as we were delivering suffering to our enemies in ways suggestive of the Old Testament, Bellow had arrived on the scene with a truism for the ages.

And, like many enduring truisms, his words would spin out into a web of urgent yet impossible questions.

What would Bellow, who died in 2005, have made of the recent actions of the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu? As a man who had written extensively on anti-Semitism in America, what would he have made of the alleged Jew-hatred that was then just beginning to erupt on Ivy League college campuses across the length and breadth of the United States? Would he have drawn a new and revelatory correlation between the two, seeing in the Israeli reaction to the Hamas atrocities of 7 October something that the rest of us had missed?

These questions were essentially unanswerable, not just because Bellow had written in the post-war era, when Jews were still regarded by Gentiles as history’s ultimate victims, but because never in his lifetime had the so-called values of secular Judaism — social consciousness, equality before the law, liberal humanism — been so endangered by the blindness of the culture itself.

And yet, I was thinking, there was a profound clue in the observation that my people were wedded to their suffering.

Take, for example, the message I received from an old and cherished friend on the morning of 15 April, when Daily Maverick had shut itself down for the day in solidarity with the plight of local journalism.

“DM being very dramatic,” he wrote. “Like a Polish mother.”

My friend, of course, being Jewish, was sidestepping the common trope — that of the dramatic Jewish mother. More than that, though, since he had left South Africa for Israel almost 10 years before, since his psyche had by now been indelibly marked by the bomb shelters and the hostage traumas and the world’s growing condemnation, it was almost natural that he would take this opportunity to lash out. For the last few months, my friend had been making it increasingly clear that he viewed Daily Maverick’s coverage of the war as pro-Palestinian at best, anti-Semitic at worst.

Still, while I was sympathetic to his lived experience, while a part of me acknowledged that he was much closer to the heat, there was something about it all that felt wholly unnatural — my friend’s brand-new cloak of rampant Jewish nationalism; his sense that diasporic Jews held an a priori superfluous voice; his inability to feel into the devastation that was being visited on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

Accordingly, I was ready with a knee-jerk response.

“Israel may want death to journalism. We don’t.”

From there, needless to say, it was downhill all the way. My friend pointed out that he had “heard from enough people to warrant attention” that they’d cancelled their Maverick Insider contributions because of the “obvious bias and tone regarding the Middle East”. He added that if we really wanted to survive and thrive, we should get our leading South African-Muslim writer (name withheld) to “proactively hit the Muslim community and get cash from there”. He noted, in brackets, that this was only a “half-joke”.

My comeback, a “yawn” emoji, opened the floodgates.

“Kev, in our conversations over the past months, there were a few comments that triggered for me some of the ideas that you’re taking on. You questioned the fact of the existence of rape on 7/10 when Pandor amplified this idea. This was quickly put to bed, and the numbers and facts are staggering, but you seemed to actually consider this at the time — without taking up the offer to view the 47 minutes documenting it, to save you and your DM colleagues from the emotional pain (paraphrasing your response).”

My ears were ringing, I had begun to sweat, my adrenaline was up.

For one thing, to the best of my memory, I had never questioned the clear and compelling evidence of deliberate and planned sexual violence on the part of Hamas on 7/10. For another, my friend seemed to be implying that I’d been swayed by the extremist and arguably bigoted views of South Africa’s international relations minister, Naledi Pandor. Then there was the famous 47-minute reel of raw footage from the day of the Hamas attack, which he had arranged for me to watch through his Israeli contacts in South Africa.

It was an offer I had refused, not because of the envisaged “emotional pain”, but because I did not see how subjecting myself to the footage would in any way move the journalistic needle on Israel’s kill ratio of Palestinians — which, at that stage, was hovering somewhere between 10 and 25 for every dead Israeli, depending on the source.

Later, it would dawn on me that those 47 minutes — and, specifically, my friend’s insistence that I watch them — were the clearest exemplar yet of Bellow’s trenchant observation.

For now, however, my friend had more schooling in store.

“You call it genocide when I think you know that it’s not,” he continued, “that the Hamas numbers are inflated; that they are themselves complicit in many ways in the reality on the ground; that this is war, as shitty as it is. I’m not washing the IDF [Israel Defense Forces], it’s been chaos, I’m just looking at where you’re holding.”

The thing was, I had also been looking pretty closely at where I may have been “holding”. Every day, in every conversation with members of my family, in every news report, in every accusation and counter-accusation.

Was it genocide? Again, there was a gap between what my friend thought he’d heard and what I had actually said. There was indeed a chance, I’d ventured, after the rubble had been cleared, after the last shots had been fired and the last graves dug, that history would judge against us.

It wasn’t something I wanted to happen, I’d added, but if there was no plan to pull the settlers out of the West Bank, if the IDF invaded Rafah, if the famine in Gaza was allowed to continue unabated, our children would be carrying the can for many years to come.

In the entirety of my friend’s WhatsApp assault, however, it was the phrase “I think you know it’s not” that was the giveaway. He was suggesting, subtly yet unmistakably, that our people weren’t capable of such an atrocity. He was suggesting, because of our suffering, that we were somehow exempt.

But my friend wasn’t done. He wanted me to know, as an olive branch perhaps, that he forgave me for getting hoodwinked.

“These comments, and the general views around this issue, make it feel to me that you’re very taken up by the views of the South African leadership and media. If so, I get it. Not simple to escape the zeitgeist of the zone. It’s just not the big mind Bloom I’ve known in the past. (There, now you can have some guilt from another Polish mother.)”

What sort of Jew are you?

In 1976, Bellow received the Democratic Legacy Award from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the organisation’s highest honour. Back then, 38 years before it would be bestowed on former US president George W Bush, the award still stood for something — its prestige, which had been rooted in the ADL’s enduring battle to secure equal rights for the US’s Jews, was at the time commensurate with the organisation’s victories since its founding in 1913.

Bellow’s acceptance speech, published in his non-fiction collection There is Simply Too Much to Think About, opened with a meditation on what it meant to have a history that was “neither simple nor brief”, which led to an explanation of why, although he understood the impetus, he had never chosen the path of assimilation: “There are others, like myself, who suspect that if we dismiss the life that is waiting for us at birth, we will find ourselves in a void.”

Then, before rejecting the assumption that the US — like too many Christian countries to count — was destined one day to turn on its Jews, he spoke about the inherent contradictions of the Jewish State.

“In Israel, I was often and sometimes impatiently asked what sort of Jew I was and how I defined myself and explained my existence. I said that I was an American, a Jew, a writer by trade. I was not insensitive to the Jewish question, I was painfully conscious of the Holocaust, I longed for peace and security in the Jewish State. I added, however, that I had lived in America all my life, that American English was my language, and that (in an oddly universalist way) I was attached to my country and the civilisation of which it was a part.”

I, for one, on first reading these words — and then rereading them in preparation for this essay — knew what was coming. And, I suspected, most diasporic Jews who had ever visited the Holy Land would have known too.

“But my Israeli questioners or examiners were not satisfied,” Bellow told his audience. “They were trying to make me justify myself. It was their conviction that the life of a Jew in what they called the Diaspora must inevitably be ‘inauthentic’. Only as a Jew in Israel, some of them told me, could I enter history again and prove the necessity and authenticity of my existence.”

Bellow’s answer to his Israeli interlocutors, for me at least, would become the final word on the matter.

“I refused to agree with them that my life had been illusion and dust. I do not accept any interpretation of history that declares the deepest experience of any person to be superfluous. To me that smells of totalitarianism.”

So there it was, set down in a speech almost 50 years ago, the signifier that would creep up on the Israeli body politic, which had always called itself — and, in April of 2024, still was calling itself — the only democracy in the Middle East.

Totalitarianism. How could it be that the Jewish people, my people, who had suffered so unforgettably, so extremely, so ineradicably at the hands of the Nazis, would begin to draw the same set of fascist signifiers from the rest of the world? Was it simply anti-Semitism? Or, conceivably, was it time to turn the mirror on ourselves?

In her chapters The Nazi in the Mirror and The Unshakeable Ethnic Double, included in her book Doppelganger — published in September 2023, mere weeks before the Hamas attack — the Canadian-Jewish writer Naomi Klein offered what were perhaps the most thought-provoking and incisive answers to this distressing question. After 7/10 her publishers had agreed to make the chapters available free online, and Klein had agreed to frame them with a short introduction.

“These two chapters also get into the ongoing debates about how the Nazis were influenced by European colonial and racial segregation in the Americas,” she wrote, “and how a failure to reckon with those connections shaped and misshaped Israeli history, and contributed to exiling Palestinians into an unbearable purgatory. Israel-Palestine has been described by many as the ‘open wound’ of the modern world: never healed, never even bandaged. On October 7, 2023, that wound was ripped open in ways we cannot yet begin to comprehend.”

For Klein, as alluded to above, there was a clear line that ran from the European colonial project in Africa, particularly the impulse of the Belgians to “exterminate all the brutes” in the Congo, to the genocide of the indigenous tribes in North America and then back again to Adolf Hitler in 20th-century Europe.

“Praising European settlers for having ‘gunned down the millions of redskins to a few hundred thousand’,” she observed, “Hitler claimed it was now Germany’s turn to engage in cleansings and mass relocations on its own frontier.”

This was an analysis, as Klein pointed out, that destabilised “pretty much all of the stories” that she had grown up with as a young Jew in post-war Canada; stories which taught that “the Holocaust was a singular event without precedent, so far outside the bounds of human history that it was essentially impossible to comprehend”.

As a Jew who had grown up in apartheid-era South Africa, I could easily relate. At my Jewish high school in Johannesburg in the late 1980s, the Holocaust stood elevated and apart — the event that encompassed all of our sufferings, from the Babylonian exile to the Roman sacking of the Second Temple and beyond. It was the event that proved, categorically and without doubt, that the Gentiles wanted us dead, eradicated, erased forever from history; and that they always would.

Accordingly, there was a specific way that the Holocaust was taught to us, which Klein — quoting a friend and colleague — had forcefully called “retraumatisation, not remembering”.

As she wrote in Doppelganger: “Looking back as the parent of a child older than we were then, I am struck by what wasn’t a part of these strangely mechanical retellings. There was space for the surface-level emotions: horror at the atrocities, rage at the Nazis, a desire for revenge. But not for the more complex and troubling emotions of shame or guilt, or for reflection on what duties the survivors of genocide may have to oppose genocidal logics in all of their forms.”

If anything would, I was thinking, this would be the insight to earn Doppelganger the epithet of “prophetic” in the years to come. Because, from there, it was a short and obvious jump to the purgatory of the open wound.

“The reason for this frozen quality to our education,” Klein explained, “was that the Holocaust was a plot point in a larger, prewritten story we not only were being told but also were trapped inside: a phoenix-from-the-flames narrative that began in the gas chambers of Nazi-controlled Europe and ended on the hilltops around Jerusalem. Though there were certainly exceptions, for the most part, the goal of this teaching was not to turn us into people who would fight the next genocide wherever it occurred. The goal was to turn us into Zionists.”

A new story

In late April 2024, after weeks of wondering whether I had lost my friend for good — whether, as a diasporic Jew, I had got it all hopelessly and unforgivably wrong — I revisited the WhatsApp message exchange between us. Was there anything in there that I had yet to properly account for; anything that I simply could not know because I didn’t live in Israel?

As it turned out, there was. While I was certain that I had never questioned the raw fact of the sexual violence on 7/10 — as my friend had angrily alleged — I had also not yet fully engaged with what had occurred on that day. This would be starkly reflected back at me by two items of impeccable and essential journalism: a deeply reported piece in the leftist Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, headlined “The New York Times Investigated Hamas’ Sexual Assault on October 7. Then the Trouble Started,” and a documentary directed by former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, titled Screams Before Silence.

On the professional level, the first item was significant because of what — to the best of my recall — I had actually said to my friend about the rapes. I had suggested that the infamously discredited New York Times investigation, “‘Screams Without Words: How Hamas Weaponised Sexual Violence on Oct. 7,” published in late December 2023, had done irreparable harm not only to all attempts at objective reporting on the war, but also to the evidence of systemic rape as released by the Israeli authorities and United Nations.

For Israelis, as the Ha’aretz report noted, that initial New York Times feature was crucial — it had landed at a moment when the international community was allegedly silent and hypocritical on the issue, and it had reset the narrative on the global stage, fortifying the IDF in its mission of pushing into Gaza and eliminating Hamas. By 28 February 2024, however, when The Intercept delivered what it hoped would be the final death blow to the Times story, all of the gains had been lost. The pro-Palestinian faction had by then flooded social media with the false assertion that no rapes had occurred at all — that it was all just a function of Israeli propaganda.

And so Ha’aretz, with admirable skill, had pulled off an analysis of how the Times had got the story both wrong and right. It was an object lesson in our loss of nuance, which was symbolic of how the war had collapsed our empathy range in general.

The Sandberg documentary, on the other hand, hit me on a personal level. Needless to say, as Mark Zuckerberg’s former second-in-command and a conservative Jew to boot, it was no surprise that Sandberg’s contribution would fail to make a global impact — even though her title was a direct reference to the Times story and another attempt to undo its damage. Still, after refusing my friend’s offer to watch the 47 minutes that had been compiled by the Israeli government, this was the next best (or perhaps worst) thing.

Interweaving the footage of the Hamas operatives with intimate and harrowing interviews of Israeli survivors of 7/10, the film proved, conclusively, that the rapes weren’t just isolated incidents typical of any armed skirmish; they were rather part of a much broader pattern, demonstrative of the dehumanisation and terror that had always been core to the Hamas ideology.

The Israeli survivors were not acting — months after the event, they were exhibiting signs of unimaginable trauma, having directly witnessed or overheard scenes that no human being should have to endure. From dismemberment to gang-rape to necrophilia, from hysterical screams for mercy to the silence after the bullet or knife, it was all too shockingly true.

“I don’t have words to explain what we saw,” said a member of the voluntary Israeli clean-up unit Zaka. “You couldn’t identify if it was a man or a woman. Everything was ripped.”

Unimaginable trauma, but also the articulation, in the present time, of thousands of years of Jewish suffering. The wound, in Klein’s terms, had indeed been ripped. The suffering on the other side of the fence, where Palestinians had been living for decades in what had long been described as the world’s largest open-air prison, had erupted inside the husk of Israel’s desensitised heart.

And the biggest tragedy of all was that it had been foreseen.

Not just by Bellow and Klein, who had warned of the fascist tendencies in mature Israeli society, but by peerless Jewish philosophers such as Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt, who had escaped the Nazi apocalypse with lessons on how best to set the infant Jewish State on the most humane and enlightened course.

Then there was Leonard Cohen.

You Want It Darker, the title track from his final album, released in 2016, less than three weeks before his death, said it all. Whatever the other interpretations of the lyrics happened to be, for me, after 7/10 and the ensuing waves of slaughter and destruction that Israel would visit on Gaza and the West Bank, the track was the most prophetic yet.

“There’s a lover in the story/ But the story’s still the same/ There’s a lullaby for suffering/ And a paradox to blame/ But it’s written in the scriptures/ And it’s not some idol claim/ You want it darker/ We kill the flame.”

The same old story, the ancient tale of Jewish suffering, was about to play itself out in an inevitable and monstrous paradox, where the ultimate victims of history would begin to resemble the ultimate perpetrators. The banning of Al Jazeera, which the Israeli government ordered in early May, would soon come to symbolise the snuffing out of the light; the immutable fact, from the perspective of the Israeli establishment, that Jewish suffering was the only story that mattered.

“They’re lining up the prisoners/ And the guards are taking aim/ I struggled with some demons/ They were middle class and tame/ I didn’t know I had permission/ To murder and to maim/ You want it darker…”

The invasion of Rafah, which Netanyahu had vowed would go ahead “with or without” a deal on the hostages — and which the US administration had consistently opposed — was now a fait accompli, proof of Zionism’s murderous self-permissiveness, an augury of the endarkened isolation in store for the Jewish State.

And then, to make it clear that he was addressing the Jewish God, Cohen offered up the sacred announcement, in Hebrew, of the supplicant’s humble presence: “Hineni, hineni/ I’m ready, my Lord.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0nmHymgM7Y

Without our suffering, to return to Bellow, what did we have? Was there even a choice not to suffer? Would we continue to hand it all over to our God, assuring ourselves that in the face of the world’s condemnation we would be miraculously redeemed, or would we finally decide to interrogate our victimhood, in acknowledgement that it had been implicate all along?

In short, would we begin to tell ourselves a new story?

Bellow, for his part, had chosen. In his 1956 novella Seize the Day, in which the great Jewish writer had first grappled with the problem of his culture’s suffering, the protagonist would reach a sublime yet simple conclusion.

“You don’t know what you’ve got within you,” he would say. “A person either creates or he destroys. There is no neutrality.” DM

Read more in Daily Maverick: Israel-Palestine War

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The words of the master

What sort of Jew are you?

A new story