Sunday's post was about an obscure Uprising in 1863 Poland.
Why?
Moral ambiguity follows Jews wherever we live because, as I said yesterday, the only place which accommodates us is history's faultlines. Jews are the world's unwelcome guests; we don't belong anywhere, so the morality of our living anywhere will be questioned.
So who do you think were the likely victims of that peasant uprising? Do you really think it was Polish aristocrats barricaded in their manors, or was it the middlemen handling their money, the administrators collecting rent, the defenseless shtetl-dwellers?
And who was the most important champion of the revolt? Karl Marx, a German Jew, born to privilege in the one country where Jewish security seemed complete, dreaming of revolution as only the privileged can.
Marx ruined German Jewry. The German psyche has a direct line from Marx to Hitler. The founders of Marxism and Nazism both grew up on German speaking lands where Jews and Gentiles had every reason to feel hope. German lands were the symbol of everything progressive: science, the arts, social welfare, economic security, religious tolerance. Yet a wealthy German Jew self-exiled to London and envisioned history's most radical transformation.
There's no certain explanation for why, but when you read enough history, something sticks out: why do people long to smash things up at the moments of their greatest prosperity? It's almost as though chaos of nature calls to us at the moments we're most shielded from it. There seems to be a homing device in humans that returns us to the world's madness.
Privilege reminds us of what we still don't have. It teases us with how close we are to better lives. Whether you're liberal or conservative, alt-right or intersectional SJW, that homing signal is the pull all Americans feel right now. If we've achieved prosperity, it makes us less satisfied, not more. Modern America's a better country than ever before, yet we've all been miserable since 2000.
If that seems true for modern America, how much more true for Israel? If American life is much better than 75 years ago, how much better is life for Jews and Israelis? The closer Israelis get to security, the more paranoid they get about losing it. The more Israel succeeds, the more humiliated they feel about the world's criticism.
Humans can deal with danger, they can't deal with humiliation. In danger, they form a heroic self-image that covers them in glory; but humiliation takes away their heroism. It reminds them of their powerlessness and shows the distance between who they are and what they want.
Objectively, there are worse places than Palestine; but to survive, Israel instilled policies which seem designed for maximum Palestinian humiliation; which makes Palestinians embrace a totalitarian ideology. Ever since, there's been a self-perpetuating cycle which exposes the greatest problem of our generation: survival vs. dignity.
Personally, I'd argue that dignity, or pride, is a vestige from the era of 'honor.' I believe no dignity's possible until we guarantee life itself; but billions of people disagree and jeopardize survival to pursue dignity. Christianity and Islam caught on because they gave people pride in themselves, so did Communism and Fascism, so now does MAGA and SJW. Pride is the center of the Nazi worldview, the Cossack, the Inquisition, the early Muslim, and the Roman.
The entirety of the Jewish story, from Abraham onward, is the story of delaying pride to survive, and when Jews like Netanyahu conjure the same dignity for us that other cultures have, Jews get killed. The only pride to take in the Jewish condition is that against all odds, we're still here.
As ever for Jews, Israelis live on the world's ideological fault line. Israel/Palestine is two worldviews that couldn't be more different facing off in a crisis existential for them both. If Palestinians don't stop Israeli occupation, they live centuries of imprisonment. If Israelis don't stop Palestinian terror, a nuclear or chemical weapon kills twice as many Israelis in a day as Israelis ever killed Arabs.
Do Palestinians deserve to be lumped with Nazis and the Inquisition? Of course not, but Middle Eastern dictators would had they ever been successful. They yearned for the power of a Hitler - including Yassir Arafat. Any dictator in the region could have resettled Palestinian refugees, and Israelis would have paid them for the service; but it serves dictators' purposes to keep Palestinians perpetually on Israeli territory. Since 1948, fundamentalist Muslims viewed Jewish control of Israel as a humiliation. Mohammed exiled Jews from Medina for treachery, and to avenge this humiliation, millions across the Middle East are happy to make Palestinians into martyrs for their holy cause.
Whether or not the Israeli worldview is right doesn't matter. There's no 'right' in a conflict when both sides are rejected by the world, there is only two peoples drawing on their traditions to find ways to live their lives. If either conceded to the other's worldview - if Israel decided to stop existing, if Palestinians agreed to humiliation forever, the conflict would end; but until the world changes in ways we can't predict, there's no end to this conflict.
No comments:
Post a Comment