So this is still about Israel and Netanyahu, but we're going to begin with Thomas Mann. Mann is generally thought the greatest German author of the 20th century and symbol to the free world of how even a barbarian like Hitler could not destroy the greatness of German culture, which could not be destroyed even if Thomas Mann was exiled to Beverly Hills.
In 1939, Mann wrote an essay called Bruder Hitler - Brother Hitler, in which he tried to examine what Hitler;s followers saw in him and the culpability of establishment liberal/conservatives like him in bringing him to power. Hitler was, in spite of it all, 'my brother', and as a German, there is no dissociating Mann from Germany's collective complicity.
Now, let's be clear: in absolutely no way does Netanyahu resemble Hitler except in his wasteful incompetence in military matters. But even we in the Jewish world who hate him are culpable for his rise and his maintenance of power. Even as we opposed his policies, for fifteen years we benefited from the prosperity he brought and our wellbeing benefited from the security we thought he gave us.
Under Netanyahu, Israel reached an absolute zenith of its prosperity, and it's hard to believe it won't take decades to rebuild whatever's soon to be destroyed.
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i've scrawled my endless annoyance with everything Israeli on my media, and yet, yes, it's more home to me than home itself. I want to be buried on the Mount of Olives, I want my soul to see the city at the center of history to watch it unfurl.
For all my exasperation, Israel is a family quarrel and when your family behaves destructively, you're reminded of how much you love them all the more. As I love America, which gave my family everything after Europe destroyed them, I love Israel, which I suspect is the reason America loves us. But I see the self-destructive ways they're both behaving and I'm helpless to stop them. I didn't enjoy living there, but every day now I'm thinking of those landscapes and that lifestyle and old friends and acquaintances and irritants with a painful nostalgia I'd have dismissed last week as performative bullshit.
Non-Jews always find something weird in the way Jews talk about their connection to Israel. Let's not lie, it IS weird. When you go there, it's like you're gripped by a sudden awareness that you've been an outsider your whole life, and your vague feelings of not belonging elsewhere have a reason. I don't doubt it's a false sense of belonging for people who need a meaning beyond their not quite satisfying lives, but this longing for Zion is real, and once you feel it you can never unexperience it. It's a longing for something more than fitting in, it's a longing to be part of something so large that being in its very presence illuminates. You see that desert and those fig trees, and you feel linked to a great chain of being, a great society linking the long dead to the not yet born, and you know that this is your chapter to write in a larger story that means something true. Whether you believe in God or you believe in nothing, you see that the larger story of Jewish history means something simply because it happened. The very facts of the Jewish story are irrational. Dozens of times, we should not have survived - a fact proven by how many of us didn't. Yet here we are, the product of those few who did, comparatively thriving in societies we know will eventually kill us just as every society did before them. God knows, Israel is not the proof that we will survive this time, but Israel is the proof that our suffering has reasons.
Once you experience something that powerful, the temptation is always there to think those before us suffered particularly for us, so we could come home, so we could achieve the reunion with the land they bled for for two thousand years. And even if we're not the reason for it , what amid a story as eternal as ours is fifteen years of false security?
But God makes Jews foot the bill for everything: for every moment we put too much faith in something other than absolute humility, he makes us pay in blood. In this case, 'humility' means everything from how we conduct ourselves in interpersonal dealings to how we deal with the international stage. The humiliating lesson of God is not that we should approach the world with our heads down, it's that we should never believe we have the true answer: there is no philosophy of how to approach to problems that always works. There are always exceptions, provisos, codicils, stipulations, caveats, appendices.
One can say that no one in Israel was responsible for what happened, one can say that everyone was responsible, but neither is quite correct. Only one side of Israeli discourse held vastly disproportionate power for an entire generation, and only one side elected their candidate precisely because they knew his filth of character, and they liked it. They so believe in what they believe that their hatred for those who oppose them became greater than their love of country. And just as He did in Biblical times, God punished the State of Israel in a manner so brutal, so unjust, so disproportionate, that one has to question His goodness, because if He exists, He heard the cries of the Palestinians, and punished Israel in exactly the manner He punished Palestine: only for Palestine's still greater hubris, He punished them still worse.
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Just because I think the Israeli side is more right than the Palestinian does not mean that the other side of the argument can be ignored. Just because I think the Israeli left is more right than the Israeli right does not mean that the other side of the argument can be ignored. Even if I disagreed with any of the three 100%, the other sides cannot be ignored because any solution that does not involve the eventual annihilation of the Palestinian people involves concessions to them all. When solutions become too drastic, one becomes the barbarity one supposedly abhors.
In any disagreement, someone is always more 'right. The chance that two people who disagree see an issue equally well is infinitesimally unlikely. Someone always has a slightly better view, someone always has slightly better points, but that does not mean the other person has no legitimate grievances, or insights, or solutions.
When two people are in the same boat on an ocean, it's highly likely that both are needed to get back to shore. One can try to toss the other into the sea, but the chance the murderer would survive is much less. If Israel annihilates Palestine, Israel too will eventually be annihilated. The genocidal precedent will be set, and some nuclear power in the international community will eventually go to total war with Israel and show them the precise lack of mercy they showed to Palestine. If Palestine and its allies annihilate Israel, Palestine will inherit a land soaked in blood, and the internecine warfare between factions will never stop until one faction emerges victorious in a generation-long totalitarian state of murder. If there is a binational state, a future civil war would be a foregone conclusion. If the status quo's maintained, the death tolls simply pile up until one of these solutions present themselves.
So that leaves the two state solution: a terrible solution among much shittier ones.
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Israel is 75 years old, and Netanyahu is still Israel's only long term Prime Minister born after the creation of the state. For almost exactly one year there was Naftali Bennett and six months there was Yair Lapid: other than them, that's it. It would seem, for all purposes, that Netanyahu's Israel is what the founding generation fought for: easy money and lack of scruple, and, god knows how, a simultaneous lack of regard for both peace and vigilance. Teetering so on the edge of authoritarianism that a war could spill it over into precisely the sort of Francoist military dictatorship that presaged the coming of the last Jewish genocide.
But Brother Netanyahu is our kin. There is not a single Jew on earth who didn't somehow benefit from him in the short term, and we will all pay God's price for what Bibi did for us.
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