Vicious Circles

Slavoj Zizek, "Nothing new on the Middle Eastern front"

Israel, Hamas and Ukraine: History repeats amid the echoes of global conflict

LJUBLJANA, Slovenia – The title of this commentary, a twist on the title of Erich Maria Remarque’s famous 1929 novel about everyday life in the trenches of World War I, seems fitting for the first anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

While the media covers each new and surprising development — the killing of Hamas’s leader, Ismail Haniyeh and Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah; Israel’s attacks in southern Lebanon; Iran’s ballistic-missile strikes on Israel — the fact is that things are becoming what they always were. Potentialities that were present from the beginning are being realized.

From a broader historical and philosophical perspective, Israel’s critics miss the point when they claim that it is failing in its mission to destroy Hamas and is merely killing Palestinians and razing Gaza. Recall Israel’s strategy before Oct. 7. For years, it ensured that foreign financing reached Hamas in order to keep the Palestinians divided, thus preventing any progress toward a two-state solution.

Of course, Israel is acting in self-defense in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon. But much depends on how one defines “self.” If Russia occupies part of Ukraine and proclaims it part of Russia, can it then claim self-defense when it crushes those who resist? When Germany invaded Belgium at the start of World War I, a Belgian minister supposedly observed that, “Whatever historians will say later about this war, nobody will able to say that Belgium attacked Germany.” Yet since Russia’s invasion, respect for settled facts no longer holds. The Kremlin and its allies have become increasingly effective at claiming that Ukraine started the conflict.

Israel’s rhetoric is not dissimilar. When the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) launched its “limited ground operation” in Lebanon on Oct. 1, one was reminded of Russia’s euphemistic description of its invasion as a “special military operation.” In both cases, we can paraphrase Groucho Marx: It may look like war, and it may hurt like war; but don’t let that fool you. This really is war.

Again, things are becoming what they always were. In late July, a coterie of Israeli ministers, MPs, journalists and TV commentators decried an IDF military police raid on the Sde Teiman base in southern Israel, following reports of Israeli reservists abusing Palestinian detainees. The raid and arrests triggered large public protests, even though it was other Israeli reservists who had blown the whistle. Horrified by what they had witnessed, they heroically came forward with allegations that security personnel on the base were torturing Palestinian prisoners by sodomizing them with metal rods. Some of the prisoners then bled to death.

Yet rather than being outraged by such atrocities, some Israeli officials were outraged at those prosecuting the case. Consider the following transcript from a debate in the Knesset (parliament), aired by the British journalist Peter Oborne:

Unidentified Israeli MP: “This is insanity, someone in the prosecutor’s office thinks it’s possible to arrest soldiers for things they do to Nukhba (Hamas Elite Unit) terrorists. We can’t continue as usual. ...”

(Interjection): “To insert a stick in a person’s rectum, is this legitimate?”

MP: “Shut up! Yes, if he is Nukhba, everything is legitimate to do. Everything.”

Or consider this clip from a panel discussion on Israeli TV (also shared by Oborne):

First panelist: “Soldiers are suspected of raping a shackled prisoner — this doesn’t concern you?”

Second panelist: “I don’t give a rat’s ass what they do to that Hamas man. The only problem I see is that it’s not state policy to abuse detainees. First, they deserve it and it’s a great form of revenge. Second, maybe it will act as a deterrent.”

Imagine our reaction if all this had happened in Russia. Crazy as it may sound, the best way to account for our moral predicament may be to entertain a conspiracy theory. Almost a year ago, I imagined a phone call between Israeli and Hamas hardliners:

Israeli hard-liner: “Hi, do you remember how we discreetly supported you against the Palestine Liberation Organization? Now you owe us a favor: Why don’t you attack and slaughter some Jews close to Gaza? They’re friends to Arabs, peaceniks, so we don’t need them. What we need is something to end the civil protests against us and to distract from the slow ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. The world will be shocked at your brutality and we will be able to play the victim, achieve national unity and accelerate ethnic cleansing in the West Bank!”

Hamas hard-liner: “Okay, but we need a favor: To avenge our slaughter, you must bomb civilians in Gaza, killing thousands, especially children. That will foment anti-Semitism around the world, which is our true goal!”

Israeli hard-liner: “No problem, we also need a resurgence of anti-Semitism, which allows us to keep playing the role of the victim and do whatever we want in self-defense!”

This imaginary scenario is obscene, of course. But recall Robert Harris’s novel "The Ghost" (later a film by Roman Polanski). A ghostwriter for Adam Lang, a former U.K. prime minister modeled on Tony Blair, discovers that his client has been planted in the Labour Party and manipulated by the CIA all along. Commenting on the book’s “shock-horror revelation,” a critic for the Observer wrote that it was “so shocking it simply can’t be true, though if it were it would certainly explain pretty much everything about the recent history of Great Britain.”

Like Harris’s invention, my own abhorrent scenario teases out the logic of today’s perverse tango: It isn’t true, but if it was, it would explain everything. My imaginary phone call is not part of reality, but it is real. Since victims are in principle permitted to strike back, the war gives Israel a chance to pursue ethnic cleansing in Greater Israel. According to Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, the “voluntary migration” of Palestinians in Gaza is the “right humanitarian solution” for the besieged enclave and for the region.

The parallel between Ukraine and Palestine has grown stronger as some key distinctions have become blurred. The pro-Israel West (especially the United States) now frames its support for Ukraine and its support for Israel as two initiatives in the same global war, as if Israel is no different from Ukraine. Meanwhile, on the pseudo-left, many claim that the initial attacks by Russia and Hamas were both justified defensive measures in response to historical provocations and oppression, as if Donetsk is the Russian West Bank.

In the new world order that is emerging, the Gaza war is a nodal point that condenses all the defining antagonisms of the modern era. It is where everything will be decided. “Palestine” today is a universal symbol — a stand-in for all European sins and a font of anti-Semitism.

The tragedy is that Israel, which resulted from Europe’s guilt over the Holocaust, is becoming a symbol of European oppression and colonization. Europeans gave the survivors of that genocide land that other people had inhabited for centuries. It is that original sin which, unexpiated, is once again preventing peace and quiet on the Middle Eastern front.