Augean Stables

Laurent Murawiec has a thoughtful piece at MENA on the attitude of Europeans towards Israel: “Disagreeable Reflections on the Jewish Question in Contemporary France” [subscription required, well worth it]. It begins with his recollections of a conversation with an old friend, a straight-shooter in the French Foreign Ministry. The conversation turned to the Middle East and his friend began to insist that Palestinian behavior, including suicide bombing, resulted from Israeli oppression.

Religion? Arab despotism? English, Nazi, Soviet intervention in regional affairs? Nothing. The key was that Israel ‘oppresses’ the Palestinians and that these latter can ‘only’ react with violence, including against civilians and innocents, etc. The murder of innocents is, therefore, explained, and, in the end, justified ‘objectively,’ even if it produces some regrettable deaths. The discussion became tenser. By the end, C… threw out: ‘If it continues like this Israelis will have no other solution but to treat the Palestinians the way the Nazis treated the Jews during the Third Reich.’ Everything was said: the mechanisms of Israeli politics derive from an exterminationist logic: the Jews have transformed themselves into Nazis.

Murawiec goes on to discuss the ways in which anti-Semitism, in the form of anti-Zionism, is no longer emotional, obsessional, paranoid, but now “objective” in the sense that it’s a simple reading of the facts. Israel does oppress the Palestinians. And the only good Jews are the ones who can be sufficiently self-critical to distance themselves from the crimes of that “shitty little country” that now does to the Palestinians what the anti-semites of history have done to the Jews.

Among the many inverted elements in the French logic about Israel is a grotesque twist of the moral knife. Israelis, and the Jews who support them, are automatically considered “communautaristes”, or so hopelessly partisan, so tribal in their loyalties, that they cannot be trusted. Whatever they say, the French dismiss it as agenda-driven and unreliable. Even the claims that Ilan Halimi was killed because he was Jewish were dismissed in this manner.

The only Jews this culture can respect are those ready to turn on their own, denounce the racism and fascism of their “co-religionists”, and reinforce the demonization of Israel that appeals so deeply to the ideological and psychological needs of the larger culture. At the same time, in a move worthy of the kind of perverted parody to which Jackie Mason made allusion, they eagerly accept whatever accusations the Arabs — the tribal, my-people-right-or-wrong folks par excellence — offer them. Hence the wild success of Pallywood and Muhammed al Durah in Europe even more than in the USA.

But behind this twisted logic so bizarre when it comes from people as naturally suspicious (méfiants) as the French, lies a more profound psychological problem that contributes significantly to the extremely dangerous situation that now prevails in Europe… almost a death wish. At one level, one might call this a perverted effort to deal with Holocaust guilt.

Consider three strange aspects of the European attitude towards Israel.

On one level on can understand this as underdoggism: the Israelis are strong, the Palestinians weak. “Resistance is not Terrorism.” But on another one can understand it as a desire not to let Israel off the hook: if we admit how relentlessly vicious the Palestinian “resistance”, if we let people know what kind of genocidal madness permeates Palestinian media, schools and mosques it would be harder to assault the Israelis for their excess use of force and their paranoia.

All of these traits, taken to the extremes that the French do, suggest that the way the French (and by extension, the Europeans who follow their lead in these matters) want to handle their guilt over the Holocaust is to point the finger at Israel and say, “you’re no better than we are… no, wait, latest news coming in suggests you’re worse than we are. You’re as bad as the Nazis.” As one commentator put it in the wake of Talal abu Rahma’s staged footage of Muhammad al Durah: “Al Durah’s picture erases, obliterates, the one of the boy in the ghetto.” We don’t have to feel guilty about you Jews, and if we do, we don’t have to feel we have a debt to you Jews, because you’re not innocent.

Now any psychiatrist — not to mention someone who pays attention to issues of morality — will tell you that this is not a particularly healthy way to go about dealing with guilt. When you run from guilt by scape-goating the victim of your crimes, you compound, not relieve the burden. Moral Schadenfreude, taking solace in the moral “fall” of Israel, is not a substitute for repentence.

Not surprisingly, the European approach to Israel therefore resembles the behavior of a drug addict, someone whose need for a fix has him hungering for increasingly large doses of increasingly less effective shots of moral Schadenfreude. “Painted cakes do not satisfy.” Real massacres the Israelis didn’t commit (like Sabra and Shatilla), false reports of massacres (Jenin), staged footage of a child shot (Al Durah), may give an initial thrill, but after a while they don’t work. Europeans apparently desperately need a real massacre, a real, clear-cut case of Israelis slaughtering Palestinians by the hundreds and the thousands, and preferably the tens of thousands, like the French, the British, the Dutch, the Belgians, the Germans, and all the other imperial powers of Europe did in their heyday. Only then will they feel better.

Woe onto those poor suffering people whom Europeans befriend.

So like a 300 pound man with a high cholesterol count who can’t stop popping bacon cheeseburgers and washing them down with cheesecake, this behavior is self-destructive. At a moment of crisis in French and European society, when the values of honesty and tolerance, the commitment to playing fair and respecting others is critical, the Europeans turn on a population overwhelmingly committed to playing by the rules of civil society, and side with a group who not only despise those rules, but plan the overthrow of the European societies built on those rules. Cowardice, bad faith, hypocrisy, arrogance… sounds like a scene from Sartre’s No Exit.

And ultimately, this kind of stuff backfires. The pervasive acceptance in European society of the trope Israeli oppression causes Palestinian hatred acts as a form of cultural AIDS. It prevents any serious analysis of the situation; it forces a reading of in which any hatred and violence from the Palestinians has no existence outside the conflict with Israel, no existential being except in response to Israel’s existence. Thus any connection between Palestinian Jihad against Israel and the larger global Jihad which, among other things, has Europe in its scope, either does not exist, or is Israel’s fault.

So any time anyone in France or Europe wakes up to the problem, any time they begin to analyze the sources of Muslim hatred of European culture, any time they identify autonomous elements within Muslim and Arab society that may be critical in appreciating the nature of the threat… in other words, any time the auto-immune system begins to operate, and a European, a Frenchman or woman, begins to identify the real threat to their culture, the anti-Zionist impulse shuts it down.

The first time this pattern became clear was in the case of Muhammad al Durah: the French news stations ran his picture repeatedly because this tasty truffle so pleased the French palate — a get-out-of-holocaust-guilt-free card. But they played them at the same time to their Arab and Muslim populations for whom it was a much more powerful drug — a call to global Jihad in which the French were as much the target, as worthy of death, as the Israelis.

It continues apace, replicated in the self-accusatory response to the riots, to the Danish Cartoons, to every aggression from a religious and social movement whose scale and menace the Europeans systematically underestimate, systematically dismiss. “Il faut pas dramatiser,” say some French academics. After all, it might seem unseemly, or still worse, it might let Israel off the hook. Sooner die than that.