For brothers slaughtered in the ghetto,
who never reached her borders—
we’ll grant—the right to speak to Comrade Parabellum
Haim Gouri, 1943, ‘The Right to Speak to Comrade Parabellum’
the right to speak to Comrade Submachine Gun
For a drifting ship of exiles
that never reached its land—
we’ll grant—
In recent months, I’ve been circling around Haim Gouri’s poem “The Right to Speak to Comrade Parabellum.” Something about the reality we are stuck in—where words lose their meaning and only actions speak—struck me, especially while on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean. The times are certainly different—the year is not 1943, we are not fighting the White Paper, and brothers are no longer being slaughtered in the ghetto. And yet, the right to speak is once again granted to Comrade Submachine Gun. Perhaps nothing has changed since the beginning of 1948, when Ben-Gurion said he had forgotten the meaning of the word “state” and the word “redemption,” because at the present time, “the wisdom of Israel is now the wisdom of war.” It may be that since then, the right to speak has been taken from the people of this land for good and given to rocks and tools.
My real acquaintance with Professor Shaul Magid is limited to one discussion at Harvard where I was a bystander. I was impressed by his pleasant demeanor and intelligence. The little I know about his approach I gleaned from a single article in Haaretz. Since people these days become experts on many things just by reading one or two articles in Haaretz, I’m allowing myself to be an expert-from-one-Haaretz-article as well. But really, the following remarks are not about Professor Magid or the choice of him as head of the Harvard Divinity School, but about Zionism, Israeliness, and Judaism.
Welcome to the Desert of the Real
At one point during our stay in the US, an acquaintance, a very active and thoughtful person in the Jewish community, approached me. He told me that he had been asked to help the various communities in his town, to have a new discussion about Israel. Three decades ago, the communities chose to stop talking about Israel because it was too divisive. Following October 7th, they realized they couldn’t continue to avoid the topic. They weren’t looking for agreements, just a way to resume the conversation. He asked for my help in thinking about the right way to approach the subject. I responded quite condescendingly and said—there are two places, which are sometimes physically in the same spot, but they are two completely different places. One is called Yisra’el – Yisra’el is a real place, with rocks and thorns and people and ugliness and beauty, like other places of the “place” type. And there’s another place called Israel, which is an imagined place, associated with ideas and dreams connected to places of the “imagination” type. And you think it’s the same place, but it’s not the same place at all. So I can’t really help you, because I think I know Yisra’el pretty well, but I’ve never been to Israel and I’m quite new to talking about it. And therefore, it doesn’t really matter what or how you say things about Israel, because it’s not a real thing.
In the article about him, Professor Magid emphasizes that he is not criticizing Israeliness, but rather Zionism as an ideology. He could, it seems, have partially adopted what I told my local acquaintance. But I think he misses the mark completely when he talks about Zionism. While in the United States, Zionism is an ideology (I don’t really know what this ideology says, but I know it’s somehow connected to Israel), in the Land of Israel, Zionism is not an ideology. In fact, Zionism is an anti-ideological movement. Zionism means abandoning the ideological, religious, abstract, conceptual muscle in favor of the real. And everyone who touches Zionism, including the Kookists whom Magid despises, eventually becomes a person of reality. Israeliness is the most pronounced embodiment of Zionism – a nation with almost no connection to the word, whether spoken or, even more so, written.
This year, Magid published a book on Meir Kahane as an “American Jewish radical.” I think he’s very accurate in that. Since Israeliness and Zionism are anti-ideological, an ideology of this kind can arrive from America or Europe in a variety of forms, but here in the Land of Yisra’el, we don’t have much to do with it. Magid says some correct things about Kahane:
“All of Kahane’s radicalism was built on 1960s [American] culture. It was built on the race wars of that era, and he transferred it to Israel. It was really strange when he came to Israel and translated it into the Israeli reality.”
And Magid adds: “His thought remained American.” What Magid misses here, in my opinion, is that thought – any thought -is an American or Jewish matter, but really not a Zionist or Israeli one. Zionism, indeed, began as an ideology, an idea without substance, but at its core, it is an ideology that destroys itself, that strives to prefer existence over the idea. And in our situation here, 130 years after the first Zionist Congress, Zionism has won: we have no time to think since the right to speak was given to Comrade Parabellum and Comrade Submachine Gun. This is misleading because, unlike Israel, America is a religious, rhetorical, and textual nation, a nation of State of the Union speeches, a Constitution, the Federalist Papers, and so on – a nation of gifted preachers and speakers. And when you’re sitting at Harvard, it’s easy to be convinced that the whole world is made of words. That you can gather all the words and all the thoughts from all corners of the globe to the hills of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and deal with them in a calm and measured way. In contrast to Harvard, Yisra’el is still a people of “we will do and (maybe) we will hear.” In other words, in Yisra’el, they still haven’t learned how to do things with words.
As a scholar of ideologies, Magid, like many on the left, longs for the glorious socialist past of Israel and laments the ideology that replaced it:
“What disappeared is the socialist spirit. And what took its place? Globalization. My teacher, Eliezer Schweid, said that globalization could be the end of Zionism, because what is the collective glue that holds the people together in an era of globalization? A vacuum, cultural and spiritual, was created, and what fills that vacuum is the religious-national. In other words, Kookism (the teachings of Rabbi Kook, A.H.) and Kahaneism filled the void that was created.”
Magid misses the point completely because he doesn’t understand that it wasn’t the socialist spirit that disappeared, but Zionism that defeated socialism just as it defeated all the other “isms.” It also defeated Kookism. Zionism eats ideologies for breakfast. And it is also defeating globalization. On points, but it’s winning – not with ideas, but simply because this is home. Globalization is a bigger challenge for Zionism because it’s not an ideology. And Ben-Gvir, as Magid recognizes, is neither a Kahaneist nor a Kookist. But then Magid makes a mistake – he claims that Ben-Gvir is a “neo-Kahaneist.” He doesn’t understand that Ben-Gvir’s success in Israel, unlike the radical Meir Kahane, stems from the fact that he is not an ideologue but just a thug.
Magid’s mistake comes from the fact that he attributes too much meaning to thoughts and words. And this is even more misleading because the words here and there are sometimes identical, but they don’t mean the same thing, just as Israel and Yisra’el are not the same place.
The Conflict Between Zionism and Judaism
It seems that Magid’s motivation is connected to the fact that he is a prominent (non-representing) representative of the American Jewish left’s criticism of Is-rael, as another interviewee in the article says:
“The rift of American Jewry is not only in the Zionist context and the context of Israel’s behavior. There is a disagreement here in the most basic sense of what it means to be a Jew. And Shaul not only knew how to point this out, he also tries to give this phenomenon a kind of constructive form.”
Joshua Leifer on Magid.
Zionism is a threat to Judaism because it requires taking a stand, not in the sense of a “pro-position” or argument, but in the sense of standing in a certain place in the world, a physical place, with physical consequences and physical horizons and boundaries of consciousness, and abandoning the position that allows one to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Zionism is a rebel aginst the transcendent position of jew – that post-traumatic, out-of-body position that Jews have loved so much since everything was burned down for them.
And Magid seemingly says this but doesn’t understand what he’s saying when he criticizes the Zionist narrative: “What is very dangerous about Zionism is that you are told that we have reached the end of the story.” This is half true—according to Zionism, we have reached the end of the story not because history is over or because there will be no more futures after Zionism, but because the matter of the story is no longer interesting. Yes, new things will necessarily happen, but it’s not so important to tell them; Israeliness forgoes the story and the Jewish obsession with telling it and returns to reality. And Magid misses the point because even the religious-Zionist enlistment in this war is, first and foremost, a Zionist enlistment, meaning it is neither ideological nor messianic. Simply because that’s how it is, because someone has to do the job. And the efforts from previous decades to create some stabilization here through the Oslo process or through the Disengagement were also Zionist, not ideological, moves because they were trying to do something within a complex and impossible reality.
At the End of Every Sentence There he Sits
When you approach things from an external position, you can say general, meaningless things and they will still sound wise and clever. When Magid addresses the issue of solutions to the conflict, he repeats the same old talk:
“Zionism comes and says: ‘The whole land is ours, but we are perhaps willing to give the Palestinians a part of the land.’ This approach must be erased. This is not only our land. This is a land of two peoples. So some will say this is the end of Zionism, and I say that’s okay, nothing lasts forever.”
Zionism doesn’t say “the whole land is ours” because Zionism doesn’t say; Zionism does, it creates solutions for Jews in the Land of Yisra’el. Zionism knows there are two peoples in this land because that is a significant part of what it is preoccupied with. And if for a moment you thought it was a good thing that the Jewish people maintain a radical ideological faction on the banks of the Charles River to develop radical ideas for changing reality, don’t hold your breath – Magid won’t tell you anything new on the matter. And this is because it is not reality that is interesting, but the idea. But really, why do we blame a professor of theology for looking for Yamakas instead of reality? The problem is that we are the ones who turn to him as if he is referring to something real.
At the end of the article, Magid seemingly contradicts himself. He starts by saying that Kahane was a radical ideologue. But then he claims that all Israelis have adopted Kahane’s radical approach:
“What scares me most are all these people who blame Hamas for the famine or the war. It’s not the Israeli right; it’s the center. Kahane was a survivalist. If you had told him that genocide would save us, he would have said, ‘Okay, genocide.’ Yahya Sinwar turned the Israelis into survivalists, into people who don’t care if children die. These are the things that scare and bother me the most.”
This is exactly what we described earlier regarding words that seemingly mean the same thing. Yes, it’s possible that part of Kahane’s ideology dealt with the idea of ‘survival.’ But Kahane certainly was not a survivalist like the Israelis after October 7. And that’s because we actually need to survive. And to survive, we need to deal with reality, and when we deal with it, we see that Hamas is indeed responsible for the famine and the war. That Hamas makes cynical and spectacular use of the famine and even promotes it. So yes. We are trying to survive but we’re not survivalist becuase there’s nothing ideological about it. It’s sure no fun, but we want to continue living here. And life here is not in the realm of ideas; it’s in the confrontation with the real Yahya Sinwar. It’s not that we don’t care about dead children. It’s that we care about life.
The Present Absent
The article begins with a picturesque description of Magid’s abandonment of Religious Zionism when he discovers that the Arab on the donkey is perceived in Religious Zionism as part of the landscape—”that is, there is a stone, there is a tree, there is a mountain, there is an Arab.” And when we return to thinking about solutions to the conflict, that same Arab with the same donkey from the first act appears and is absent again. The discussion about the moral, Jewish position never seriously deals with the rival’s desires, his aspirations, and what he is willing to do to promote them. No one asked the Arab if he wanted the moral and proper solution that would free the Jews from the curse of the Land of Israel and the two nations within its womb. Because this solution is supposedly required so that we can continue to be Jews, people of the world, and what does the Arab understand about that.
And unfortunately, American Jewry will not save us from this because in their eyes, we are all the Arab with the donkey. There is a stone, there is a tree, and there in Israel, there are Israelis. We are all scenery in some internal discussion of theirs, a hyper-Ashkenazi, terribly privileged, and unreal discussion. In contrast to the battle on the lawns of Harvard, the battle in Gaza is not an ideological one (at least from the Israeli side). The campaign is a Zionist attempt to fix this broken thing. And because Israelis don’t know how to do things with words, there are no words and no story, and it is very difficult for us to explain where this is going or what it is supposed to do. And therefore, the Jews there have no chance of understanding what is happening here.
The dirty little secret of strategy is that it is done with words. But without any words, here in Yisra’el we here are trying to make strategy only with our feet and hands. And yet, our motivation is clear – we want to bring our hostages back, and we want there to be a future for Gaza, and we know there will be no future for Gaza if Hamas continues to control it. We have some vague clues regarding how we’re going to get there, and for sure we will need all the available help in reaching it because it’s our first time. But since there are no words, the people who could be our helpers, look for a story and an ideology everywhere see all the words they already know but have no meaning in Yisra’el, and therefore they understand nothing. And tragically, all the clever Jews, with their propositions and super-positions, have so far failed to bring a single new idea on how to change reality. For them, it doesn’t matter, because words are everything, but for us, all that matters is reality, and so we will once again grant the right to speak.
Leave a Reply