Eva Illouz : Rethinking the 'banality of evil' theory
The
time has come to reexamine Hannah Arendt's thesis. Not all evil is
banal, certainly not the kind that grips a nation with a sense of racial
superiority. Israel is…
haaretz.com
Rethinking the 'banality of evil' theory
The time has come to
reexamine Hannah Arendt's thesis. Not all evil is banal, certainly not
the kind that grips a nation with a sense of racial superiority. Israel
is neither Nazi nor fascist or apartheid – but its current colonialist
regime does bear a family resemblance with other evil regimes.
What makes some political
regimes evil? Why do some human beings, especially if they belong to
ethnic, racial, religious or national majorities, want to expel others
from their homes, take away their work, their land and their property,
put them in prisons, torture or kill them – especially if the latter are
members of minority groups?
The evilness of the human
heart has long preoccupied theologians and philosophers. In the 1960s, a
social scientist resolved to use the methods of science to understand
the nature of evil, what made people engage in large-scale massacres, of
the kind for which Europe had just recently been the theater. For that
purpose, he devised what became one of the most influential experiments
of all times. This man was named Stanley Milgram, the son of Jewish
Europeans who had immigrated to the United States. The brilliant
experimental psychologist from Yale University was deeply troubled by
the genocide of the Jews. As he himself said, the impulse behind his
studies stemmed directly from the Shoah.
The experiment, which began
running in 1961, involved recruiting subjects who were made to believe
they were participating in a study about how people learn. The subjects
were invariably assigned to the role of “teacher,” while all of the
“learners” in fact were part of Milgram’s team. The teacher would read a
list of pairs of words to the learner, and then go over the list again,
asking the learner to recall the second word in each pair. Each time
the learner gave a wrong answer, he was administered an electric shock,
with the strength of the shock rising each time another wrong answer was
given.
There were 15 levels of
shocks, with the highest – marked, “extreme shock: danger” – said to be
set at 450 volts. As the shocks became more severe, the “learner,” who
was really an actor, began to protest more strenuously, eventually
screaming in pain, before going ominously silent. But if and when the
volunteer said he wanted to stop, that he was concerned for the welfare
of the learner, the person overseeing the trial would respond, with a
firm voice, “you must continue” or say, “the experiment requires you to
continue.”
What made the experiment
particularly brilliant was that before he ran it, Milgram surveyed a
wide sample of people and social groups and asked them to evaluate the
likelihood that people would administer the maximum shock, if instructed
to do so. Almost all the people he polled predicted the percentage
would be very low, that most people would refuse to cooperate with the
experimenter.
The actual results were
stunning: 65 individuals administered the final maximum electric shock
of 450 volts. Many expressed great discomfort in doing so (sweating,
shaking, trembling, stuttering, etc.), but nonetheless, they continued
until the end. As Milgram put it in a 1974 article: “Ordinary people,
simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their
part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process.” He
identified obedience to hierarchy as crucial to the process of
destroying others.
This experiment resonated with
another highly publicized thesis offered by Hannah Arendt, in her book
“Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.” In fact, the
trial of Adolf Eichmann, which was covered by political philosopher
Arendt, also took place in 1961, getting under way a few short months
before Milgram’s experiments, and he could not have been ignorant of the
bewildering question Arendt’s report had raised: Was the cataclysm of
the Shoah the deed of a monstrous, abnormal, atypical people, or the
result of an undiagnosed but latent disease of regular, ordinary human
beings?
Rather than being exceptional,
claimed Arendt, the Shoah was the ultimate expression of a universal
and banal capacity to not ask questions, to fulfill orders, to trust in
one’s superiors. In analyzing Eichmann’s own account, Arendt had come to
the conclusion that the person who had signed orders to kill hundreds
of thousands of Jews had been only a cog in a vast bureaucratic machine
of killing.
Christopher Browning’s classic
1992 study of the 101st Reserve Battalion of the Ordnungspolizei (Order
Police) provided further historical proof of the thesis: He studied a
reserve unit whose members were ordinary working-class German men, who
were drafted to serve in occupied Poland, and whose assignment included
killing, by bullet, tens of thousands of Jews (some 83,000 in total).
They shot at close range, ceaselessly, from morning to night, men,
women, children, old people, pregnant women, babies. And because this
was a harrowing task – their uniforms quickly became soaked in blood,
and they witnessed close-up the growing piles of corpses – their
commander gave them the option, during one particularly horrendous
massacre, not to participate in the butchery. Nonetheless, the
overwhelming majority of soldiers continued shooting: that is, they
preferred to bow to pressure, both from their superiors and from their
peers.
Out of 500, only 12 (!) took
advantage of the option not to shoot. The very title of Browning’s book,
“Ordinary Men,” emphasized too the normality of men who could execute
monstrous acts: The men of Reserve Battalion 101 were not committed
Nazis and none had criminal records. They simply did what others did and
what they were told to do.
The theses offered by Milgram,
Arendt and Browning are strikingly convergent. All arrived at the
conclusion that a key explanation of evil, even of its most extreme
form, was a latent tendency of all human beings: the propensity to
follow orders and to conform. The “banality of evil” thesis – the idea
of the crushing power of hierarchical authority or of peer pressure –
universalized both victims and perpetrators. In the same way that the
Shoah became the universal symbol of all victims of racism and hatred,
its perpetrators became the universal symbols of the dormant human
propensity to fall into barbarity.
For Milgram, Arendt and
Browning, then, a monster need not have horns and a tail; nor does he
need to be mentally ill, a deficient father or a cruel husband. Most
surprisingly, the monster does not even really need to hate the person
he kills. A monster need only have a few banal capacities: to accept
authority unquestioningly, to be susceptible to group and peer pressure,
and to display a special kind of forgetfulness – of the humanity of the
human being he destroys.
The banality of evil thesis
became especially influential in academia, probably because its thesis
suits well the axioms of social psychology and sociology that say that
people’s behavior is shaped by a group. This thesis, however, suffers
from three flaws, and therefore the time has come to reexamine it.
The first flaw in the thesis
is that it makes evil itself banal. If everyone has a Nazi sleeping
inside, it makes it more difficult to be scandalized by barbarity. It
also makes it more difficult to hold those who perpetuate barbarian acts
morally responsible for their acts..
Second, the thesis tends to
decontextualize evil: A soldier shooting at an adolescent who throws a
stone at a checkpoint becomes equivalent to a soldier releasing hydrogen
cyanide into a gas chamber.
Finally, the thesis has
distracted our attention from other, perhaps more powerful forms of evil
– those that derive from people’s deep belief that others are inferior,
that they represent a danger to their group and society, that they
deserve to be expelled, imprisoned or killed. The banality thesis is
blatantly inadequate to address people’s readiness to expropriate the
property, dignity and freedom of others, not because they have been
ordered to do so, but out of a sense of moral entitlement and moral
mission. The political leaders of evil regimes are not obeying orders
when they incite to hatred against a minority group, when they propose
racist laws, when they encourage the army and the police to commit
violence acts, or in branding as traitors those who attempt to uphold
the rights of members of minority groups. When they do this, politicians
are acting according to their perception of what is right. Whence the
question: What must happen in a society for a large group of people and
its representatives to transform violence into a form of moral behavior?
In a very important book,
“Diviser Pour Tuer” (“Divide and Kill”), which inspired and shaped my
reflections above, the Dutch sociologist Abram de Swaan rejects the
thesis of the banality of evil by inquiring into the conditions that
precede genocides. He examined the cultural context and frame of the
various nations that massacred so many people during the 20th century
throughout the world. An estimated 100 million people, says de Swaan,
perished after being targeted by other human beings in Congo, Indonesia,
South-West Africa, China, Mexico, Cambodia, Pakistan, Rwanda, Turkey,
the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Kosovo and of course all those killed by
Germany.
Genocides, de Swaan writes,
are preceded by two powerful cognitive and emotional features. The first
is the capacity of a particular group to create a very high internal
cohesiveness, to feel unified by a strong and glorious common historical
past and by a shared sense of mission; the second is the capacity to
“dis-identify” with other groups, to draw a rigid boundary between “us”
and “them” – a process that usually occurs after the minority group has
been isolated, physically or symbolically, from the majority. Strategies
of isolation can include putting members of the minority into ghettos,
having them wear a distinctive mark (like a yellow star), or building
fences, literally dividing “us” and “them.” According to de Swaan, these
constitute the necessary (but not sufficient) conditions for massacres
or genocides.
Are groups a source of evil?
Collective identification does
not automatically derive from the spontaneous and natural fact of being
born into same group. It is actively maintained through beliefs in the
uniqueness and greatness of the group. Identification with a group is
achieved by telling the story of its creation, often located in a remote
past, in which a god (or several gods) assisted. Some groups even have a
story of how they were chosen by God to accomplish a special mission on
earth. Identification with the group is further maintained by marking
out the fundamental differences of one’s own group from other groups.
Nazis excelled at both tasks.
They bestowed on Germans a presumably ancient lineage found in the
Aryans. The Aryans were at the top of a hierarchy of human beings; they
were the HerrenVolk (the master race), which was entrusted with a
special mission (to conquer the land and erase the lower races – Slavs,
Jews, etc.). The belief in a common ancestry enabled the articulation of
a messianic vocation to the group: Nazis believed that their noble
origins made them a chosen people endowed with the mission of redeeming
the world.
German historian Hartmut
Lehman has showed, for example, that throughout the 19th century, the
camp of conservative, devout and nationalist religious Protestants in
Germany came to develop the notion of a special covenant between God and
the Germans. That idea became especially strong after the 1870 victory
of Germany over France in the Franco-Prussian War. Those Protestants
were the most likely to take part in the German national movement and to
hate the French (who had invented human rights and the Enlightenment),
as well as the socialists and liberals inside Germany. As Lehman put it:
“The idea that the Germans were a chosen people and that they should
make special sacrifices in order to regain greatness were some of the
most dangerous and misleading Nazi slogans after 1933.” The sense of a
group’s greatness, of its historic mission, of its superiority, can
forge a powerful collective narrative that unifies its members.
That sense of unity, of
“group-ness,” is also manifested by the daily and routine exclusion of
others – in deeds, in law and in ideology. Nazis were racist, but
ironically, they were racist first and foremost because they adopted a
racial view of themselves which they institutionalized through the
mechanisms of the state. Nazis divided Germans into true and non-true,
thus putting a mystique of blood at the center of their nationality.
True Germans were now defined, by lineage, as being descendants of
Aryans.
Lineage and ancestry
transformed German-ness into a race. This is also why Nazis became so
preoccupied with preserving the “purity” of their blood and race. Once
lineage was crucial to nationality, nationality became defined in
biological terms: One was either born German or wasn’t; one either had
German “blood” or didn’t. It is this racial conception of themselves
that led Nazis to establish a process that would trace the purity of
one’s family lineage and prove one’s Aryan ancestry. Beginning in April
1933, this certificate was required from all employees and officials in
the public sector. This racial conception of the German nation further
explains why Nazis abhorred mixed marriages between Jews and Germans.
If a true German was someone
of Aryan ancestry – that is, if citizenship became a matter of
biological lineage – it was far easier to turn, overnight, bona fide
citizens into non-citizens. Nazis thus illustrated what sociologists
know: namely, that groups do not have intrinsic or natural boundaries.
These boundaries – between “us” and “them” – can be easily shifted. Jews
viewed themselves as full members of the German or French nations until
these nations “reclassified” them according to ethnic or racial
criteria. The Nazi notion of race divided humanity into un-mixable human
groups, making mixing itself a crime, the sign of a degenerate
humanity.
A distinctive characteristic
of evil regimes in general is the belief in the need to preserve the
racial or ethnic or religious purity of the dominant group, with
minority groups – be they “Jews,” “Muslims,” “Tutsis” or “Armenians” –
becoming a qualitatively distinct group, a compact entity perceived to
be radically “other,” distinct from the majority by dint of some
invisible and powerful criterion. Mixed marriages represent a dangerous
threat of pollution to the purity of the race.
Such polarization between
social groups, de Swaan says, are not born overnight. The capacity to
divide sharply between “us” and “them,” and to view the “them” as a
foreign element in our midst, is the product of a historical process
through which new modes of thought are acquired.
Nazis could instill new habits
of thought through a number of factors that had simmered and percolated
in German society for a decade. Germany had lost the Great War, and in a
country with a long authoritarian and militarist tradition, this defeat
represented a blow to national identity and pride. Even though Germany
had been an aggressor, many at home viewed it as a victim. The
resentment regarding Germany’s military defeat crystallized, in the
years following the armistice, around the “enemy within”: Political
propaganda, media, academia and religious clergy all concurred to view
Jews as inferior and dangerous, and to designate them and their
supporters as traitors from within. These fears were compounded by great
economic difficulties, which created a general climate of frustration
among the working and middle classes. A sharp antagonism between
political camps, one internationalist and one hyper-nationalist, was
accompanied by a progressive weakening of liberal, democratic forces.
All of these explain how the Nazis progressively enacted racist laws in a
way that was virtually unhindered.
The Nazi worldviews became
acceptable to a wide variety of Germans, not overnight but through a
gradual change of norms. Evil political regimes rarely emerge full-blown
overnight. They emerge after a period during which violence toward
another group becomes gradually normalized, in which violence verbal and
physical is a daily phenomenon, is justified, tolerated and
progressively unnoticed. According to de Swaan, societies in which
violence against another specific group is routinized and tolerated are
societies in which the mechanism of civilization has broken down.
“Civilization” must be
understood here in the sense that the Jewish sociologist Norbert Elias
gave the word: as a historical process in which the state progressively
monopolized violence, forbade members of a community to use violence
against each other, and came to appropriate, exercise and symbolize law
that was universally applied.
As the process unfolds, the
state plays the role within its territory of pacifier in relations among
its members. Civilization is created as people undergo the slow process
of learning to restrain their aggressiveness, of paying attention to
others through codes of civility, of spreading respect for the rule of
law. Civilization has nothing to do with the presence of Mozart, Heine,
high-tech or Google in its midst. Universalism flows naturally from
“civilized” societies because once violence is prohibited, it becomes
easier to view others as equal and similar to oneself.
De Swaan’s thesis is thus
startling: Civilization breaks down when one group inside the collective
body starts over-emphasizing its own cohesiveness and unity, thereby
excluding other groups, isolating them, spatially and symbolically. It
is an excess of unity that facilitates dis-identification from other
groups, and thus encourages violence (immediately after the Brexit vote,
England saw expressions of such breakdowns in codes of civility and in
verbal violence against Polish or Latvian migrants). The paradoxical
point here is thus that civilization breaks down through what
individuals often experience as positive, warm feelings deriving from
membership in a whole greater than themselves, in a unit imagined as
eternal and unified.
The elusive power of analogies
The question of what makes a
political regime into an evil one has become a burning one in Israel.
Israel Defense Forces Deputy Chief of Staff Yair Golan provoked a ruckus
earlier this year, when he expressed
his fears that Israel of today contained elements that were reminiscent
of the dark hours of Europe between the world wars. Former Defense
Minister Moshe Ya’alon, not known for his left-wing tendencies, has
spoken of the country’s “dangerous drift.”
These claims, proffered by
people who cannot be suspected of being pacifists, should give pause to
any intelligent and responsible Israeli citizen. The political climate
and policies of Israel of the last few years have been variously
qualified as “fascist,” “Nazi,” “apartheid” and reminiscent of the
Weimar Republic. In this super-game of super-analogies, it has become
difficult to know just what, if anything, has made Israel become an evil
state.
Let me say from the outset
that however much we may oppose the occupation, the analogy between
Israel and Nazi Germany must be erased from our conceptual map. A small
country recently born, engaged in a prolonged military conflict,
dominated by a religious worldview and engaged in a messy colonial
enterprise cannot be compared to an old country determined to dominate
the world through a secular and racial worldview, engaged in the
systematic conquest of land, and in the industrial mass destruction of
civilians who were not in any way its self-declared enemies. To draw a
direct line between a soldier in a concentration camp and a soldier
shooting at a Palestinian attacker lying on the ground, subverts one's
intelligence. However revolting both situations are, and however much
they may draw on some presumed primal instinct to kill and humiliate –
they occur in drastically different contexts.
The “banality of evil” thesis
tempts us to such analogies, but obscures crucial differences between
historical and other contexts, and ultimately confuses the similarity of
our moral outrage with the similarity of contexts. Such confusion
ultimately makes it more difficult to understand the nature of what we
oppose. Israel is not Nazi (it does not want to conquer the world and
has not industrialized its oppression of Palestinians), it is not
fascist (Israel has several parties competing for power and a free
press); and it is not overseeing a system of South African-style
apartheid. (Apartheid was not part of a military conflict, whereas the
very group that Israel oppresses and segregates, the Palestinians, are
also engaged through a system of regional alliances in a military
conflict with Israel through its identification with self-declared
enemies of Israel as Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, Syria, Lebanon Yet, many in
Israel and around the world are growing increasingly uneasy about the
political actions and statements proffered by representatives of the
government, so much so that we may speak of a new political regime
having taken over. So what exactly is the current Israeli regime?
The philosopher Ludwig
Wittgenstein offered a concept that may help the perplexed here, using
the following example: Such activities as card games, board games, ball
games and strategic games are all different (with different rules and
objectives) and in fact even have nothing in common (Monopoly, Scrabble
and chess games have nothing in common). Yet, Wittgenstein says, we know
they are all games and that they bear what he calls a “family
resemblance.” We know they are games in the same way we know three
people are of the same family when we look at their faces, even if we
cannot pinpoint a specific identical trait. There can be a family
resemblance between different objects, even if we cannot isolate a
common overlapping trait.
Wittgenstein’s analogy was for
language but it is an apt one to understand what is at stake here:
Israel’s current colonialist regime bears a family resemblance with
other evil regimes, even if it does not share overlapping features with
them. It is not Nazi, not apartheid, not fascist – yet it belongs to
that unhappy family. How do we know that? James Waller – a specialist in
the study of the Shoah and genocide in general – gives a hint: “The
greatest catastrophes occur when the distinctions between war and crime
fade; when there is dissolution of the boundaries between military and
criminal conduct, between civility and barbarity … Such acts are human
evil writ large.”
The question is thus the
following one: Is the distinction between war and crime fading in
contemporary Israel? This question was poignantly illustrated by the act of Elor Azaria, an IDF soldier in uniform who shot to death a wounded Palestinian lying on the ground,
in alleged violation of all rules of military engagement. It is not by
accident that this affair has shaken Israeli society to the core,
sending a competent defense minister home and driving wedges between the
political class, the top military brass and the general population.
This is because the question that implicitly reverberated through this
affair was whether the distinction between crime and war is fading in
Israel.
For the distinction between
warfare and crime against a population to start fading, the state itself
must be the source and origin of ordinary violence directed at ordinary
citizens. Moreover, such a state and its representatives must use an
ideology to justify violence against the minority group, and must try to
enshrine in law to make it look unavoidable, necessary and even moral.
In Israel the rabbinate has
played an increasingly powerful role in transforming nationality into a
quasi-racial definition, reserved only for a group that meets clear
biological requirements (conversion processes are so difficult and
humiliating that they are de facto a politics whose purpose is to
dissuade non-Jews from joining the Jewish people, thus reinforcing the
biological view that a Jew is someone born of a Jewish mother). It is
not by chance that religious people in Israel are spearheading racist
views. Rabbis on the public payroll call for not employing Arabs and for
boycotting shops that do so; these rabbis also call on the population not to rent or sell apartments to Arabs.
They frequently cite the Torah to justify the idea that that Jewish and
non-Jewish lives are of unequal value. In fact, the view that Jews and
non-Jews are both equally the children of God would be, for many
religious Jews, sacrilege, a profanation of Judaism. The Lehava
organization, that which battles against interfaith marriages and has
set for itself the goal of maintaining the racial purity of Jews has
been, as revealed in Haaretz in 2011, indirectly financed by the State
of Israel.
A legal prohibition on civil
and non-Orthodox weddings is preventing 660,000 Jewish Israelis –
including 364,000 immigrants from the former Soviet Union (or their
children) from marrying, because one or two of the partners in the union
does not conform biologically to the rabbis’ definition of Jewishness,
since the mother is not Jewish. A religiously Orthodox Knesset member proudly declared his wife would not be willing to share a room in the same maternity ward as an Arab mother.
His wife had asked the hospital to remove her from the care of an Arab
obstetrician because, at the special moment of the birth, she wanted to
be surrounded by Jews.
Such an approach is common
among a certain section of the Orthodox public, and suggests a racial
definition of "sanctity." The minister of education, also Orthodox,
ordered the removal of a novel from the required high-school curriculum
because it presented a love story between a Jewish Israeli woman and a
Palestinian man from Israel (and this against the own recommendation of a
panel of professionals). Such a step would have dignified many Southern
states in the U.S. when slavery was still in place.
An
MK, a settler, who had casually declared in the past that Israeli Arabs
that turn against “us” should have their heads chopped off, was promoted to the rank of defense minister. An MK from Habayit Hayehudi declared that Palestinian women and the elderly can be legitimate targets in times of war, in violation of elementary international law. That same woman is now the minister of justice.
The chief rabbi of the Israeli
army – someone who is supposed to provide moral and spiritual guidance
in situations of extreme moral dilemma – declared in the past that the
lives of Jews and non-Jews could never have the same value. In the
occupied territories, the army itself turns a blind eye to daily crimes
against Palestinians and de facto becomes an accomplice to them.
The State of Israel frequently
imprisons Palestinian men, women and children without a stated charge,
simply on the basis of vague suspicions. A poet – an Israeli citizen – simply calling on her Arab brothers to resist Israeli colonial rule was thrown in jail.
In this context, it is not
surprising that many Israelis have enthusiastically expressed support
for Elor Azaria among the general public (82 percent of those commenting
on social networks expressed support of the soldier's act) and by
senior politicians. In this case, the distinction between crime and acts
of war fades, and the army is increasingly dragged into this process.
To dub all of the above as
sporadic events or as less significant than the fact that Israel has a
“vibrant democracy” is tantamount to moral bankruptcy. These acts
constitute a coherent matrix, rooted not in the fundamentals of Zionist
theory, but in settler ideology, which, even if the latter reflects some
key themes of early Zionism, fundamentally distorted its spirit and
intentions by incorporating them into a messianic view of Jewish history
and a sacralization of the land.
Shimon Dotan’s recent film,
“The Settlers,” is a powerful documentation of this ideology. As the
movie shows persuasively, the settlement movement was from the outset
both messianic and lawless, driven by a religious, mystical impulse to
free Jewish land and Jewish tombs, to allow one to re-immerse oneself in
the land of the forefathers. Various rabbis (Abraham Isaac Kook and
Moshe Levinger, for example) played a crucial role in the inception of
the movement and presented these ideas with much pathos, thus
transforming the Jewish people from a political entity into a mystical,
trans-historical entity, having a natural right to the land promised by
God himself. Settlers view themselves as direct heirs to Joshua’s
project to settle the land, thus reenacting the historical narrative of
the Bible. This is why they hold democracy in contempt, and view it as
self-evident that Jews are the chosen people, directly elected by God.
More than any other group
perhaps, they dread the mixing of ethnic groups and advocate ethnic
isolation (except in cases where non-Jews can provide cheap or free
labor). Settler ideology is thus at once fundamentalist and lawless: It
despises state authority and jurisdiction and aims to restore the
kingdom of God, by violent means if necessary. This fundamentalist,
lawless, anarchic and messianic ideology has slowly penetrated to the
center of the state apparatus. Calls to violence now emanate from the
state level, thus generating a breakdown of the rule of law and of
civilization among the general population.
Countless ordinary
interactions in Israel are negotiated through the violent assertion of
one’s right and power. Violence percolates through the Israeli social
bond, rippling and undulating in many different ways. A
hyper-nationalist policy creates a situation of a war of all against
all, and no group is spared hatred: Arabs first and foremost,
Ashkenazim, Mizrahim, non-Jews, left-wingers, right-wingers, secular
people, religious people, settlers. How else should we characterize the
dominion of Likud over the state, if not as the subtle normalization of
violence, as the slow disintegration of law, order and justice?
A recent survey of Israeli
youth, conducted by the daily Israel Hayom, captures these deep trends
aptly. Among 11th and 12th graders polled, 59 percent identified
themselves as right-wing, 23 percent classified themselves as centrist,
and only 13 percent said they considered themselves left-wing.
Similarly, 85 percent said they "love" Israel, 89 percent see their
future here, and 65 percent said they agree with the line, attributed to
pre-state military hero Joseph Trumpeldor, that, “It is good to die for
one’s country.”
The same poll found nearly
half of Jewish Israeli high-school students agreeing that Arabs should
not have the right to vote. To the question, “Do you think Arab Israelis
should be represented in the Knesset?” 48 percent of those polled
responded, “no.” Asked what they loved most about Israel, the top
answers were that the country felt like a family and that Israelis
banded together in a time of crisis.”
Dotan’s movie shows a striking
abundance of footage of joyful settlers chanting and dancing,
celebrating weddings, bar mitzvahs, births, religious holidays, land
grabbing, new illegal settlements, expulsions of Palestinians, victories
against the state – and mostly, reveling in the intimacy and joyful
communion of the great family of the Jewish people. Even more
distressing than the calls to see an Israel that extends from the Nile
to the Euphrates, are the indelible images of ordinary men, joyfully
chanting and dancing, advancing from victory to victory, convinced they
have been divinely election, on both the personal and collective levels,
and indifferent to the thunderous the collapse of the rule of law, of
justice, and of humanity itself. Greedy land grabbers have become the
moral compass of Israeli Judaism.
In his provocatively titled
“Moral Man and Immoral Society,” published in 1932, the great Christian
theologian Reinhold Niebuhr argued that there is a “basic difference
between the morality of individuals and the morality of collectives,
whether races, classes or nations.”
What is this basic difference?
For him, groups are inherently selfish and uncaring. He meant that
groups have a tendency to close up and to fetishize themselves, and that
when they crowd too densely around common beliefs about themselves,
they undo the delicate normative fabric that holds diverse human beings
together.
I concur with Niebuhr.
Closed-up groups are selfish, have a tendency to legitimize their own
violence and suffer from a deficit of intelligence. If there is one
thing that powerful democracies have learned, it is that collective
solidarity and strength are built inclusively rather than exclusively,
by mixing different humanities and contemplating the startling outcome
of hybridized forms of intelligence. Solidarity built from mythical
pasts and from messianism has the fugitive beauty and engineering
stupidity of a sand castle, and will be quickly washed away by history.
In the face of the chanting
and dancing ecstasy of settlers, we may quote the French, 19th-century
thinker Gustave Le Bon: “A group … accepts as real the images evoked in
its mind, though they most often have only a very distant relation with
the observed fact ... Whoever can supply [a group] with illusions is
clearly their master; whoever attempts to destroy illusions is always
their victim.”
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