Israel's war on Gaza and Einstein’s definition of madness

Another Einstein connection

There is one further, more tenuous connection with Einstein worth noting: a massacre that occurred in 1994 at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron. The perpetrator, one Baruch Goldstein, killed 29 Muslim worshippers and wounded a further 150.

At the time, his actions were praised by some extremist settlers. Yochay Ron, for instance, said that he "felt good" when he heard the news, adding that Jews were "at war with the Arabs" and "all Arabs who live here are a danger to us... they threaten the very existence of the Jewish community on the West Bank."

Until recently, Israel's National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, himself a settler, had a picture of Goldstein hanging in his living room.

So, where is the tenuous connection with Einstein here?

Well, Ben-Gvir's hero had grown up in Brooklyn and trained as a medical doctor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx. It seems unlikely, however, that the college had the great man's words on madness inscribed over its entrance.

Ben-Gvir has since taken the portrait down, but he is as fierce as ever in his views as the outspoken Minister of National Security.

He was previously convicted of supporting a terrorist group known as Kach, which espoused Kahanism, an extremist religious Zionist ideology based on the teachings of Rabi Meir Kahane, which maintains that the vast majority of the Arabs of Israel are, and will continue to be, enemies of Jews and Israel itself, and that a Jewish theocratic state, free of a voting non-Jewish population, that includes Israel, Palestine, areas of modern-day Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, should be created.

Here, Jewish law (as codified by Maimonides) would apply, under which non-Jews who wished to dwell in Israel would have three options. They could remain as "resident strangers" with all rights but national ones or, if unwilling to accept such a status, they would be required to leave the country with full compensation. Those who refused to do even that would be forcibly removed.

"Meir Kahane did not hate the Arabs – he just loved the Jews", said his widow Libby in a 2010 interview. Greater love, as someone once said, hath no man than to lay down his life for his friends.

The rabbi, who had been born in America, was addressing an audience of mostly Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn when he was assassinated by El Sayyid Nosair, an Egyptian-born US citizen who would later be involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

His victim had been urging American Jews to emigrate to Israel before it was too late. As it turned out, for the affectionate rabbi, it already was.

Profound cynicism about the Arabs has been present since Zionism began, though not among all Zionists. It was the quasi-fascist version of Zionism, known as Revisionism, that harboured the deepest suspicions and advocated a revision of the "practical Zionism" of David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann, which was focused on the settling of Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel) by independent individuals.

Fascist leanings

The revisionists were led in the early years by the formidable Ze'ev Jabotinsky, whose sympathy with fascism, and with Mussolini in particular, led one of his followers to hail him as the Jewish Duce. Jabotinsky's devoted amanuensis, in an eerie prefiguring of the present madness, was Benjamin Netanyahu's father.

Though Jabotinsky was to change his mind about Mussolini after the Italian befriended Hitler, he had a vision of his fellow Jews that grew out of disappointment with the people of the Diaspora and dreamt of a new super race, healthy and oddly Hellenic.

As early as 1905, he was writing: 'To imagine what a true Hebrew is […], we take as our starting point the Yid (used here as pejorative for Jew) of today, and try to imagine in our minds his exact opposite […]. Because the Yid is ugly, sickly, and lacks handsomeness, we shall endow the ideal image of the Hebrew with masculine beauty, stature, massive shoulders, vigorous movements, bright colours, and shades of colour.'

'The Yid is frightened and downtrodden; the Hebrew ought to be proud and independent. The Yid is disgusting to all; the Hebrew should charm all. The Yid has accepted submission; the Hebrew ought to know how to command.'

'The Yid likes to hide with bated breath from the eyes of strangers; the Hebrew, with brazenness and greatness, should march ahead to the entire world, look them straight and deep in their eyes and hoist them his banner: "I am a Hebrew!"' (from Dr Herzl).

Contempt for weakness

Compared with Rabbi Kahane's unconditional love of the Jewish people, this passage demonstrates marked ambivalence, if not outright contempt.

The attitude wasn't confined to the right. Jon Lansman recalls similar attitudes among those on the left in what he calls Israel's prehistory: '…those who led the Jewish government-in-waiting before the state's establishment observed the Holocaust from British-administered Palestine.' 

'Their attitude to the 6 million murdered… can be characterised by the phrase they used to describe the manner of their deaths: They went like sheep to the slaughter. A contempt for weakness was embedded in the Israeli left, which, now in the hands of its far-right successors, has created a culture of permanent war that is supremacist and authoritarian towards Palestinians.'

When it came to the noble art of self-loathing, Jabotinsky was way ahead of his time. It was probably with the passage contrasting 'Yids' with 'Hebrews' in mind that Joshua Cohen, author of The Netanyahus, presents us with a fictional dream about Jabotinsky that sees him with: '…dark round Bakelite glasses, the plastered-down, swept-aside, steel-grey, steel-white Hitlerite hair.'

Cohen might as well have completed the portrait with a toothbrush moustache. Jabotinsky is a stern Führer fit for the Jews, but only if they themselves are fit. While the scary Duce of the revisionists was ambivalent in his attitude toward his Jewish brethren, he had a grudging respect for the population he intended them to colonise.

By the time he wrote The Iron Wall in 1923, the dreamy idealist with his athletic vision of the Grecian Hebrew had got real. In the interim, he had become the steely pragmatist of Jewish colonisation. And colonisation was the operative word.

At a time when the old European empires had taken a sound beating in the Great War and within years of the biggest Empire of them all crumbling into independent fragments, the Zionists were proposing to colonise a country already inhabited.

The Iron Wall makes no bones about this: Jabotinsky knows very well that the Arabs in Palestine will not be bought off, that they will fight for their land as other indigenous populations have done, from the Papuans to the native Americans: '…this does not mean that there cannot be any agreement with the Palestine Arabs. What is impossible is a voluntary agreement.'

One man's dream is another man's nightmare

This is surely a definition of the word 'agreement' unique to the authoritarian mentality. You will agree with us, whether you like it or not. On the same principle, Orwell's hero, Winston Smith, eventually agrees with his interrogator that two and two are sometimes equal to three or five, but only after being exposed to his worst nightmare. 

'As long as the Arabs feel that there is the least hope of getting rid of us, they will refuse to give up this hope in return for either kind words or for bread and butter because they are not a rabble, but a living people.'

One cannot accuse Jabotinsky of naivety here. His eyes are so wide open to the reality of what he proposes one wonders how he could bear to look. But Jabotinsky can, and what he sees with unblinking clarity are the consequences of a dream that amounts to someone else's nightmare.

His future looks remarkably similar to the Palestinian present. Here was a man who could acknowledge the other as a mirror image of himself, as a people with the same claim as his own to self-determination, a land and a future, yet his guiding conviction never changed that the Arabs would have to be worn down and demoralised before they would comply:    

'…the only way to obtain such an agreement is the iron wall, which is to say a strong power in Palestine that is not amenable to any Arab pressure. In other words, the only way to reach an agreement in the future is to abandon all idea of seeking an agreement at present.'

The form this 'strong power' would take was an explicitly military one. Early on, Jabotinsky organised the Jewish Legion, which was a force of 5,000 soldiers that contributed to the British conquest of Palestine during World War I. 

For the Zionist state, he wanted a military force independent of the Arab population that would protect Jewish immigration to Palestine. Ten revisionist youth groups emerged in Poland, one of which was known as Betar. 

Jabotinsky became Betar's head in 1929. By 1931, he had created a political platform called 'The Ultimate Objective', which called for the establishment of a Jewish state with a Jewish majority on both sides of the Jordan River.

In November 1934, Mussolini hosted a Betar squadron at Civitavecchia, where 134 cadets were trained by the Blackshirts. There was a meeting of minds.

Like his fascist colleagues, Jabotinsky denied class struggle, insisted on the "compulsory arbitration" of labour disputes, and prioritised national interests over those of a specific social or economic class. Underlying all these things would be the realistic expectation of opposition from the Palestinians, or 'the Arabs' as Zionists preferred to call them. 

We see the same clear-eyed acknowledgement of Palestinian enmity throughout the career of Benjamin Netanyahu. He has always sought agreement if understood in the same strained sense as the old Jewish Duce used it.

Callous indifference

In his article entitled 'The Netanyahu Doctrine: How Israel's longest-serving leader reshaped the country in his image', Joshua Leifer says the 'success of Netanyahu's vision of Fortress Israel could be measured in the imperceptibility of the Palestinians and their suffering from the comfort of a Tel Aviv café.' It's a stark image of callous indifference to the suffering of the vanquished. Leifer continues:

'Netanyahu is not a conventional ideologue. His opposition to a two-state solution does not derive from any messianic conviction or biblical inspiration. While many of his supporters are religious traditionalists, he is staunchly secular and doesn't even keep kosher. Instead, his worldview is shaped by deep pessimism.'

Read more: Israel's 'Netanyahuism' runs deeper than judicial reform

The fact that this resembles the revisionists' pessimism may account for numerous references to iron. In the beginning, there was Jabotinsky's Iron Wall. Then, as protection against the missiles lobbed from Gaza or elsewhere, there was the Iron Dome.

Now, following Hamas's attack on 7 October, we are witnessing Operation Swords of Iron. In 2015, Netanyahu told a group of Knesset members, "I'm asked if we will forever live by the sword – yes."

As Leifer puts it, the 'iron tracks' that Netanyahu laid 'may prove too hard to shift.' Still, some notable members of Netanyahu's cabinet show no desire to shift them: men of iron, such as Ariel Kallner, who has tweeted, 'Right now one goal: Nakba!'

On his part, Bezalel Smotrich, Minister of Finance, denied Palestinian identity, saying that there wasn't any "Palestinian history or culture", and followed up by saying that there was "no such thing as a Palestinian people".

These remarks were decried as "racist, fascist, and extremist" by the Palestinian foreign ministry. Too right, and they betray attitudes that have never been a state secret.

Likud: A racist, anti-Arab party

In the 2019 election, Likud was widely criticised as a "racist party" after scaremongering anti-Arab rhetoric by its members as well as Netanyahu, who claimed minority Arabs and Palestinians in Israel were "threats" and "enemies". 

Just days ago, UN experts said there was "evidence of increasing genocidal incitement" against the Palestinian people. One is bound to ask: What moral justification can such people claim for a state which, though born out of the horrors of Nazi genocide, has leaders who speak the language of fascism so fluently? 

Yet, the failure of Benjamin Netanyahu's power has never been so evident. In an effort to divide his enemies, he went as far as to prop up the Hamas government in Gaza, encouraging Qatar to transfer billions of dollars to the militant group and declaring that "Anyone who wants to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state needs to support strengthening Hamas" at a Likud party meeting in 2019.

"This is part of our strategy, to divide the Palestinians between those in Gaza and those in Judea and Samaria." Strategies don't come more cynical than that.

Meantime, while assuming that Hamas had been bought off and was no longer as dangerous as they had been, he moved his iron wall over to the West Bank, where settler violence was reaching its peak.

The Israeli army deployed 32 IDF battalions there, protecting the settlers, while just two battalions were deployed along the Gaza border. It was a heady mix of cynicism and café insouciance, a consequence of forgetting the warnings of Jabotinsky that 'as long as the Arabs feel that there is the least hope of getting rid of us, they will refuse to give up this hope… because they are not a rabble, but a living people.'

A living people, however often you try to kill them.

Dehumanising the enemy

Once you've dehumanised the enemy to the extent that the settlers now have and grown accustomed to killing them, you run the risk of failing to understand their pain or even noticing it's there. Such a strategy makes it harder to manage the grievances it creates and perpetuates.     

Yuval Noah Harari has referred to this strategy as 'violent coexistence.' Among Israelis, it is more commonly referred to as occupation management, divide-and-rule or – rather more grandly – the 'conceptzia.'

It has led to ever more self-defeating violence in the occupied territories and repeated attempts, since the Israelis disengaged from Gaza in 2005, to solve the problem of Hamas by bombardment, culminating in the latest, most devastating and doomed attempt of them all.

Suffice to say, whoever came up with the conceptzia, he was no Einstein.