Arnon Grunberg

Country

Price

On the gun – David Shulman in NYRB:

‘Let’s put aside, for the moment, the hard-hearted rationalizations that are all too prevalent among Israelis, such as “It’s all the fault of Hamas,” or “They started it,” or “Our soldiers’ lives come first,” or “Our enemies want only to destroy us,” or “All Arabs are Hamas.” (This last one is common among Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s supporters and very close to his stated view of the Palestinian Authority.) What is striking, and horrific, is the fact that Israel has embraced cruelty and atrocity as a normative mode of waging war. It’s not as if there was no cruelty in the army’s rules of war before October 7, 2023. But since that date a dark miasma has enveloped the collective conscience of this country. If you watch the evening news on the mainstream Channel 2, or listen to government ministers and members of the Knesset, or even if you simply pay attention to accidental encounters with passersby, you usually perceive a blank indifference to the huge civilian casualties in Gaza, in Lebanon, and—in particular—among Palestinians in the West Bank. The government sets the tone; the army, although at odds with Netanyahu, follows suit; the Jewish supremacists marshal biblical texts proving the joys of revenge. For them, and for many others in Israel, tens of thousands of dead Palestinian civilians in Gaza are an acceptable price to pay for a reckless, savage war.

Needless to say, there are also many Israelis who are sickened by this idea and who have the courage to speak out or write against it publicly.’

(…)

‘Did the British and the Americans show any empathy with the victims (some 25,000) of the Dresden bombings of February 1945? Empathy is usually focused on individuals, not on groups. But still: believe it or not, the Palestinians are our sisters and brothers, and someday, if the Israeli state survives, they will be our partners in making peace. There is no other way forward. What we are experiencing now in Israel is a profound failure of our shared humanity, a deadly apathy of the soul. Worse still is the taste for killing and inflicting pain that has infected so many, beginning at the top.’

(…)

‘Israel is well on its way to an authoritarian government—actually a dictatorship on the model of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey. The extreme right wing, represented in the government by the Jewish supremacists Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, despises the very concept of democracy; they march to a higher principle. A generous view of Netanyahu’s seemingly erratic, not to say criminal, behavior might claim that he is the prisoner of these extremists, who are always threatening to leave the coalition if the prime minister does something even slightly moderate or sensible for a change. But it would be more accurate to say that Netanyahu couldn’t care less about the rule of law and the democratic order—in fact, he has done whatever he could to subvert them. It is the citizens of the state of Israel who are the prisoners, hostages to a prime minister with delusions of grandeur who, in the words of the popular columnist Nadav Eyal, has nothing but contempt for his own people and for the state that he allegedly serves.’

(…)

‘So far the story is familiar; Zanuta’s fate was shared by some twenty-two other Palestinian villages in South Hebron and the Jordan Valley. But the Zanuta shepherds appealed to Israel’s High Court of Justice. In July 2024 the court decreed, first, that these villagers should be allowed to return to their homes and, second, that the army and the police had to ensure their safety there. The second stipulation was a kind of fantasy, utterly remote from reality on the ground; you will be hard put to find even a single army officer or policeman anywhere in the territories who would protect Palestinians from Israeli settlers. Still, the hopeful people of Zanuta returned to their demolished homes. At that point the Civil Administration—that is, the army—told them that they were not allowed to build even a small clay oven, let alone rebuild a room or put up a wall or even a curtain in a ruined house. Any attempt to put one stone on top of another would bring the soldiers back within an hour. At night the Zanuta shepherds with their families were sleeping on the ground under the stars.’

(…)

‘As an officer once said to me when I showed him the High Court ruling prohibiting the expulsion of Palestinians from their grazing grounds, “Why do I need the High Court? I have my gun.”’

Read the article here.

If you have a gun you don’t need the law, your gun is the law, your god is the law, and he gave you the gun.

The Messianic zealots are taking over. We know this.

Was this wat Herzl had in mind? Of course not.

But as a friend of mine in NY said: 'A Jewish state in half of Wyoming would be detested as well.'

Maybe no Jewish state?

That didn’t work very well.

Or as a Swiss acquaintance said: 'Why should the Jewish people have no state?'

The less liberal Israel becomes the more diasporism will look like a feasible alternative.

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