Kafka and Counterterrorism
Someone must have been telling lies. When he’s arrested at the beginning of Franz Kafka’s The Trial, Joseph K. thinks first of his innocence. To be innocent is to be innocent of some crime, but the court that’s ordered K.’s arrest never says what crime K. has committed. K. seems to be guilty simply–there are no reports or accusations for him to expose as lies. Because the court “is attracted to guilt,” it will wait for K. wherever he goes. And K.’s guilt for doing nothing cannot be remedied by his doing anything now. “The court wants nothing from you,” the chaplain tells K in The Trial’s climactic scene. “It receives you when you come and dismisses you when you go.”
K.’s guilt is reason-blind and indelible, an inscrutable scrutiny. As a metaphorization of Jew-hatred, therefore of hatred for the only Jewish state, you could hardly do better.
To take a recent example. Amnesty International has just released a report accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza. The accusation itself is a lie. Israel has uncontested airpower and the best weaponry in the world, but it has given food and medicine to its adversary’s civilians in humanitarian zones–very unusual behavior for genocidaires.
But behind the genocide mendacity, which is obvious to anyone with newspapers and a dictionary, is something more interesting–how Amnesty International treats Israel’s responsibility for the Palestinians that Israel is allegedly trying to eliminate. Amnesty International laments–it is certainly lamentable–the number of Palestinian civilians killed in the current war. Now, the surest way to keep civilians safe in a warzone is to keep them far from the fighting. That is hardest when combatants embed with civilians, as Hamas does with Gazans, hoping to maximize civilian casualties for propaganda purposes. Knowing this, and because it is humane, Israel routinely issues evacuation orders in advance of intense operations (ordering civilians out of harm’s way is, again, very unusual behavior for genocidaires).
But these evacuation orders have opponents–including Amnesty International. The orders treated Palestinians “like pawns in a chess game;” “forcing them to move again and again.” The orders “contributed to the infliction of conditions of life calculated to destroy Palestinians in Gaza and violated the prohibition of mass forcible transfer.” To move Palestinians was an act of genocide. But not to move the Palestinians would’ve resulted in more Palestinian deaths. It would have only intensified the genocide. Israel is thus guilty of genocide no matter what.
Since October 7, 2023, Amnesty International and its progressive allies in the West have been damning Israel for one thing and for its opposite. For evacuating Palestinians and for not evacuating Palestinians. For protecting itself and for not protecting itself. For not supplying aid to Gaza, and for prolonging the war in Gaza (itself the partial result of Hamas looting the aid Israel has facilitated). For the predicament of the hostages, and for the security measures–a fence, a partial blockade–that limited the number of hostages to a few hundred as opposed to a few thousand.
The people and institutions who issue these omni-indictments are not guilty of Jew-hatred because they apply double standards. They are guilty of Jew-hatred because they apply no standards. They condemn the Jews no matter what the Jews do and whether the Jews are living and fighting or getting burned to death in their homes. They condemn the Jews for being while Jewish. They are the real-life court of Kafka’s Trial––with law degrees from Harvard, subscriptions to The New Yorker, and opinions from Tehran.
To punish the Jews for defending themselves in a war begun by the slaughter of Jews–that is, with the failure of Jews to defend themselves–duplicates the structure of Jew-hatred in centuries past, when Jews were persecuted for being capitalists and communists, parochial and cosmopolitan, too wealthy and too poor.
This Jew-hatred cannot be refuted, because it is insane. But it can be intelligently resisted, and its damage minimized.
Zionism is one attempt at resistance. Zionism is the idea that there should be a Jewish-majority state in the Jewish homeland. What this means practically is that the survival of Jews will depend on Jews, not only people who hate Jews. Because Jew-hatred is often violent, the Jewish state must be militarily excellent to serve its central purpose.
Some prestate Zionists argued that a Jewish state would solve Europe’s “Jewish problem” by removing Jews from the Gentiles who hated them. Normalizing the Jews politically would get them out of the gentile line of sight, which would get them out of the gentile line of fire. K. would’ve sympathized–his curse is his visibility; his being noticed.
Zionism has largely normalized the political condition of Jews–making them citizens of a strong state rather than vulnerable strangers in lands not their own. But solving the Jewish problem was too utopian a standard for a practical project like statehood. Zionists can be satisfied with less. They can be satisfied that Israel has dramatically reduced the deadliness of Jew-hatred. The following will assuage nobody’s anguish, though it does provide some useful perspective: 1,500 Jews killed in a year of war is fewer than were killed during day-long periods in the death camps. The initial number of hostages, 204, is under one tenth the population of certain barely-remembered Polish ghettoes. Murderous Jew-hatred will abide as long as Jews abide; Israel ensures the hatred is far less effective.
The haven for Jews that Israel uniquely provides is, incidentally, why hostility to Zionism should not be distinguished from hatred of Jews more generally. The distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism is, to be sure, the subject of a great debate. That great debate has many virtues. It is historically learned, conceptually sophisticated, and dialectically rich. Its only flaw is a frequent failure to get to heart of the matter. Anti-Zionists aim to deprive Jews of the best weapon against Jew-hatred ever created–a Jewish state. Orwell wrote during World War II that pacifism was objectively pro-fascist. Equally, anti-Zionists are objectively antisemitic. The Jewish anti-Zionists too. But their hostility is worse for being treachery. And shoddy treachery. The Jews who titillate themselves by bookishly romancing about the statelessness of their brethren are scandalously blasé about what statelessness actually meant for their brethren. And they are criminally unimaginative about what it would mean for their brethren today.
Israel has not eliminated Jew-hatred but it has mitigated Jew-hatred, and it is an irony worthy of Jewish history that Israel has also become the most serious target of Jew-hatred. A practical response begins with this insight: hostility towards Israel is not equally influential at all times.
Consider when Israel is at peace–say, before the current Gaza war. Divesting from Israel or boycotting its goods was much advocated but rarely done. The accusations of apartheid published by The Nation, Dissent, The New York Times, the United Nations, the European Union, and universities all over the West did not threaten the two great centers of Jewish life in Israel and America. Nor did they stop Israel from gaining allies among the Sunni Arab states–even with Israel’s military presence in the West Bank, and even with growing Jewish communities in the West Bank. Before October 7, 2023, the most threatening kind of Jew-hatred was vulgar and low-class. Thugs in Brooklyn roughing up kids in streimels, Muslim migrants harassing Jews all over Europe. Such violence isn’t trivial and its Muslim variant is making Jewish life miserable in England and France and elsewhere on the continent. But even if Jews did leave Europe, they’d have safe places to go.
But whenever Israel is at war, hostility against Jews is broadened and magnified in proportion to the deadliness of whatever terrorism started the war. Since the worst massacre in Israel’s history, left-wing fantasies of isolating Israel have become the policies of corporations and states. Companies and funds have reduced operations and investments in Israel, and no doubt many have decided not to put money in Israel in the first place. Violence against Jews has increased in Europe and America. Lesser forms of persecution have done likewise, especially at universities. Non-Israeli airlines (with some noble exceptions, like Emirates) are refusing to fly out of Israel’s main airport near Tel Aviv. The United States (aped by NATO allies) has sanctioned Israeli civilians and restricted weapons transfers to the Israeli military. Greater popularity has accrued to the cause of Palestinian statehood, which would empower a political culture distinguished by a hundred years of producing and celebrating the murderers of Jews.
Why does the slaughter of Jews elicit the desire to punish Jews? To ask the question is to miss the point–just as K. misses the point by demanding answers of the court. Hostility towards Jews has no point beyond itself. The latent suspicion that there is something wrong with the Jews is simply confirmed and aggravated when someone does to a Jew what the court does to K.–make him abnormal through persecution (and worse).
How can Jews mitigate the costs and the degree of hostility towards the Jewish state? This problem is often described as Israel’s legitimacy problem–Israel’s fate to be always losing in court of public opinion, which of course limits Israel’s superb military on the field of battle. This legitimacy problem manifests as an intellectual or ideological problem–denunciations in the press and protests on the quad lead to boycotts, divestments, and sanctions. Perhaps this ideological problem has an ideological solution–a campaign of persuasion. Recently, the Israeli government announced over a hundred million dollars to fund Israel’s public advocates. Alan Dershowitz is assembling America’s finest lawyers to do battle for Israel at the International Criminal Court. Many private organizations have realized the problem. Since cloning pro-Israel intellectuals like Douglas Murray is currently impossible, they are trying other things.
Any improvement in public opinion is valuable, because public opinion is essential to Israel’s survival. Attacks against the Jewish state mean hostile attention and sanctions, and if continued and increased, these wartime measures might isolate the Jewish state to death.
But the most important determinant of public opinion may not be strictly speaking “intellectual.” Historically, what moves public opinion in Israel’s direction is an absence of violence. That is, Israel’s legitimacy depends on suppressing terrorism, especially Palestinian terrorism.
The only reliable guarantee against Palestinian terrorism is an Israeli presence–military and civilian–among Palestinians. That presence, especially the military presence, has declined disastrously since the Oslo Accords of 1993. The deadliest Palestinian terror attack was launched from an enclave, Gaza, from which Israel withdrew entirely in 2005. West Bank terror is much less of a threat because the Israeli Defense Forces have long operated there consistently.
Not that West Bank terror is insignificant. After Israel turned over the Palestinian enclaves of the West Bank to the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1993, Palestinian terrorism in the area increased. The PLO-sponsored terror war of the early 2000s claimed 1,000 Israeli lives and took several years of intensive operations to defeat. In recent years, Palestinian terrorism in the West Bank has been worst where the IDF operates least (which is also where there are the fewest Jewish communities).
Effective security measures would not eliminate Israel’s troubles entirely. They would, however, be a fitting application of a central Zionist insight: while the enemies of the Jews are impenetrable to reason, the murderous among them can be defanged, and their useful idiots isolated as cranks and bigots. A policy that does so successfully is indispensable for the surest guarantor of Jewish life since the Lord Himself fought the battles of Ancient Israel.
Image by Picturellarious and licensed via Adobe Stock.