I had to take down my first impatient attempt to write about Israel and identity.

I think I’m not generally inclined to write about geopolitics; it’s far enough out of my zone of interest to make me impatient. The intricacies of international law and all the dramas of who did what to whom and when require expertise on the level of Jeffrey Sachs. That’s not me.

I appreciate the existence of experts in history, social movements, law, policy and politics. And I understand why the news is focused exclusively on these areas. But this focus is not mine. And yet I have to pay a certain careful, bare-bones attention to those subjects in order to step through those entanglements as carefully as I can, while trying to express a vantage point that calls all that human drama into question.

My feeling is that nothing is going to change this repetitive history of mass murder, or nation against nation, until the illusions of “who we are” dissolve. This dissolution of the illusions of identity would snuff out the various fuses that are constantly being lit before they lead to war, bypassing the need for political “campaigns” and social “warriors”.

Rather than constantly relighting these fuses of Us against Them, we need to allow that fuse itself to dissolve in a broader vision than geopolitics. Because every political or social movement starts from the same rotten assumption – namely, a belief in the reality (not mere fictional reality) of a separate Self (whether national, political, religious or racial, and so on). It’s this belief that is the fuse.

But almost everybody finds this criticism of identity absurd or far-fetched or unrealistic, or even offensive, and so on. Because people primarily look at nations, tribes and other group entities as if they were real. It’s the psychology underlying this illusion that attracts my interest; not the geopolitical dramas carried out by these fictional entities.

But people are overwhelmingly drawn to the level of human drama – absorbed almost constantly from morning till night by the various Netflix or Hulu dramas involving egos in conflict, or nightly news dramas between nations or demographic groups in conflict. Sure, human beings are naturally interested in politics, because we’ve lived in complex group dynamics for millions of years.

But that wasn’t the only level of attention we had developed over those millions of years. We also used to be even more deeply attuned to the delicate balance of the natural world, which includes the immaterial mysteries of being alive.

People had to know their relationship to that broader world beyond their petty concerns. In healthy indigenous tribes, people tended to be broad-minded and philosophical. But that sensitivity has faded, as human drama has escalated. And now I believe we’ve reached a point where our political intelligence has made us blind, because now this focus no longer leaves space for a coherent relationship to the larger natural world and the even larger immaterial realms.

The personal (whether national, racial or individual) has overshadowed the genuinely communal and the authentic cosmic perspectives, which kept the personal (or political) from metastasizing into narcissistic rage (or might makes right). The nested hierarchy of order has been reversed to the point where we value only self-interest and scoff at the possibility of anything more; which is a vantage point so benighted that it can’t recognize its own self-destructive destiny.

So, this is why I feel that these “abstract” essays are actually far more practical than constantly focusing on political, cultural and national news. We can’t find our sanity by focusing constantly on nations and other oppositional identities.

So, I’m going to keep talking about these illusions, without proposing any additional solutions (which are inevitably political or social solutions). Because the solution in this case is the problem. The solution of politics is the problem because it always reinforces the illusion of separate identities; and these solutions are never any better than temporary truces.

Neither Israel Nor Palestine Can Be Killed

Neither Israel nor Palestine can be eliminated. And neither force, nor treaty, will resolve this. Every political solution to this “problem” strengthens the illusions of separateness. Until the two sides abandon the illusions of one-sided thinking, then this will never end. Because nobody ever entirely conquers anyone without also eliminating their own decency and righteousness. Whoever “wins” will be destroyed.

Antisemitic Elements in Israel Itself

The US partnership with Israel is not a friendship. Nations are one-sided machines of one-sided thinking and self-centered violence. They don’t make friendships, only alliances. Alliances are like friendships among sociopaths. They are momentary coincidences of self-interest. We know this on a certain level, but act as if America or Israel or Iran, etc., were capable of decency. They’re not. They are only self-centered, mechanical entities with nothing but manipulative motives. People (with genuine empathy) who subsume themselves under these brand names absorb the mechanical and sociopathic motives of the institutions, just as employees absorb the sociopathic motivations of a profit-seeking corporation. The system ends up running us like toxoplasma Gondii.

So, the alliance between the US and Israel is not a friendship; and it’s particularly unfriendly to Jewish people.

I think western support for Israel is blatantly manipulative. And vice versa.

The status of Jewish people in America and Europe changed (contingently) from “non-white” to “white” right after the genocide – right after America (for one) refused to accept boatloads of Jewish immigrants. And allies refused to bomb the rail lines carrying the Jews to the camps. This support for the modern state of Israel was merely a convenience, allowing the Jewish refugees to serve as a proxy western colonizing force in the Middle East.

This hijacking of Israel was easy because “Israel” worked on two levels – as a genuine unifying call to a people who had been brutalized and violated in the most disgusting ways; and as a cold calculation of geopolitical chess by the West, without regard for the chaos this would cause for the people in that region themselves, Islamic and Jewish.

After all, the whole middle east is an anti-Arab chessboard set up mainly by the English, who threw these various states together without regard for tribal boundaries.

Or, in fact, they were thrown together as a strategy to maintain constant conflict, which could be manipulated for western benefit. The same strategy used by Rome in Germania.

Two brutalized peoples — the Jews and the Arabs — have been made into opposing pawns to benefit the West. In the West, we’re pressured into seeing only antisemitism as the pervasive evil; as if seeing anti-Arab bias is itself antisemitic. But it’s a whole package. A white supremacist crusade that cares for neither side, beyond cold calculations of State power.

Israel and Judaism – a Category Confusion

The West calculated on that long-cherished memory of Israel in the Bible — -that ancient unifying vision maintained like the most precious talisman of a better world. The faith that got Jewish people through centuries of abuse was a faith in returning “Home”. But on a less romantic level this meant “returning” to a home most European Jews had never personally seen before. And a home already belonging to other people.

And because of this complex religious connection to a particular piece of land, the government of Israel became easily conflated with being Jewish. This conflation of Jewishness with the state apparatus of Israel is even true among many Jewish Americans who have never set foot in Israel.

The illusions of national identity become even more difficult to recognize or admit when church and state are joined. The Islamic states, the Jewish state, the Christian states, all end up betraying their own religious truths, and becoming one-sided (unwholly, unholy) illusions.

In a “religious state”, the state apparatus largely replaces or absorbs the actual religious faith as a source of identity. This is like a category confusion in philosophy. Israel is the confusion of a religious world (with its faith in a mythic homecoming) with a geopolitical world, with its sociopathic faith in Real Politik. The two value systems collide. And the timescales of the various religious deeds to the land are in conflict from the start.

And it places Jewish people who absorb this category conflation in tremendous danger, because any egregious acts committed by the state can now serve as a pretext for real antisemitism.

And when the behavior of the state of Israel becomes closely aligned with “being Jewish”, this undermines the capacity for self-criticism and state restraint. Being able to love your “country” and oppose your “government” becomes almost impossible. And this is why criticism of Israeli policies is often equated with antisemitism.

This also made it especially impossible for Jewish people to see how Palestinians might perceive the very origins of the modern state as an originating aggression in the conflict. Even mentioning such a thing might be construed as an attack on Jewish people themselves, because the state of Israel and Judaism have merged their identities to the point where their destinies seem tied (although many rabbis do in fact criticize the origins of the modern state. But they tend to be dismissed as “self-hating Jews”).

In these various ways, the reduction of a Jewish identity to a state apparatus betrays Judaism, and undermines their legitimately righteous place in the world. That’s why I say there’s an element of antisemitism in the state apparatus itself.


Why Is this All So Repetitive?

Maybe this suffering goes on and on because the Holocaust (and all the other holocausts in history) were never mourned sufficiently. None of the perpetrators fell to the ground and wept with shame or vowed to give up the pretense of superiority. The perpetrators merely hid in dark corners and pretended to be innocent victims of their own “sabotaged” defeat.

The rest of us wanted to go on as if nothing happened. We didn’t openly deny what happened, but we carried on as if it had never happened. As if there was no need to change.

So, it feels necessary to recall the traumas, because forgetting becomes another form of annihilation. The embers of fear have to be constantly stoked.

When the trauma is allowed to define us like this, there is no way out without losing everything we believed ourselves to be. The ancestors peer through the veils of time to question your loyalty: will you be the broken link that causes us to disappear?

All the world’s conflicts draw upon this ancient chain of pain. A chained community becomes the real religion. It’s not faith in god or faith in something larger than a nation or tribe, but faith in trauma itself, an aching need for this confirmation of suffering, which defines who we are. That’s why the fascists are always searching for injuries to their delicate egos. Hands are joined, chanting the liturgies of a foretold return of pain, as a reminder, and – worse yet – as a way of justifying the vengeance.