The Zone of Uninterest

Corey Robin recently published a post about how opinions on Israel are rapidly changing among Jews. It is heavily ironised, and stands at the intersection of the literary traditions of awakening conscience and the Jewish-American experience (his own style owes not a little to Philip Roth), but the essential point I'd like to focus on is his recognition of that rapidity: the sense that there has been a sea-change in opinion and understanding. He quotes a number of statements by prominent Jews, introducing them as follows: "I’m posting these statements here just to give you a sense of how quickly opinion is changing. And it’s not Israel-haters and antisemites or self-hating Jews who are voicing the alarm. Most of these individuals below continue to identify as Zionists, as liberal Zionists, and of those who no longer identify as Zionist, they come by their positions honestly, as I hope you will see."

What changed in recent weeks was the incontrovertible evidence that the Israeli government is engaged in a deliberate policy of starvation, with some members of the cabinet openly advocating the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, an intent reinforced by Benjamin Netanyahu's current proposal for the IDF to occupy the entire territory for an indeterminate period of time. What changed was the IDF murdering Palestinians queuing for food in what can only be described as a killing field. The decision of a number of Western countries to signal their intent to recognise a Palestinian state next month, along with the long-overdue and still tentative steps towards an arms embargo by the likes of Germany, have been symptomatic of this wider sea-change, rather than contributory factors. They are evidence of the realisation of governments that have willingly supported Israel that they are way out of line with their own electorates, and are increasingly out of line with liberal Jewish opinion globally.

Many of the people cited by Robin discuss the issue in terms of crossing a line: that Israel has gone too far, and risks losing its soul in the process. Perhaps the most interesting citation is of Avrum Burg, a former interim President of Israel and Leader of the Knesset who is prepared, at least rhetorically, to address the more existential issue - essentially the entire history of the state since 1948 - but who frames this in terms of Israeli/Jewish loss: "Could it be that the current State of Israel, that its body stronger than ever and its spirit deader than ever, no longer deserves to exist? Not because of what happened on October 7, but because of everything that came before, and everything that has erupted since….The destruction of Gaza is a damning indictment of Israel’s moral bankruptcy. And we must face the truth: Israel without an ethical foundation has no justification to exist."

There is a well-worn trope in the literary treatment of Nazism and the Holocaust of the cultured German officer listening to Schubert after a hard day's work overseeing the gas ovens. Beyond the inherent class bias in this image, which assumes the ordinary German soldier was an unthinking brute in comparison, there is this idea of loss: how could a culture that produced Schubert lead to the Final Solution? Where did Germany's soul go? The problem with the "crossing a line" framing is that it suggests a step back could be taken across that same line, like the German officer coming to his senses as he listens to Erlkönig, feeling pity for his victims and understanding that he is the evil-doer. But that is obviously absurd. While some Germans bravely resisted the Nazis, most did not, and those officers in the camps were selected precisely because they were true-believers who would feel neither shame nor guilt. 

In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt (another writer Robin has long engaged with) famously wrote of "the banality of evil". The book caused a furore (and continues to divide historians) both because it described Eichman primarily as a careerist rather than a fervid antisemite, and because it highlighted the complicity of some Jews in the facilitation of the Holocaust. The first charge is problematic because it suggests Eichmann's behaviour was the result of incentives, rather than any commitment on his part over-and-above career advancement. At the close of Jonathan Glazer's 2023 film The Zone of Interest we see the Auschwitz camp commandant Rudolf Höss retching as he descends the stairs of a deserted palace into the darkness. Is this his conscience rebelling? In reality Höss claimed to have realised the enormity of his crimes only days before his execution. Prior to that, his attitude when challenged was described as "apathetic" and having "a lack of empathy". I can't be the only one who saw a parallel between the film's scenes of mundane looting and videos of IDF soldiers cavorting with children's toys and women's underwear in the ruins of Gaza.

Western governments have gone out of their way not merely to support Israel's military actions but to provide it with every possible excuse to step back over the line: to be applauded for restoring a status quo ante bellum in which Gaza was already a concentration camp, blockaded and rationed to punish the Palestinians as a people. Keir Starmer's pompous conditionality is simply a route that Netanyahu can take, with minimal inconvenience, to ensure that the recognition of Palestinian statehood is once more deferred and Israel reaffirmed in the community of the Western powers. In reality, the momentum of events and the wider anger in Europe may see the UK isolated in September, perhaps only lining up alongside Germany, a country whose Staatsräson requires that it expiate its guilt over the Holocaust by giving Israel carte blanche (the embargo on arms that "could be used in Gaza" is obviously little more than a gesture).

But is it possible to step back over that line? It clearly wasn't in the case of Eichmann and Höss. You can't simply say "Sorry, we went too far" after committing a deliberate genocide. Robin quotes the academic Lihi Ben Shitrit: "As psychologists note, shame and guilt are similar and often appear together, but there are crucial differences. Feeling shame is associated with embarrassment over the actions of members of our group that we think negatively reflect on our group’s identity. Guilt occurs when we feel collective responsibility for the negative actions of our group members. Shame leads to avoidance — hiding, denying or looking away from such actions. Guilt, on the other hand, motivates reparative or restorative responses. Liberal Jews like myself need to overcome our shame, which pushes some of us to avoid or even deny the reality of Gaza. Instead, we must grapple with guilt; guilt not in the sense of personal culpability, but rather in our collective responsibility."

Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian provides an object example of that liberal avoidance, even going so far as to claim a "moral case for escapism", and thus superior virtue: "For it’s when we feel ourselves plunged into the abyss, when our despair at our fellow human beings pulls strongest, that we most need to look upward – and glimpse the stars." What Freedland is implicitly saying is that his shame will never become guilt, in Ben Shitrit's terms. In other words he will neither question the existence of the State of Israel, like Avrum Burg, nor concede that collective responsibility means that Western governments, complacement liberal media and Israeli society generally must be deemed as guilty as Netanyahu, Smotrich and Gvir. As with the reaction to Eichmann in Jerusalem, it is that second charge, of collective responsibility, that sticks in his craw.