Newly Discovered Devotion to Israel: A Case of 'Negative Dialectics'
Before 10/7 of 2023, I probably would never have thought widespread ATTACKS upon someone or something might be the precipitant of my coming to LOVE the relevant someone or something.
I would have thought that at most such hysteria would elicit my instinctive protectiveness or sympathy, maybe accompanied by some disgust or outrage, along with some puzzlement as to how literally scores of millions of people all could go suddenly stark raving mad while being identically programed with one single non-referential new idiom ('zios,' 'ethnostate,' 'genoicide,' etc.).
But lo, LOVE has happened. Literally the more hatred I see here - the greater the frequency, spatial or temporal, of its expression - the more admiration, devotion, and outright love I feel for the people of the state of Israel on the one hand, and the Biblical 'children of Israel' more broadly through time on the other hand.
How to explain this?
As best I can tell thus far, there are two mechanisms, or 'channels.'
The first I will call 'the Psychotic-Sophistry Channel.'
Here what seems to be happening is that the claims made and 'arguments' proffered against Israel thus far in my experience have been - ALMOST WITHOUT EXCEPTION - (a) so routinely demonstrably false once one visits the region or consults the primary-sourced historical record, (b) so manifestly embarrassingly 'argued' when one follows the chains of proffered 'reasons,' (c) so implausibly conjectured when one thinks about how human minds and action generally 'work,' and/or (d) so clearly hysterically Jew-obsessed once one notices how every charge ever leveled at Israel could be leveled one-thousand-fold at literally any other state or relevant 'non-state actor' on the planet, that one cannot but conclude that Israel HAS to be right given how nearly everyone attacking it is so ... not only wrong, but PSYCHOTICALLY wrong.
The second mechanism complements the first. I'll call it 'the Do Your Homework Channel.'
Here what seems to have happened is this: with every bizarrely implausible-ringing claim of the sort just alluded to, one decides to look into the matter oneself, making a point of avoiding all polemic on either 'side' and instead looking only to primary sources (government archives, old newspaper pages, official memoranda, etc.), visiting the region, or both. What happens over time as you do this is a steady accumulation of actual knowledge as distinguished from quiversful of stock word and phrase arrows and bigoted tropes that Jew-haters and Zionophobes routinely belch out as if they were programmed nazi loudspeakers blanketing the streets of Berlin in unhinged invective while the Allies closed-in in Spring 1945.
For me both of the above-described Channels began opening, the mechanisms first lurchingly creaking and then ever more smoothly running, in late October of 2023. One day in that period I simply happened upon a prime time television interview of Arafat's here in the US in late summer of 2000 during 'Camp David.' Arafat with straight (but still half-shaven) face smilingly 'informed' Barbara Walters or Leslie Stahl or who ever and 200+ million Americans that 'archeologists' had now shown that 'the Jews' had no historic connection to any temple in Jerusalem. WHAAAAT?, by brain screamed. I'd never heard that one - nor, more importantly, would I ever have EXPECTED to hear any such crazy-ass thing.
But lo (again), upon deciding to investigate I quickly learned that this very shit - and incalculably more - has been the very ESSENCE of both Middle East antisemitism and broader Zionophobia FROM THE START, FOR FUCKING MILLENNIA.
And so I have come to think, vis-a-vis Israel in relation to its now-common media portrayal, ... 'where have you BEEN all my life, Darling?' Where have YOU - the REAL you - BEEN behind all that shit-simulacrum that is the media- and now social-media-spectacle that PRETENDS to be ... YOU?
And Israel's answer is:
'Here, all along. Come visit please.'
And so, through a most unexpected 'negation of the negation' that I hope would do Hegel and perhaps even Teddy Adorno both proud - my negation of that pure negationism that is 'palestinianism,' which seeks not 'a palestinian state' but literally only the NON-existence of any JEWISH state - I have come both to love Israel and to see its existence and safety as essential to any just world and just world order.
The love's not uncritical - no love of anything as complex and various as a state and its many people and institutions could be that - but it is, crucially, critical always and only FROM THE INSIDE, as it were. (Sometimes I'm LITERALLY, GEOGRAPHICALLY inside. And at ALL times I'm SPIRITUALLY, ETHICALLY inside.)
Israel cannot be 'other' any more once you learn what's been actually happening all these years.
Israel is all of us - all of us who are just, decent, and sane.
Newly Discovered Devotion to Israel: A Case of 'Negative Dialectics'?
Before 10/7 of 2023, I probably would never have thought widespread ATTACKS upon someone or something might be the precipitant of my coming to LOVE the relevant someone or something.
I would have thought that at most such hysteria would elicit my instinctive protectiveness or sympathy, maybe accompanied by some disgust or outrage, along with some puzzlement as to how literally scores of millions of people all could go suddenly stark raving mad while being identically programed with one single non-referential new idiom ('zios,' 'ethnostate,' 'genoicide,' etc.).
But lo, LOVE has happened. Literally the more hatred I see here - the greater the frequency, spatial or temporal, of its expression - the more admiration, devotion, and outright love I feel for the people of the state of Israel on the one hand, and the Biblical 'children of Israel' more broadly through time on the other hand.
How to explain this?
As best I can tell thus far, there are two mechanisms, or 'channels.'
The first I will call 'the Psychotic-Sophistry Channel.'
Here what seems to be happening is that the claims made and 'arguments' proffered against Israel thus far in my experience have been - ALMOST WITHOUT EXCEPTION - (a) so routinely demonstrably false once one visits the region or consults the primary-sourced historical record, (b) so manifestly embarrassingly 'argued' when one follows the chains of proffered 'reasons,' (c) so implausibly conjectured when one thinks about how human minds and action generally 'work,' and/or (d) so clearly hysterically Jew-obsessed once one notices how every charge ever leveled at Israel could be leveled one-thousand-fold at literally any other state or relevant 'non-state actor' on the planet, that one cannot but conclude that Israel HAS to be right given how nearly everyone attacking it is so ... not only wrong, but PSYCHOTICALLY wrong.
The second mechanism complements the first. I'll call it 'the Do Your Homework Channel.'
Here what seems to have happened is this: with every bizarrely implausible-ringing claim of the sort just alluded to, one decides to look into the matter oneself, making a point of avoiding all polemic on either 'side' and instead looking only to primary sources (government archives, old newspaper pages, official memoranda, etc.), visiting the region, or both. What happens over time as you do this is a steady accumulation of actual knowledge as distinguished from quiversful of stock word and phrase arrows and bigoted tropes that Jew-haters and Zionophobes routinely belch out as if they were programmed nazi loudspeakers blanketing the streets of Berlin in unhinged invective while the Allies closed-in in Spring 1945.
For me both of the above-described Channels began opening, the mechanisms first lurchingly creaking and then ever more smoothly running, in late October of 2023. One day in that period I simply happened upon a prime time television interview of Arafat's here in the US in late summer of 2000 during 'Camp David.' Arafat with straight (but still half-shaven) face smilingly 'informed' Barbara Walters or Leslie Stahl or who ever and 200+ million Americans that 'archeologists' had now shown that 'the Jews' had no historic connection to any temple in Jerusalem. WHAAAAT?, by brain screamed. I'd never heard that one - nor, more importantly, would I ever have EXPECTED to hear any such crazy-ass thing.
But lo (again), upon deciding to investigate I quickly learned that this very shit - and incalculably more - has been the very ESSENCE of both Middle East antisemitism and broader Zionophobia FROM THE START, FOR FUCKING MILLENNIA.
And so I have come to think, vis-a-vis Israel in relation to its now-common media portrayal, ... 'where have you BEEN all my life, Darling?' Where have YOU - the REAL you - BEEN behind all that shit-simulacrum that is the media- and now social-media-spectacle that PRETENDS to be ... YOU?
And Israel's answer is:
'Here, all along. Come visit please.'
And so, through a most unexpected 'negation of the negation' that I hope would do Hegel and perhaps even Teddy Adorno both proud - my negation of that pure negationism that is 'palestinianism,' which seeks not 'a palestinian state' but literally only the NON-existence of any JEWISH state - I have come both to love Israel and to see its existence and safety as essential to any just world and just world order.
The love's not uncritical - no love of anything as complex and various as a state and its many people and institutions could be that - but it is, crucially, critical always and only FROM THE INSIDE, as it were. (Sometimes I'm LITERALLY, GEOGRAPHICALLY inside. And at ALL times I'm SPIRITUALLY, ETHICALLY inside.)
Israel cannot be 'other' any more once you learn what's been actually happening all these years.
Israel is all of us - all of us who are just, decent, and sane.
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