Warrior Nations of the Middle East

NEW YORK – The French leftist Pierre Goldman was a revolutionary fantasist and a criminal. Charged with killing two women during a holdup in a Paris pharmacy and robbing various other stores, he admitted to the thefts but denied the murders, and received a life sentence in 1974.

Goldman was acquitted in a 1976 retrial, which is the subject of The Goldman Case (2023), a fine film directed by Cédric Kahn. By then, Goldman had become a hero to the French left, and many supporters, including luminaries of the Parisian literary and cultural worlds, attended the court sessions. When he was gunned down in murky circumstances in 1979, Jean-Paul Sartre was among the mourners.

This unlikely hero was born in Lyon to Polish-Jewish immigrants, who fought in the communist resistance against the Nazi occupation of France. The genocide of the Jews was a permanent stain marring Goldman’s life. Obsessed with anti-Semitism, he wanted to be a resister, too, like his father, and traveled to Cuba and Venezuela in the hopes of seeing revolutionary action before returning to France, where he became a thief. During his trial, Goldman declared that he had always wished to be a “Jewish warrior,” for this was, in his view, the only way to eradicate “Jewish shame.”

The desire to project toughness to overcome the humiliation of centuries of persecution, culminating in the Holocaust, is not unique to Goldman. It is also useful in understanding the history of Israel and the belligerence of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. Of course, there are many reasons why Netanyahu has continued to escalate the war against Hamas and Hezbollah. If he relented, the hardliners in his government would abandon him, and once out of power, Netanyahu could end up in prison.

But there is more than a little of Goldman in Netanyahu’s rhetoric. He frequently invokes the Holocaust, when the Jews were forced to suffer their fate alone, to justify fighting the Palestinians. Pressed to stop the war in Gaza, Netanyahu said: “We will defeat our genocidal enemies. Never again is now.”

Military prowess has been part of the Israeli ethos since the state’s creation in 1948. A new type of Jew – a warrior – would populate the new country. But in the 1940s and 1950s, invoking the Nazi genocide was never done. David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, wanted to move on from this European past. Holocaust survivors were an embarrassing reminder of an historic humiliation.

Ben-Gurion changed his mind only after the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Holocaust’s chief engineer, in Jerusalem. The Holocaust was no longer treated as a symbol of shame, but rather as proof of Israel’s destiny to ensure that Jews would never again be the victims of mass murder. Israeli schoolchildren, on visits to the death camps in Poland, are told that if the Jewish nation-state had existed when Hitler came to power, six million lives would have been saved.

Netanyahu prided himself on carrying that burden. He was “Mr. Security.” Under his tough leadership, Israeli Jews would be safe. The brutal attack on October 7, 2023, when Hamas murdered, raped, and kidnapped Jews, was thus a moment of deep humiliation – for the Israel Defense Forces, which were unprepared; for the intelligence agencies, which had largely ignored the warning signs; and, above all, for Mr. Security himself.

Netanyahu had to lash out, and keep on lashing out, first and foremost to stay in office and out of jail, but also to expunge the shame and to show that Jews would fight back, even on their own if need be. The enemy is real: Hamas and Hezbollah are terrorist organizations dedicated to wiping Israel off the map. But with October 7 resurfacing old Jewish traumas, Israel is also fighting phantoms of the past, hence the repeated claims that the Islamist groups are today’s Nazis.

The continuing cycles of violence can easily spiral out of control, precipitating a wider war involving nuclear powers. Moreover, Netanyahu’s goal of “total victory” against an ideological movement cannot be achieved by military means alone. But, most importantly, war and oppression generate more shame. However justified and necessary the founding of Israel may have been, Palestinians have been humiliated over and over as a result.

Demeaned men and women will only become more militant when barred from their ancestral homes, constantly bullied at roadblocks and border crossings, intimidated by violent Jewish settlers while Israeli soldiers watch, and forced to live under permanent occupation or face oppression by their own extremist leaders. Like Goldman, Palestinians will likely want to be warriors to rid themselves of their shame.

So long as both sides seek to inflict maximum damage on the other to right past wrongs, the violence will not end. Netanyahu may think that total victory is in sight, now that Hezbollah is badly damaged and Gaza reduced to rubble, but that is an illusion. All he has done is create more enemies who will want to restore their honor by killing in a war without end.

Ian Buruma is the author, most recently, of Spinoza: Freedom’s Messiah (Yale University Press, 2024).

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2024.
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