Iran, Israel and moral confusion

The duck-rabbit optical illusion (or that of the young and old female face) suggests something powerful for perception: when you see the duck (or the young woman), you cannot see the rabbit (or the old woman). It is either one or the other. The two are embedded with each other, but it is impossible to see them simultaneously. Although vision does not quite work in the same way as the realm of concepts and politics, where one thing can coexist with its contrary, since Oct. 7th we seem to have collectively engaged in a duck-rabbit game: On that dark day, Israelis were massacred with a rare annihilationist joy and fury. For a brief moment, we saw Israelis for what they are: terribly vulnerable to the genocidal aims of Hamas, Iran, Hezbollah (all in fact being a single entity). Then came the expected and understandable military response under the leadership of an exceptionally incompetent and amoral government. The military response had no real vision or plan in mind. It is therefore unsurprising that in the face of the vast destruction of homes and infrastructures, of civilians among whom children and women, and the humanitarian catastrophe creating conditions of famine, Israel was viewed through the immense semantic confusions which anti-Zionism has created in the last decades: Israel became a genocidal entity. Brazil’s Lula even resorted to the obscene analogy of calling this disproportionate military response a new Shoah, as if a country attacked on its territory in such a brutal way was not entitled to respond to its attackers. A disproportionate military response is very different from a genocide. Then during the night between April 13th and 14th, Iran attacked Israel for the first time in its history. To be sure, it has relentlessly attacked Israel for the last decades but it did so through its proxies, the Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and Hamas in Gaza. But on Saturday night, it sent from its own territory a variety of hundreds of missiles, each running at different speeds in order to make response difficult. The Hezbollah and the Houthis joined in, showing again the exceptional vulnerability of Israel, now threatened on six fronts (Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Gaza, Yemen, West Bank). Then again on Sunday morning we were informed that the alliance of the USA, UK, France and most critically, Jordan and Saudi Arabia had destroyed 99% of the missiles, displaying its technological and military superiority. The image of the invincible Israel came back, making us forget that a few hours before we had expected in anguish devastation and chaos.

This oscillation of images has been accompanied by tremendous semantic confusion, some intentionally engineered, some the result of the reigning moral confusion which seems to characterize our times, especially in many quarters of my political camp, the Left. Examples of such semantic confusion are abundant: crimes against humanity were dubbed “anti-colonial resistance;” a fundamentalist group aiming to establish Shari’a Law in a Palestine emptied of all its Jews is viewed like a modern day anti-imperialist Che Guevara; a legitimate military response, poorly conducted and disproportionate was dubbed a genocide; people living in a country recognized by the UN in 1947 are called colonists. The national home of Jews — who have been everywhere persecuted, massacred and expelled, in Europe and in Muslim countries—is now viewed as an illegitimate colonial enterprise. The security which Israelis demand for themselves has become an intolerable demand to the Left because it cannot disentangle the political disaster of the Occupation from the very existence of Israel. Words seem to have become disarticulated from the real. This disarticulation creates tremendous confusion and makes it very difficult for us to adequately criticize the Israeli government when the critique of Israel is marred in so many willful distortions and misunderstandings. There is an even greater danger: that the Left, caught in its simple categories of colonizer-colonized, oppressor-oppressed, does not understand that behind the attack on Israel hides an ominous new reality: the alliance between Iran, Russia, China and North Korea, with the intention of undermining the power and the values of the West. The short-sightedness and confusion of the Left serves directly these imperialist and anti-democratic powers.

I am thus not suggesting to give a blank check to Israel. On the contrary. I am glad Biden and the world put enough pressure to help relieve the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. The world should insist at every turn to demand accountability from Israelis in the conduct of war. We should insist, far more than we have, that Israel offers a diplomatic and political solution to the statelessness of Palestinians. But I also suggest that contrary to the duck-rabbit optical illusion, we hold together multiple realities at once: the messianist government of Netanyahu wants to pursue and annexionist-colonial policy and does not want a political compromise. Yet, Hamas and Iran are the closest equivalent we have to Hitler today in their determination to eradicate Jews. The West colonized large swaths of the world, the Middle East included, but that does not mean other imperial powers are not far worse and far more threatening for the moral progress we have accomplished. Israel may be strong militarily, yet it is also extremely vulnerable, its capabilities have decayed, and it could be destroyed by a large-scale sophisticated attack from several countries which would repeat the genocidal scenario we know. In contesting Israel’s right to self-defense, in confusing the 1967 Occupation with the 1948 creation of Israel, in celebrating the annihilationist antisemitism of Hamas, we are in effect recreating the Jewish problem, denying Jews their right to exist in peace and security. More than ever, we need an intelligence free of simplistic categories and a feel-good morality to help resolve this century-long conflict.

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