Nietzsche in Israel

Dear friends,

Several people have asked me over the past few months to speak out about the ‘Israel-Palestine conflict.’ I can say that I am writing an essay on it. However, I am not in a hurry to publish it. If I write something about it today, it is because Ghent University has decided to end its cooperation with Israeli universities. I want to start by making something clear: I do not support this boycott.

When it comes to this conflict, I see and hear quite a few superficial sentiments and strong convictions in the public sphere, but little genuine desire for evenings of love and laughter between Jews and Palestinians. I suggest, to begin with: better leave aside the strong convictions and certainties.

When we talk about ‘Israel,’ who are we talking about? Are we talking about the Jewish people are seeking a place on earth where they are not bombarded with rockets every day? Are we talking about Israel in so far as it tries to be an orderly democracy where Arab and Jewish Israeli citizens live on an equal footing? Are we talking about the Israeli state as a crucial pawn of a globalist and technocratic New World Order, which briefly surfaced during the corona crisis? You cannot simply be ‘pro-Israel.’ There are many different kinds of ‘Israel.’

And when you talk about ‘the Palestinians,’ what are you talking about? Are you talking about the group of people displaced by the series of events in the British Mandate of Palestine over the last century and a half? Are you talking about the victims of an Israeli war machine that at times is the grim manifestation of ultranationalist sentiments? Or are you talking about a Hamas mass that is the spearhead of a Jew-hatred that thrives in much of the Arab world and that, no matter what Israel does or does not, wants to eliminate the last Jew?

If you keep in mind the Jewish person who does not get lost in ultranationalist feelings of superiority and the Arab fellow human who does not fall prey to Jew-hatred, you see that what is happening there is a classic human drama. And that human drama is not unique. It arises, like most human dramas, because people lose themselves in petty sentiments and ultimately fail to recognize the humanity in their fellow human beings.

That is why I do not participate in the increasingly fashionable ‘pro-Palestine’ demonstrations: with a few exceptions, I feel mainly a lot of fanaticism and little genuine concern for the fate of anyone. If you take to the streets when violence is done to one party, you must do the same when the other party faces the same. Otherwise, your activism does not testify to humanity but to unacknowledged hatred.

We can casually ask the pertinent question: why so disproportionately more attention to this drama? There are so many conflicts worldwide, so many armies causing large numbers of civilian casualties; there are so many refugees mourning the land and house where they were born. What makes the world’s eye so drawn to this conflict? What is the relation of the disproportionate attention to the qualification of Jewish people as God’s chosen people? I leave that question open for now, but that question also has a right to exist.

It is good to cherish our questions and be cautious with our answers. If you speak about the founding of the state of Israel, you are talking about something both humanly necessary and problematic. How can the Jewish people give themselves a (deserved) homeland without making it an ultranationalist ‘Jewish state’? Where does nationalism turn into ultranationalism? Can there be mass migration to a country without threatening the integrity and way of life of the people already living there (a pertinent question in Israel and beyond)? These are difficult questions. Great minds like Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt have pondered them and never gave a definitive answer. Ultimately, the only answer that will be satisfying comes from the world of the soul and the heart, not from reason.

And the following dimension must be taken into account: anyone who speaks about the conflict in question speaks about a clash of religious and cultural entities, not only the Jewish and Arab-Islamic culture but also Christian culture and Enlightenment culture. In comparing and evaluating these cultures, we are comparing different forms of power and evil. There are cultures that tend to express hatred and lust for power in a physical way through terrorism and other forms of direct aggression; there are cultures that hold the world in their grip through monetary-economic means; there are cultures that say ‘love your enemy’ while at the same time colonizing the entire world; there are cultures that carry rationality and humanism in their banners but ultimately cause the irrational and ultimate dehumanization of totalitarian systems.

It would be interesting to evaluate different cultures starting from Nietzsche’s Will-to-power-ethics (which, by the way, I do not endorse), but this would lead us too far here. I will just say this now: those who only look from a ‘pro-Western’ perspective easily declare Islam, with its preference for suicide attacks and terrorism, morally and ethically inferior. But those who broaden their view and take into account the tens of millions of victims of Western colonialism and totalitarian systems and the ongoing suffocating grip of the banking world on the world population, are a bit more cautious. I think more along the lines of Solzhenitsyn, that the dividing line between good and evil does not run between cultures but through cultures and even through each human heart. At one point, the scale tips in favor of one side, and at another point in favor of the other. Ultimately, you conclude about most people, including yourself, with Nietzsche’s words: ‘Human, all too human.’

I come to this again: I have the impression that there are quite a few people regarding that conflict in the Middle East who are absolutely certain and convinced about things you cannot be entirely sure and convinced of after thorough consideration. For example, I hear quite a few people who locate the cause of the conflict with one party or the other. I see mainly an endlessly receding series of actions and reactions in history. The cause of the war in Gaza is the raid of October 7; the cause of the raid of October 7 is Israeli policy in Gaza and the West Bank; the cause of Israeli policy in Gaza and the West Bank is endless Palestinian terror; the cause of Palestinian terror is the expulsion of Palestinians from their villages by Israelis, the cause of the expulsion of Palestinians is the collective attack by Arab countries on Israel in 1948, the cause of the Arab countries' invasion was the colonialist founding of the state of Israel by the United Nations, the cause of that founding was the Holocaust, and so on.

You can go back to the expulsion of the Jews from Israel by the Romans and even further. Depending on your prejudices and the object of your hatred, you can stop at a certain point in that causal reasoning, locate the ultimate cause of all misery there, and then be convinced that you know the culprit. What thinks in that way is not reason, it is hatred. Love does not quickly fall into the false certainty of ‘logical’ thoughts; it finds certainty only in itself. The only real certainty, by the way.

This is what I think: the cause is not in one point; it is simply at every point where a person loses their humanity. I also come to the same point here: humanity lies mainly in the ability not to be so certain and convinced that you no longer see someone with a different conviction as a human being. It is the courage to be uncertain that brings people around the campfire and really lets them listen to each other and talk to each other. Also in the Holy Land. Not that everything is solved with that insight, far from it, but if you realize this, you might be a bit more cautious with a boycott.

More on that later.

Mattias