Deferred Obedience

At a psychoanalysts’ lunch in Munich in November, 1912, the conversation turned to a pharaoh who had been dead for more than three thousand years, and Carl Gustav Jung vehemently rejected the idea that resentment had led Amenhotep IV to have his father’s name chiselled off the monuments of Egypt and his own carved in its place. Sigmund Freud was fifty-six and had a theory for nearly everything, including the resentment of sons, and on hearing his thirty-seven-year-old disciple he fainted and slid from his chair, as had happened to him three years earlier in Bremen, when, on coming to, he had accused the heir he had chosen for psychoanalysis of harboring a death wish against the master. Jung lifted the unconscious man from the floor and carried him in his arms to a sofa in the next room, and the master travelled the rest of the way cradled by the suspect.

Months later, Freud published the final essay of Totem and Taboo, the story of a violent and jealous father who kept all the women of the horde for himself until the day his sons banded together, killed him, and devoured him. At the feast, each brother acquired a portion of the dead man’s strength, and the guilt that arrived with dessert led the parricides to forbid themselves what the father had forbidden them in life, so that the dead man became stronger than the living one had been, and the author named this reversal deferred obedience. Master and disciple saw each other for the last time in September, 1913, once again in Munich, and this time nobody had to be carried.

We have had Benjamin Netanyahu as Prime Minister for nearly nineteen of the past thirty years, and on June 13, 2021, the horde at last gathered against the father, with eight parties ranging from the Islamist Ra’am to the right-wing Yamina and a margin of sixty votes to fifty-nine, the narrowest a vote allows. The brothers were sons of the house, since Naftali Bennett had been Bibi’s chief of staff, Yair Lapid had served as his finance minister, and Avigdor Liberman had directed the Prime Minister’s Office in Bibi’s first term. Netanyahu heard a death wish in that coalition and promised to return, and after the swearing-in, when Bennett took his former boss’s chair on the Knesset floor, with the father’s name chiselled away and his own carved in its place, Bibi refused the hand he had shaken a little earlier.

I wish I could report that the change government fell over war, or peace, or the constitution we still do not have, and the less solemn truth is that its majority ended over bread in April, 2022, when Idit Silman walked out of the coalition she chaired after the Health Minister ordered hospitals to abide by the Supreme Court ruling that allowed leavened food on their premises during Passover, the holiday on which the Haggadah teaches parents how to answer four different sons. At nightfall, Bibi called on those elected with the votes of the national camp to follow Idit’s lead and come back home, where they would be received with open arms, and on December 29th he returned to power with a coalition of sixty-four seats, at the head of what was regarded as the most right-wing government in our history, with the Kahanists in command of the police and Idit Silman among the ministers, received as promised. The dead man of June, 2021, had become stronger than the living one had been.

On March 17, 2015, election day, Netanyahu recorded a video warning that right-wing rule was in danger because Arab voters were heading to the polls in droves, and six years later the same man courted Mansour Abbas and held out his hand to Ra’am, so much so that on the night of June 13, 2021, Bennett himself acknowledged from the podium that Bibi had paved the way. In September of this year, the Central Elections Committee obliged Likud and the Kahanists and banned Ra’am and the Joint List, the Supreme Court unanimously overturned the ban on October 2nd, and the party they wanted off the ballot has, in second place on its list, a Zionist Jew who served as a deputy minister from Lapid’s party. The violent and jealous father still keeps for himself what he forbids his sons.

The Haggadah foresees four different sons, and ours have decided to speak with a single voice, which happens to be the father’s. On June 27th, Netanyahu promised a broad national government, neither a right-wing government nor a left-wing government that depends on Arab parties, and the same verb turns up in the mouth of Bennett, the man who brought Ra’am into the 2021 coalition and who now promises to take care of Arab citizens without depending on their parties. Liberman was finance minister in that government with Ra’am, and in September his party voted alongside Likud and the Kahanists to ban the Arab lists.

Netanyahu chose Gadi Eisenkot as Chief of the General Staff in 2014, and after October 7th the general spent eight months in Bibi’s war cabinet. Today Eisenkot leads in most polls, and until the last week of September, according to Haaretz, he was still resisting party colleagues who pressed him to rule out Ra’am, on the grounds that exclusion would narrow his path to a government. On Saturday, September 26th, he announced on Channel 12 that he would not include Ra’am in its current form in any government he headed, and in the same interview he said that Bibi’s approval of Qatari money for Hamas had put the Prime Minister somewhere between treason and a grave breach of trust. Shortly afterward, Netanyahu answered the opposition leaders’ meeting with a fake image, generated by artificial intelligence, in which Mansour Abbas and Ahmad Tibi appeared at the gathering, and the son who had just accused the father of near-treason and obeyed his prohibition was portrayed as disobedient all the same.

The general has three reasons, none of them foolish, which are that a commitment to Ra’am before the election would hand Netanyahu the very attack Likud is looking for, that a Maariv poll taken on October 7th and 8th found fifty-nine per cent of Israelis opposed to an Arab party joining the next coalition, and that in July, on Kan radio, Mansour Abbas apparently refused to say that Hamas must be destroyed and complained about the purity tests to which his party is constantly subjected. All three have some truth in them and none excludes the others, and I have a fourth of my own, called deferred obedience, which explains the other three.

The massacre that weighs on the third reason also cut through Rahat, the hometown of Youssef Ziyadne, who was seized with three of his children at Kibbutz Holit, where they were working on October 7th, and taken to Gaza, and of the four only the two youngest came back alive. No one asked the Ziyadne family to pass a purity test before putting their name on the list of our hostages.

In this month’s polls, the Zionist opposition falls short of sixty-one seats without the Arab parties, and only Channel 14, openly sympathetic to the Prime Minister, gives Bibi the sixty-one he needs. Only one candidate in the Zionist opposition has said so out loud, and when Yair Golan promised on television, in early October, to work for a government with Ra’am, Liberman replied that there would be no coalition with Arab parties, Likud promised to prevent a left-wing government with the Arabs, and, with the delicacy of a man who once waved portraits of our dead around the Knesset floor like campaign placards, Bezalel Smotrich predicted a government of persecution. I will vote for Golan and, if the opposition wins, I will support a center-right government led by the general, which strikes me as bad and still better than the one we have.

The objection most sympathetic to the general calls the promise a tactic and recalls that Bennett also promised in 2021 not to form a coalition with Ra’am and then formed one. If the general repeats the maneuver after the election, we will have learned from the candidate himself that governing with a party of Arab citizens is something one does in secret, and the prohibition will have come out of this election stronger than it went in.

I hope that on October 27th the ballot box will remove Bibi from the chair, though the vote alone will not be enough, because the sons who take that chair have already devoured the father and will govern by his prohibitions, as Bibi without Bibi. Deferred obedience will stay with us until the day we understand that the father we need to kill is the one we carry inside us.