‘Genocide! Genocide!’: Israel in the Accusing Age
How an accusation against Israel reaches the Jew
In the language surrounding Israel and Gaza, evil no longer requires a rare event, for its signs proliferate faster than the crimes they claim to name. The gravest words circulate in advance, until accusation becomes a moral glare beneath which every distinction fades into insignificance.
Under the older structure of judgement, moral language drew its force from restraint, since a word retained its gravity only while some acts remained beneath it and others beyond comparison. That structure has collapsed into the limitless reproduction of condemnation. Lesser crimes seize the names of greater ones, while the greater crime, when it returns, finds its name already consumed by imitation. Difference is deliberately sacrificed to equivalence, to the point at which every evil must appear absolute and the absolute can no longer be recognized.
Should the crime for which the word was once reserved return, it may find its name exhausted by repetition and incapable of recognizing what it was meant to condemn. The event will then confront its own sign like an original appearing in a world already saturated with copies.
The last thing transmitted by a moral word is its meaning. History leaves us the word after the event has withdrawn, and we mistake this survival for possession. We believe we are preserving the memory of the crime by repeating its name; in fact, repetition delivers the name from memory. The most terrible word becomes the most convenient because terror now belongs to the word, whatever the event.
Precision maintained a distance between things. It prevented one crime from borrowing the face of another and allowed disagreement to survive without becoming complicity. But this distance is intolerable to contemporary discourse, which demands immediate equivalence, immediate guilt, immediate moral visibility. Thus language becomes more violent as judgement becomes less possible. The accusation illuminates everything and reveals nothing.
Politics accelerates this exchange until the word no longer follows the evidence but compels evidence to assume its image. Guilt is announced before the act acquires meaning, while memory is arranged according to loyalties already formed. The accusation then ceases to concern the accused and becomes the password through which the accuser declares allegiance.
Once severed from the event it claims to describe, the word becomes a declaration of allegiance, revealing the side to which its speaker belongs.
When an accusation can no longer be delayed by the demand for proof, it attains perfection: it becomes impossible to disprove because every hesitation before it is interpreted as complicity. “Genocide! Genocide!” The cry does not await judgement. It manufactures the scene in which judgement has supposedly occurred. Evidence may enter later, though only as confirmation or scandal; it has lost the power to alter the form of the event. The verdict has ceased to be the destination of inquiry and has become the condition under which inquiry is permitted.
In Israel’s case, accusation often collapses government, army, citizen and Jew into a single figure, allowing blame directed at the state to reappear as suspicion of a neighbor, colleague or friend. Hatred need not appear openly, because one person has already been made answerable through inheritance.
Although I cannot know what each speaker intends, intention may reveal less than the operation performed by the language. A word can accomplish socially what its speaker denies intending personally. Here the moral term functions simultaneously as condemnation and password. The term declares an atrocity while identifying those entitled to condemn it, and the truth of the accusation begins to matter less than its power to decide who may speak without first proving innocence.
Through an excess of accusation, the crime supposedly being exposed begins to disappear. Ubiquity gives the appearance of vigilance while destroying the distinctions upon which recognition depends. When a reality arises that demands the full measure of the word, the word may already have been converted into noise, allegiance and ritual. We shall possess the accusation in abundance and shall have lost the judgement it was meant to make possible.
