Holy Hatred

This essay is about the phenomenon you think it’s about.  But it’s probably not about the people you think it’s about.

This week I received an email from “Telem,”  an online magazine published by the Berl Katzenelson Fund.  Berl Katzenelson was one of the founders of the Israeli Labor movement, which played the central role in founding the State of Israel and governed it for many years afterward.

The email from Telem highlighted an article by one Uri Tuval.  It’s worth reading in full.  I’ll translate a few sentences here; I’ve provided links so readers can go to the original website and verify that my translation is accurate and doesn’t take words out of context.

“A violent civil war is taking place in Israel between the government and its opposition through the agency of a proxy – Hamas.  As opposed to the usual political conflict that finds expression (chiefly) through a democratic struggle for control of the state’s institutions, the indirect civil war exploits the physical assault on the opposing [political] camp and intensifies it.  Hamas’ violence plays an actual role in the internal [Israeli] conflict over land, the means of production, capital, military power, governance and the constitutional rules of the game. . . . While this camp [i.e. the opposition] contends with a trauma that at one point seemed national but ever more clearly becomes sectoral, similar to the assassination of Rabin, the government exploits this external violence so as to increase the damage to its opponents.”

To sum up:  Hamas is the tool the Israeli government is using deliberately to sow death and destruction among its domestic opponents who, more than other Israelis, are to be pitied because they are the chief victims of the war.

I have no intention of defending this government.  It has conducted this war with a political and military incompetence that threatens the survival of the state.  Its political and military leaders ought to have shuffled off the public stage months ago – though as regards political leadership, I cannot, alas, point to an alternative I would trust to do better.

But to seriously entertain the image that Uri Tuval wishes to conjure up, of Binyamin Netanyahu and Itamar Ben-Gvir rubbing their hands with glee because Hamas destroyed kibbutzim and massacred their inhabitants?  What about the hundreds of soldiers, including at least half among this government’s supporters, who have given their lives to defend the country?  What about towns like Kiryat Shmona, hitherto a bastion of Likud support, which Hizbullah has laid waste?  What Tuval writes is a calumny – and worse than a calumny.  Because, even though Tuval doesn’t write this explicitly, if the Israeli government is pleased to allow Hamas conduct a shooting war against its domestic opponents, it’s only a short step to recommending that the government’s alleged victims start shooting back, and not at Hamas, or giving up entirely on the State of Israel and its defense.

Eran Nissan is an activist in a left-wing group called “Mehazkim,” which (among its other activities) has taken upon itself to defame Kohelet Policy Forum, a free-market think tank that is the source of many policy proposals on the Israeli right (full disclosure:  the author worked at Kohelet prior to his retirement and is still active as a volunteer).  In a short video entitled “Has Kohelet Deliberately Shafted the Families of the Hostages?” Nissan argues that that is exactly what Kohelet intended to do – because it opposed the wildcat strike called by the Histadrut labor union the day after six hostages were found shot to death in Gaza.  In the video Nissan wears a t-shirt that directs an obscenity at Kohelet, which he pronounces at the end of his video.

My object in citing these examples of domestic Israeli hate propaganda is not to provoke outrage, of which there is more than enough in our lives, thank you, but to attempt a brief forensic analysis of the spiritual lives of the people who spread these messages.

These are people who possess intense ideological beliefs – in itself, not necessarily a bad thing.  The leaders of the Berl Katzenelson fund and of “Mehazkim” see themselves as spiritual and intellectual heirs of the Israeli labor movement’s policies and worldview.  They believe that they are acting with the best intentions, though as we know this does not always lead to the best outcomes.

But while they assert their own ideology, at no point do they confront or argue with the positions of their opponents.  They present those opponents as evil, and bend every effort to convince their readers and viewers of this.  They portray Netanyahu as welcoming the massacre of October 7^th 2023, and attribute to the staff of Kohelet the objective of deliberately intensifying the grief and despair of the families of Israeli hostages.  The point of these portrayals is to dehumanize their opponents, to portray them as incapable of ordinary human feelings and motives.

Portraying one’s opponent as less than human serves obvious political purposes.  Totalitarian societies deploy hate propaganda to keep their peoples in a state of constant tension, fear and anger, invoking dark, hidden conspiracies – by the Trotskyites, by the Jews – always portrayed as possessing inhuman characteristics and objectives.  Hate propaganda is tragic particularly because of what it reveals about the spiritual lives of its authors, as George Orwell well described in 1984.  If ideological passion leads one to believe that one’s opponents are subhuman, it is but a short step to actually treating them as subhumans who are entitled to no rights.

I think such behavior has spread due to the decline of traditional religion.  Western religion teaches that nothing so threatens man’s spiritual and indeed mundane life as his passions, which he must always keep in check, and especially so in his conduct toward his fellow man, toward whom God mandates justice.  Modern ideologies, which serve as a substitute for religion, imagine utopias created by man.  They hold that true believers are good, opponents evil; they have lost the notion that even people who believe in good things must guard themselves against behaving badly to others.  Of course, there have been devout monsters who believe they must bring about God’s kingdom with the sword, such as Abba Sikra, Torquemada and Yihye Sinwar.  They have much in common with secular, ideologically motivated monsters such as Hitler, Stalin and Mao.  But true religion is that of Jonathan Sacks, Dietrich Bonhoffer and Tadeusz Mazowiecky, who hold that God demands that people be just to their fellows, and leave the Kingdom of Heaven up to Him.

How can one oppose hate propaganda spread by Uri Tuval, Eran Nissan, and their ilk?  Certainly, when they misrepresent the views and policies of their opponents they should be called out.  To believe that a wildcat strike is the wrong thing to do in the midst of a war of national survival is not tantamount to wishing that the families of Israeli hostages suffer.  But it’s even more important to call out hatred as such, and explain that the haters are destroying the very society they seek to preserve.  It is worse than useless to answer denunciation with denunciation, abuse with abuse.  That is not to oppose the authors of hate propaganda, but to join them. 

Rather, resolve not to join them.  When you read something by someone who seeks to elicit your outrage, even someone whose views you share, refuse to take the bait.  Discount claims that people you disagree with are engaged in a dark plot against you or possess inhuman motives.  If, upon examination, you find that people you disagree with are neither violent nor intentionally encourage violence, give them the benefit of the doubt.  Seek one out to have a conversation in which your differences become clear.  It’s hard to have such a conversation without coming away with the feeling that the other side is at least human.

It’s not our differences that threaten to destroy our society, but rather a spiritual disease too many of us share, on both sides of ideological divide:  The willingness to believe the worst of each other, the temptation to treat opponents as too evil to merit a fair shake.  The works of Uri Tuval and Eran Nissan sadden me, but I don’t want to respond to them with condemnation and outrage.  It would be too easy to become just like them, and I fear that more than I fear anything they may say about me.