NAZA: Why 25 Minutes of Applause?

There are occasions when excess becomes more revealing than argument. The twenty-five-minute standing ovation accorded at the Venice Film Festival to NAZA, a documentary devoted to allegations against Israel, was such an occasion. The film itself need not detain us here. What warrants examination is the spectacle that followed it: an audience on its feet for nearly half an hour, applauding with a fervour so prolonged that the response ceased to resemble ordinary appreciation and assumed the character of a public rite.

This is not an insignificant distinction. Applause is normally episodic. It registers approval and then subsides. When it persists for twenty-five minutes, its duration becomes part of its meaning. The audience is no longer merely acknowledging a film; it is participating in a collective affirmation, one in which each individual is fortified by the visible enthusiasm of those around him. By that stage, the object on the screen has receded and the moral self-conception of the audience has moved to the foreground.

To anyone familiar with Jewish history, there is something disconcertingly recognizable in the disproportion.

One of the more curious features of the Jewish experience in the West is the extent to which Jews have repeatedly occupied a place in the imagination of surrounding societies vastly greater than their demographic or political significance could possibly justify. They were never permitted simply to constitute a small and ancient people with their own religion, traditions and communal life. They were transformed, again and again, into symbols through which other civilizations explained themselves.

In medieval Christendom, the Jew was not merely the adherent of another faith. He became a theological necessity: the figure who possessed revelation but, according to Christian teaching, failed to comprehend its fulfilment. The Jew was therefore made to serve a function within a Christian account of history. His persistence required explanation; his refusal to disappear into the dominant theological narrative acquired significance far beyond the actual scale of Jewish life.

The secularization of Europe did not abolish this habit. It merely modernized it.

By the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Jews could be accused of being at once the principal agents of capitalism and the architects of revolutionary socialism; cosmopolitan to the point of disloyalty, yet tribal to the point of separatism; dangerously assimilated, yet constitutionally incapable of assimilation. These accusations were frequently mutually exclusive, but that was not their weakness. It was evidence of their function.

The Jew had become a receptacle.

Societies deposited in him whatever they most feared.

The Dreyfus Affair demonstrated this with extraordinary clarity. Alfred Dreyfus was one French artillery officer falsely accused of treason in 1894, yet within a short time his case had become the arena in which France fought over the army, the Catholic Church, republicanism, nationalism, citizenship and the nature of Frenchness itself. Dreyfus ceased to be merely a man accused of a crime. He became a vessel into which France poured its deepest anxieties about itself.

That historical pattern is worth recalling when considering the place occupied by Israel in contemporary Western life.

Israel is a country of approximately ten million people. Jews constitute only a minute fraction of humanity. Yet one would scarcely infer this from the astonishing volume of political, cultural and emotional energy directed toward the Jewish state. Universities thousands of kilometres from the Middle East are convulsed by it. Artists are expected to pronounce upon it. Musicians interrupt performances over it. Professional associations debate it. Cultural institutions reorder programs around it. Corporations are pressed to formulate positions on it. Individuals whose knowledge of Jewish history, Zionism, Palestinian nationalism or the modern Middle East could generously be described as superficial nevertheless speak on Israel with an assurance bordering on the sacerdotal.

The world is hardly lacking in brutality. Sudan has suffered catastrophe on a scale that should shame the conscience of the international community. The Iranian regime has imprisoned, tortured and killed those who challenge its authority. Wars, ethnic massacres and systematic repression occur elsewhere with horrifying regularity.

These matters are reported and condemned. Serious people labour courageously to alleviate them.

But they do not produce the same phenomenon.

Israel has become something more than the subject of political judgment. It has become a moral symbol.

That distinction is essential.

The contemporary West possesses its own vocabulary of moral condemnation: colonialism, racism, white supremacy, militarism, nationalism, indigenous dispossession, genocide and imperial power. These concepts possess genuine historical content and should not be trivialized. Yet it is remarkable how frequently they are now concentrated upon one small Jewish state, as though Israel had become the composite embodiment of nearly every sin the modern West has learned to abhor.

Every era, of course, speaks in the moral language available to it. Medieval Europe spoke primarily through theology. The nineteenth century increasingly spoke through nation, class and race. Our age speaks through colonialism, oppression, identity and human rights.

What should command the attention of the historian is not that the vocabulary has changed, but that the Jewish subject remains peculiarly available for symbolic use.

This brings us back to Venice.

A twenty-five-minute ovation is not required to express sympathy for Palestinians, nor admiration for a documentary. Its extravagance suggests something else: the public confirmation of belonging to a moral community. By remaining on their feet, by continuing to applaud, by observing the identical response of hundreds around them, the participants were doing more than registering approval. They were asserting a moral identity.

And Israel has become extraordinarily useful for this purpose.

To denounce Israel in certain Western cultural environments now communicates not merely a position on a distant conflict, but something about the speaker himself. It can signify that one is anti-colonial, anti-racist, humanitarian, progressive, aligned with the oppressed and securely positioned on what one takes to be the correct side of history.

Israel becomes the instrument through which virtue is demonstrated.

This is where the historical parallel becomes uncomfortable.

For centuries, Western societies did not merely dislike Jews. They employed Jews symbolically. Christian civilization used the Jew to illuminate Christian truth. Nationalists used the allegedly rootless Jew to clarify national belonging. Revolutionaries could use the Jewish financier as a personification of capitalism. Racial theorists used the Jew to define biological purity.

The forms changed because the societies changed.

The utility of the Jew endured.

There was once a phrase in Europe — the “Jewish Question” — whose very construction should strike us as extraordinary. Jews, though few in number, had somehow become a problem requiring solution. Could they assimilate? Could they be trusted? Were they a religion or a nation? Could they become fully French, German or Austrian?

Zionism offered a radical answer: Jews would cease to be somebody else’s question. They would recover sovereignty in their ancestral homeland and become political actors rather than permanent objects of other peoples’ anxieties.

Yet sovereignty did not terminate the obsession.

It enlarged its stage.

The Jew who once occupied an absurdly magnified place within the European imagination now possesses a state, and that state has inherited much of the symbolic burden once imposed upon the individual Jew. The Jewish Question has, in some respects, been succeeded by the Israel Question.

This is why the duration of the ovation in Venice deserves scrutiny. Had the applause lasted several minutes, it would scarcely have warranted comment. Twenty-five minutes is another matter. At such length, excess becomes meaning. The applause acquires a ceremonial quality and the audience ceases merely to react to a film; it begins to participate in a drama of moral self-definition.

Criticism of Israel is not the issue. Governments, armies and political movements must be open to criticism, and Israel is no exception. What warrants attention is the point at which criticism becomes fixation, and fixation begins to reveal more about the observer than the observed.

That is the significance of Venice.

The audience stood for twenty-five minutes.

One need not speculate about the private motives of every person in the room. The collective act is sufficiently eloquent.

For centuries, Jews have been compelled to carry meanings assigned to them by others, meanings wildly disproportionate to their actual place in society. Today, increasingly, Israel bears that same burden.

The vocabulary is new.

The obsession is not.