Politics at the Seder table

Our lovely hosts, on the second night of Passover, were troubled at the thought of once again lamenting the historic saga of Jewish deliverance from Egyptian oppression in the light of Israel’s oppression of its neighbouring Palestinians (I’m quoting).

They thought that fetishising Egyptian inhumanity and Jewish victimhood gave the appearance that we were indifferent – not just to the suffering of others but to the fact that our kith and kin may have been causing it. That we deserved, in other words, to be taken down a peg or two from our paschal self-righteousness.

Their response was to suggest that we either discard the Haggadah for the evening and conduct an open discussion of the dilemma before us, or use it to pivot from the conventional religious narrative to a more contemporary political appraisal.

That was how the evening began. It quickly led to a listing of grievances against (a) settler violence, the toleration of it by the police, and the encouragement of it by Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s current Minister of National Security, and others; and (b) the implied complicity of the mainstream Jewish community – in Israel, in the diaspora, and perhaps even around our Seder table. The tone was simultaneously accusatory and breast-beating.

After the complaints had been restated several times, I tried to pin our hosts down. Where did they want the conversation to lead? If it was more than just a rehearsing of their anguish at supposed Jewish collusion, what should the takeaway be? Did they want us to write to our MP? Or to a Member of the Knesset? Or agree then and there to join a political party opposing the settler movement? Or donate to a charity supporting the Palestinians – Amnesty or Oxfam, perhaps?

But nothing concrete was proposed. Nothing was asked of us – just, apparently, that we wallow in guilt and denunciation of ourselves.

From ritual to reproach

That left me confused: did they only want us to unload our political discomfort? Was it that the more we wallowed, the more meritorious we would be? The Haggadah encourages this in our talk about the Exodus, and yet a conversation without agenda or purpose risks being merely noise – unless the idea is to explore contrasting views, or how to construct contrasting views – and that did not seem to be the point.

The problem, I think, was the implication that “we,” unlike our hosts, were untroubled by events in Gaza and the West Bank, and that the Seder – with its focus on the historic persecution of our ancestors – ought now to enlighten us about “our” contemporary persecution of others.

In fact, Jewish exceptionalism – the notion that no one has ever suffered as we have – must have pained many of us over the last few years, especially as we have watched the suffering of the Palestinians. I’m sure it bothered all of us sitting around the table on Thursday night.

But an important consideration was lacking in our hosts’ otherwise admirable kneejerk: the inability to comprehend, or even want to comprehend, the motivations of the bad guys.

The double standard

When it comes to reacting to the actions of Hamas, for example, or Palestinian Islamic Jihad or similar groups, there’s no shortage of sympathy in the world for their choice of violence as a weapon. The standard defence of them comes straight from the playbook of Lenin and Frantz Fanon: these people are so oppressed that any tool is justifiable in their quest for liberation.

What is odd is that those who have no difficulty using this argument to defend Hamas and its ilk find it impossible to apply the same thinking to those who use violence to promote a Greater Israel. Instead, the unspeakables on the Israeli right are written off in uniquely emotive language – as “hateful” and “evil” – without any consideration of how they came to be so.

Arguments used to excuse others are not deployed to excuse Israel’s ultra-nationalists. It’s easier to treat them as quintessentially evil, innately vile, and as a phenomenon rather than as individuals with human motivations. This resistance to explanation seems to be based on a fear of excusing what we come to understand (“tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner”), which no one wants.

This disinclination to rationalise Israel’s far right is mulish and intellectually lazy. Israel’s ultra-nationalists aren’t a distinct breed; they’re not genetically fixed in the way that every boy and every girl that’s born into this world alive is, in W.S. Gilbert’s Iolanthe. They have become ultra in response to the circumstances as they see them. It is necessary, therefore, to understand what is turning them to the ultra-right – not least because many may be members of our families, or former friends.

This is important also because, however despicable we may find their behaviour, each player has agency and choice; in their own minds, they’re behaving rationally. We have an obligation, therefore, to understand what game (in game theory terms) they are playing – and to point our outrage at their behaviour, not at them. This is something those who are shocked by the settlers’ impunity find hard to do, even when they happily contextualise the ill deeds of others.

However uncomfortable it makes us, the problem group needs to be addressed anthropologically and psychologically. We need to examine the motivations of its members. If we do, we’ll see that underlying their behaviour is fear.

That does not mean that, as a community, they do not wish to dominate, suppress, or impose their questionable commitment to a greater Jewish state. But the question that should concern us is what leads them to such extremes. To write them off blithely as “evil” – as does Francesca Albanese, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian Territories – is vague, absolute, and places the offending parties beyond reach and redemption.

Even if one insists on demonising language, we still need to take account of how behaviour adapts to threat – the threat from neighbouring countries, historic Arab opposition, Iran-sponsored terrorism, suicide bombers, UN opposition, world antipathy, etc. We all accept the idea of “fight or flight” as a normal response to danger. It’s not such a stretch to interpret ultra-nationalism as a similar response.

An Albanese might call that fear unreasonable, or engineered, or paranoid, or psychotic, or delusional. That may be so. But that does not take away from the fact that it is nonetheless an authentic human reflex, and that it can be explained, rather than simply judged as deplorable.

We don’t judge other people’s behaviours that way; to do so would be outrageous. And yet it is normal to do so in the case of ultra-Zionists. That places it in defiance of the analytical procedures that those who condemn the far right most revere. We should call it out when we see it being used by others – and by ourselves. It should matter more to us to understand than to condemn, if for no better reason than to avoid sounding pious.

What the Seder is for – and what it isn’t

That’s my first point. My second point concerns the idea that those who know better need to bring to our attention how evil these players are, and make an issue of how “we” have failed to confront them. That, I argue, is to frame things back to front, as also is the idea that a Seder is the right occasion to alert us to such crimes.

The fact is, no one is in denial: we all go about lamenting the horrors of settler action on the West Bank every day, and despairing at the State’s refusal to act. What we need is for the Seder to help us out of our misery – to show us a larger picture, to provide context, and to help us grasp what we may not have grasped from what we see day after day in the media.

The structure of the Seder shows how we were lifted from abject misery under Egyptian rule to triumph under our own rule – or under God’s. If we’re going to be invited to view modern conditions alongside our experience in the past, the same approach needs to be taken here. The evening should build, so that however grim we felt when we arrived, however wrecked by anxieties, we end it being buoyed by something that gives us consolation and hope.

That is the long-established pattern of the evening, and that is what we’re all in need of.