The Jew as an Error in His Own Simulation
How condemnation and admiration hold Jewish life to an impossible image
The world has acquired so many images of Israel that it can increasingly dispense with Israelis, those inconvenient inhabitants who continue to quarrel, fall in love, bury their parents and miss their buses beneath a country already perfected in other people’s accusations. Their presence introduces discrepancies into an image whose attraction lies in its freedom from discrepancy. Once Israel means only what the spectator requires, he can contemplate it without encountering anything capable of implicating him; his innocence has already been included in the picture.
Under the strange privilege of endless exposure, every gesture becomes available for inspection, and visibility performs the work once entrusted to darkness. Another image arrives to correct the previous image, requiring another explanation, another correction, until the spectator can no longer recall what he had wanted to see.
An Israeli mother may discover that the significance of her grief has reached the audience before the name of the person she has lost. Whatever she says will enter an interpretation already in progress; remaining silent offers no exemption. While a commentator assigns her suffering a place in history, she finds her child’s coat where it was left, still awaiting a gesture from someone who will not return.
Through this excess of representation, a second exile becomes possible without anyone having to leave the country. The Jews remain at home while the meaning of their home is transferred elsewhere. In an argument conducted far away, Israel becomes the evidence through which Europe examines its conscience, and Hebrew spoken at a kitchen table is scarcely audible beneath the proceedings. Someone objects that this hardly describes the country; the objection is entered as further evidence of the country’s reluctance to understand itself. Its inhabitants may speak, provided they accept that others possess the explanation.
Admiration can make similar demands upon the people it proposes to defend, requiring an immaculate Israel whose citizens would eventually become afraid to appear in public. Every foolish remark would endanger the exhibit. Whoever admires such a country has acquired an attachment to its perfection and may resent its inhabitants for spoiling it, particularly when they disagree with one another or elect someone embarrassing. Israelis need room to be politically wrong without discovering that they have reopened the question of whether their country should exist. No population could survive if its residence permit were renewed according to the political performance of its government.
Within the familiar arrangements of sympathy, the powerless Jew occupies a place that sovereignty makes difficult to preserve. The person awaiting rescue has acquired an army and may now act against the advice of those who had expected his gratitude. Something proprietary can emerge from the disappointment, as though compassion had purchased a continuing interest in his dependence. Jewish decisions then become offensive before their merits have been examined, because making them already exceeds the role allotted to the beneficiary. He was understood more completely when fewer possibilities were open to him.
When a civilian dies in Gaza, the death remains beyond whatever use can be made of it in an argument, and an Israeli decision remains open to judgement for what it has done. Neither the account of the death nor the defence of the decision can return a person to life. Yet even here, where an explanation ought to encounter its limit, the work of assigning meanings continues. A Palestinian child is made to accuse an entire country; elsewhere, someone requires an Israeli child’s death to carry the burden of that country’s defence. Nothing in either life authorised these tasks. The argument proceeds over the bodies, occasionally pausing to establish who is entitled to mourn them.
Once Israel’s existence enters the indictment, the trial can dispense with a verdict: the accusation already supplies the reality against which every answer will be measured. Even the defence feeds this circulation, producing an Israel obliged to justify its appearance at every instant, as though Jewish existence were a provisional concession of discourse. Somewhere in this exchange the country becomes superfluous. Its signs perform all its functions, confessing, denying, returning endlessly to the scene of an offence that precedes any act. The Jew who speaks introduces a disturbance into these proceedings, where his meaning has arrived before him and occupies his place.
Perhaps what scandalises the spectator is the Jew who carries his existence beyond the symbol, into a country where the meanings assigned to him have no authority over the hour of his return. Israel introduces this disturbance into the circulation of the Jewish image: people live there, compromising the perfection of every explanation. The spectator supplies further meanings, until the image accounts for everything, until the Jew himself becomes an unauthorised version of his image.
