The Jewish Power Blog: Embracing Victimhood

Three weeks after the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas on Israel last year, Gilad Erdan, Israel’s ambassador to the UN, expressed his frustration with the General Assembly’s failure to agree on any condemnation of Hamas by donning a yellow star while addressing the Assembly.  He argued that the silence of the UN in the face of this atrocity was a kind of reenactment of the silence of the world in the face of the atrocities of the Holocaust.  This comparison (which aroused an outcry, even among some of his colleagues on the Israeli right) suggested that just as the Jewish people were powerless victims of Nazi cruelty then, so the Jewish state is the powerless victim of Hamas cruelty today; and now, as then, the world stands by, unable to agree to take a stand.  Meanwhile, strident protests on US campuses were accusing Israel’s army of genocide in its response…

It seems that Israel and the Palestinians have locked themselves into a discourse of competitive victimhood that prevents any possibility of useful dialog.  Israel, as a sovereign state, has taken on the victimhood identity that has become commonplace among Jews since the Enlightenment, what historian Salo Baron (in 1928, before the Holocaust) called the “lachrymose conception” of Jewish history: Seeing that history, since the exile, as a story of discrimination, persecution, massacre, wandering, pauperization.  Powerless since the exile, the Jews are the eternal victim people.  The Holocaust simply proved, to anyone who had doubts, that this characterization was correct.  And the perpetuation of this victimhood identity has found many cultural expressions, from high school pilgrimages to Auschwitz to the obligatory visit to Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial by every arriving diplomat.

Meanwhile, the Palestinians claim that while the Jews may have been victims in the past, they have become perpetrators, so that now it is the Palestinians with the claim to be the world’s victims.  Engaged in commemorating the villages destroyed in 1948 and preserving the traditional culture overwhelmed by the western colonialist juggernaut, they see Israel’s very existence (not just the occupation of the West Bank) as the explicit, deliberate, and violent crushing of their national aspirations, of their right of self-determination or even of their national existence.

And of course with every eruption of violence – of which the current one is typical – each side can convincingly portray the other as cruel, violent, and oppressive – and portray themselves as, once again, powerless, victims.

But, as many scholars have pointed out, there is a difference between victimization and victimhood.  Victimization is what happens to you.  Clearly, both Israelis and Palestinians have been, at various times, victims.  They have also been perpetrators.  There are mechanisms for remediating such unjust suffering: on the level of collectives such as nations, there are direct and indirect mechanisms for negotiation, international tribunals, truth and reconciliation commissions.  These serve to empower the victim by exacting repentance/apology, agreed-upon punishment and/or restitution/compensation from the perpetrators, resetting the relationship to an equilibrium.

Victimhood, on the other hand, is allowing your victimization to become part of your identity, so that the above mechanisms of remediation cannot operate.  The reason that victimhood is so difficult to escape is that the siren song of powerlessness is very hard to resist.  Why?   Because we all know that it is forbidden to blame the victim; that is, if I am powerless, I am not responsible.  I owe nothing to anybody.  I occupy the moral high ground, ruminating endlessly on my injury and resentment, absolved of feeling any empathy for or understanding of my injurer.  And of course, the only route I can envision to restoring my power is to turn the tables, to make my injurer into a powerless victim; i.e., revenge.  So round and round we go (see my post on vengeance).

But what if we Jews were to try to disengage our current predicament from our memory of the more distant past?  What if we said, “OK, we suffered a lot over the centuries, because we were stateless – a powerless, scattered minority without political status or military might; but since 1948 we have emerged from powerlessness and, as we had always hoped, returned to being a player on the world stage.  Our economy, our political institutions, and our army are vastly more powerful than those of the Palestinians.  Victimhood no longer becomes us.  As a sovereign regional great power, no one can ‘make us’ do anything; we never ‘have no choice.’ ”

Indeed, over the years we, as a nation, have made certain choices regarding our involvement in Lebanese and intra-Palestinian power struggles, our response to Palestinian national aspirations,  how to relate to the Palestinian minority within Israel, and with which foreign powers to ally ourselves, in the region and elsewhere.  And as a sovereign, even powerful state, we cannot stick on a yellow star every time one of those choices turns out to have been a mistake, claiming that once again the world is victimizing us.

If we indeed have power, then, at least sometimes, the buck stops with us, and we must stop and take a careful, critical look at the choices we have made – and at the ones still facing us.