Israel: The Modern Philoctetes

In 1941 Edmund Wilson, the American literary and social critic, published The Wound and the Bow in which he deployed Sophocles’ character Philoctetes, the legendary archer, who had a bow that never missed but who also had an evil-smelling wound that never healed. Wilson used the metaphor of Philoctetes as exemplary of the situation of many writers, the bow representing their art and the wound their neuroses.  Within this metaphor Wilson dealt productively with the writings of Casanova, Dickens, Kipling, Wharton, Hemingway and Joyce.

Wilson was preoccupied with the influence of psychic trauma on the work of individual artists. Suppose we deploy the Philoctetes metaphor not on the individual psyche but on that of the nation, specifically Israel. If the bow represents Israel’s overweening military power, what then is the evil-smelling wound that, as befell Philoctetes, is causing Israel to be shunned, to be banished or more accurately, confined, within its own redoubt, to become indeed a pariah?

Unlike Philoctetes, Israel’s wound is not physical, it is psychic. Although early glimpses of Israel’s psychic trauma have been discerned by several commentators post the 1967 war, a firmer indication of its nature is provided by Norman Finkelstein, himself the son of survivors of the Nazi holocaust, in his 2000 book The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering.

Finkelstein insists on making a spelling distinction between the term for the murder of six million Jews (not to mention communists, anti-Nazi Christians, Roma, homosexuals and the disabled) which he renders as ‘the Nazi holocaust’ and the relentless weaponizing of that event by the state of Israel and some diasporic Zionist organisations, which he renders as ‘Holocaust’. The book was traduced by the Israeli state and by most diasporic Jews, even those who think of themselves as ‘liberal Zionists’ (an oxymoronic formulation if ever there was one) such as The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland when, indeed, they should have welcomed it with open arms as pointing the way towards the healing of Israel’s psychic wound.

Without theorising the process or wholly teasing out its implications, Finkelstein identified Israel’s locating the Nazi holocaust as front and centre in the state’s evolving of the Zionist narrative as a fateful decision condemning Israel and by implication all diasporic Jews to be eternal victims, forever fending off existential threats, real or imaginary. By Israel’s foregrounding the Nazi holocaust such threats were inevitably viewed through its lens, the purported embodiment of the threats, the surrounding Arab states and, of course, the hapless Palestinians, of necessity being viewed, in some sort of perverse apostolic succession, as Nazi clones. The most absurd recent manifestation of this trope was Gilad Erdan, at the time Israel’s permanent representative at the United Nations, brandishing to the General Assembly a wartime photograph of the Arab leader, the Mufti of Jerusalem, meeting Hitler in Berlin. This ‘Arabs as Nazis’ trope has been explored by Mandy Turner in a recent paper entitled ‘The Nazi Analogy and the Trauma of October 7 . . .’. 

In spelling out the wholly deleterious effects of Israel’s fashioning of its national identity around the Nazi holocaust, no writer has been more industrious than political scientist Ian Lustick who has indeed coined the term ‘Holocaustia’ for the paradigm which, certainly from the 1970s, has shaped every aspect of Israeli life from political discourse to art production. In this endeavour, Israel has had legions of unwitting allies in those western film-makers, Jew and Gentile alike, who chose to make films about the Nazi holocaust. Wikipedia offers a list of upwards of two hundred fiction films partaking of the phenomenon.

Doubtless some were made for honourable reasons – western guilt and outrage at the events – and some for less honourable ones – addiction to what Susan Sontag has called ‘fascinating Fascism’ and the melodramatic possibilities offered by the subject. There is no shortage of books about cinema and the Nazi holocaust, for example Annette Insdorf’s Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust, though they tend to be strong on thematic analysis, less so on formal, cinematic analysis and the ideological implications of the latter. There is room for a genre-based account of ‘Holocaust films’ which would reveal their particular recurrences and their creation of repeated fetishized moments, central of which might be called ‘the Auschwitz tattoo’, although this should be understood as shorthand for the tattoos applied in all the death camps. Such revelations are often moments of stylistic excess, dramatic music and/or camera movements and a heightened emotional acting style. It comes as no surprise that ‘the Auschwitz tattoo’ is also a trope within Zionist political discourse, as Ian Lustick has discovered, citing a 2015 address by the then President of Israel, Reuven Rivlin, on Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Day: 

Today, 70 years after the liberation of the death camps, 

we stand before you and we swear on oath and a promise. 

‘All of us, each and every one of us, have a number tattooed 

on their arm.’ 

Lustick also reports Israeli high school students, on government-organised visits to the sites of death camps in Poland, having numbers tattooed on their arms. 

Diverse writers, including Ilan Pappé, Shlomo Sand, Avi Shlaim and Rashid Khalili, have exposed the outright lies, half-truths and arrant fantasies constituting the Zionist narrative, but these have been for the most part historians, humane and rational figures for whom the political process is primarily a rational enterprise. It has taken psychoanalytically-informed writers such as Jacqueline Rose (The Question of Zion) and Paul Werner (‘On the Psychopathology of Zionism’) to reveal the homicidal, and ultimately suicidal, bind Israel has locked itself into by foregrounding the Nazi holocaust in its fashioning of its national identity. Although Rose and Werner do not put it quite so bluntly, it is not just deranged fanatics like Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir who require psychiatric treatment, it is the state of Israel itself. A way of putting it is that, in order to save what remains of the Palestinians, Israel must be cured of it its own self-laceration.

The modern Philoctetes’ evil-smelling wound must be healed.