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Moral and esthetic discussions on the depiction of horror and genocide, which were prominent in the aftermath of World War II, seem to have lost their relevance today. Is there still value in the debate between Claude Lanzmann and Jean-Luc Godard or Georges Didi-Huberman on the limitations of visually representing the Holocaust? Lanzmann emphasized the cognitive and moral insecurity of those witnessing the witnesses, while Godard was in favor of visually portraying evil. Today’s media environment seems to have followed Godard’s example. Who can expect discretion, or any regulation of the dissemination of images of catastrophe, when smartphones, go-pros and livestreams make everything accessible online?
Constant exposure to crude imagery creates a proximity all the more paradoxical the more we consider it: we are at once compelled to involve ourselves emotionally and to maintain psychic distance in order to protect ourselves.
These questions have come roaring back after the largest terrorist attack on Israel since its founding: one documented and reported as it occurred by both the perpetrators and the victims. Unlike Nazism, which sought to erase the traces of testimony, the raw material from 7 October 2023, the apocalyptic sights of mutilated bodies, abandoned vehicles, homes burnt to the ground and communities devastated, were disseminated indiscriminately in video clips. These images exposed—on a global scale and not only to the eyes of those directly concerned—acts of rape, kidnapping, and killing.
Such free-floating, overwhelming imagery along with its eerie soundtrack, however gripping they may be, are incapable of telling a coherent story. After 10/7, this excess of images may have created an inverted impression: increasing chaos and disinformation, which paralyze thought and feeling to this day. How does one retrospectively invoke what happened on that day whose proper name, as Lee Yaron notes in her book 10/7, signifies a cycle of Jewish mourning?
10/7 indicates a process of mourning that evokes multi-layered emotions from all parties involved, starting with endless sadness and despair and ending with revenge and cruel destruction, with raw and complete objectification. At the edges of the ongoing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, among the leadership of military action but also among the activists that carry the conflict to the world stage, nobody wants to negotiate. It is a world of constant talking, but no speech takes place. Returning to meaningful speech requires, therefore, a narrative and interpretive effort: a detailed description of the people involved in the conflict, of how they live, in what landscapes, in what languages—of their sense of the world. A narrative-interpretive endeavor such as this cannot even begin, and can certainly not achieve much, if it proceeds through preconceived political categories. Rather, it requires testimonies that imbued with both affect and the flexibility of becoming.
Collecting Testimonies
10/7 by Lee Yaron and The Gates of Gaza by Amir Tibon are part of a wave of books published after a year of disaster and war. Both authors are journalists at Haaretz: Yaron deals with social welfare and climate issues, Tibon with political commentary. Neither book is literary writing, and in Yaron’s case, it is not even writing in Hebrew (her book, unlike Tibon’s, is only published in English and other translations). Both books seek to actively digest and process, reclaiming what happened through documentary work.
The power of investigative journalism, its disciplined style and non-sensational modesty, has been growing in recent years not only in Israel. It is present in the literary turn of the memoir, which is largely related to the transformation of political life into fiction, that is, the false and fictitious governmental performance in the face of which writers devote themselves to a search for referential truth that exceeds the literary space.
Notably, Yaron and Tibon’s books speak from radically different perspectives. Yaron was outside Israel on 10/7, and she returned from the United States after the event. Tibon, on the other hand, was at the scene as a member of a kibbutz Nahal Oz: a community of 450 people that lost 13 members and saw seven more people kidnapped that day. Both books shift between individual and regional stories of the survivors of this extreme political violence in southern Israel, providing an overview of Jewish and Israeli history that sheds light on the events.
Yaron and Tibon were born in the late eighties to early nineties; they grew up in the generation after the Oslo Accords and Rabin’s assassination. All they have known is Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership, which offers no hope for peace but only «conflict management». For both, the core drama of the event involves a blurring of lines between the front and the rear, the army and civilians, and the Israeli government’s complete failure to effectively respond, leaving citizens to fend for themselves. They point to abandonment by state institutions, which continues unabated during the ongoing war on the northern front and in negotiations on the return of hostages in Gaza. They emphasize the tangible danger of abandoning hostages, the impact of such neglect, and the coeval disrespect of the civil contract that has the haunted Israeli society since 10/7.
Following the disaster, Lee Yaron wandered among diverse communities and between different scenes of events allowing her to map the economic-political-sociological faces of the South. The rich collage of portraits she draws «from the bottom up» and with few direct dialogues, zeroes in on the blink of the eye of the civil rupture on 10/7.
We encounter, for instance, Ukrainians who fled Putin’s invasion. Since they survived the Russia-Ukraine war, they were not afraid of missiles launched from Gaza. They settled in Ashkelon in the bosom of a Russian-speaking community that allowed them little interaction with Israelis and minimal knowledge of Hebrew. Another stop on Yaron’s journey brings her together with Bedouins who live in unrecognized villages, hurrying to help their neighbors even though they are constantly exposed to rockets from Gaza without alarm systems, shelter, or protection.
Yaron meets with young people who participated in the Supernova festival, where 364 were murdered and 40 kidnapped, with pacifist kibbutzniks who are committed to Israeli-Palestinian coexistence, with students and workers from Nepal who are unaware of what is happening around them, with religious Zionists who have experienced the withdrawal of Israeli settlements and military structures from Gaza as a personal, political and theological betrayal, as Haim Katzmna, a political scientist and garage worker murdered on 10/7 in kibbutz Holit, had convincingly shown. Yaron talks to people from developing towns populated by immigrants from Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, Ethiopia, and the Soviet Union.
The richness of her soft, non-judgmental gaze not only reveals discrete acts of kindness of people working for the good of the community, it also provides a glimpse into alternative types of existence within Israel that supersede national ties. In other words, it is a glimpse into the double movement of territorialization and deterritorialization characteristic of today’s global existence, as it finds expression within Israeli society. These unexpected margins of Israeli society are sites of potential for the political imagination: it happened this way; it could have happened differently; it may be different. Perhaps. One day.
The unexpected and the exceptional often provide the azimuth for human creative compasses: the chance of escaping one day from the cruel cycle of bloodshed is also evident in the story of Amir Tibon. Tibon sheltered at a missile-proof bunker from 6 am until 4 pm on 10/7 with his wife and two little daughters, literally in darkness with almost no communication to the outside world. His retrospective writing, which has the character of a suspense story, tries to capture in negative the story that unfolded outside.
Through interviews with kibbutz veterans, conflict researchers, and experts in Palestinian politics, he reconstructs the chain of moral, political and strategic mistakes that proved responsible for strengthening the militant elements on both sides. The plot of Gates of Gaza starts when «a short message from my mother» appears on Tibons phone screen: «Father is approaching you.» This commences a rescue operation of his father, Major General Noam Tibon, released from the army in 2014 and leaving Tel Aviv along with his wife, Gali to journey to Nahal Oz, collecting on the way both veterans and regular soldiers.
In this text there are two chilling moments where the Tibon couple, hurrying in panic to save their defenseless family, stop to offer help, first to a couple who escaped from the Nova party and then, close to Kibbutz Nahal Oz, to a bleeding soldier who needs to be rushed to the hospital. These quietly determined moments of decision that surpass the intuitive, self-evident territoriality of family ties and give precedence to the suffering of others constitute a sort of subversion of the dominant, quasi-deterministic narrative in which another future, a future of friendship, neighborliness, and cooperation is precluded.
Fleeting through it may be in this story, such a horizon is Israel’s only hope. It stands against the disarming fear that one must get used to the rules of a sick place, that adapting to the «radioactive radiation» of trauma, as the psychoanalyst Yolanda Gampel would say, is the only way to survive.
An Ahistorical Drive
Do we even have yet the right coordinates for thinking through this event? Is what happened a turning point in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a rupture, or the beginning of something else? Tibon links his descriptions of 10/7 to the recent history. What appears is a series of major political missteps, from the expulsion and dispossession of Palestinians after the 1948 war and the establishment of the Israeli state to the ongoing reality of endless war. There were, of course, statesmen, like Yitzhak Rabin or Ariel Sharon, who recognized that Israel was slipping into the unstable reality of a binational state: an apartheid-like regime without civil rights for half of its population. They strove to establish a different reality. But what has increased even more so after Rabin’s murder is a continued rightward shift toward militarism, and commensurate marginalization, if not delegitimization, of the peace camp. The right became the center, and the center became «leftist,» so to speak.
Today, the word «peace» as an object of hope has completely vanished from political discourse. As Yaron aptly puts it, the Palestinians are no longer part of the conversation. They are no longer a subject of the internal struggles between Israelis who are supposedly fighting for liberal democracy and those who are almost completely ignoring the Palestinian reality in the West Bank. Netanyahu’s attempted coup brought hundreds of thousands to the street in 2023, but there are gnawing doubts about the nature of this democracy when it comes to the Arabs and the occupied territories. Even in the newspaper Haaretz, writes Yaron, the very existence of a discourse on this issue is considered treason—especially towards journalists who report on the occupation.
Tibon, too, describes the complete indifference and blindness that prevails between Israelis and Palestinians. Ignoring the disaster on the other side engenders ongoing dehumanization. As Yaron puts it, «the shared political ground has never been narrower: what unites the poles of Israeli society is a sense of utter collapse». And Tibon: «Acknowledging the pain of the other side is seen by many people today as a weakness, almost a betrayal.»
An air saturated with sorrow and despair, anger and frustration cannot help but cause compassion fatigue. Otherness is experienced as a scratch; it is ipso facto a wound, first and foremost among the Israelis themselves, despite the false umbrella of solidarity. The depressive mindset, which is taking over the entire world, produces a one-dimensional, dichotomous, and hollow picture of reality, phasing out any complex perspective that goes beyond the position of the single, particular witness.
What is the weight of individual choice and initiative in the face of ahistorical drives? In his afterword to 10/7, the novelist Joshua Cohen reflects on the imaginary basis of 10/7. This was, after all, a modern pogrom in which the Israelis of 2023, despite a completely different geopolitical reality, witnessed the reactivation of a helplessness and passivity that was characteristic of the pre-sovereign Jewish existence. The validity of such a «homologization», when history seems to repeat itself as if they it was obeying quasi-mystical patterns, is not immediately clear. Tibon, who recounts his parents’ meeting with the couple who escaped from the Nova party, writes: «My mother, a historian of the Holocaust, was horrified to hear how they covered themselves with dry leaves and hid quietly so that the murderers would not find them … She found it hard to believe that such an event occurred in Israel in 2023.»
The thesis of antisemitism from time immemorial, a historical constant that shifts in shape but never goes away, already provoked Hannah Arendt’s opposition during the Eichmann trial. It signals an apolitical dimension to the politics of Israel as the sovereign Jewish state, a paradox at the root of the Jewish «entrance into history». Arendt was right to say that antisemitism is plunging Israelis into melancholy. But perhaps there is more to that melancholy than pathological withdrawal and total—though ambivalent—identification with the dead. It sits in the Israeli temperament like a small fire next to a heart of activism. It appeals to a mindset of fundamental passivity that exists alongside and even pulls against more aggressive or even militaristic instincts. It is not laziness of thought. Rather, it is a fatigue that withers shock and paralysis: a substratum as primitive as it is vital.
During the last year, this quality has been at odds with forces of demonstration and protest that go out into the streets. Is such withdrawal and introvertedness distinctly «Jewish»? Is it what any society may feel in the face of endless suffering? A sense of defeat is produced when external abandonment becomes self-abandonment, provoking a kind of malignant disease. Despite spectacular military operations, the pervasive feeling of vulnerability is undiminished and undiminishable.
But perhaps such vulnerability is necessary. A day will come when this vulnerability, which heretically denies [Koferet, כופרת] the sovereign principle, may bring with it powers of atonement (Kippur, כיפור).
— Note from the editors: A few quotes from Amir Tibon’s book have been translated by our author from the Hebrew edition; they differ slightly from the English edition.