We are all, ultimately, Palestinians

(DRAFT. This is admittedly quite rough, with errors, posted now because the situation is a crisis (if not for me personally in the way my detractors would like to claim (read on!). I will polish it later).

Will this war prove a turning point for Americans, and American Jews, in the way that the 1967 war was? For decades, support for the Palestinian people has been a staple of the left, but taboo both for Jews and in American politics generally.

I was harassed by the NYPD, probably at the behest of the FBI, in 2015 partly because I had vocally and in writing (as a translator) opposed the last Israeli war against Gaza. They hospitalized me on psychiatric pretenses, and told me, privately (while maintaining the lie in the official records), that this was done at the behest of the police. I was told all kinds of things, to harass me, including that I was supposed to recognize that "this is a good country," as a psychiatrist on the ward put it, and as if I had denied that. Another psychiatrist opened his arms wide and said, "I welcome you to be American with me." I was subjected to potentially indefinite detention -- the possibility of which was mentioned to me, also privately, of course, for deniability -- because I was suspected of un-American opinions and personality. (Is there an American personality that is mandated? The 'admitting' psychiatrist at a New York public hospital seemed to think so. A colleague of his averred that he was keeping me to punish me for expressing political dissent. On the next to last day, they had a social worker (who still works there) threaten me with permanent lockup at a distant facility, a place where I would obviously be sent so that I could not do anything (except maybe slowly die), since this incarceration prevents you (and is obviously designed partly for that purpose, and that is why it was threatened to me) from doing any work (including my work as a writer) or pursuing any of your own interests, even associating with your friends. Family contacts are closely regulated, as in prisons, and I was harassed whenever I used the phone to call them; for example, I was constantly told to hang up the phone because people were waiting, though there was another phone free and no one was waiting. There were no books to read, as these are jail wards that have no library.

I always worry they will do it again. If you are a poor enough that you can only see a doctor at a public facility, then they keep public records on you, available to the police (who of course have them in perpetuity, though you can only see them for six years). These doctors are in effect police officers with medical degrees. Their job is to provide social control to the huge numbers of people deemed 'sick in the head' (as I prefer to put it -- why use polite language, which is just euphemistic lies?) and who, because poor, they figure are potential criminals. Most of their questions, and those of their therapists, are inculpatory. They suspect you of crime, even though you have not committed any (that just means to them, that you have not 'yet' -- but you 'might', and can be punished, excluded from society, for that).

Is it merely hysterical and wrong for me to point out that the Holocaust was partly a 'clean up operation' (something one of their police officers, acting undercover, though making it obvious) directed at the so-called "mentally ill," who like the Gypsies, Communists and other political dissidents, and anyone they thought deviant or lacking "health" -- which in Nazi ideology had replaced sin and crime as the object of policing and social exclusion, even to the point of extermination? I don't think it is excessive to point this out. They used the mental health ideology against me to prevent me from doing my work as a writer. The very springs of my creativity are madness to them, unacceptable. But the truth is they really don't like my political inclinations. I was being watched for that; this is known. I recently learned that some of my friends knew that; they did not say how they learned, as it was not from me, nor was it later; they knew it at the time. They acted against me only after I had translated a piece sharply critical of a prominent Jewish leader in France, and gotten into a row of no great consequence with a local rabbi.

Are things changing now as a result of the public clamor, including in the Jewish world today, which is sharply divided, over the war? The American police state is what it is, and is far more repressive in America and the other Anglosphere countries than it is in Europe and many other countries. So "if they want to get you, they'll get you," as Snowden put it. But I wonder if it's going to be a bit harder this time for them to crack down on opponents of what Israel is doing. That's the hope.

Of course, if the US becomes directly, rather than indirectly, involved in a war in the middle east, there will probably be something like overnight raids and lots of political repression. I am not very confident that my own civil liberties amount to much for my government. I think that in general in this country they amount to a very inspiring nice idea, and little more than that. They are not so readily used against the right, and never have been, and are usually used against the left.

In my case, they'll say I'm crazy. I say that's a lie. I may not have a chance to speak publicly, and certainly will not be able to write, if they do that to me again. It is a crime on the part of our government, and one in which most doctors and other "mental health" professionals are willingly complicit. They are America's "willing executioners." Most of them cannot be accorded much blame, of course, because they are inundated and their behavior determined by ideologies and lies.

To care about the way things are in the world is morally infinitely better than being indifferent. The American Jewish philosopher Abraham Joshua Heschel did much to argue this point. If you care, then you are passionate. If you are passionate, you hate evil and love the good. That means you must love justice, peace, and the well-being of all peoples, not just your own tribe, and hate injustice. It is not "violence" to feel and express such passion. That is just a Protestant Christian prejudice. It was common in Germany and is in America today. They lock people in crazy wards in order to make them so calm they seem indifferent, which is why they used to use lobotomies, and now use more short-term chemical and therapeutic equivalents, designed to extinguish all discernible passionate feeling, to dull and calm a soul to degree zero, a frozen personality that cannot or will not react. Much intimidation is used to effect this result as well. To me, it is a kinder, gentler Nazism, driven by a similar hatred, also exterminationist (the undercover cop, pretending to be a hospital social worker, threatened me with "elimination," which he said would be in case of "a matter of life and death," meaning of course that they could say that and use it to put me to death). I think psychiatry, along with social Darwinism and the rhetoric of social health and sickness and "degeneracy," which was widespread in Europe between the 1850s and the rise of the Third Reich, a rhetoric that was also used widely by Jews, including the famous Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig, and found its way into Zionism, where Jews accused themselves of having been weak and degenerate physically and morally because they worked in supposedly parasitical occupations rather than working the land. So there is a whole huge and interesting tie-in here.

I am an anti-fascist. I am that at the core of my being. I don't have any illusion that America is changing wholesale in this respect. But these are among the personal reasons why I cannot fail to radicalize and take to its logical further development the principles of anti-fascism and anti-anti-Judaism that my knowledge of, with some, enough, intimate connections to European history in the 20th century, render to me as if commanded, that is, morally necessary and compelling. I also ask what it is to be a victim, to know you can be one, and what is the victim's privilege and duty? To start with, I consider Sartre's affirmation, "It is right to rebel." It isn't always, but it can be. There are people who tell me I must obediently trust the authorities, who like the proverbial father always are usually know best, keep working, and buying, and obeying, and never rebel, because that is sinful, since people are by nature evil, and the nature of sin and evil is rebellion against divine or absolute authority, obviously a mirror of that of the state. That is a Christian idea; it is not true in Judaism exactly, and it is not true on the left. You say we have freedom of conscience and religion? I am a man of the left. That is part of my religion. My denomination, I denominate myself thus.

If they try to "eliminate" me, and I am still alive, in some place of detention, and maybe only psychological torture, which harassment at certain levels can and should be called, I hope that I have friends who will try to say what I at least momentarily cannot. More importantly, I hope and pray that I will be worthy of them.

The current image of Zionism and "the Jews" promoted by the right-wing colonialists and militarists is completely unacceptable. It does not just negate, it reverses, it perversely is the very opposite, of the Jewish values of opposition to oppression and injustice, of concern for the stranger, the poor, the displaced and dispossessed, the powerless, and its affirmation of universality. The Jews as a people were defined historically in their religion as a particular people whose "chosen-ness" was not a privilege making their lives more worthy than that of others -- indeed, the Talmud says that "no one may say that my blood is redder than someone else's." It was rather that the Jews were an avant-garde ethically and morally, and also politically. The messianic age is not a Jewish national state on the modern post-Westphalian model, with its fortresses, walls, and army; the messianic age is an "end of history" in which there will be no more war, poverty, injustice or crime, and law itself, and the state violence that the existence of law entails, will become precisely inoperative. The prohibitions of violent crime will be inoperative because people will be learned and wise to the point that no one would think it makes any sense to do such things. Thus, the moral laws will become objects of study alone as the temple animal sacrifices did 2,000 years ago. This is a dream, and we do not know if we will get there, but that is the dream the Jews held out, not that of a modern fortress state armed to the teeth. Until then, the Jews were separated only because their particularity gave them a position (it is impossible to say it is the only possible one) from which to articulate and represent universal values. The Torah says that the same law must apply to the citizen and the stranger. I conclude that Judaism itself was progressively hijacked by a right-wing. And the consequence of this is the current war. I do not love Hamas, but if Israel prevails in the way that it wants to, the situation will only be worsened. Gaza is a slum that was artificially created and has been kept as such, and policed such that it is a prison whose people cannot escape. Israel wants them to disappear.

For a people who are objects of colonization to be made to disappear (which in some languages is also a euphemism for die, and being killed is the only way people can be definitively made to disappear), how is that different in kind from the Nazi project? The Nazi project is that of enhancing the well-being of a given national state and its people at the expense of some others, from which it is supposed to be purified. The discourse of mental illness, which is largely contemporaneous with the rise of fascist nationalism and the medical model of it in the second half of the 19th century, is another, far milder, form of the same thing. So is allowing billions of people to live the most abject lives in the world's slums. Gaza is one of those slums. It is a kind of Apartheid Bantustan, similar in a way to America's native American reservations. In these places, people are given to understand that they can only manage their inevitably sad existence, in sad ways, given sad inevitable results. (That is also what psychiatry largely does, especially today: people are designated sick in the largest number of ways and subjected people possible, and there is no cure; they can only be managed. That psychiatrist is there to manage your life, help you with government-approved social control. To them, you can have no interesting potentialities, and nothing you could like want to do of your own accord would be encouraged. They are afraid of us. What do they fear we will do, rebel? What do they fear I will do, I who only ever have wanted to write, and have never done anything transgressive except being outspoken and saying something someone did not like?

This is why I stand with the people of Gaza. Like recent ancestors of many people I know who were victims of the Nazi project of social purification and elimination, a murderous ideology largely driven by ideas of spiritual and mental health, on which many people, some unwitting, modeled their way of thinking about whole societies and populations. Mental health and illness played a central role in the Holocaust, and it was thus no accident that people accused and excluded on its terms shared the fate of the Jews (and the Gypsies, who were also subject to a genocide) and others. And it goes beyond that. Ultimately, the system that these policing and social control forces are enforcing has no certain friends or beneficiaries and not millions but billions of victims. There are slums everywhere.

As a social historian has recently argued, "Capital hates everyone." I am on the side of the people of Gaza because I recognize that this ultimately is an objective fact. If this can be done to them (displaced, bombed, and that in a place where they were already imprisoned, and like prisoners everywhere, the potentialities of their lives and those of their children greatly reduced and closely policed), then it can be done to me, and it could be done to you. Will you wait until the clouds appear on your more provincial and local horizon?

The greatest lie they told me may have been that said by a specialist they brought in to utter certain messages, apparently directed particularly at me. One of them was "I learned that it is all about myself." It is not all about you. That is the most fundamental error, whose perpetuation is criminal, of medical psychiatry today. Your problems are not "psychological" problems that originate in your morally defective soul or physically inferior (shades of Nazism, again) body. People's problems, however they construe them or others, like those assigned to police or manage them, do, are never about themselves alone. We live in societies and relationships. Everyone does unless and until they are put into something like a solitary confinement. That is a technique used to isolate people, of whom it can then be said that they are themselves responsible for their own isolation. You are told that you are "outside society," and you have become such in and through the private and separate evolution of your own self and body. But it's a lie. They exclude you by force and then attribute that exclusion to you yourself, to make you responsible for the violence being done to you. This is a form of torture, albeit a "soft" form because psychological. It no longer deserves the mere name "harassment," it's more than that, and be policy. It is the person thus excluded, and he or she only, of whom it can then be said that what has happened to them, or what they are rightly concerned with, is "about themselves only." They perpetrate the lie that the society consists of a bunch of absolutely separated bodies, who then may be tasked with "communicating" as something they may or may not actually do, and might be ordered to do as an injunction (the "specialist" said this to me also, comically saying that he had "never communicated" until he reached a certain age -- or until he was isolated as I was, and then told to confess). These separated bodies are supposed to generate spontaneously illnesses that have sociological and linguistic components, and that, whether or not they can in any sense be said to exist at all, are unintelligible, as all psychiatric medicine would be, if the putative illnesses originated with them. Presumably as if with a defective will.

I am a pariah. I have been a victim, in the mildest ways compared with a great many people worldwide. Jews used to be pariahs, even more than they were victims, but no longer are. But the kinds of effects, the kinds of relationships, the kinds of actions, the kinds of injustices or wrongs, and the ways good people everywhere are capable of responding to them, which often means a refusal, these things persist. I side with the world's pariahs, its excluded, even if mostly I myself have been in the luckier portion of humanity. I try and intend to be faithful to a certain idea of the Jew and what is Jewish, ethically, historically, politically. I am scandalized by the horribly false and wrong misreading of that. I appeal to the Jewish non-Jew in others, including my readers. Actions and the true descriptions of what people do and is done to them are louder and more important than stale identities. For these and other reasons, I oppose the violent attacks on and displacement of the Palestinian people, and their ongoing exclusion and displacement, which was constitutive of the Zionist project from the beginning and in its essence. I stand for Jewish values and the universal good that is necessarily their object, and for the values apparently stemming from any elsewhere that are consistent with these principles. The Biblical promise was not one of domination and supremacy.

In 1968, when the French government responded to the protests in the streets by banning the student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit (who was Jewish), from returning from a visit to Germany, marchers chanted, “We are all German Jews.” Ultimately, we are all Palestinians. (These are objectively similar statements, as they concern what can happen to people as “objects” of the actions of states and others; subjectively, what matters is what people intend and do do, starting with recognition of what can be done to them.) Anyone can be sent to a camp, a prison, a policed ghetto, a place of “elimination.” And there are all kinds of pretexts. Thus:

We cannot be for ourselves alone. The very idea of that doesn't even make any sense to begin with. Even if it can be violently enforced.