The Dialectic of Negation

By Gilad Atzmon

"......As much as early Zionists had never tried to disguise the extent of their prophetic dream, they didn’t make any efforts to conceal their contempt towards their brothers either. In their emerging fantasy of national awakening, Jews were to divorce from their greed and money seeking as well as their cosmopolitan tendencies. In their vision, Zion was there to transform the Jew into an ordinary organic human being. The move to Zion was there to fill the chasm created by emancipation. The settlement in Zion was there to give birth to a new man. A Jew who looks at himself with pride, a Jew who fills Jewishness with meaning. A Jew that is defined by positive qualities rather than by mere negation.......

Evidently, Zionism has failed completely due to various reasons. Though the Israelis speak Hebrew and dwell on a land they associate with their collective past, the 'new Jew’ failed in transforming himself into an authentic humanist. Israel is an urban capitalistic society that maintains its existence at the expense of others. The bond to soil and nature didn’t last long. If this is not enough, Israelis didn’t really manage to divorce the dialectic of negation. Israel has never become a state of its citizens. It is still a racist state that employs racially orientated immigration laws.......

Early Zionists were critical enough to expose the non-ethical characteristics amongst their fellow brothers. Zionism was there to erect a new ethical Jew, a genuine moral being. Yet, the premise was flawed from the very beginning. Zionists wanted to make Jews 'people like other people’. To a certain extent they wanted Jews to convey the pretence of being people like other people. The failure of the Zionist dream made it clear that even the new Jew, the Zionist, cannot engage in authentic ethical thinking. At most, they look ethical instead of becoming ethically orientated.

As frightening as it may sound, looking at Israeli Hasbara as well as at Ziocon politics around the world and especially in America and the UK, it reveals the bitter truth of the matter. Ziocons and Hasbara always presents an 'ethical like’ argument. They would employ what seems as a moral excuse in order to introduce destruction and carnage. As we know the 'only democracy in the Middle East’ is also the one that has been starving millions of Palestinians in concentration camps for decades. Similarly, the Wolfowitzes and Perles dragged America and Britain into a futile criminal war in Iraq in the name of 'democracy’, 'human rights’ and 'liberalism’. Clearly the Palestinians and the Iraqis are victims of the politics of negation. But they are not alone. The Western subject who is stained with the crime of genocide is as well a victim of the Western shift towards politics of negation. Rather than defining ourselves by who we are, we get accustomed to our politicians defining us for how we hate (or whom is it we suppose to hate: red, 'axis of evil’, Islamofascists, etc.)......."