One of the arguments that comes up time and again in discussions of Israel and the oppression of Palestinians goes, “and the Jews ought to know better because of what was done to them by the Nazis.” The argument is so common that one might assume that it is widely accepted, but I think we need to seriously problematise it, and to conclude that it is a dangerous mode of thinking. As the argument usually goes, it sounds pretty straight-forward: something bad happened to you so you should know not to do it to someone else. It seems to be presented as a golden rule type affair, a do-as-you-would-be-done-by, an ethics of in which you become capable of recognising your own feelings in others. But this is to clean up the matter somewhat. At the centre of the argument is a notion that we should consider the traumas we suffer when we act, and in particular we should learn from them.
It may well be the case that in many situations we can learn from our own experiences of our feelings and emotions what other people will feel if we commit violences against them. In being sensitive to ourselves in social interactions we can also become empathetic. But there are definite limits to this logic. One of the great discoveries of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was that we could have certain experiences that we could only return to with difficulty: that traumas do not remain immediately accessible, but are instead repressed. At the same time it was discovered that one of the consequences of traumas were certain repetitive compulsions: acts governed by this repressed experiential material were driven simultaneously by attempts to return to it and address it, and by a defensive mode that would keep it repressed, hidden, or screened from consciousness. Many experiences are repressed but traumas hold a special place, because even after the event they pose an enormous threat to whoever experienced them. The defensive mechanisms that keep them repressed take seriously the real capacity for experiences of past violence to destroy the subject.
We might think of the argument about what the Jews ought to have learnt from the Holocaust by analogy to another type of trauma. As is well known, men who suffer from sexual abuse as infants have a greater propensity to abuse as adults. The term that is usually used for this is “cycle of abuse.” But what is important in this scenario is that we also know that it is no way helped by saying that abuse by people who were abused is doubly bad because they knew the effects it would have since the same was done to them. Indeed, the situation of the cycle of abuse is much better dealt with if it is considered as a pathological situation, in which a propensity towards abuse considered a symptom of what was done to the abuser – a sort of long term affect. Then, with due consideration, it can be addressed. It is clearly the case here that suffering can have quite the opposite effect from education.
Against this due consideration, taken ad absurdum, we might conclude from the argument that the Jews ought to have learnt from what was done to them – that the Holocaust offered some kind of exemplary education – that the best way to create a peaceful, non-violent culture would be to give everyone an education of torture. We should murder their families, in order that they know exactly what is wrong with it, in case they ever consider doing it to anyone else.
The situation in Israel is (perhaps in this sense only) complicated. During, and in the aftermath of the catastophe in Europe lots of very traumatised people ended up there. Quite a lot of them believed that after the destruction of the Jewish people in Europe, anything was justified to offer Jews protection. Often elements of the Israeli state, even today, like to say that what happened in the Holocaust justifies whatever they want. They say, “if we didn’t have Israel we would have been wiped off the face of the earth.” They say, “what was done to us, and what they tried to do to us justifies anything.”
People who are genuinely damaged by traumatic experiences that the world let happen to them can respond by condemning the entire world. The past wrong that was done to them and cannot be righted becomes a foundation upon which any and all acts of retalliation can be justified. In the demand for purgation past suffering is fully instrumentalised. Meanwhile the very extremity of the trauma can transform into a nihilism that takes its cue not from the history of violence but from its very inaccessibility.
In politics as well as in social life, a lot of discussions of these phenomena suffer from an immediate leap into an ethical appraisal. This is not only the case of those who condemn but also those who suffer. It is often assumed that to explain something is to justify it. To know that people may act in a way they themselves don’t wholly understand – to understand the obscurity of desire, and that it might be led by experiences that could at the same time destroy the desiring subject – was a victory won late in history. The immediate leap into ethical appraisal often leads to irreconcilable contradictions. For example, Adorno’s discussion of “blaming the victim” in The Authoritarian Personality, which was initially noted as a means of considering typologies of character in the analysis of a world in which fascism was able to take hold, has recently been transformed into the ethical imperative “never blame the victim.” Here, as all consideration of historical violence is transformed into evaluation, the imperative simultaneously conjures into its existence its opposite: “blame only the perpetrator”. It is significant that these evaluative ethical modes trade only on blame, that they imagine the only productive, or revolutionary, human relation to be a prosecutorial one. This is the mark of all instrumentalisation. But the cycle of abuse might be seen as the locus classicus of the disintegration of this ethic claiming to counter “victim blaming”, as a site in which victims damage victims, and it becomes unclear whether blaming the perpetrator is at the same time blaming the victim.
This is not to claim that there are only victims here. The situation today in Israel is one in which millions of Palestinians suffer because of the ongoing history of massacres, house demolitions, land grabs, military incursions while Israelis do not. Palestinians live under siege, while Israeli’s live protected by an enormous military. The purpose of invoking a certain cyclical-traumatic logic here is not to say to Palestinians, “you should accept that because your persecutors are victims too.” But instead it is a claim that the situation of Palestine is one in which any revolutionary demand for the a new sovereignty of the victim is troubled. It is to say that no ethic of victimhood can triumph here, and it is to return the notion of “blaming the victim” to its more properly psychoanalytic basis. And it is to make a certain advance on the notion that the Jews should have learnt from the Holocaust. It says instead “we can learn from how damaged people behave, from the nihilistic logic of victims that might lead them to become perpetrators, that the demand for the sovereignty of the victim ought to be troubled lest it become tyrannical.” It says “maybe they don’t know what they are doing, but we can still consider it, address the wrongs they do, without demanding they know why they do it.” Perhaps we can all learn from that.
These arguments might be called civilising ones, in the sense that Freud used the term. They are arguments that say that violence cannot be overcome by establishing a sovereignty of the trauma (as many Zionists claim to do). They are arguments that say that life going on is different from a world ruled by its traumatic origins, and that we must constantly return to the distance, the alienation, the difference, between the two if we are to do politics. We need to constantly negotiate that distance in our politics. They are arguments that say that both the immediacy of a claim to the truth of a trauma in establishing sovereignty, and that the claim that the trauma could be in some way edifying, miss their targets, and block the possibility for this sort of negotiation, because they both want to instrumentalise that traumatic moment, and to obliviate the obliviating function of defenses against violence. Both claims, in making the trauma an instrument, want everything to become too clear.
On all sides the argument against the instrumentalisation of suffering needs to be advanced. This is not to say that no truth can be drawn from past suffering, but simply that where trauma and defence takes hold we need to do politics differently. The notion of a traumatic education, that the Jews should have learnt from what was done to them, rests heavily on the idea that all experience can and ought to be instrumentalised in this way. But ultimately any such concept of education is nothing but a quiet justification that cycles of violence continue, with the hope that eventually peace will arrive from remembering how violence was done. Instead this history inaugurates a future of cyclical forgetting, and nothing can be learnt.