Oded Na'aman & Simone Weil

Oded Na'aman writes in the Boston Review 

Since October 7 there have been fierce debates around the world about condemnation and empathy.

No. Those who hate Jews condemn Israel and empathize with people who kill their grandmothers and mutilate their babies. Others are dismayed by yet another display of stupidity and criminal psychopathy by Palestinians.  

Some who sympathize with the Palestinian demand for freedom

from Hamas? from the PLO? from the King of Jordan? from the Lebanese?  

and the end of occupation and

the slaughter of Jews and assorted Kaffirs 

apartheid

Apartheid? Why not mention the Spanish Inquisition?  

have refused to condemn or express grief over the mass killing of Israeli civilians and have perceived any show of empathy toward Israelis as a failure or even betrayal of the Palestinian cause.

Which is what Hamas represents. It is Islamist not 'wataniya'. If the entire Palestinian population is slaughtered to advance the cause of radical Islam, the Ikhwan will be well pleased.  

Others have called for a “humane left”

why not a less hysterical Left?  

committed to mourning the loss of all civilians,

after which it is welcome to mourn the loss of my neighbour's cat 

and they see this commitment as the basis of their resistance to Israeli occupation and apartheid.

Not to mention the Spanish Inquisition. 

Meanwhile, in Israel, any show of empathy toward the suffering of Palestinians, or any rejection of calls to “flatten Gaza,” is seen as a failure of solidarity, bordering on treason, even while some of the survivors and family members of the victims of the attack declare that they themselves oppose the killing of civilians in Gaza.

Worse still any show of wistfulness while farting is condemned more particularly if the farts in question are very smelly. The plain fact is that empathy and condemnations and so forth butter no parsnips. Moreover, seeking to make somebody else's tragedy into an occasion for solipsistic hysterics or histrionics involves 'extractive introjection'- you are confiscating another's psychic pain for your own self-aggrandizement.  

At first, I couldn’t understand the various demands and refusals of empathy.

Nor could Oded understand that he and his merry band of virtue signalling careerists had shat the bed.  

Why resist showing empathy with civilian victims, no matter who they are?

Why talk incessant bollocks?  

And why should the expression or denial of empathy be made into a condition for engaging in discussion?

Why discuss anything with these cretins?  

It seems to me now that these clashes have to do with the impossibility of handshakes.

This silly man forgets the granny who shook hands with her Hamas captor.  

Genuine conversation depends on mutual recognition.

No. A genuine conversation is a useful conversation. It can occur on the basis of complete anonymity.  

To be recognized is, very roughly, to be publicly acknowledged as someone whose existence and dignity should be protected.

No it isn't. For a fugitive war criminal to be recognized is the prelude to being publicly hanged.  

When recognition is in doubt, expressions of empathy may be demanded in order to make recognition explicit.

We may not be sure that this guy is the wanted War Criminal. We are not required to display any empathy for him. 

Expressions of empathy are like the baring of one’s hand.

No. They are like wistful farts. Moreover they can be made while keeping your hands in your pockets or wearing gloves.  

But if, as many feel at this moment, the recognition of one “side” comes at the expense of the other, the expression of empathy for one is the refusal of empathy for another.

The solution concept relevant here is Maynard Smith's 'uncorrelated asymmetries'. We may sympathize with the poor lunatic as well as the wealthy Professor whom the lunatic is stabbing. But only one of them should be arrested and confined in a padded cell.  

Many seem to feel that no hand is bare—that all hands are holding knives, pointing in opposite directions.

Only if they also believe, or pretend to believe, that Israelis are actually 'colonists' practicing 'apartheid' and conducting a Spanish Inquistion.  

This moment is characterized by a widespread conviction that recognition can only go in one direction: that any show of empathy toward Israelis is tantamount to supporting the oppression of Palestinians, and that any show of empathy toward Palestinians is tantamount to supporting the massacre on October 7.

Empathy, like wistful farting, is irrelevant. Hamas committed and is committing war crimes. It is likely that this will cause the death of tens of thousands of Palestinians. True, the Muslim Brotherhood or outfits more radical yet may gain relative to more moderate Islamic political groupings. But we are not required to feel any great empathy or sympathy for their cause. 

Those who subscribe to this dichotomy see attempts to recognize all suffering as disingenuous and manipulative.

It is a nuisance- like farting wistfully or in a manner that conveys nostalgia or empathy or the recognition of the sufferings inflicted by the Spanish Inquisition. 

They sometimes complain that symmetrical empathy entails symmetrical judgment, symmetrical condemnation, or attribution of symmetrical power.

Which is why the relevant solution concept is 'uncorrelated asymmetry'.  

And since they reject these equivalences, they reject the equivalence of empathy. But empathy for all those who suffer doesn’t entail any of these equivalences.

Though it may entail wistful farting.  

In principle, at least, people of opposite political views can consistently empathize with both Palestinian and Israeli suffering and yet vehemently disagree about who’s at fault, what should be done, and where justice lies.

Which is why empathy is as useless as wistful farting. Still, we are not concerned with shite these cretins might agree on. 

I doubt the concern with false symmetries is the main driver behind the dichotomy of recognition. It is fueled in part by anti-Semitism and Islamophobia—a hatred of Jews, Arabs, or Muslims, found across the political spectrum, by which certain groups of people assert their identity and agency, revealing themselves as morally vile.

Oded is morally vile. His 'identity and agency' are tied up with virtue signalling and teaching worthless shite.  

But I believe the dichotomy is primarily fueled by panic and helplessness, by the deeply internalized, longstanding narratives that we resort to in order to make sense of the horror of the past eleven days.

But the 'longstanding narratives' shitheads resort to are and will remain utterly shit. Few people in Europe or America feel 'panic and helplessness' with respect to Hamas or ISIS. They may, for their own political or careerist reasons, be against Jews. Their attitude to the Palestinians may be that the only way they can serve the greater good is behaving bestially and then being slaughtered like rabid dogs. So what? This attitude has been prevalent in some parts of the world- and is becoming increasingly so on some Western campuses and on the Left of certain Western political parties- for at least fifty years. But it has been counter-productive. Jeremy Corbyn's Labour party paid a high price for a fashionable type of anti-semitism propagated by nutters like Oded.  

What happened is seen by many as proof that Israeli Jews and Palestinians cannot coexist, in the most literal sense of the term.

Only Oded and his merry crew required any such proof. Everybody else already knew that Palestinians can't 'coexist' with anybody else- not Jordanians, not the Lebanese, not even each other.  

It is important to understand why this is the conclusion so many reach.

Hamas doesn't give a shit about Gaza which it has turned into a hellscape. It wants to take over East Jerusalem and the West Bank from the geriatric PLO so as to destroy the life-chances of the Arabs there.  

I can only try to speak to the Israeli reaction.

No. Oded can only try to speak to the reaction of a small number of Israeli careerists who hate their own country or appear to do so for their own mercenary reasons.  

In the Israeli imagination, this land should have been empty when Jews immigrated here to settle it in the first half of the twentieth century: the vacant land of Israel, waiting for its children to return to it after two millennia in exile, to find refuge from their troubles. This land, we were raised to believe, is the one place Jews can claim as their own, the one place where we belong. But, as history would have it, the land was not empty and the people who lived here were reluctant to leave and hostile to the Zionist project.

So, Israelis are immigrants not colonists. There are plenty of neighbourhoods in Europe and America which have been 'taken over' by immigrants. True, these 'colonizers' paid good money for the houses they bought. Still, if it is right for the Palestinians to expel the Jews then it is right for Neo-Nazis to attack and expel immigrants from 'ghettos'.  

The existence of Palestinians in this land and their resistance to Israel was always seen as the main obstacle to realizing the Israeli dream, and Israel has responded to it by using force to push Palestinians away and to keep those who remain at bay.

No. The Ottomans wanted some Jews to settle in Palestine as a counterweight to Christians. The Brits, who took over the mandate, found that the Jewish portion of the land was at least potentially viable politically and economically. They thought there could be a Jewish statelet which subsidized a Palestinian statelet. But the Palestinians were and are ungovernable and unable to finance a state of their own. Thanks to Hamas, they may become hostis humanis generis- the common enemy of all mankind. It may be that the Ikhwan view is that since the Palestinians are incapable of having a State, they serve the greater good by provoking the Jews into equally bestial behaviour. The problem here is that Israel needs to prosecute its own war criminals just as America and Britain need to do so. This is because a soldier who enjoys raping and mutilating people needs to be locked up. He is a bad apple. His continued employment will destroy morale and esprit de corps.  

The full acknowledgment of Palestinians as equal citizens would have required

Palestinians acting like citizens not rabid dogs. It must be said, some Palestinians are perfectly good citizens of Jordan. Still, a lot weren't and had to be expelled with great bloodshed. I recall a Pakistani military attache explaining to me that the PLO had supplied missiles to Bhutto's sons to down Zia's aircraft because Zia had helped the Jordanians against the Palestinians. What greater Islamic solidarity can you ask for than Pakistani pilots flying Saudi jets to bomb Palestinians on behalf of the Hashemite King?  

a substantial change in the conception of Israel as a Jewish project,

No. Pakistan was formed at the same time as Israel. Non-Muslims could have been 'equal citizens' without any change in the conception of the State as an Islamic project.  

while the founding of an independent Palestinian state would have required Israel to give up parts of the land that are also widely seen as essential to the Israeli project.

All of it. Also, they should kindly top themselves rather than putting others to the trouble and expense of slaughtering them. 

Furthermore, many Israelis see violent Palestinian resistance to the growing Jewish community in the first decades of the twentieth century and, later, to the founding of Israel in 1948 as proof that Palestinian political freedom poses an intolerable risk to Israel’s existence. What the majority of Israelis find impossible to accept is that many Palestinians see this land as their home—that those here are deeply committed to staying here and that those who are refugees aspire to return.

What Oded can't accept is that, as the British saw in the Nineteen Forties, Palestine is not viable. It can either be the cat's paw of an expansionist power- currently Iran- or it can go in for bestial terrorism so as to be, briefly, the cat's whiskers of militant Islam. The point about mutilating Israelis is that they are not human.  

But ethnic cleansing and genocide are not only morally reprehensible; they are impossible.

Sadly, they are all too possible.  

Palestinians will continue to exist in this land, and there is nothing Israel can do about it.

Israel gained from Palestinian labour. Investors in Israel want its knowledge economy to gain even more by recruiting young Palestinians- who, it must be said, are a brilliant and hard working people.  

I think most Jewish Israelis know this, but given what happened, they find it impossible to accept. The compromise that allowed for some bare form of Palestinian existence under Israel’s rule of force can no longer be sustained, but the idea that force is our only savior is as entrenched as it ever was in the Israeli psyche.

Terrorism is a crime. It is easy enough to curb crime and kill or incarcerate criminals. Hamas can indeed be obliterated. There can be a peaceful Palestinian state or two or three statelets which can experience very rapid economic growth. At that point it is in everybody's interest to increase their connectivity. If people focus on making money by making useful things, rather than going in for 'pay for slay', then Israel can be a plural nation. The Haredi and the Orthodox Hanafi may ally on some issues, while younger LGTQ activists of different ancestral religions can come together to overthrow Patriarchal Neo-Liberalism's repressive desublimation by fisting themselves vigorously.  

I do not accept the dichotomy of recognition and the genocidal conclusion it leads to.

Why accept shite you've pulled out of your own arse? Flush it down! 

I believe that force on its own is not power, and that power requires recognition of those who exist alongside us—recognition that their existence and dignity should be protected.

Power means the ability to change outcomes. It does not require recognition or empathy or wistful farting or vigorously fisting yourself. Economics provides a sustainable basis for the burgeoning of power and, no doubt, the nature of open markets is such that 'dignity' gets equalized.   

To protect its own existence and dignity, Israel must fight Hamas while giving Palestinians hope for a decent life, hope for recognition without violence.

Israel must fight those who attack it or else surrender and seek to evacuate its people to somewhere they won't be slaughtered. But fighting does not require giving the enemy any hope whatsoever.  

We must not view the massacre of October 7 as an act committed by all Palestinians

It was committed by ultra-Islamist outfits like Hamas and Islamic Jihad 

or as an expression of innate hatred of Jews,

Jews are kaffirs only a little better than Hindus. God hates them and has reserved Hell Fire for their immortal souls.  

and we must not conflate it with the Palestinian demand for freedom, which is just.

Why not? Israelis are welcome to hand over their property to suitable Palestinians and to emigrate. Alternatively they could just top themselves while wistfully farting or empathizing with the victims of the Spanish Inquisition.  

And yet I confess that I too feel the widespread terror and panic that make such distinctions fall on deaf ears. I feel the terror of knowing it could have been me: I could have easily been one of the people who were slaughtered, one of the people kidnapped, one of the people who lost a child or a parent. Like most Israelis, I know people to whom this happened, and I know people whose friends and family were directly affected. I feel the terror, the grief, and the rage; I see these feelings in the eyes and movements of the people I meet; I hear these feelings in their voices.

But you are still a shithead teaching worthless shit. The problem with saying 'you should empathize' is that we notice that those who say they are empathizing are self-publicists of an utterly useless and hysterical kind.  

When terror and brutality are as rampant as they are now, they possess us.

But this nutter has been writing the same sort of shite even when no terror was rampant! 

Resisting them feels as futile as resisting a force of nature—a giant wave, an avalanche, a blizzard.

But Oded has successfully resisted saying anything sensible for two decades. Still, it is good to know that his resistance to calls of nature are futile. I like to think of him empathizing deeply with the turds which his colon is trying to mercilessly eject. This causes him to shit his pants. 

We are compelled to exercise force by the force that terrifies us.

Oded passes wind because he gets terrified by a gale. Then he shits himself. Sad.  

Yet this observation, that we do not possess force but are possessed by it, is significant.

No it isn't. Churchill possessed force. He wasn't possessed by it.  

It might, in the words of Simone Weil, “interpose, between the impulse and the act, the tiny interval that is reflection.”

Weil was mad and had some sort of eating disorder. Churchill mattered. Weil didn't.  

“Where there is no room for reflection,” Weil writes, “there is none either for justice or prudence.”

There was no room in her brain for anything sensible. Don't study Philosophy. It will make you stooooopid.  

In The Iliad, or the Poem of Force, published in the winter of 1940, Weil argued that force is the true hero of the Iliad.

She was wrong. The Iliad is about Gods whose internal disputes are reflected on an earth where some heroes might themselves rise up to Olympus as demigods. However, better than force is cunning. Odysseus prevails. Ajax, like Weil, goes mad.  

Force determines human affairs,

No. Knowledge- including knowledge of 'threat points'- determine game theoretic outcomes. 

but it belongs to no one; even when it serves our ends, it is never ours:

Yes it is. If you use physical force to eject someone, it is your own muscles you are using to an end that is wholly your own. No doubt, if you are accused of rape and murder, you may say that the force you used actually belonged to some Jewish guy in Israel. He is the chap the police need to arrest.  

“Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. The truth is, nobody really possesses it.”

Sheer balderdash! Hitler may have eaten a bullet and Musso was hanged by his own people. But Churchill and FDR both used force in a constitutional manner without any damage to their inner ethos.  

When force is on our side, it blinds us to the existence of others and to our own vulnerability. Thus, the Iliad describes “men in arms behaving harshly and madly.”

Precisely because they know they might get a dagger in the gut or an arrow in the skull at any moment.  

A sword driven into the breast of a disarmed enemy pleading at his knees; Achilles cutting the throats of twelve Trojan boys on the funeral pyre of Patroclus “as naturally as we cut flowers for a grave.”

This is foolish. It is clear that human sacrifice was a part of certain Iron Age Hero-cults.  

Under the spell of the force they exercise, these men cannot see that they, too, will succumb to force.

Fuck off! Soldiers do know that they can get shot just as easily as they can shoot. 

“Thus it happens that those who have force on loan from fate count on it too much and are destroyed.”

But fate will destroy them anyway. Weil had shit for brains. That's what happens if you study Philosophy. 

Force takes hold of us and traps us inside the terror of death.

NO! Force takes hold of the neighbour's cat's Nicraguan horcrux and traps the US inside the vagina of wistful queefing. I've explained all this in my next book.  

In war, Weil says, force takes hold of us and traps us inside the terror of death. It effaces even its own goals as well as the notion of it ever coming to an end. This is not easy to understand.

It is nonsense. Weil was mad. She had studied useless shit. No doubt, there were French academics who wrote even more noisome shite but they had penises. 

There is a rift between those who look upon war from the outside and those who inhabit it.

It is the difference between combatants and observers.  

“To be outside a situation so violent as this is to find it inconceivable; to be inside it is to be unable to conceive its end,” she writes.

Which is why she'd have been a shit war correspondent. On the other hand, Churchill could describe the situation accurately and was able to conceive how hostilities could be successfully concluded.  

In the presence of an armed enemy, what hand can relinquish its weapon?

The one you are wiping your arse with.  

The mind ought to find a way out, but the mind has lost all capacity to so much as look outward.

Fortunately, the IDF is not composed entirely of hysterical ninnies like Oded. 

The mind is completely absorbed in doing itself violence.

Is it bashing its own bishop?  

Always in human life, whether war or slavery is in question, intolerable sufferings continue, as it were, by the force of their own specific gravity, and so look to the outsider as though they were easy to bear; actually, they continue because they have deprived the sufferer of the resources which might serve to extricate him.

Oded and his ilk get hard thinking about 'intolerable suffering'. They lay down their weapon to bash their own bishop. The Boston Review will publish their ejaculations.  

It is now 9 p.m., Thursday, October 19. The mind is doing violence to itself. We are inside war, inside terror, but we must envision the end of war and terror. We must ask ourselves how we can bring about a reality in which life is possible, and we must accept the unalterable fact that life will not be possible for us unless it be possible for those who share this place with us.

Including those more at risk from Hamas and its rockets, not to mention its rabid dogs. 

In the words of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish,

whose family returned to Israel thus permitting him to get an education and become a communist. Hamas would have slaughtered him as an apostate. 

translated by Munir Akash:

“It’s either him or me!”
That’s the way war starts. But
it ends with an embarrassing confrontation:
“Him and me!”

The plain fact is Darwish benefitted from his family's return to Israel. He then left and joined the PLO. True, he did well for himself. But his people did not do well. Still, the man was a poet- i.e. had shit for brains.  

There is darkness outside and darkness inside,

unless you light your own farts 

there is inconceivable loss, unfathomable evil.

Not really. You can put a dollar value to both. Indeed, once that is done, both the loss and the evil can be avoided provided there is a Schelling focal 'uncorrelated asymmetry'- e.g. the fact that one side can annihilate the other for a small fraction of its GDP. Still, maybe, for the Islamists God is served if the Palestinians are slaughtered by Jews rather than rival clans of their own.  

This land is beautiful and its people are good.

People are good and countries become beautiful where useful work is done. Hysterical psilosophers and histrionic poetasters are welcome to fart wistfully or fist themselves vigorously but we must not empathize with them. On the other hand, micturating mightily on their heads may enable us to overcome Neo-Liberal repressive desublimation within a wider context of expressing solidarity with LGBTQ Guatemalan goats recovering from horrendous epistemic self-abuse.