“I must seize suicide by the throat.”

—Theodor Herzl¹

“In order to forget more efficiently we rather avoid any allusion to concentration or internment camps we experienced in nearly all European countries—it might be interpreted as pessimism or lack of confidence in the new homeland.”

—Hannah Arendt²

I am taking the liberty of writing an open letter to citizens of Israel, especially those of you who consider Israel a homeland for Jewish people. Though for a long time this letter has been on my mind, I was held back by a grim, harsh sense of futility. In truth, I have little to say that has not been said by others. Perhaps my imagined addressees as well—in case any of you actually comes across this letter—will quickly judge it by skimming a few sentences. You’ve heard it all before. It doesn’t make sense. It comes from a place of non-comprehension. Nevertheless, I write to you today, if only to inhabit more self-consciously the suffocating space in which we find ourselves. While a welcome ceasefire has recently been announced, the future still appears uncertain and bleak—for Palestinian lives, Palestinian self-determination, and peace in the Middle East.

You must be aware that most people, across the globe, believe that only your unwavering support for Israel’s military actions has enabled the daily slaughter of Palestinian children, women, and men for the past two years. It is true that some of you have passionately objected to your government’s policies and even dissented in ways that have placed you in grave danger; yet from what we read, it seems that those of you who protest remain, in the end, a rather small minority.

In this regard, we are not so different from you. We—I mean not only those whose governments have provided essential support to your country, but also those whose governments have done nothing essential to question or halt the genocide—we all are, in so many ways, just like you. For even though many people around the world have protested—sometimes in very brave ways—they too remain, evidently, a small minority. And hence it is, on the one hand, not so surprising that you, Israelis, are able to go about your daily lives: eating, drinking, cooking, eating, working, hugging and kissing your children, buying food, buying clothes, eating, getting medical treatment, reading books, watching movies, eating; that you are able to do this while also enabling, enforcing, executing the forced starvation and mass killing of your neighbors, the people whose land you occupy—no, it is not surprising. It is, after all, what most of us have done, in one way or another, for centuries, and continue to do to this day. I imagine—though I could of course be wrong about this—that there might be two paths that enable you to live on, to continue to eat, and perhaps these are exactly the same paths that enable the rest of us to eat and drink—and, let us face it, even to enjoy!—in a world horribly bruised, irrevocably damaged, by violence. The first is a path—or perhaps it would be better to call it a propensity, an inclination—that we find in all echelons of society, from the highest to the lowest: the inclination that leads us to assault others and to take immense satisfaction in such assaults. It draws us to cruelty and makes cruelties of varying shapes and sizes a familiar part of our daily lives—most certainly of our political lives. Our great talent for continually inventing new ways of inflicting pain on others surely testifies to our ancient attachment to cruelty. But there is also a second path that enables us to eat our way through the extermination of others. Though apparently distinct from the path that binds us to cruelty, this second path nevertheless sustains the first: it allows us not to dwell for too long on, or even to acknowledge, our own pact with cruelty. This is the path along which old habits invariably draw us: the well-worn path of avoidance. Just as people all over the world go about their business by “avoiding Gaza”—putting it aside, skirting our way around it, not letting it intrude too forcefully into our days and nights—so too, I imagine, do you continue to function while unending slaughter is planned and executed, day in and day out, against your neighbors. Are we all living in the rhythmic complicity of slaughter and avoidance?  A most potent concord: for what is avoidance, after all, if not the attempt to erase and render void the thing we wish to avoid?

In this sense, it seems to me, you are just like us, and we are just like you. And indeed, if that were not the case, if we—most people in the rest of the world—were completely different from you, you certainly could never have done what you’re doing now. And yet—I hope you will not be too offended if I say this—you are not “simply” like us; there is also a difference that is hard to ignore—indeed, a difference that you yourselves have brought to our attention time and again. To put it bluntly: though many of us—especially those who live in the “Global South”—have faced in the past and even continue to face in the present extermination and genocide, “genocide” has carried, since the monstrous rise of Nazism in Europe, an unforgettable and singular significance for you. And so, what has been most revelatory, most terrifying, is how this significance becomes manifest today. You, Israelis, must know that in doing what you do, and in demonstrating what you demonstrate, you inevitably reveal to us all something we might not have otherwise known about ourselves: the lengths to which a people might go in their attempt to violently rewrite the past, to erase the irrevocable.

What you—and we—have become today is something even Theodor Herzl, widely considered the spiritual father of the Jewish state, could not have imagined, visionary though he was. In one of the many speeches he wrote in his diaries about the inevitability of the Jewish state, he paints a vivid picture of the extent—as well as the limits—of European antisemitism, as he saw it in 1895. There must be a Jewish state, he argues, for the simple reason that the unwanted Jews of Europe must go somewhere; a national home, after all, must be found for them. “They cannot throw us into the sea, at least not all of us, nor burn us alive. After all, there are societies for the prevention of cruelties to animals everywhere. What, then? They would finally have to find us some piece of land on the globe—a world ghetto, if you please.”³ Despite Herzl’s acute sense of the burden of history, despite his conviction that nothing but a long history precisely of cruelty has formed and molded the European Jew, transforming the Jew into a hated and despised figure, even he could not envisage, at the turn of the century, that “they”—the European nations—could either drown or burn “all of us.” “After all,” he wrote with bitter irony, “there are societies for the prevention of cruelties to animals everywhere.” Yes, it may well be that Europeans see us as animals—it may even be that they have turned us into animals—but can the European mind, which Herzl never ceased admiring, for all his historical consciousness—can it really countenance such cruelty, even to the animal? Such was the childlike incredulity of a worldly European journalist in 1895.

I cannot think of a way to say it lightly. When you, who have faced and suffered extermination, go on to inflict similar suffering not on your erstwhile oppressors (as happens in every war; the logic of revenge is one whose familiarity has long exhausted us), but on an entirely different people, those whom you yourselves have robbed and impoverished; whom you, in turn, call animals—it seems then that through the dark, suffocating memory of the Holocaust surges something even darker. Yes, darker, an unspeakable desire: the desire to emulate your killers, to replay the drama of extermination, with yourselves now in the role of the brutal, powerful executioners.

Gideon Levy—whose name will perhaps be recognized by many of you—has persistently attempted to bring just this strange drama into view. In July, he published an article in Haaretz. This is how the article starts:

Adolf Eichmann began his Nazi career as the head of the Central Agency for Jewish Emigration at the security agency charged with protecting the Reich. Joseph Brunner, the father of Mossad chief David Barnea, was three years old when he fled Nazi Germany with his parents, before the evacuation plan was implemented. Last week, Barnea, the grandson, visited Washington in order to discuss the “evacuation” of the Gaza Strip’s population. Barak Ravid reported on Channel 12 News that Barnea told his interlocutors that Israel has already begun talks with three countries on this issue, and the irony of history hid its face in shame. A grandson of a refugee of ethnic cleansing in Germany discusses ethnic cleansing, and no memory comes to mind.⁴

Perhaps we could go further and ask: what is the “memory” that, without coming to mind, nevertheless directs Barnea’s actions? In a book written long before the current conjuncture, which some of you may have read, The Question of Zion (2005), Jacqueline Rose anticipates Levy: “How did one of the most persecuted peoples of the world come to embody some of the worst cruelties of the modern nation-state?”⁵ Rose’s response to this question forms, in my view at least, the crux of her book, although her larger argument is less about this question than about the possibilities of dissent within Zionism. She suggests, in brief, without putting it in exactly these terms, that the Palestinians, for reasons that have little to do with them, have become paradoxical or impossible figures for you. She proposes that you, who had already witnessed—even if indirectly—the most organized and widespread extermination pogroms in Europe, might read any sign of Palestinian aggression as a repetition of an existential threat with which you are already acutely familiar; in this way, the Palestinians might appear to you as echoes, doubles, of the Nazis. In reading Palestinian violence in this manner, you perhaps end up “avoiding” and rendering null the bald historical fact that this aggression comes not from the place of power, but from that of the dominated: as the response of the subjugated to a prior colonial violence—precisely the colonial violence enacted by you and your own parents and grandparents. This kind of argument has been made by others as well, and perhaps you’ve heard it too many times already.

The paradox of the figure of the Palestinian, however, arises because the same Palestinian who, on the one hand, appears as a violent existential threat, on the other appears as a psychic but no less existential threat—this time as a figure who perhaps replicates your own past history. In this connection, Rose notes how the Holocaust itself is often remembered in Israel not only as a catastrophic and violent event, but also as a shameful one. She cites, among others, the political economist Sara Roy: “Most painful to me was the denigration of the Holocaust and pre-state Jewish life by many of my Israeli friends. For them, these were times of shame, when Jews were weak and passive, inferior and unworthy, deserving not of our respect but of our disdain.”⁶ On this reading, Palestinians incite violence because they are viewed as powerless, defeated and shamed, just as the Jews were in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe. They recall, for the Israelis, their own past and repressed abjection. In wiping out Palestinians, Rose suggests, Israelis might be wiping out a part of their own history that shames them. “For psychoanalysis,” she writes, “things are most likely to repeat themselves when they have been driven underground. . . . Daily, the evidence suggests, the Israeli army re-enacts one of the buried, shameful fragments of the past it most fiercely dreads.”⁷

Hence a crucial twist, according to Rose, happens when suffering is internalized as humiliation—that is, as a wound to the ego. Her point seems to be that the Palestinian thus acquires the impossible distinction of representing, for you, both a past hated self and a hated enemy, and this is how she seeks to understand—though not thereby to exonerate—the extremity of the violence visited upon Palestinians by a “democratic” modern state with at least a minimal commitment to the idea of rights.

The move that causes one to internalize one’s powerlessness as disgrace, one’s suffering as a mark of humiliation—who would have known this better than Herzl? Some of you may recall that a key character in the novel he planned to write—before it was displaced by his political project—was a figure modelled on his friend Heinrich Kana. Kana, who killed himself in 1891, exemplified, for Herzl, the suffering of poor and despised Jews. In the first draft of his novel, Herzl imagined his friend’s last moments thus: just before killing himself, he goes for a stroll and walks “in such a proud and lordly manner that instinctively everyone got out of his way.”⁸ This “placates” him, so that he can kill himself, as it were, in peace.

Despite this restorative effort, Herzl didn’t cease to be haunted by suicide understood as “one of the worst stigmata of a civilization in which tidbits are thrown to the dogs from the tables of the rich”⁹ —in other words, a civilization of extreme inequality, where “philanthropy” exists only to sustain beggars.¹⁰ This is how Herzl saw the Jews of Europe in the late nineteenth century. His vexed, tormented relation to both rich and poor Jews, each indispensable in their own way to his project, takes several turns through his diaries. His rage, however, was curiously directed precisely against those who found this dispensation unbearable: in a sense, his own inverted “doubles,” who, like him, were driven to seek an exit—albeit by embracing death rather than life. Hence his scattered and jarring outbursts against the very act of suicide as well as those who choose to kill themselves: “My punishment for suicide: . . .  refusal of an honorable burial.”¹¹ To be overwhelmed by misery seemed profoundly dishonorable to Herzl, presumably because honor requires confronting, fighting back against, the force that oppresses one. In a later draft of the same novel, when the hero, perhaps modelled on Herzl himself, receives news of his friend’s suicide, his initial sorrow almost instantly turns into rage.¹² It is as though the hero, by immediately converting his own grief into rage, sets himself apart from his friend; he does precisely what his “weaker” friend was unable to do. Only in retrospect, with the chilling knowledge that both Herzl’s son and grandson killed themselves, can we perhaps begin to speculate about the ominous shadow cast into the future by his violent, contemptuous shunning of weakness, coupled with his great admiration for strength—in particular German strength.

It is difficult to read Herzl’s remarks on suicide today without calling to mind the great Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt’s stunning essay, “We Refugees,” published about half a century later, in 1943. A devastating indictment of a Europe that “allowed its weakest member to be excluded and persecuted,”¹³ the essay seems to respond, in its own way, to Herzl’s intolerance of those who, by taking leave of the world, declare it a place unfit for human beings. Unlike Herzl, Arendt reads suicide (in this case, of Jewish refugees) not as a sign of weakness, but as a response to the vicious imperative to hide one’s grief, even from oneself. For her, in effect, these suicides are nothing but a response to the prohibition on mourning. Thus she presents suicide as the path chosen by those unable to reconcile a painful, forced posture of cheerfulness with their vast, mute, and unshareable grief: “Unlike other suicides, our friends leave no explanation of their deed, no indictment, no charge against a world that had forced a desperate man to talk and to behave cheerfully to his very last day. Thus funeral orations we make at their open graves are brief, embarrassed, and very hopeful. Nobody cares about motives, they seem to be clear to all of us. . . . If we are saved we feel humiliated, and if we are helped we feel degraded.”¹⁴

Who are these people who have been taught that grief is shame? They are those for whom there is no longer any place in the world: “Apparently nobody wants to know that contemporary history has created a new kind of human beings—the kind that are put in concentration camps by their foes and in internment camps by their friends.”¹⁵ Does this not ring a jarring bell today as we read how “peace” plans fold and unfold?

To us, today, watching the news (before dinner, after dinner), it seems that you, Israelis, have also created a new kind of human being. It is certainly not you alone who have created this being, but you have played a remarkable role in its creation. This is the being who, watching the repeated, prolonged staging of the torture of Palestinians, suddenly, imperceptibly, becomes complicit in this torture. Day after day, we, these new beings, have watched Palestinians first systematically starved, then lured by food supposedly given as charity, only to be killed when they arrive to receive their food. We have watched those who are first hideously wounded, then shot and killed in hospitals. It is as if once were never enough and you had to kill each Palestinian by a thousand cuts in front of the camera, counting on the camera to leave an immortal, powerful, deforming deposit in the soul of each viewer. Viral cruelty feeding on viral humiliation.

In concluding, let me turn to a recent short piece written by the Palestinian scholar Abdaljawad Omar that asks Rose’s question in a different way: “Why, then, does this perverse need—the compulsion to disseminate images of humiliation and to stage strength through degradation—hold such political appeal among Israelis?” This compulsion, Omar suggests, should be read as an indication of the fragility of domination: “the settler’s sense of supremacy depends on a constant return to scenes of subjugation, as though power could only be verified in the moment it is enacted upon the other. Domination becomes less a fixed state than an anxious performance, forever haunted by the possibility that, without its endless restaging, it might dissolve.”¹⁶

The disgrace of suicide evidently lies in what it makes manifest: supposedly a lack of courage, strength, and “manliness.” But, pace Herzl, doesn’t the very frame of disgrace and humiliation already imply an acceptance of the terms through which domination is exercised? Omar asks how one might, even in the worst, the most brutal, of circumstances, attempt to exit such a frame. His work teaches us that the moment when suffering or oppression is scanned, received, as humiliation is the moment when the victor’s victory is truly sealed. That is the moment when the oppressed render themselves blind; they exchange their own gaze for that of their oppressor. They begin to watch and replay the scene of oppression from the perspective of the oppressor, to see themselves as the oppressor wishes to see them: to see violence as strength to be emulated, and the violated, correspondingly, as worthless.

Omar’s essay concludes by describing a strange, brutal scene, where, by mocking their own suffering as well as the theater of cruelty that produces it, Palestinians enact a kind of “exit” from the script of domination forced upon them. It is not a scene that inspires hope; nevertheless, it limns a strategy for maintaining the scaffold of dignity even while enduring debilitating violence.

If, like colonialism, fascism lives its most virulent afterlife today in the admiration of those it most despised, our collective task—yours as well as ours—would be to resist and challenge such admiration, with all the strength we can muster. A most difficult and demanding task indeed—almost as difficult as allowing oneself to mourn the past instead of mechanically reproducing it in new contexts. Much easier, instead, to avoid Gaza and unthinkingly plot “the destruction of the earth.”¹⁷

1. Theodor Herzl, The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, Vol 1, edited by Raphael Patai, translated by Harry Zohn (The Theodor Herzl Foundation, 1960), 127. [↩]
2. Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees” in The Jewish Writings, edited by Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (Schocken Books, 2007), 265. [↩]
3. Theodor Herzl, Diaries, 172. [↩]
4. Haaretz, July 20, 2025, https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2025-07-20/ty-article/.premium/its-clear-israel-now-has-a-plan-for-the-ethnic-cleansing-of-palestinians-from-gaza/00000198-2456-d55c-a1be-7efe76860000. [↩]
5. Jacqueline Rose, The Question of Zion (Princeton University Press, 2005), 115-116. [↩]
6. Rose, The Question of Zion, 137. [↩]
7. Rose, The Question of Zion, 143. [↩]
8. Herzl, Diaries, 12. [↩]
9. Herzl, Diaries, 138. [↩]
10. Herzl, Diaries, 20. [↩]
11. Herzl, Diaries, 57. [↩]
12. Herzl, Diaries, 13. [↩]
13. Arendt, The Jewish Writings, 274. [↩]
14. Arendt, The Jewish Writings, 267-268. [↩]
15. Arendt, The Jewish Writings, 265. [↩]
16. Abdaljawad Omar, “Marwan Barghouti, Itamar Ben Gvir, and the Israeli Need to Humiliate,” Mondoweiss, August 16, 2025, https://mondoweiss.net/2025/08/marwan-barghouti-itamar-ben-gvir-and-the-israeli-need-to-humiliate/. [↩]
17. See Andreas Malm, The Destruction of Palestine is the Destruction of the Earth (Verso, 2024). [↩]