Undermining Netanyahu

The corrosive power of truth-telling and the narcissistic fragility of authority.

 

While the immediate focus is on the ground incursion into Lebanon, military operations and targeted assassinations, and the regional and even global balance, Noémie Issan-Benchimol, in this letter from Jerusalem, wants to bring us back to the more modest scale of the political emotions and wounds of Israeli society, starting with the still-open wound of the hostages, which is not without drawing a deep fault line between the advocates of the citizen’s social contract and the supporters of deterrence. Taking the opportunity of a political micro-event, she offers us here a meditation on power and an insight into that part of the Israeli people that opposes the Netanyahu government and its way of waging war without preparing for peace.

 

 

Two weeks ago, an eternity in terms of media time in Israel, among the too many noteworthy events that punctuate a suffocating political atmosphere, one event stood out. It was one of those seemingly insignificant moments that are nonetheless revealing. It was an act of speech: one man talking to another man; a commonplace structure in all human exchanges, you might say. But as we all know, in today’s devalued marketplace of truth, not all words carry equal weight or value.

During a visit to the bereaved family of Israeli hostage Ori Danino, brutally murdered by Hamas in the Gaza tunnels, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tried, as usual, to shift the blame onto everyone else, thereby performatively contradicting the very nature of a visit to the bereaved, which is to console or attempt to console, rather than to absolve oneself of blame. But the family, although demographically expected to be a safe haven for Benjamin Netanyahu since we’re talking about a Sephardic Haredi family from Jerusalem (and some even claim that this is why he visited this family and not others), with the infinite courage that absolute sadness and having nothing left to lose can provide, allowed themselves a moment of what Foucault called parrhesia, the courage of truth. “You equipped them with weapons. You’ve equipped them with tunnels and dollars… Have you come here to listen or to be listened to? Because what you have to say, we’ve been hearing for 15 years.”^[1]

Because this moment suspended so many social and political conventions and upended power hierarchies, I wanted to come back to it, cool-headed, to try and analyze it, but also to make it the occasion for a more general reflection on authority and the subversive power in a context of authoritarian drift, of a simple word of truth that binds an individual to a word in the deepest possible sense.

Amid the paranoid drift characteristic of a powerful man who clings to it like a drowning man to his last breath of oxygen, Netanyahu makes sure he is in front of supporters before showing his face.

 

Mourning as a sacred space

Certainly, some circumstances made this moment of truth possible. Firstly, in its choreography: the Prime Minister came to a private home in mourning, and mourning is presumed, like birth and death, to be a sacred space, both outside the usual world and the instrumentalizations that characterize the latter. Jewish mourning laws, if we think about it, reflect this idea, since the mourner is forbidden everything that makes up the habits and customs of cultivated human life: greetings, politeness, cleanliness, and self-presentation^[2]. The texts even draw a profound analogy between the excommunicated and the bereaved^[3]. As a subaltern figure, momentarily removed from the world, and freed from the demands of tact and formality, the mourner can also be the one through whom a voice of revolt and justice is expressed (as in Greek tragedy). This voice, carried by Elhanan Danino, exploded the idea that Netanyahu seeks to maintain, according to which the personal attack on the leader is an attack on all the country’s citizens as if there were only one united body: “they are me and I am them”. Instead, he reminded us that, while Hamas was responsible for the assassinations, the Prime Minister was personally responsible for breaking the social contract between citizens, and that he was therefore there as the guilty party, not as a politician showing empathy and closeness to the suffering of his people.

The king’s two bodies: the paradoxical narcissistic vulnerability of the authoritarian leader

Over the past several months, Netanyahu’s physical presence as a leader has been steadily fading from the public sphere and genuine, impromptu interactions with citizens, giving way to an increasingly virtual mode of appearance. Pre-recorded messages and staged meetings replete with forced cheerful slogans and contrived reassuring body language, and refusal to face the press and the public in favor of rare interviews on Channel 14, which is to Benjamin Netanyahu what Fox News is to Trump. In the grip of paranoia characteristic of a powerful man clinging to power like a drowning man to a life raft, he makes sure he’s in front of supporters before he shows his face. The kitschy aesthetic is hard to ignore, from the poorly executed hair dye and caked-on makeup to the staged photos in military uniform or donning helmets alongside soldiers (a practice that’s supposedly off-limits). While Putin remains the undisputed master of the ‘botox-inflated old man with baby-smooth skin’ aesthetic, Netanyahu is not holding back in this becoming-idol/statue that misses its target and operates a becoming-clown/puppet. Acutely aware of his growing unpopularity, Netanyahu increasingly withdraws from public view, emerging only as a carefully curated image or spectral presence, while studiously avoiding unscripted encounters with the public. This undoubtedly adds to the significance of the exchange with Elhanan Danino: it was a rare crack in the carefully constructed facade of PR teams and choreographed appearances.

 

Parrhesia versus empty political speech

This moment of truth can be described thanks to Foucauldian use of the ancient concept of parrhesia, the verbal practice of a free individual who ties an existential truth to a word, despite certain usages, in opposition to certain hierarchies^[4].

Michel Foucault contrasts parrhesia with another type of speech: political rhetoric, which today we would call doublespeak or political bullshit. Parrhesia is as raw, sincere, and unvarnished as rhetoric is polished, constructed, and often devoid of genuine emotion”.: “In other words, rhetoric implies no link of the order of belief between the speaker and what he [enunciates]”. The idea of rhetoric is to make the audience feel certain feelings, to push them to adopt certain conclusions, but there is no link of vital necessity between the speaker and his words. Netanyahu’s language, like that of Trump, is eminently poor: it makes use of what are known as spins, and the repetition of simple but striking slogans such as “There will be nothing because there is nothing” about his judicial affairs, or “Until total victory” about the absence of a realistic war and post-war plan in Gaza.

Because it is a pragmatics and not an essence, authority is also extremely fragile and vulnerable: a laugh, a slip of the tongue, a joke can reveal its emptiness and put it in danger.

Elhanan Danino’s language, on the other hand, is steeped in frankness and religious admonition: a veridiction^[5]. It’s also a form of authoritative speech, this bereaved father also being a rabbi, so an authority, not a person in a position of authority. At times, biblical accents of Tochecha from a Nathan to David were heard: “Lock yourself in a room and think about the Jewish value you bring – not the Jewish identity of the State of Israel – we will control here, control there. In the end, the Holy One, blessed be He, does it all. As strong as we were before this, at Simchat Torah, we received a slap like never before. A slap in the face. Neither the air force nor the infantry [were of any use]”^[6]. Also quoting Psalm 126: “Put not your trust in the mighty, in the son of man, with whom there is no salvation”, he recalled what is undoubtedly the most painful fact for any narcissistic tyrant: the reminder of his naked condition as a mere human being among others. Foucault, moreover, linked parrhesia to the practices of a spiritual guide. He who is outspoken and free is the one who can guide others. Here, a citizen was for a moment in the role of prophet-critic of power in the face of power itself.

Corrosive discourse: the pragmatic approach to authority

Authority is an elusive concept. Caught between persuasion and constraint, charisma, and violence, it is often the subject of essentialist or psychologizing approaches, linked to impressions, affects, and considerations about the natural authority of so and so and the magic of the presence of another. Instead, historian of religion Bruce Lincoln^[7] proposes a pragmatic approach, focusing on the strategies and effects produced: authority is the ability to make others react in certain ways and not in others. Using a metaphor from Roman law, that of auctoritas vendoris, i.e. the ability to ensure that a sales action is considered valid insofar as one acts as owner, Bruce Lincoln defines authority as the ability to produce certain effects: to be listened to in silence, not to be contradicted. But precisely because it is a pragmatics and not an essence, it is also extremely fragile and vulnerable: a laugh, a slip of the tongue or a joke can reveal its emptiness and put it at risk. In his book, Lincoln examines several of these moments when a “corrosive speech” shakes the usual march of authority, which must then react to reinstall itself as quickly as it has been endangered and exposed, as in the case of Ulysses’ response to Thersite’s speech against Agamemnon in Canto II of the Iliad. It was Sarah Netanyahu who stepped into the role of Ulysses, doing her best to shore up her husband’s crumbling authority. She attempted to undermine Elhanan Danino by claiming he was simply parroting what others had told him to say, portraying him as a mouthpiece rather than someone speaking his own truth. In doing so, she tried to sever the powerful connection between Danino and his heartfelt words. Rav Elhanan Danino’s remarks to Benjamin Netanyahu are among the “corrosive speeches” that subvert the performance of authority.  Contrary to what Hanna Arendt said about the disappearance of auctoritas in modern political life, Bruce Lincoln shows that its performances are simply more and more costly and sophisticated and that if authority has to become seductive (and therefore disguise itself), it nonetheless continues to exist in political modernity as it has always existed.

I’d like to end this reflection with a more general opening linked to collective practices of resistance, and to the destituting power of the tiny things we do for the beauty of the gesture, for honor, for form, because otherwise we’ll die, because we are beings of symbols and words, traditions and stories, polyphony and resistance.

What characterizes an authoritarian political situation can often be summed up by the following rule: there is an inversely proportional relationship between the ridiculousness of the offense and the state or police violence used to repress it. The more frivolous the offense (carrying an empty white sign for an old Russian lady at the start of the Russian offensive in Ukraine), a smile (Iranian dissident before his hanging), sitting in a park with a Hamas hostage poster and being arrested (Israel, here and now), the more it makes visible and exposes a naked fact: what power represses is not so much a particular act as the intimate act of resistance, the manifestation of radical unavailability to the clutches of power, of freedom.

And the more democracy, whether formal or real, still exists, the less repression can be naked and brutal: at the very least, it must be clothed in a few insidious, and therefore often legal, forms.

The fact remains that human creativity is structurally superior to any law based on the persecution of dissidents. Alexandre Zinoniev, in Yawning Heights, imagines the following situation: Let’s consider a text A, which can be qualified as hostile to society (anti-text) by application of a system of legal rules B. The author N of A could be prosecuted. But, asks Zinoniev: “What would be the nature of a text of the type ”N affirms that A” from B’s point of view? Would it be an “anti” text? Fine, but what will the prosecutor say when he accuses me in court of saying “N affirms that A”? That this man is uttering an “anti” text? No? and why? Where will be the formal criterion that will distinguish us? (…) Give me a code B that contains laws that allow us to assess texts as anti, and I’ll make a point of elaborating, from any anti text, a text that cannot be judged as such according to B, but which will, in any case, be understood as an opponent’s text. Every rigorous right is a priori a possibility of opposition”.

Wit, wordplay, metacommunication, subtexts, and irony are all hallmarks of human ingenuity that often slip through the cracks of oppression, fueling resistance, no matter how symbolic.

The Israeli case is interesting in this respect since the leader takes care to subcontract and delegate to others the violence of the repression directed against the citizens, to an Itamar Ben Gvir Minister of Internal Security, to the police whose integrity he has gangrened to the marrow, putting between his person and the violence exercised several echelons so that everyone knows that he is the source without him ever clearly claiming it. We Israelis, we Jews, must cultivate and cherish this discrepancy and radical unavailability to the grip of power, by creating collective images and emotions, adopting postures, and exercising our civic bodies: the march, the sit-in, the raised arm.

This image of a demonstrator with a sign reading “Only weak rulers treat their citizens as enemies” standing between two mounted policemen facing each other like Assyrian lamassus is very powerful. Nothing strikes fear into the heart of an authoritarian regime quite like a piercing truth wrapped in pain, or the gallows humor that thumbs its nose at tyranny with a sardonic grin or a well-placed biblical quote.

I’d like to end with a wish that is also a blessing.

May external security threats never make us forget the democracy we must cherish, and the justice we must pursue. We must survive, of course. But we must also live and let others live.

May every one of us find our language of truth as Elhanan Danino and all his family have found theirs. Amen.

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Noémie Issan-Benchimol