Abjection and Genocide

What led Israeli society to commit genocide? This is the question addressed in the essay, through an analysis based on the concept of abjection and insights from psychoanalytic and anthropological theory. In this reading, the Palestinians constitute for Israelis an object of desire through which they establish their collective subject. This subject is in constant danger of collapse, partly because the emotions attributed to the object of its desire are very violent. The subject is also characterized by a deep dissonance, which stems from the fundamental tension between the democratic component in the work of Israeli identity and the Jewish component in it, that is, between the liberal desire to hold complexity, difference, and uncertainty and the ethnic desire to eliminate these very components. The current moment is characterized by an inability to hold the dissonance, and a strong desire to decide for the side of ethnic cleansing. In the shadow of the war and the legal reform, Israeli racist discourse is extreme to the point of denying the humanity of the Palestinians. Paradoxically and tragically, this negation boomerangs back to the Israelis who look at the Palestinians and do not see them, causing the collapse of their own collective subject, because when the Palestinians are inhuman, they cannot serve as objects of desire for the Israelis, and therefore relegating them to a state of abjection inevitably draws the Israelis there as well and destabilizes their capacity for moral thought. To restore collective subjectivity, Israelis must acknowledge their own violence, temper the rhetoric of phobia and affect, restore historical context to political discourse, and recognize Palestinians as subjects with autonomous consciousness.