Friday, July 28, 2006
(10:46 PM) | Anonymous:
A Particularly Sensitive Place
Much has been made recently of Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah's holocaust-denial, notably his assertion that "Jews invented the legend of the holocaust". This is denial of a familiar kind: the claim is that whatever might have happened, it wasn't "the holocaust" (or even a holocaust), and that any historical narrative in which the holocaust is presented as what happened is therefore an ideologically-motivated fabrication. In Hezbollah's case, this is part of what we might call a "greedy rejectionism": not only the actually-existing Israeli state, but also any possible "Zionist entity" is decreed illegitimate, and this illegitimacy is so total that any circumstance that might conceivably support a Zionist claim must also be minimised, treated with disdainful skepticism, and finally exorcised as a phantom.
Such rejectionism accepts as integral the total structure of Zionist ideology, including the particular function that the holocaust performs in this structure, in order to dismiss it in toto. It is thus radically complicit in perpetuating that ideology's illusion of consistency. Leftist anti-Zionists more usually argue that the notion that the fact of the Nazi holocaust entailed the necessity of creating a "Jewish state" is a kind of moral non sequitur, a factitious suturing of collective victimisation to aggressively expansionist religious nationalism that amounts to an illegitimate appropriation of the memory of the holocaust. One can only guess at why this interpretation might be lacking in favour with the leadership of the Army of God.
That is one sort of denial; it leads to a certain frantic cynicism, inasmuch as it makes the structure of reality dependent on the negation of a chimera, but Hezbollah at present have more urgent matters to worry about: chiefly the repelling of a brutal and indiscriminate exercise in military terror, aimed directly at a civilian population with the intention of punishing them, collectively, for permitting Hezbollah to exist. It is not a question of whether this is a "proportionate" or "disproportionate" response to the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers; clearly, it is not a response at all - at least not to that - but an independently motivated political act for which the kidnappings serve merely as a pretext.
As a political act, it has a political meaning; although this may be obscured by the desperate moral hooliganism of the perpetrators, whom one suspects of piling up Lebanese corpses largely in order to establish themselves as players of repute in the domestic arena of Israeli politics. Part of this meaning is surely apparent in the bombing of the former interrogation centre at Khiam, where members of the SLA routinely tortured prisoners under the supervision of the Israeli occupiers. The centre had been "rehabilitated" by the Lebanese government, apparently in close co-operation with Hezbollah, and now served as a museum documenting the brutality of the occupation and the atrocities endured by the Lebanese people. It was a place where former prisoners would meet with visitors and talk about what had happened to them: a site of active memory and resistance. On Wednesday 26th July 2006, without any ostensible military rationale for doing so, the IDF blew it up.
