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PDF FormatClearly Weizman is outraged that IDF officers dared to use the radical theories so dear to his heart in their campaign against Palestinian terrorists. In his interview with Naveh, he asks how an army man can reconcile these theories’ leftist agenda with the oppression of the Palestinians. Naveh replied,
Theories do not only strive for a utopian socio-political ideal with which we may or may not agree, but are also based on methodological principles that seek to disrupt and subvert the existing political, social, cultural, or military order. The destructive capacity is the aspect of theory that we like and use.
To Weizman, this claim recalls yet another revolutionary theoretician, the Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse. “This is a particularly chilling demonstration of what Herbert Marcuse warned of as early as 1964,” writes Weizman, “that… ‘contradiction and criticism’ could be equally subsumed and made operative as an instrumental tool by the hegemony of power.” All of this is not to say anything negative about the theories themselves, of course. On the contrary, Weizman rushes to absolve them of any crimes committed by the Zionist occupation. His intent, he says, is “not to place blame for Israel’s recent aggression in the hands of radical theorists and artists, or to question the purity of their intentions.”
This vigorous defense of theory is particularly pronounced given Weizman’s sharp criticism of almost everything else—including various international humanitarian organizations he accuses of “unwittingly aiding” the occupation. It seems, in fact, that Weizman’s loyalty to radical theory is stronger than his concern for human beings. When he discusses, for example, the contribution of Marxist ideology to the PLO’s 1970s policy of deliberately perpetuating the misery of Palestinian refugees, he mentions the concept of la politique du pire—in a nutshell, the idea that a revolutionary should make a given situation as bad as possible in order to garner sympathy and political support, or to arouse revolt amongst the people. Many terrorist and guerilla organizations adopted this inhumane logic out of the belief that “the pace of change could be accelerated by acts of indiscriminate violence designed to provoke the ruling power to throw off the mask of legality and reveal itself to the peasants and workers in all its brutality.” The Shining Path, for example, a brutal Maoist guerilla organization in Peru, applied this strategy when it murdered aid workers whose only sin was to try and ease the suffering of poor villagers. While Weizman does not explicitly advocate this point of view, it would seem from his harsh criticism of UN aid to Palestinian refugees—an assistance that only makes the occupation “bearable”—that he holds similar beliefs. In fact, he appears to feel that any act of mercy that might dampen the flames of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict only plays into the hands of the Zionist oppressor, and must therefore be rejected.
Ultimately, it seems that the real reason for Weizman’s objection to the IDF’s utilization of post-modern theories is not that he rejects violence, but rather that he opposes anything that represents what he perceives as the existing order: the Zionist regime, the occupation, colonialism, capitalism, etc. This approach, which is shared by prominent thinkers on the radical left such as Slavoj iek, Alain Badiou, and Antonio Negri, glorifies subversive action over any humanitarian considerations, treating real people as if they were no more than means to a revolutionary end. Weizman is no exception. His book purports to show how the occupation has turned an “occupied space” into a “hollow land,” but in truth it treats its human subjects—Israeli and Palestinian alike—as “hollow” people, mere pawns to be sacrificed on the theoretical chess board.
Yagil Henkin is a military historian and a fellow at the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies at the Shalem Center.
