Psychic identification with the Nazis or European colonialists is socially unacceptable, and so such identification takes place via a negative formation: we are not the “Jew with trembling knees” exterminated in the Shoah, we are not the “backwards” Jew of the shtetl or the naively idealistic Jew of the Bund, we are not the “backwards” colonized Palestinian or Arab living under foreign rule.
With each new murder, each new expulsion, Zionists further cast their ballot on the side of the antisemites: they reaffirm particularity against the universal, they transform the world into, per Adorno and Horkheimer again, “the hell they have always taken it to be.” This negation voids Judaism’s historical content—the construction of the law against power, homeland without nation, messianism which reconciles past wrongs.
In a similar vein, that Hasbara has become more untethered from rational argumentation since this intensification of the genocide of the Palestinians reveals Hasbara’s libidinal core: blind domination, even on the field of reason. As the physical domination of the Palestinians reverts once again to the murderous blindness of its origin, so too does the propaganda which justifies it. The façade of lies and innuendos which the Zionist has constructed—Israel as a liberal-democratic nation, as a bastion of tolerance in a sea of hatred, as the most “moral army” in the world, Palestine as backwards, fundamentalist, incapable of peace—collapses under the weight of its actually existing actions. The performance of a false unity and its derivative power must be emphasized all the more.
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Since the invasion of Gaza, Israeli soldiers have documented themselves—with bizarre frequency—looting lingerie and underwear and bras from Palestinian stores and homes. They wear them, they strap them to their Humvees, they hold them up for the camera—in every case they are displayed as trophies. It is a means of feminizing the enemy in toto—of using the visual language of misogyny to say “these fighters are merely women, and look, we have won,” of asserting dominance through a symbolic rape, as the garments without wearers are standing in for the act of forcible removal (which is elsewhere literally carried out in the prisons). It is also a means, ironically, to “westernize” Palestinians, who, like most Muslims in the Zionist imagination, are considered to be sexually repressive and culturally “backwards.” “Look,” the soldiers seem to say, “deep down we know you want to be like us, deep down you like it.” The private erotic lives of Palestinians are imagined to be driven by distinctly Western feelings, as opposed to human ones. The animal-enemy merely breeds; in the lingerie, the Zionist sees the humor of a pig in lipstick, which explains their laughter. The invasion of privacy into the intimate carries the message that nowhere is safe.