Israel vs. the Israeli People: The State Was Supposed to Protect Us. Instead, It Turned on Us
A Tel Aviv protest earlier this month, following the firing of Defense Minister Gallant. We stand wide-eyed in the face of the decisions made by the government.Credit: Tomer Appelbaum
Tomer Persico writes in Haaretz
“Proceedings have been instituted against you, and you will be informed of everything in due course,” says one of the strangers who have come to arrest K. in Franz Kafka’s novel “The Trial,” giving precise expression to the helplessness of the citizen in the face of the machinery of the state. “We’ve been abducted,” shout the demonstrators in Tel Aviv and across from the Prime Minister’s Residence in Jerusalem, giving vent to the same angst.
The helplessness that underlies our present situation places us opposite the vast power of the state. We encounter that power when we are inducted or are informed about a tax audit, but at present the lines are sharpened and the danger of losing all we hold dear looms clear and immediate. As though we’ve been transformed from citizens into subjects, we stand wide-eyed in the face of the decisions made by the government. Like the faithful in the hands of an angry God, we are unable to wield influence and also have no knowledge of what to expect.
In his 1829 essay “Reflections on Tragedy,” Benjamin Constant pointed out the profound transformation that occurred in the human consciousness upon the entry into the modern age. Constant explains that it no longer makes sense to write tragedies that pit the individual against the forces of fate or the gods – they are no longer on our mind, and in any event are not the entities that are threatening us. They have been supplanted by other forces, far more concrete and no less appalling:
“The social order, the action of society on the individual, in diverse phases and in diverse epochs, this network of institutions and conventions which envelops us from our birth and is not broken until our death, these are the tragic motivations which one needs to know how to manipulate. They are entirely equal to the fatality of the ancients; their weight composes all that was invincible and oppressive in that fatality… Our public will be more moved by this combat of the individual against the social order that robs or pinions him than by Oedipus pursued by destiny or by Orestes pursued by the Furies” (translation by Barry Daniels).