Israel as Samson?

This isn't about Lebanon or Palestine or even Israel. Well maybe it is about Israel, in that by shining a light on one zionist "peace activist" zionist in the west can provide cover for the more grotesque imperatives of the zionist project. It's a review by Jenny Diski of David Grossman's latest offering, Lion’s Honey: The Myth of Samson in the London Review of Books. David Grossman is one of the zionist establishment's "peace activists," or what Yitzhak Laor calls "the Israeli Peace Camp's intellectuals."

I don't think the latest round of Israeli atrocities could have begun when this review was written but in it you can see how the zionist "left" lines up its excuses for the worst imperatives of the zionist project:

It is Grossman’s contention that Samson is the emotionally disfigured child who becomes the frustrated artist (the honey episode, the killing of the 30 men for their coats, the tying and burning of the foxes’ tails all a kind of performance art), whose work turns murderous when he cannot receive love, desperate as he is ‘for the embrace of a caring, compassionate parent’ and betrayed always by the women in his life. And somewhere in all this is the state of Israel. The Samson state, not properly born and nurtured and therefore given to violent tantrums and excessive – though hardly artistic – behaviour to those it feels unloved by.

And, liberal though I am, I come up against the thought: what about behaving decently to others? Just that. Even if you’ve been unloved. Or especially if you’ve been unloved. What about making an art of empathy, or simply an elementary human choice not to cause suffering just because you’ve suffered, or because you figure it’s a good enough excuse to behave just like everyone else? Perhaps Grossman would say that the unloved Samson can’t help himself and is not in control of his emotional responses. He is probably right. Many people aren’t and clearly Samson wasn’t capable of control, but the individual Samson and the state of Israel are actually not bound by the same emotional imperatives. We ought perhaps to try much harder to keep separate the lives and passions of individuals and the behaviour of nations. But analogy is apparently irresistible, though the Palestinians might be forgiven a hollow laugh at Grossman’s conclusion that Samson’s final act, killing three thousand partying Philistines and himself into the bargain, set a precedent:

There is no escaping the thought that Samson was, in a sense, the first suicide-killer; and although the circumstances of his deed were different from those familiar to us from the daily reality of the streets of Israel, it may be that the act itself established in human consciousness a mode of murder and revenge directed at innocent victims, which has been perfected in recent years.

A bit naughty of me to post the last bit of the article there. Please read the whole thing though. It's here. If you can't get it there, try here.