Beyond the Jewish Pleasure Principle: West Bank Expansion and the Settler 'Death Drive' - Opinion - Haaretz.com
As incidents of settler violence in the West Bank have multiplied, the lawbreakers have begun openly boasting about their deeds, sometimes calling themselves "the King David Battalions." They have posted a detailed list of the Palestinian villages that have been attacked, along with a video of a masked teen wearing ritual fringes, and instead of titling it "Jewish terror," they titled it "Jewish light."
On the face of it, this is an externalization of their appetite for occupation and control. But I want to offer a different interpretation, in the spirit of Freud. I want to point to something deeper that is happening underneath their declaration of intent, something that lies "beyond the Jewish pleasure principle."
This isn't a movement toward maximizing control and expansion, but breaking into a part of the unconscious mind in which destruction and loss are the goals in and of themselves, a "death drive." The settlers' radicalization doesn't stem from a desire for control, but from its opposite. It's a desire to return to a pre-sovereign state, just as man, according to Freud, longs to return to a preorganization state.
In this reading, the settlers are setting the West Bank on fire because they are jealous of the Gaza Strip. The fire blazing in the West Bank is the settler unconscious whispering to the world, "Internationalize us, too."
Smoke rising from a Palestinian scrapyard set on fire by settlers in Hawara, West Bank, Thursday evening.
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The violence in the West Bank is an _expression_ of a deep, collective repetition compulsion. It seeks not the establishment of sovereignty but rather its loss, another repetition of the closed cycle of building a "home" and then destroying it, over and over. This cycle keeps repeating itself – the First Temple, the Second Temple – not due to a historical failure, but as a psychological mechanism.
It's like in the game of fort/da played by Freud's grandson. The toddler would throw a wooden spool with a string attached to it out of his cot until it disappeared from his view. Then he would yell "fort" ("gone"), then bring it back and yell "da" ("there"). Control is achieved not through stability but through the cyclicality of loss and regained control. The ultranationalist messianic Jew seeks to play fort/da with the Land of Israel: to control it in order to lose it; to lose it in order to control it once more.
The site of an olive harvest in Beita, October.Credit: Jaafar Ashtiyeh/AFP
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SubscribeFor one brief moment in history, it seemed as if the Zionist project sought to create a new Israeli who would detach the string from the spool. But the Jew reattached them. To him, Zionism was one overly long "da!" October 7 was, in the depths of the unconscious, an opportunity to get the game back on track. And thus we got the Israeli apocalypse. But it was a "miraculous time" for the Jewish death drive.
Come on, America; take us over, Donald Trump! Come on, Tony Blair, take over Gaza! Britain, bring back the Mandate! Come on, Turkey, sit on our borders and seize Jerusalem again!
Right-wing Israelis celebrate Jerusalem Day in front of the Old City's Damascus Gate in May.Credit: Olivier Fitoussi
It doesn't matter which empire wins; what's important is that it take the land from us. Gaza is being internationalized, and from there the entire conflict will be internationalized. The governing coalition will be internationalized via a pardon for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The entire country will be internationalized.
"Zionism is an eternal ideal," we were taught. But it turns out that achieving it undermines the conditions for its existence as an ideal. Let us dream about Jerusalem, don't let us control it. Because when we control it, we have no choice but to lose it. Again and again.
The Jew who eliminated the Israelis in 1996, when Netanyahu first came to power after the murder of Yitzhak Rabin, openly sought the "Greater Land of Israel." But in the depths of his unconscious, he sought the "Ideal Land of Israel – the biblical one, which cannot exist except as a yearning, a dream.
Occupying territory, building settlements, messianism: none of these is the action of a sovereign master. They are directed toward loss. Like Freud's grandson, the messianic right is recreating the disappearance in order to experience the return: building in order to destroy; destroying in order to build. Fort – destruction; da – a state; fort – destruction.