Slavoj Žižek Ideologies At Play - Israeli Collective Punishment

In the vast, often cruel theatre of human affairs, ideologies do not merely obscure reality; they mold it, imprison it within the confines of a simple moral fantasy, one where truth is reduced to the tragic absurdity of “good” against “evil,” or the hollow rhetoric of “security” against “terror.”

In the Israeli bombardments of Gaza, an empty comfort that blinds the eye to the suffering of the Palestinians, whose lives are shattered beneath the weight of bombs, burned out buildings, broken glass everywhere, women and children buried alive from the rubble.

Žižek, might call this a fantasy, a convenient illusion, a pretense that cloaks the true horror of the brutal military machinery of power, occupation, and endless collective violence, all masked as righteousness.

But violence, as Žižek insists, wears many masks.

There is the obvious, physical violence, the 1000s of bombs exploding, the shattering of homes, the screaming of children in the night.

Yet behind it, lurking like a sinister ghost, is a more insidious violence, the objective violence of structures, systems, the cold and merciless order of oppression.

The bombings may grab the headlines, but they are but symptoms of this deeper disease, the occupation, the economic ruin, the displacement that gnaws at the heart of an entire people. To focus only on the bombings to dehumanize the cruelty is to miss the ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinian people.

And yet, how easily we fall into the “ethical trap,” as Žižek names it. Responding to violence with more violence seems senseless, absurd. But what is it if not madness? Bombs fall to crush Hamas, and yet they crush also the bodies, the hopes, the very soul of a people, creating not peace, but deeper hatred, an abyss of hatred from which no escape is possible. Is this not the path to ruin, where conflict feeds on conflict?

Žižek might remind us of the deeper, unspoken trauma that drives the madness. Beneath the surface, the scars of history never heal.

The Holocaust and the Nakba, two horrible extreme traumas, each binding a people to its past, locking them into narratives of victimhood and survival, aggression and defence. These traumas, festering and unresolved, shape the actions of the present, as Israel’s military fury becomes not a solution, but a repetition of the cycle of violence, forever feeding itself.

How pitiful is man, when trapped by history’s ghosts, destined to destroy himself again and again!